Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / January 27, 2019 | Can I Help? - Best World Ever

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January 27, 2019 | Can I Help? - Best World Ever · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: How are you this morning?
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's really great to see you.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Both Mulvaine and College Avenue Buildings, thank you for coming.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's a great morning.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: We're in a series called Can I Help?
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: You look like you need it, God speaking.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's a series on the book of Isaiah.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: A great book, 66 chapters.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Longest book, a number of words in the Old Testament.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so we're going to go through this book.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: We're doing it.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: This is the fourth week.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to do it all the way up through Easter.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: We have an Isaiah challenge.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you'll be part of.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: We're reading Isaiah during the series, about five chapters a week.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: How many of you have started?
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: Really?
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Good.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: This week we'll be reading chapters 16 through 20.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: If you're just starting, no problem.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: You can read that far.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm writing devotionals every week.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'll write them on chapters 16 through 20, and they'll be up on our website, discoverTBC.com this week.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: And thank you for writing me.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: A number of you are texting me letting me know that you're doing these.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's encouraging to me and makes it seem like it's really worth my time.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: So thanks.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: So the title of this morning's message is Best World Ever.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I heard about this story of this young couple, or the wife, one night, found her husband standing next to the crib that held their first baby, their infant.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: And as she she stood back at the door and she was watching him, and she saw crossing his face these deep emotions of disbelief and delight and amazement and even a little bit of doubt, along with the enchantment, a little bit of, you know, these deep feelings.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: And she was overcome by it with her uh with her um eyes tearing up.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: She came up, slipped her arm around her husband, and she said, whispering, is there a penny for your thoughts?
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's just amazing, he replied, I can't see how anybody can make a crib like this for just$49.95.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Melody told me I had to tell that.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: He was observing something significant, at least if you like to say pennies like I do, but not something really all important.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: And honestly, sometimes we get together in church and we're talking about things that are significant.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: We talk about personal relationships, we talk about success, we talk about finances, we talk about conflict.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Things that are significant.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, they're not all important to civilization.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: And this morning I'm going to warn you, we're not going to talk about the crib, we're going to talk about the baby.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to talk about injustice, and we're going to talk about government.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to talk about the present, we're going to talk about the future.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: And we're going to one of the great locations in the Bible.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: If you have a Bible with you, even on your iPhone, then open to Isaiah chapter 11.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's the address.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: I want to see you there, the 11th chapter of the book of Isaiah.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I realized as I read this chapter that while it's a phenomenal and a great chapter, I'm not sure.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Wasn't confident that we would feel this chapter like I know God wants us to feel it.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: You see, at the heart of this chapter, verses 2, 3, and 4, we're told that the best king ever is coming.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: And the spirit of the Lord will rest on this future king, a spirit of wisdom and understanding, a spirit of counsel and strength, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: We're told that his delight will be in the fear of the Lord, and as a result, he won't judge by what he sees with his eyes, he won't execute justice by what he hears with his ears, but he'll judge the poor righteously.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: He'll execute justice for the oppressed of the land.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: He won't take bribes, he won't be guilty of corruption, and he will not be guilty of injustice.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: And it struck me that we don't, many of us, don't understand how broken this world is and how full of injustice, and that I felt that God wanted me to drag you through a bit of the swamp of global injustice this morning.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: For this purpose only, for this purpose only, that you might feel the need, the desperate need that this world has for a king who will finally bring justice.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Social justice, political justice, moral justice to the world.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: So let me take you on a little bit of a tour of injustice in our world, of human rights, things like equality, the rule of law, dignity, justice.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: As I start around the world, I think of what affects me the most when I travel overseas, it's the oppressed majority.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: That is, in so many of the countries I visit, third world countries, Arab countries, and so forth, women are, girls are oppressed.