Clough Hebrews Lesson 68

Fifth Warning Passage II  – Hebrews 12:25-29

 

Hebrews 12:12-29 is the fifth and last warning passage. And as we have said over and over again, each of these warning passages must be understood in the light of the old covenant.  Remember, the people that originally read this epistle or who actually heard it are people who have strong Jewish backgrounds and they’re going to think in terms of the old covenant.  So for that reason the epistle is written in terms of the old covenant.  And under the old covenant warning passages make sense.  They make sense because the old covenant was a covenant given to a nation and inside that nation you had some people who were born again and some people who were not born again.  You had a faithful remnant and then you had a group of people who were unbelievers, all however were under the old covenant because they were all of the tribes of Jacob.  If that’s the case, and the nation is addressed, the nation is an entity within which there are professing unbelievers and believers thus the author of Hebrews approaches the Hebrew community of his day along the lines of the old covenant.  So we have these frequent warning passages. 

 

Now we said that this is an epistle of exhortation and we are looking as we go through these verses on ways this author exhorted, and we’ve seen that he uses three primary techniques.  One is that he exhorts on the basis of the overall plan of God.  Because God’s plan is so great, because Jesus Christ has done so much, because grace is so over-excelling our problems, therefore certain things follow.  A second technique that he uses is reward and punishment, blessing for obedience, cursing for disobedience, and the third technique that is used is the modeling technique.  If somebody else made it in the faith life, using the faith technique and they were an ignoramus then you too can make it.  That’s the modeling technique.

 

Last time we ended at verse 24 where we had concluded there were two areas of operating of the Holy Spirit being mentioned here; one was the Old Testament kingdom and one was the New Testament era.  The Old Testament—Moses, Mount Sinai, the darkness of God when He invaded the sinful world, there was the noise of His Word, there were angels serving and in the New there were Jesus the mediator, it was based on human blood, His own blood, it dealt with angels who were not only serving but they were also celebrating and the called out remnant and so on. So we had a series of contrasts.

 

Now tonight we begin at verse 25 and here is his summary exhortation.  This is his last exhortation in general terms.  Beginning in chapter 13 he’ll have specific directions for the operation of a local church. But at verse 25 we have the general exhortations to stay with Bible doctrine.

 

In Hebrews 25 a it says, “See that ye refuse not Him that speaks. For if they escaped not who refused him that spoke on earth, much more shall not we escape, if we turn away from him that speaks from heaven, [26] Whose voice then shook the earth; but now He has promised, saying, Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven.  [27] And this word, Yet once more, signifies the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.  [28] Wherefore, receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved, let us have grace, by which we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear; [29] For our God is a consuming fire.” 

 

So verse 25 starts with “See then,” it refers back to what he has said, the entire epistle actually, about the revelation at Sinai.  Remember the first warning passage dealt with this.  In Hebrews 2:1-4, Mount Sinai.  At Mount Sinai God revealed Himself via angels.  Now in the New Testament era God is revealing Himself through His Son.  So there’s a contrast.  You have a person of higher rank giving the order, so that means that the person of lower rank, the angels, their orders, if they were in force, are obviously an adumbration of the orders being enforced in the person of higher rank.  The argument is from the lesser to the greater.

 

So, “See then that ye refuse not him that speaks.”  “Refuse not” is present tense which means see that this doesn’t become a pattern in your life.  It can very easily become a pattern, a pattern of refusal, it’s the same word  that is used in verse 19, and because this word “refuse” is used in verse 19 and because supposedly we all by now know the event of Mount Sinai, we ought to be able to read in quite a bit into this word “refuse.”  “Refuse” is used in verse 19 for the people at Mount Sinai who rejected revelation; they didn’t want to hear revelation and we know enough from the Mount Sinai incident to know a little bit about why they turned away from revelation. Do any of you recall some things that made the people turn away from God’s revelation at Mount Sinai.  Remember some things? God started speaking and they said no, we don’t want it.  It wasn’t exactly overt disobedience but what was it that made them turn away.

 

 [someone answers] All right, God’s over awing glory at Mount Sinai made them very aware of their sinfulness and their inability to keep the Word.  So what were they mostly aware of when they made this kind of a refusal?  It was an awareness of their inability to obey the Word.  And they knew the more they heard of the Word the more responsible they would be, and therefore they took the smart way out; they got out from the teaching of the Word, they were a lot smarter than a lot of believers today, the nod to God crowd at 11:00 o’clock.  They always trot in, if hell froze over they’d still be trotting in at 11:00, that’s the tradition, that’s the habit, and so they come in here time after time and hear the Word, they’re no more interested in applying it than anybody else, yet they continue to hear it.  Now those people are being very foolish because people who come in at 11:00 and have no intention of obeying the Word, who just sit there and do nothing, let it go in one ear and out the other, fail to realize a certain point of doctrine, and that is that every time you are exposed to the Word the Holy Spirit makes a record of that, and you’re going to be judged on the basis of how much you have been exposed to.

 

So these people are really smart, they’ve figured out in the name of the game, they said look, we can’t obey this thing so the safest thing for us to do is just tune God out, stay away from the Word. And they’re very smart people, the longer they stayed away the less standard they’d be held against.  So the refusal back in the Old Testament comes about through actually wisdom but it was their inability, they had their eyes on their inability and the inability over-awed them, they had no confidence that God in grace could enable them do the Word. 

 

Now that’s precisely the situation of the Hebrew Christians, isn’t it.  They face persecution, they’re depressed, they’re discouraged, they figure they can’t make it any more, so they too are looking and focusing on their inabilities.  And so what God says here is especially directed to discouraged believers who are focusing on their inability.  Now it’s necessary for you to recognize that you cannot obey one single area of the Word of God correctly.  Oh, there’s some overt things that you can do, but inwardly there’s not the correct thankful mental attitude and there can’t be unless the Holy Spirit fills us, unless we’re in fellowship.  If that’s the case, then no one can submit to the Word apart from grace.  So it’s good to know that you’re unable, as long as you don’t stop there and get in a tailspin and focus on that and not focus on the next step which is trusting God and His grace to enable you.  So then, “See then that you not refuse,” don’t be like the people in the Old Testament who had their eyes continually on their inability to carry through with the Word.  That’s the wrong thing. 

 

“See that you refuse not Him that speaks.  For if they escaped not who refused him,” now we’re into the aorist, “if they escaped not who refused him that spoke on earth, much more shall we not escape, if we turn away from Him that speaks from heaven.”  Now how did they not escape?  Can you think of some ways the Exodus generation did not escape.  What happened to that generation collectively.  They died in the wilderness, minus a few people; minus how many males?  Two. That generation of probably two million males, minus two, died.  And the women and the children remained alive, natural deaths but a lot of them remained alive and they survived and the reason was it was the men that were responsible; God holds the men responsible.  When the men fail to apply the Word, God holds the men responsible.  So He didn’t discipline the women, He disciplined the men in that generation.  And it was because they had the idea they couldn’t trust God to enable them, so “they escaped not.”

 

Now at the end of verse 25 there are two revelations of God and these twin revelations of God hold and continue the theme that we’ve seen, the Sinai revelation versus New Testament revelation.  The Old Testament angelic mediated revelation versus the New Testament Son mediated revelation.  Notice the location of the revelation, verse 25, at the end, “who speak on earth,” or who spake on earth, that’s at Mount Sinai, and the one who “speaks from heaven.”  Now we’re up against a little interpretation problem here in that we don’t know exactly what this difference is: earth – heaven.  We’ve got to go on further because he’s got something in mind, a very startling thing in fact that’s on his mind and now in verse 26 he is going to let us in on what it is that he’s thinking about.  Why does he refer to God as speaking on earth and from heaven? 

 

Let’s take the earth side of it and develop this, and when we develop God speaking on earth we’ll see a whole bunch of characteristics down here and then we’re going to see okay, now God is going to speak from heaven, what will be the characteristics over here.  So verse 26 starts the set of characteristics of God speaking at Mount Sinai.  And to see this we’re going to have to go back into the Old Testament because he presumes that we understand something, he uses a verb in verse 26, “to shake,” or to cause an earthquake, “whose voice then shook the earth,”  “then” refers to Mount Sinai, then the entire planet shook.  Now there were remembrances of this throughout Old Testament history and we’re going to turn back to see if we can list some characteristics of this shaking to see how bad it really was. 

 

Turn first to Exodus 19:13, this is God, what it was when He spoke on earth.  Now God hasn’t spoken like this in many, many, many, many, many centuries.  For that reason the human race is not prepared for what’s coming.  To the degree that we are in the Word we will be prepared but very few people ever even give it a thought, leave alone being prepared, because the human race collectively has forgotten what it was like to have the God of the universe address this planet.  It’s just an experience that hasn’t happened recently in history and therefore people just had no idea what it’s about, so we’re going to show you some of the things that happened last time.

In Exodus 19:13, there was the instruction that was given to the nation, about which we spoke last time, “There shall not an hand touch it, but he shall surely be stoned, or shot through; whether it be beast of man, it shall not live,” now that is anyone who touched the mountain.  So during the time when God spoke on earth there was contamination of some sort, contamination of all flesh; whether it was some sort of radiation, whether it was some strange disease, whether it was something that actually happened to the living tissue we do not know.  But anyone besides Moses who touched Mount Sinai would be considered contaminated and how do we know they’re considered contaminated from this passage?  Because of the mode of execution. Both the systems of execution in verse 13 are systems of executing somebody from a distance.  A sword is not used, a spear is not used; stones or slings are used, and that’s so you can kill them whether they’re men or animals, kill them, get rid of them, they are contaminated beings because they have touched the mountain of God.  Now we don’t know, all we know is that there was some strange contamination going on at this point in history. 