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: No less than 130 million girls around the world are denied education, sometimes beat up by men, say in Pakistan, if they find that they're going to school after first, second, or even third grade because they're only good, remember, for bearing babies or for cooking or for serving their husbands, and so they don't need an education, and they're denied education.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: But beyond that, of course, uh they're treated as property in many countries of the world and they have absolutely no rights of their own.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: They're owned by their fathers.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes they're brutalized sexually at birth, and sometimes they're sold as either slaves or wives, even when they're very, very young.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: In China, of course, they may not make it past birth, because if you're only having one child or just a couple of children, you don't want to have a girl when you can have a boy that has your last name.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's injustice.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's a horrible injustice toward the majority of the world.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, many times it is girls or women, sometimes it's also boys or human traffic, 20 or 30 million of them right now around the world.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then we move to something that we think about, oftentimes the Mideast.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: And we think of some of the poorest people in the entire world, 60% of the people in the Gaza Strip, are absolutely devastatingly poor.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: But yet we hear that their rulers, that they're that their leaders and so forth are using half of all of the foreign aid to reward terror, that they're not giving that money to all these poor people who hardly have anything to live on.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: And even the Gaza manager of the great Christian charity, World Vision, it's been found out, siphoned off$50 million of the aid that some of us sent to World Vision to give to Hamas and terrorism rather than giving it to these starving people.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Australia, the number one, actually, the number one donor to Gaza strip poverty, ended their direct aid to Palestinian Authority amidst fears the money was going to terrorism.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Here's a picture recently taken of a family in Gaza, a large family, just in total poverty, and a poster in the past seven years, Palestinians have received$16.2 billion in foreign aid.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's estimated between 90 and 95% of this money has either been flat out stolen or delivered to terrorist groups.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's unjust.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: That is an injustice that's just horrifying to all of those children.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: Talk about corruption, however, it's easy to talk about corruption in Africa, where we hear that uh 25%, maybe, of all the money and foreign aid that goes in there is stolen and subject to corruption.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Many, excuse me, I don't know what that was, but didn't get enough sleep last night, apparently.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: Haiti, many of us go down to Haiti.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: Many of you have been to Haiti, and you go down to Haiti and you find that 70 or 80 percent of the airplane that you're going down on is filled with Christians, Christian groups from churches going down to to use their money and use their time to help in Haiti, and billions of dollars have been given to Haiti just in the last 20 years, and yet there are only 20 countries in the whole world that rank lower than Haiti does in actual just stealing, corruption, stealing the aid that goes down there.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: How possible is it?
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's impossible to have the rule of law and justice and democracy and quality of life when all of the aid constantly gets stolen by rich and powerful people at the top.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Or move over to South American Colombia where the people are now rioting because they find out that the government all along has been in cahoots with the drug cartels and getting siphoning money back and so forth, and all the taking advantage of individual people and so forth as part of the government, part of their actual rulers, and Colombians are fed up with it.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: But what can you do?
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: The Iranians, we have wonderful Iranians in our town and in our church and so forth, and they remind me that the Iranian people, most of whom are under 30 years of age, love America.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: But the rulers, the rulers are a far different matter.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: They hate America and they're oppressive and they're scary.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's oppression, that's injustice.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: Or you move over to India, where I've spent some time on the board of a mission that works in India, and India is still governed by a caste system.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the highest caste and so forth, and the lowest caste are called dollits, and they're treated like animals by the rest of the country.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: Once every 18 minutes, one of these dollits is brutalized or killed in that country for no reason at all.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: And the media in India entirely ignores such events.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: Like this 21-year-old young farmer, a lowest caste dollet man killed for owning a horse.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: His father, as this boy grew up, he always talked about a horse.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: He loved horses, so his father gave him a horse for his 21st birthday.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: But he rode the horse, and three higher caste men felt like uh, you know, that's not something that was too nice for him, and so they killed him and the horse.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: Or if you wear leather shoes, a 13-year-old boy was beat, was beaten up severely.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: A whole village was was nearly torched and several men killed because one man crossed his legs at worship in front of higher caste people who decided that was insulting.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's injustice.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's a world where you live in India and if you happen to be one of the you know, 100, 200 million people born into that caste, you're in you're in trouble.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: But listen, am I right about this?
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Amen?