 

Now that’s one odd item.  Now if you turn to Judges 5 we’ll see something else to add to our list of characteristics.  This is very important because we have people today that don’t want to take prophecy literally.  And developing out of this list of characteristics is proof as to why we are premillennialists who take Scripture literally concerning the Second Advent.  Judges 5:4-5, speaking of Mount Sinai, “LORD, when You went out of Seir,” by the way, this is a psalm, even though it’s not in the book of Psalms, this is a psalm written by Deborah and Barak; Barak you remember was the mouse that had to have Deborah go along everywhere he went because he was afraid somebody might beat him up.  So he said, “LORD, when You went out of Seir,” that’s the area of Sinai, “when You marched out of the field of Edom, the earth trembled,” so that’s another characteristic we have of that revelation, that it was accompanied by earthquake, “the earth trembled,” we don’t know what it was on the Richter scale but it was an earthquake of memorable proportions, “and the heavens dropped, the clouds also dropped water,” so “the heavens dropped” means there was a low ceiling, there was something in the atmosphere so the atmosphere itself was affected. See, when you start adding up these characteristics this Mount Sinai thing isn’t just somebody blowing a horn on the top of the mountain.  This is a very complicated thing that happened in the past.  And you can understand, you’ve all heard the expression, somebody will put the fear of God in somebody.  Well, God put the fear of Himself in Israel and now you’ll see why He put the fear of God in them. 

 

Notice also in the next verse, Judges 4:5, “The mountains melted from before the LORD,” that means that there was tremendous heat that was generated and whatever this contamination was in the mountain it may have been electrical, and the electrical energy in the rocks may have sent to the melting point, but the melting point of rock was reached on Sinai.  So tremendous heat, we’re talking about thousands of degrees centigrade, so this is the kind of physical disturbance that accompanied the speaking of God’s Word.  Needless to say people in that day didn’t have any philosophic difficulty, seeing that God’s Word covered and controlled nature. 

 

Now that’s one passage that deals with it, let’s turn to Psalm 68:7-8 for some more characteristics.  Again this is another Psalm and it commemorates the same thing.  “O God, when You went forth before Thy people, when You did march through the wilderness, Selah, [8] The earth shook, the heavens also dropped at the presence of God: Sinai itself at the presence of God;” now you’ll see in the King James the italics which means that we have to supply the verb; since the main verb is shake, we take it that Mount Sinai shook,” also verse 9, tremendous rain.  [“Thou, O God, did send a plentiful rain, whereby You did confirm Thine inheritance, when it was weary.”]  So the atmosphere was disturbed, we now know that the atmosphere was affected at least by causing tremendous rain, we know the melting point was reached, we also would suspect orogeny, that’s generation of mountains, or the remolding of mountain ranges that was done at this time. 

 

Can you imagine now, just add these characteristics up in your head and visualize what it must have been like to stand there, listen to God speak the ten words, and then everywhere you go you see these cosmic disturbances, you look up, you see the atmosphere looks crazy, the earth is shaking under your feet, you look up at the rocks and they’re melting while you hear the Word of God.  Now that’s the kind of picture they had of a powerful God speaking His Word. 

 

Psalm 114:4, this repeats some of the characteristics, “The mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills like lambs.  [5] What ailed thee, O thou sea, that you fled?  Thou Jordan, that you were driven back?  [6] Ye mountains, that ye skipped like rams, and ye little hills, like lambs? [7] Tremble, thou earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob,  [8] Who turned the rock into standing water, and the flint into a fountain of waters.”  So obviously verse 8 repeats this characteristic that the melting point of rock was reached.  We had lava flows initiated around the spot where God spoke.  You’ll notice “the mountains skipped like rams” in verse 4, that emphasizes orogeny, it emphasizes tremendous earthquakes.  So we’re seeing a tremendous disturbance on the earth.

 

Now connect all this with the divine viewpoint framework we can come up with some interesting things.  According to our framework the Mount Sinai, it’s connected with revelation and Exodus, Exodus and Mount Sinai are together in this treatment we’re seeing, and both of those speak of revelation and matching the color again, we see the color here is orange for judgment/salvation so we’ve got judgment/salvation and we’ve got revelation.  Now judgment/salvation is pictured by the flood and it’s pictured by the Exodus, the events that went on during these two times.   Those two pictures, the flood and Sinai, are pictures to give you the perspective to interpret prophecies concerning Christ’s return so you won’t think of Christ’s return as some spiritual thing that’s tranquil, that’s quiet, that’s passive.  It’s nothing of the sort.  The people to whom the prophecies of Christ’s return were given are people who had experienced these two events.  They would never have interpreted those prophecies in any other terms except catastrophic terms.  The Biblical view of history is catastrophic history; this is where evolution and uniformitarian geology is wrong because it has a false view of history; it is not catastrophic enough.  And here we’re talking about a catastrophe, not in ancient times, we’re talking about a catastrophe in the 14th century, a catastrophe that was great enough to turn rocks into lava flows.  It caused the Red Sea to split, it caused the Jordan to divide, it caused the atmosphere to be disturbed; tremendous disturbances all insistence in the Scriptures connected with God’s Word. 