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: And we have injustice in America, despite it being the greatest country ever.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: And it starts with the social justice of abortion.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: The anniversary of Roe v.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Wade was this past week.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: But this is big news.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: Abortion is big news because of what's happened just in the past week or so.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: New York, uh, Governor Cuomo, uh Catholic, who uh uh used, you know, has just celebrated legalizing abortion up till birth.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: Up till birth celebrates it.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I just found it, I thought I'd put the picture up here, striking that he celebrated it by lighting up the spire.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought it's ironic for two reasons.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, because that spire looks a little like the needle used to inject a nearly full-term baby and kill it in the womb, but also because this building right here is on the World Trade Center, where the World Trade Center was.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: And if you've been to the World Trade Center like I have, it's very moving, and you start reading the names of the thousands of people killed, it's just significant that every time you come to a woman who was pregnant, it lists the woman's name and it says, and her unborn child.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: And now we have a law that says an unborn child up till the very moment of birth can be killed and dismembered.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: And the same thing's now happening up north of New York in the state of Vermont.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: A bill is being offered on the floor that'll bar any government restrictions on abortion, and it has already been uh agreed to by well over half of the legislators.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's a crime of injustice against youngsters, against uh true humans in the womb who can't speak out for themselves.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: But then there's other illustrations, aren't there, in our country?
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: I mentioned human trafficking overseas, 21 to 30 million women, women men, usually young men, boys, women, and children, you know, in the caught in this modern-day slavery.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: But 60,000 victims in our country, maybe as high as 70 or 80,000.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: I really appreciate the fact that you opened your hearts and generosity at Christmas and that we gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in our Christmas project to help out and try to stop human trafficking in the state of Kansas.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then there is, let's be honest, the unique fear of DWB of driving while black.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's really an honest.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: If you talk to African Americans, they really are scared.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: Black America fears the police, here's why, and there are real reasons, and one of the reasons is as a North Carolina cop says, we we fear black men, and that's real.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: This is on a Black Lives Matter website.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: At the same time, police officers are thinking, just stay alive.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: And one of them, African American, says, you know, I'm terrified, and so I go up, and yeah, I can see that I could shoot someone who's entirely innocent because I'm terrified of being shot.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: That whole situation is just rife with injustice.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: It makes you long for a day when that will not be a problem, am I right?
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's the criminal justice system, and whether you're left wing or you're right wing, everyone agrees.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: I think this article was written by Newt Gingrich, for instance.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: The criminal justice system we have is broken, and frankly, it's broken for the same reason that our poverty side, our poverty fighting system is broken.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: Our poverty system locks people into welfare because once upon a time it was challenging.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: It was personal, it was spiritual, it was moral, but now it's amoral.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's not spiritual and it's not personal, it's dehumanizing, locks people into welfare.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: And the same is true in the criminal justice system.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: A brilliant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, I admire him, Stefanos Bibos, has written a book called The Machinery of Criminal Justice.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: I love this sentence in it.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: Criminal justice used to be individualized, that is personal, moral, transparent, and participatory, but it has become impersonal, amoral, hidden from people.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: That is, it leads to injustice.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I know that I know that as soon as somebody commits a crime, you think, well, you lock them up and throw away the key.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: That that's not what God says.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: There's an injustice there that needs to be fixed.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: It can it get fixed?
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: Some people write articles say it'll never be fixed.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: But we should want it to be fixed.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I uh here's something that I've often told you is that in our desire for social justice, we need to remember that the gospel is the greatest, the greatest, you know, um what is the chemical element?
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's the greatest catalyst, you know, for social justice that there is.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so we mustn't forget sharing the gospel.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: We must be careful that we don't always go do social action things without speaking the gospel.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, a person should be more concerned with spiritual matters than with material matters.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: Amen?
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: But listen, another's material welfare is my own spiritual concern.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: And therefore, you and I need to care about this, need to do something about it.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: But but then we ask the question the New Yorker magazine asks as it talks about corruption and graft and crime and injustice around the world.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: Can it ever be eradicated?
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: When will this ever end?
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: I hope by now that as I've dragged you through the swamp, your heart says, I want it all to end.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the answer to that is Isaiah chapter 11, when it talks about the best world ever, verses 1 through 5, the best king ever will finally make everything right.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: He'll bring social, political, and moral justice, verses 6 through 9.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: That'll result in the best world ever.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: Verses 10 through 14, it'll be a homecoming for the whole world.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: Let's take a look at this.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now, as we take a look at um uh Isaiah 11, let me tell you that back in chapter 10, uh we it reminds us that we're in a specific turning point in history when the Nazi Germany of the 8th century BC, the nation of Syria, a wash in the blood of its victims, was rampaging throughout the world, destroying whole civilizations and gloating at their power.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: They were saying things like, I have cut down another nation, I have killed another king, uh, verse uh 13 of chapter 10, by my own wisdom and might, because I am clever.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: Just amazing.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: But God has said, Assyria is simply the tool or the rod that I am using to discipline my people and to cleanse and purify them.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: You're just simply a tool, Assyria, but Assyria says, no, I'm doing it, and God says, okay, because you're so arrogant, the moment you get, I stop using you as a tool on my people, I'm gonna turn around and I'm going to cut you down.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: And chapter 10 ends with these words in verses 33 and 34.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: Look, the Lord God of armies, angel armies, will chop off the branches with terrifying power, and the tall trees will be cut down, the high trees felled, he'll cut down the thickets of the forest with an axe.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so at the end of chapter 10, what we have is the scene where we have all of these stumps, because God has taken his chainsaw to the proud nations of the world, including the nation of Israel, and all we see is stumps, and then in the very next sentence, we have the words, chapter 11, verse 1, then a shoot, a twig, a sprig will grow from the stump, here it is, of Jesse.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: So this is the house of Israel.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: Who's Jesse, by the way?
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: David's daddy, okay.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: I take it that David isn't mentioned here because David was a hero.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: And you don't want to call, you know, the stump of George Washington's, you know.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: So, um, so I think that may be why that's there, but it's the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots will bear fruit.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: The point is here that I'm going to solve the problem of justice, chapter 11 is going to say, because out of the broken down stump of Jesse, remember, God, during the days of David, uh, Israel was like a great cedar tree that towered over all the other nations of the Mideast.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: But in 2 Samuel 7, God said, You're gonna have a descendant on the throne here in Jerusalem forever and ever.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: But what's happened is that the kings, David's descendants, over the 300 years since then, have gotten weaker and worse and more ungodly, and God is eventually gonna just stamp it out and stop it for hundreds of years until the Lord Jesus, the baby Jesus, a little shoot, will grow up in zero AD, right?
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: So here's the question, here's the weirdness.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: How is it that in the previous sentence where God says, I'm gonna chainsaw Assyria down to a stump, we know that was fulfilled in 700, 600, actually, 612 BC, but we know this didn't happen until 700 years later.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe not completely happen until 2700 years later in the future.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the confusing thing about reading prophecy.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: If you've been reading Isaiah with me, you've been going back and forth.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: What is he talking about?
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, chapter 10 is talking about Assyria in 700 BC, and all of a sudden we jump to the future.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: So let me very briefly give you a little seminary moment, and that is that prophecy is given to us in sort of one way of seeing it is like mountain peaks.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: If you grew up close to the Rockies, say, or I was, I grew up close to the Cascades in Oregon, you'll see mountain ranges, but it looks like oftentimes just like one mountain, but there's a mountain behind it that sort of reaches up in that same perspective, and it's only when you drive past them that you realize that there are actually three individual mountains that look like one mountain.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: So Isaiah from his day, as he prophesied, he could see clearly the present day and the fall of Israel and the fall of Assyria, and he knew he was saying more than that, but we don't know how much he knew about the fact that the Messiah king, the shoot from the stump of Jesse, would be born six, seven hundred years later, and he wouldn't actually rule over the earth until 2,700 years later, approximately.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's going to be in the future.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: Does that make sense?
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: So that's called prophetic fulfillment, and that's why it's kind of hard to understand how you're going back and forth in that way.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: Someone reminded me this week that I used to use another metaphor, and that is that in history, history's like a stream, and to get across the whole stream, there are these stones of prophecy.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: And and you sort of have these multiple fulfillments.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so in the prophets, especially in Isaiah, there's generally three stones.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: There's a fulfillment in seven hundred BC with Assyria and Israel.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's a fulfillment in the Lord Jesus Christ when he was a human on earth.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then here comes the second coming of Christ.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: Who knows, 2030 AD.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: Does that make sense?