 

So now we come back, seeing this we come back to Hebrews 12 and keeping in mind these two events, particularly Exodus and Sinai, these are the events this man is talking about. And so he says, Hebrews 12:26, “”Whose voice then,” back then at Sinai, “shook the earth,” and he means shook, literally, “but now,” notice the contrast in verse 26, then—now, “but now He has promised,” perfect tense, the promise was made in the past, results continue to the present, “but now He has promised, saying, Yet once more I shall shake not the earthy only, but also heaven.”  So now let’s see what we’ve got.  Remember, keep in mind the interpretation.  These people, the people who experienced a literal earthquake, literal rocks turning to literal lava and so on, and now we go back to our set of characteristics and we come up and are now prepared to see what he’s really saying.  He is saying that when God speaks again planet earth will not be the only place the only place in disturbance but the entire universe, for the word “heaven” refers to the rest of the universe.  So, whereas we have the planet earth suffering at this point we can expect great disturbances in the solar system and in the galaxies, all the way out; on the level of the solar system for the nearby events, the planets, these planets will suffer.  They will suffer catastrophic forces being introduced into the system.  Uniformitarian astronomy will have to be abandoned at that point because momentum transfers and forces will be introduced in the system that will totally imbalance the system.  We’ll have galaxies changing, perhaps we’ll discover more about light, the fact that some people think that light from the furthest part of the universe can reach us in less than 17 minutes, and even though their million and millions of light years way in geometric space, other theories, by treating space in different formulas come up with 17 minute max figure.  So it’s possible that in the future we’re going to see this demonstrated before our eyes, that the universe has an oddness to it that we never even comprehended until it see it shaken to the core because of God’s Word.

 

Now you might ask at this point, why is it that the Second Advent includes the solar system and the galaxies whereas at Sinai the only thing that was shaken, apparently, was the earth.  Maybe there was some other disturbances out around, but that wasn’t the focus; the focus was on planet earth.  You say well why does it escalate; why does it escalate out into the universe?  We’re going to get into this, we can’t right in this particular passage, but this has to do with the angelic conflict.  By the time of the Second Advent the church of Jesus Christ will have been finished.  During this period of time, for 1900 years, since Jesus Christ died, until He returns again to rapture the Church, we have had millions of believers, millions and millions of people have trusted in Jesus Christ.  For every person who has trusted in Jesus Christ during this period, we have an addition to the body of Christ. When that body is finished, that body will subdue the universe.  Israel is God’s component to subdue the earth; the Church, the body of Christ, is God’s instrument to subdue physical creation all around the earth. So when God gets ready to speak again he is going to restructure the entire cosmos as a result of the church of Jesus Christ.  Now that is how significant planet earth and sanctification are. 

 

Now the average 20th century man who comes to a passage like this is incapable of understanding it; absolutely incapable of understanding it.  For a person to step out of that world that exists around us, with the uniformitarian evolutionary philosophy that has been taught since childhood, with a view of the universe that the average person that is a product of our school system comes to the Bible with, he is not prepared for this kind of passage. This is why I’m kind of going slow and trying to put it to you in all of its starkness, and putting it to you in all of its challenging form.  This author has the audacity to say that when you are depressed, when you are suffering from a spiritual problem, apparently as insignificant as a little mild case of depression, the basis of exhortation for that little depression is nothing other than a worldview so radical that it has within itself the entire transformation of the physical universe. 

 

In other words, he doesn’t recommend taking a few verses and scotch taping them to your medicine cabinet so while you shave you can memorize verses all the time.  Now memorizing verses is good, fine, but the point remains that he’s prescribing far more potent medicine than just a few verses that could be psychologically interpreted.  He doesn’t permit you to worm your way out of this passage, you can’t worm your way out and say why, he’s giving us a way of positive thinking here, he’s giving us a new mental attitude, just that.  No he isn’t; he is demanding that you consider the actual physical nature of the entire physical universe, that that entire universe can be upset by the Word of God, and if the Word of God is so potent that it can affect Mars, Jupiter, the sun, Saturn, it’s so potent that at one sweep it can influence these bodies, then the Word of God is big enough for you to trust with your little problem.

 

That’s the argument and that’s the potency that this author approaches the Word of God, and it’s in utter conflict with the 20th century.  You take your choice, you can go along with the 20th century and have your problems and disbelief in a powerful Word of God or you can abandon the false view of the universe that you have and come on over to the Scriptural view, which is a true one, and view the universe the way it ought to be viewed, and that’s the choice and the challenge this man presents; nothing less than this, nothing less than a total recommitment to a completely different philosophy that collides at every point with everything that you’ve ever learned in school.

 

That’s the demand that Scripture makes upon you and as thinking believers that’s your assignment, to think this through to see if you really believe it.  And until you have thought it through to the point where you can say you believe it, you won’t believe it.  You can pretend but you won’t really believe it. That’s why I’m so convinced that unless you solve this creation/ evolution question to your own satisfaction you are never going to move in the Christian life.  People who fence sit, people who are trying to steer the middle of the road course like a few organizations on Texas Tech campus, people who are trying to avoid the issue or worse than that, not thinking about, coming up with all the excuses that we didn’t know and this and that, which is tantamount to an admission that they have incompetent ignoramuses in charge of the group. And when we have this going on, on campus and elsewhere, then you can expect people are not going to grow.  People can’t grow with that kind of stuff, who are we kidding. The only kind of stuff you can grow with is powerful stuff, direct fiat creation, total antagonism at every point with biology and geology today.  Now that’s the kind of stuff that causes you to grow spiritually and nothing less, nothing less than a total, complete transformation.

 

So that’s when we read verse 26 now we’re looking at it through the eyes of a man who doesn’t look at the world the we’re used to.  “Whose voice then shook the earth;” but He says, I’m going to shake the earth and I’m going to shake the universe the next time I speak.  Now to show that Jesus believed this, turn to Matthew 24:29; again, unfortunately for the compromisers Jesus believed in a literal Scripture.  Jesus grounded His entire ministry on a literal treatment of Genesis.  And if you like the ethics of Jesus and you like the new thought of Jesus, you’d better be prepared to accept the foundation of Jesus, which is a literal Genesis. 

 

Matthew 24:29, Jesus Himself is thinking in exactly these same terms when He predicts certain things are going to happen when He comes again.  “Immediately after the tribulation of those days” there will be political upheaval, but the Bible insists that man’s spiritual and political upheavals are in somehow synchronization with all nature, this is why I was so careful in the early chapters of Hebrews to keep saying to you over and over again, that angels, to this author, are very intimately connected with physical phenomenon.  Remember that passage we learned way, way back; it said God makes His angels flaming fire and wind.  In other words, they pass between appear to us as inanimate physical chemical phenomenon, all of a sudden they can move from that and become spirit beings with volition.  Now how one being can be a spirit being and then suddenly appear as a flame, or as a wind, we don’t know, but angels can transform themselves into inanimate physical chemical phenomenon, so they are tied in here. 

 

And this is why, when it says the tribulation, which is a spiritual political type thing going on in the minds of men and in society at large, involves physical and demonic forces and the struggle becomes so intense during the tribulation and the conflict so great in the angelic realm, that at last the angelic links with physical creation are exposed and so it spills over, as it were, it doesn’t stay confined to just political issues, it’s not just social issues,  it’s not just the mental attitude of people during the tribulation, but it spills out until the very atmosphere and the earth themselves start to shake.  The tribulation is an awesome, awesome period on the face of the earth; the human race has never, never, at any point including Noah’s flood, seen the kind of shock that it’s going to see in the tribulation.  And if the film Earthquake shook you up, you’ve seen nothing compared to what the tribulation is going to be like. 

 

“Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light,” obviously then we have interference, probably dust and so on in the atmosphere, “the stars shall fall from heaven,” these are the lights from heaven so it’s not astronomically wrong, not a contradiction, they obviously are talking about meteoric showers, lights are falling from heaven which means that something is generating these fragments and these chunks of rock that are coming into the gravitational field of the planet, something out there is disintegrating, we don’t know what it is, but during the tribulation there’s going to be disintegrating bodies in the outer space and they’ll be close enough, and explode close enough to the earth so the earth’s gravitational field will pick them up and we’ll see them, “the stars shall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken. 

 

Now the “powers of the heavens” is an expression that only a person thinking biblically is going to understand.  “Powers of the heavens” mean what to the modern man must be two different things.  The modern man thinks in terms of astronomical laws, Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, for example, with the ellipse and so on, the arc of the ellipse, carving out equal areas for equal time, this is a law of astronomy, and they think of that as a power and authority in the universe, and yet the Bible in the same words, without a shift of vocabulary, apparently without moving from one category to another, will speak about what we call natural laws and then immediately talk about angelic beings.  It doesn’t know any difference between those two categories.