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: So these are the steps of prophetic fulfillment.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: And what we have here is this shoot growing from the stump of Jesse.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: And the question is, who is this speaking about?
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer is that it's speaking, as we know, from Jesus' own statements and the Gospels and the book of Revelation, that this is actually the Lord Jesus Christ, the Messiah.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: Why does it call him a shoot or a sprig?
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: For the same reason that in the last four or five chapters it's been calling him a little child.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: Chapter 7, a little child will be born.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: You will eventually call him Emmanuel, chapter 9.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: Last week, a little child will be born.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: Eventually you'll call him Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: And now we find this shoot.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: And you say, it's trying to let us know that the great best king ever is not going to be born in a palace.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: He's not going to be born powerful.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: No, he's, we know from hindsight, you know, Peter says to his first century people, you can understand prophecy better than Isaiah, he says, because you live right here at the first coming, and 2,700 years later, you and I can understand it better.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: We now know that baby Jesus was born in a cave, born to a peasant woman.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: And he grew up like a little shoot in an obscure village up north in Galilee.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: What good could come from Nazareth?
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: And he grew up as a mason and a carpenter, not a hero, nothing famous.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: Then when he was 30, he became an itinerant preacher and he walked around and he had a had a following.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: But he still was unpopular, not popular with anybody who really mattered down in Jerusalem.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: And he walked around as an itinerant preacher, and then this person who had no formal education, who had no family, no place to lay his head, never went to university, and had no credentials, no property that he owned himself, this person was finally delivered over to his enemies.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: And his friends ran away and deserted him, and his enemies paraded him in a mock trial, and then they executed him amidst common thieves.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: And as he was being executed, the soldiers who executed him thought so little of him that they gambled for his only property, his coat, cloak, right in front of them.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: And when he died, he was thrown into a borrowed tomb.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: And yet Arnold Toynbee today and other major historians say that the most significant events of all history are the birth, the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: And in retrospect, we know that all of the parliaments that have ever sat, all of the kings that have ever reigned, all of the armies that have ever marched, all of the navies that have ever sailed, all the squadrons that have ever flown cannot match the importance, the significance of this one little shoot from the stump of Jesse.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: For he is the one who has changed all of history and one day will come as the best king ever to establish the best world ever.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: And Jesus himself knew it because Jesus quoted the next verse referring to himself in the Gospels.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: He said, The Spirit of the Lord rests upon me, and this was the prediction the spirit of the Lord will rest on this future king.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: A spirit of wisdom and understanding, a spirit of counsel and strength, a spirit of knowledge, and the fear of the Lord.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: There are many kinds of wisdom in the Old Testament.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: A spirit of wisdom is said to be the property, a gift of God to those who are good musically, or those who are good at carpentry, to those uh so if you have an athletic or an academic skill, if you are good at speaking or at serving, if you're good at massaging or at music or at building or anything like that, this is a wisdom from God.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: You ought to tell your child when you find out his skill, his gift, tell him this comes from God.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: This is a hokma.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: This is a word still used all the time by Arabs and Jews over in the Middle East.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: This great word wisdom, hokma.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: Or you can oftentimes use that word haqqam, meaning wise when you're overseas.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: I love to use that to compliment a shop owner who's just given me a good deal.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: I say, you're hakam, you're very wise.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, but this, there's a spirit of wisdom that's especially needed by rulers, because as you know, finding someone who can run things well, run a school well, or run a city well, or run a government well, is so rare in this day because the temptations to bribery and graft and corruption and rushing to judgment and stupidity are so strong.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: No, this ruler, this great ruler, is guaranteed success because the spirit of the Lord, a spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of great ruling, ruling well, will be on him.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe you say, but hold it, how come Jesus needs the spirit?
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus is the second person of the Trinity, he's the Son of God Himself.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: How come he needs the third person of the Trinity to help him out?
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I say, that's the wrong question to ask.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's not, does he need him?