 

Now why this is, that’s just the way the Bible is revealing the way nature is, that the scientific laws are somehow intimately connected with angelic rule and so when it says “the powers of heaven shall be shaken” it means that during this latter time, when Jesus Christ is approaching His return to the planet, He is actually disturbing the angelic beings that are in charge of nature and when they are disturbed then nature is disturbed.  And so these cosmic things show up. And ten verse 30, here’s why, because Christ is approaching the planet and He’s approaching the planet He’s sweeping the angelic forces, the powers of darkness, ahead of Him, He’s pushing them, He’s shoving them physically and so it’s manifesting itself physically in phenomena and you have bodies in the solar system exploding, colliding, disintegrating, things going out of orbit, everything goes haywire.  “And then,” verse 30, “then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven; and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.”  And the “clouds of heaven” here apparently refer to clouds outside of our own atmosphere.  So Christ will appear in this massive cloud that will be visible to the entire planet.  So this is the cosmic picture you have of a cosmic Christ, and a cosmically changing powerful Word of God. 

 

Now back to Hebrews 12; when God speaks again and he quotes, by the way, this is a quote from Haggai 2:6 and 21, He says, “Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven.”  “once more” then means that once more there will be an outpouring of revelation in history, which should argue against a lot of our neo-charismatic friends who want to see God revealing Himself continually.  God does not reveal Himself continually, that’s the whole point of this passage, that the next time God speaks it’s going to be with these phenomena, so if these phenomena haven’t happened yet we can safely and dogmatically say God has not spoken since the death of the last apostle, period, because the promise is that when God speaks again this is going to happen.  Now I haven’t seen the sun darkened and the moon darkened and I haven’t seen bodies in outer space explore, I haven’t seen great meteor showers yet, so I have stay with the Word and have to conclude that God hasn’t spoken yet. 

 

Now this gets unto a thing where we’ll just have to summarize a few points of doctrine here and people ask some questions about it so we’ll just stick that in here at this point. What is the evidence that the apostles have ceased?  The evidence that the New Testament apostles no longer exist?  All right, I’ll list here some points that you can get down on apostles because this passage refers to sporadic revelation, not continuous revelation.  There’s no such thing as continuous revelation; the last means of revelation was by the New Testament apostles and their secretaries, one secretary being Mark. 

 

The apostles are ended: number one, there was a little circle of twelve apostles, no more, no less. Acts 1:25 and Revelation 21:14.  Acts 1:25 is a passage where they’re electing somebody to fulfill Judas Iscariot and the point of that passage is that they know there has to be twelve, they don’t elect five people, and they don’t let the office go empty.  Now we’re not debating whether they’re right or wrong here, I’m just pointing out Acts 1:25 shows you that the early church knew there had to be twelve apostles.  Now why?  Because twelve was the number of the apostles, no more and no less. But you could say well, yeah, as they died off they could have appointed more, somebody else retires and they could have brought someone else in, constantly keep it at twelve.  That’s knocked out by Revelation 21:14 which says that in the New Jerusalem there are only twelve foundations and each one has the name of an apostle on it.  So that shows you there is a closed circle of twelve apostles only, there weren’t going to be any more, when those twelve men died that was it, no more apostles.  Paul, by the way, was the twelfth apostle. 

 

And that gets us to the second point, had there not been a closed circle of apostles, Paul would never had the problem trying to prove he was an apostle in 1 and 2 Corinthians.  Paul has to go to great lengths to justify his own apostleship.  Now if the number of apostles weren’t so crucial, Paul would never have had the problem that he had.  The reason Paul had the problem was that the early church had filled the twelfth chair that was empty from Judas Iscariot, with Matthias.  And they thought they had a complete boat, and then God brings along Paul on the Damascus Road and Paul says I’m the twelfth apostle.  So the early church took many years trying to straighten this thing out as to who was the twelfth apostle and Paul insisted that he was the twelfth apostle. And you can see it in passage after passage after passage in 1 and 2 Corinthians, he goes and watch how he justifies his apostleship in those passages, over and over and over he has to fight his way into the church to prove to the church that he is the twelfth apostle, he’s legitimate.  And I say, and the argument here is that that twelfth apostleship, and the idea of the closed circle is why he had the problem.

 

[someone asks question]  I didn’t want to get into Acts 1, but we have no signs from the Lord they were supposed to elect anybody; apostles are appointed.  Jesus runs His kingdom by a dictatorship, not by a democracy. 

 

The third point is that in 1 Corinthians 4:9 Paul says the apostles are the last people in the parade; there is no one in the parade after the apostles.  He says the apostles last, and in the Greek those are words that were used in a gladiatorial contest, when the people would march in before the audience and there would be a parade and there would be a group of people that marched in the rear rank of the parade and Paul says in 1 Corinthians 4:9 we’re in the rear rank, after us nobody else.  So 1 Corinthians 4:9 closes it off; since there are only twelve and they are the last, then there are no more channels for God’s revelation.