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's a matter not of need, it's or depends, it's a matter of cooperation and unity and love.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: For from eternity past, the three individual persons of the Godhead have communicated with each other in absolute love, and they are one.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: And even when our Lord Jesus came down to earth and he was human, every single day he consulted his father and he consulted the Spirit, the other two persons on the Godhead, especially at critical moments.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: He'd stay up all night to pray before he decided on the twelve disciples, before he went into battle against Satan in the wilderness, before his baptism, just before he decided to raise Lazarus from the dead, which guaranteed that he would die in Jerusalem the next week.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross, the Lord Jesus constantly consulted the other persons of the Trinity, the Father about his will, the spirit for wisdom.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: And one day when he comes to earth, he will reign with a spirit of wisdom.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: That same spirit, by the way, that a young man many years ago, 900 years before Christ, a young man named Solomon, prayed for that night that he was terrified because the next day he was going to take over his father's throne.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: He felt utterly inadequate.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: He prayed to God, and God said, I'll give you something.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: You ask for it.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: You want wealth, I'll give it to you.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: You want power.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: Ask for one thing.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: And that boy said, What I want is a spirit of wisdom so that I can rule well.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: And God said, I'm pleased with you.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: And he poured out on him a spirit of hope ma, a spirit of wisdom, so that rulers from around the world came to sit and listen to the wisest man in all the world.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: And one day the best king ever will have a spirit of wisdom, and he will be so wise.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: We read how wise he'll be is that because his delight is in the fear of the Lord, and it's not in surveys, and it's not in polls, and it's not in being popular on television, and it's not in being cool, because his delight is in the fear of the Lord, he won't judge by what he sees with his eyes.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: And he won't execute justice by what he hears with his ears.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: No, it won't be that shallow.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: He'll have a spirit that can look beyond this, be behind the surface.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: He won't rush to judgment.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, he will judge the poor righteously and execute justice for the oppressed of the land.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: No bribes, no corruption, no injustice.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: And there are many ways we could illustrate this, but frankly, I can't help thinking about something that's happened just in the past week or ten days in our country.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: When I read he won't judge by what he sees with his eyes, he won't execute justice by what he hears with his ears.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: I can't help thinking of that tweet that went out that caused such danger to some Catholic kids from a high school down in Kentucky.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_00: For it appeared and all of the major media rushed to judgment that this was a shameful act.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: The video captures the mocking of a Native American veteran.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: We now know that he's lying about that.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: That he never served in, he's an ex-con who never served in Vietnam.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: But it looked like that, and so everyone rushed to judgment.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone in power, everyone in leadership, including even evangelical Christian leaders, judging in just a moment by what they could see with their eyes and what they heard with their ears.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_00: And as a result, the social media outrage quickly turned dangerous.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: As one uh well-known leftist wrote, I just want these kids to die.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: Simple as that, every single one of them and their parents.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: And a move started to try to talk to the employers of their parents, to put these, put their entire families out of work and crush them.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: And they were called supremacists, they were called oppressors, they were called racists, they were called bigots, and they were called worse on nearly every channel on television.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_00: And Covington Catholic High School closed for safety after the students were receiving hundreds of death threats.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then the whole thing all of a sudden changed.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason it changed is all of a sudden, instead of a short little tweet which had been deliberately selected and put out by a special group that uh has an agenda, all of a sudden you can see the whole hour and two hours that happened when these kids who had gone up to Washington C for the March of Life and then were standing by the Lincoln Memorial, turned out not to be the oppressors, but the oppressed.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: For an entire hour before that little tweet, they had been vilified, they had been cursed by a group of black supremacists called the black Israelites, a special cult.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: And they were called vile, racist, sexist names for an hour, and they did not retaliate.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: And then an activist, a liar, an old Indian came up who's very well known.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: And he beat a drum in their faces.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: I really liked the way that John Miller summarized this whole thing and his TV program.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: The media immediately, however, knew who were guilty here.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: Not the black Israelite adults who were shouting filthy, violent racial and religious slurs at the teens.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: And not the Indian liar activist who came up and beat his drum in their faces.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: No, the kids had to be the oppressors because they were white, Christian, and somewhere make America great again, Caps, which some of you remember was the slogan for our great evil president during the last campaign.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know what made me sad about this is that, uh, and by the way, I appreciated the fact that a leftist magazine just this weekend have an article, this is how the left destroys itself.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know what bothered me the most is that Christians, some of whom, Christian leaders, some of whom I know personally, jumped on board with both feet.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_00: They rushed to judgment.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not going to tell you all who they were, though maybe I was most burdened by Beth Moore, who used in one sentence the words dehumanizing, antichrist, vomit, and another word to describe these kids.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: And unfortunately, you know, I'm looking online to find apologies from these evangelical leaders.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: I found an apology, the the head of the Catholic diocese down there condemned it, and even the principal of their own school said they were going to kick them all out.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: May have apologized to their kids for rushing to judgment, but some of these people that I know and admire, as far as I can find, have not apologized.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder, is it a coincidence that none of these evangelical, all of these evangelical leaders who jumped on board with both feet are well-known anti-Trumpers?
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: Is it really all about that cap that some of them wore?
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: Is it really worth ruining some kids' lives and endangering their safety?
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_00: Just so that possibly you can get rid of the most evil president in history, in your opinion?
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, I stray, but you know it's gonna be wonderful.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: Will it be wonderful to have a king one day and a ruler who will squelch that kind of trash?
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_00: Who will say, hold it, stop it.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: We're not gonna do this, we're not gonna rush to judgment, we're not gonna condemn too quickly, because this will be a leader who will not judge by what he sees with his eyes or what he hears with his ears.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: He will have the spirit of wisdom, he will be able to look behind the scenes, he will be more cautious.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to a day like that.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I confess maybe it's because my wife runs a Christian school in town, and that at the same time that we have the whole Covington Catholic High School thing, we have Emmanuel Christian School in Washington, D.C.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_00: And our vice president's wife made the mistake of saying she was looking forward to going over to the school and teaching an art class.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, some people looked at the school and they looked up that that school says that you can't be a practicing homosexual and teach there.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: Well duh, what a shocker.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this is just simply Orthodox Christianity for the last 2,000 years.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: And a president or a king, a future king, won't allow this kind of trash to happen, won't allow somebody's reputation to be dragged through the mud for these things.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: But instead, he will judge fairly and righteously for the poor and oppressed, and he will also strike the world with a scepter from his mouth, with a rod of his mouth, and he'll kill the wicked with a command or breath from his lips.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: So he'll reward and prosper the righteous, and he will kill the wicked.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that's going to be what he's going to do.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: And it concludes in verse 5, Isaiah 11, 1 through 5 says that righteousness will be a belt around his hips, and faithfulness the belt around his waist.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: He's going to basically be the best king ever.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, around the world, there will be justice, and the result will be the best world ever.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: And now we come to some famous verses.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: The wolf will dwell with a lamb, and the leopard will lie down with a goat.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: And the calf and the young lion and the fattened calf will be together, and a child will lead them.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_00: So, really quickly, there's a biblical zoo in Jerusalem, but it doesn't have this exhibit anymore.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_00: The biblical zoo in Jerusalem, very popular, used to have an exhibit called the Isaiah Vision, and it quoted this exact verse, and it had the biggest crowds by far of anybody at the zoo.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_00: And the crowds were looking, and they'd look at it, and there was all there's a young lion, and then there was a kid, uh a young goat.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_00: In the same one.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_00: Fulfillment of Isaiah, right?
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well, not quite, but but and I love the fact that the guide would turn to us and say, they have to replace the goat every week.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: So let me go, what?
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, just kidding, because you can see they were friends, they were playing around, they'd eat out of the same dish, they'd lie down together.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now, of course, after the lion grew up a little bit, they had to replace the lion.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: But apparently, what's going to happen is we're going to have this world that will be entirely changed in some significant ways.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_00: The cow and the bear will graze, their young ones will lie down together, the lion will eat straw like cattle, an infant will play beside the cobra's pit, a toddler will put his hand into a snake's den.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_00: They won't harm or destroy each other on my entire holy mountain.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: For the earth will be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the sea is filled with water.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_00: No one, there won't be children, little children around the world, dozens of millions of them, abused, sex trafficked, killed, forced to hold weapons and fight in a warfare they don't understand.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: There won't be that kind of harm or destroying in this world that is coming in this golden age.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: Why not?