 

Finally, a fourth point, the aorist tense of Ephesians 2:20, God has laid the foundation upon the apostles and prophets, past tense, He isn’t laying the foundation again.  It doesn’t require a building contractor to know that you only lay a foundation once.  It’s over with; the foundation of the Church has been laid, the gift of apostleship has been given to every generation of believers through the New Testament.  We don’t need apostles today because we already have apostles.  Where are the apostles today?  The apostolic writings of the New Testament Scriptures, the foundation of the Church.  So the apostles have ended, they are no more, there have been only twelve, never will be thirteen, never has been thirteen and for all eternity there will be twelve men names on the steps of the city of the New Jerusalem and Jesus is not going to redesign it and put Joseph Smith on the 13th. 

 

So now revelation has ceased for the time.  Now how do we know that revelation… this is closely correlated with the apostleship, that revelation has ceased.  Number one: Israel is the custodian of the Word of God, Romans 3:2.  Israel is no longer functioning with living prophets, therefore the Word of God is not growing.  The Word of God, the canon, will be reopened when Israel gets in line again, sure, but Israel is not functioning.  Romans 3:2 says that Israel and Israel alone is the custodian of the Word of God.  The Church is not the custodian of the Word of God, never has been, wasn’t designed to be.  It’s not our prerogative to determine canonical books and so on; the Church is only using Israel’s literature; it’s all Jewish literature, Israel’s literature.

 

The second thing is that the period of New Testament revelation was temporary as is shown by the fulfillment of John 14:26 when Jesus Christ promised His Holy Spirit will lead them into all truth, “them,” the people to whom it was promised, the apostles, who were in the upper room.  John 14:26 is not a promise to believers in the Church Age; it is a promise directed to apostles, “I will give you the Holy Spirit and He will lead you into all truth.”  You, the apostles in the upper room, and fulfilled in 1 Corinthians 8, “when that which is perfect is come then that which is in part shall be done away with.”  That’s not referring to eternity because in eternity you’re still finite, you’re still going to learn, so that can’t be, so eternity is not a good interpretation of 1 Corinthians 13:8.

 

So much for apostles and revelation, now Hebrews 12:27, he goes on to refer to Haggai, the Haggai quote is the end of verse 26, “Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also the heaven.”  See, he’s quoted the passage and now in verse 27 he says, “And this word, Yet once more,” and he goes on.  Now verse 27 at the very beginning proves to you that the early teachers in the first century of the church of Jesus Christ taught the Word verse by verse.  You see what he’s doing?  He cites Haggai, and what does he do?  He starts breaking up word by word, now this word, “yet once more” and he goes on to explain it. So we can tell their preaching style.  Their teaching and preaching style in the early church was just exactly what we’re doing, exegesis of Scripture.  And this word, “yet once more, signifies the removing,” the word “signifies” is deloo, which is a word that means to make plain to the mind, not make plain to the senses.  There’s two Greek verbs, one to make plain, to appear, to manifest so you can see it.  And then the other one is to make plain up here. The verb used here is the one that makes plain up here, to be mentally clear.

 

So he’s saying, “this word, yet once more, makes clear to your mind the removing of those things that are shaken.”  In other words he’s saying that Haggai is talking about the changing, the “removing” means the changing of things that are shaken.  In other words, God is going to speak again, here’s Mount Sinai in time, 1440 BC, and God is going to speak again, way, way, way in the future, we don’t know what the date is, but God is going to speak at the return of Jesus Christ and when He does He is going to change, everything is going to come loose, that’s the point. Everything about the old creation is going to come loose.  So he says that’s what it means, “the removing of those things that are shaken, as of those things that are made,” that refers to the old creation, “that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.”  The “things that cannot be shaken” are the new creation. 

 

So what he’s saying it this:  you can visualize on going down through history, we have kind of two creations here, inside all of creation we have the old components, the old part, and then beginning with Jesus Christ and the cross and the Holy Spirit and Pentecost we have inside the old creation a new part.  Now, when the shaking comes, the shaking is going to crack open and fragment all of this older part and the only part that is going to be left is that; that’s what he’s saying.  When God’s Word comes again it’s going to destroy the physical universe, and when the physical universe is destroyed, the only thing that’s going to be left are going to be the things that are going to be the things that have been built for eternity.  

 

Now we have to say at this point, we have to halt here a minute and say now is this teaching amillennialism.  Is this teaching amillennialism? What do we mean by amillennialism?  There are two views, there’s actually three but we’ll be simple here, there’s two views of the Second Advent of Christ.  One is that Christ died on the cross, He’s going to come again and after He comes we’re ushered into the eternal state.  That’s one view.  That’s the amillennial view; the amillennial view, “a” means none, there is no millennium.  The other view is the premillennial view, which is our view, that is Christ is going to come again, same as here, He’s going to set up a kingdom, however, for a thousand years, and then eternity begins.  So if you look at this passage hastily you’d think it teaches amillennialism because what it’s saying is that when Christ comes again, when He speaks, when revelation begins in a cosmic public way, then everything is going to be shaken up and destroyed to the point we’ll go into eternity.  So it looks like it’s teaching amillennialism.  It doesn’t look like there’s any room for an intervening period of time of a thousand years between the time that Jesus Christ returns and the shaking finally is finished and you have the eternal state. 