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because the whole earth, including animals and people, will be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the sea is filled with water, and therefore everything will be changed.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: I love the way it says it in the old King James Version.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_00: The earth will, read this with me, the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_00: Is that beautiful?
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't that a lovely?
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the way it's going to be.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: And because we know the Lord, all of us, it will be a golden age.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when will it happen?
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: You say, is this heaven?
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yes and no.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: I say that, but the interesting thing is when you look at the parallel passage in Isaiah 65, the parallel passage, you know, Cobra and all that stuff, and the little kid includes this verse no longer will babies die when only a few days old, no longer will adults die before they've lived a full life, no longer will people be considered old at a hundred, only sinners will die that young.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so this can't be heaven, can it, when there's sin and when there's death.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_00: No, this happens to be, you could call it stage one of heaven.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: You could call it the millennium, this period of time that we're told about in the book of Revelation, chapter 20, a thousand-year reign, where Christ comes down, rules from Jerusalem, and sets up a golden age, but there will be sin and there will be death, even though it's a golden age.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: At the end of that time, it'll move into heaven.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: Millennium.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_00: We're not talking Millennium Falcon here.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: Trivia.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_00: Who owned the Millennium Falcon?
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_00: Hansel, thank you.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_00: Boy, you're a little slow on that.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_00: No, we're talking about the millennium, we're talking about a thousand years.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: You can look that up and you can study that on your own because I need to finish a sermon.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_00: We've talked about the best king ever, and this is the best world ever, and the result will be this amazing homecoming of all of the nations of the world as well as of Israel.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: On that day, this root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_00: The nations will look to him for guidance, and his resting place, Jerusalem, will be glorious, and it will be glorious, and he will be given glory because of who he is, full of wisdom and understanding and grace and beauty and delight and strength and power.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_00: And he will be given glory because of what he has done.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_00: He has ended the great curse against mankind.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_00: He has brought life and forgiveness and joy and peace and justice to the world.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_00: And as a result, his resting place will be full of glory and glorious.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_00: And on that day, the Lord will extend his hand a second time to recover the remnant of his people who survive from all over the world.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_00: And he'll lift up a banner.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_00: God the Father will lift up a banner.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: Who's the banner?
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus Christ for the nations and gather all of the ones of Israel and gather all of the scattered.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_00: This banner will wave over the world, and it'll be the banner of the Lord Jesus Christ, and it'll be the banner of salvation and hope and a golden age.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_00: I need to give you two applications because I am hard, I can hardly wait for you to hear the song that Jeremiah and I have picked out.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_00: But listen, here's the two takeaways.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_00: Two takeaways.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_00: They're so important, I boiled three, four, five down to just two.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: They're that important.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_00: Listen carefully.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, long.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_00: This is why I dragged you through the muck today.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_00: Long for the day when the best king ever takes the throne to establish the best world ever with finally justice for all.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: Let me say it again.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_00: Long for the day when the best king ever takes the throne to establish the best world ever with finally justice for all.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_00: And secondly, Jesus, the little shoot from the stump of Jesse, is God's saving banner, the hope of the world.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_00: Wave the banner.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_00: Lift it up when somebody says it's so unjust.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_00: This side is broken.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_00: Say, yes, it is.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_00: And it'll only be fixed when the best king ever comes to establish the best world ever.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_00: And his name is Jesus.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: And wave the banner of the glory of Jesus.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: Amen?
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: All right, let's pray.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, we look forward to that day.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_00: One day is coming, oh glorious day.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_00: And we will rejoice in that day because then finally we'll have justice.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: And even better, we'll have the King of justice himself in our midst and visible, whom we can see and speak to.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_00: We'll have the Lord Jesus Christ.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: That little shoot from Jesse has grown up to give us the best world ever.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: In his name we pray.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.