 

So what is our response?  Our response is two-fold.  Our response is: number one, the base of premillennialism.  We haven’t dealt much with this, we will in Daniel because we have a lot of complicated prophecy coming up in the book of Daniel on Sunday morning but here are the four reasons or the four touchstones behind premillennialism, that is why we believe that after Jesus Christ comes and before the eternal state comes there’s an interim of 1000 years.  Why do we believe that?

 

Number one, we believe it because there are golden age prophecies in the Old Testament that have to be fulfilled inside a mortal world; by that we mean there has to be death, still, even in the golden age.  So golden age prophecies can’t be transferred over to the eternal state because what’s missing in the eternal state because what’s missing in the eternal state?  Death.  So in the golden age prophecies we have death spoken of so therefore the golden age prophecies must be this side of eternity; they can’t be in eternity. 

 

The second reason for the premillennial position is that man has to fulfill the job given in Genesis 1:26-28 of subduing the earth before eternity begins.  Man has to fulfill his mandate to subdue the earth before eternity or he hasn’t filled his destiny in mortal history.  And the millennium is that period of time, when under the leadership of the Lord Jesus Christ, the human race will finally subdue the earth.  You’ll have peace, you’ll have a world government with world law, and you’ll have human society on a very, very high plain. 

 

Three; we believe in premillennialism because when prophecy is fulfilled it is always fulfilled by the installment plan.  That is, what looks at first like a simple down payment, simple gift that’s promised, turns out to be given by installments.  In the Old Testament there was a promise of Messiah, one promise, but how has historically that occurred?  Two advents.  There was one promise in the Old Testament of the Holy Spirit, and how is that going to be fulfilled?  By two comings of the Holy Spirit, one on Pentecost, one at the Second Advent of Christ.  In the Old Testament it was prophesied that David’s son would build the temple, but David has two sons, Solomon and Christ and both build temples.  So prophecy it turns out, when it is fulfilled, it is fulfilled in the installment plan.  So when we talk about the end of history, the end of history itself comes about on installments.  One phase is the end of history as we know it with the return of Christ; and then there will be end of this interim period, the end of the thousand years. Revelation 19-20 depict that.

 

And then the fourth reason why we believe in premillennialism is that in the New Testament whenever the authors refer to fulfilled prophecy, they refer to it literally, not allegorically.  When they say Jesus has fulfilled prophecy they say yeah, He’s fulfilled prophecy because He was born in Bethlehem of Judah.  He fulfilled prophecy because He literally rode and ass through the east gate coming into Jerusalem.  He fulfilled prophecy because he literally went down to Egypt and came out with His father and His mother.  He fulfilled prophecy because He literally was out of the tribe of Judah.  There’s nothing allegorical about fulfilled prophecy in the New Testament.  And a little reflection would tell you there couldn’t be anyway because on the allegorical basis how could you tell which was the fulfillment of the prophecy?  Prophecy can’t be fulfilled in any other way except literally. 

 

So for those four reasons we believe in premillennialism.  Well then how do we handle this passage?  This passage of the great future shaking of heaven and earth is going to be through three installments.  The future shaking, if you’ll turn to the first installment, Matthew 27:51, part of it has already occurred in the past and it’s a little known passage, a little noticed passage, people read this verse and they see the first part and everybody knows how the temple veil was cut in two but they don’t look at the other part.  At the same time that the temple veil in Herod’s temple was split, “the earth did quake, and the rocks split open.”  Now it’s true, apparently was in a local earthquake only but it reports an earthquake.  So the first installment was in Matthew 27 and it happened with the death of Jesus Christ.  God had spoken through His Son and now He’s signed on the dotted line, it’s like causing an earthquake to occur.

 

The second installment will be during the tribulation and that is recorded in Revelation 6:13-17.  That’s the second installment and that’s the next time the earth is going to shake, it’s going to be during the tribulation.  There’ll be earthquakes now but just keep this in mind; no earthquake, whether it’s the one in Peru, whether it’s one that someday may occur along the San Andreas fault in California, whether it’s some place somewhere else, whether it’s a subterranean earthquake that cause a tsunami or a tidal wave to go across the earth and drown thousands and thousands of people in low lying beaches, regardless of whatever we see we are never going to see an earthquake that geophysically is as bad as the one’s that coming in the tribulation.  In Revelation 6 there is going to be a fantastic earthquake like this world has never seen.  That’s the second installment of the shaking.

 

The third installment of the shaking occurs with the collapse of the universe.  Needless to say, that’s a shaking experience.  And that is the old creation collapses, just folds right up.  Revelation 20: 9, 11, and Revelation 21:1.  The entire universe collapses.  Apparently the material that’s used in the old creation becomes the source of the lake of fire. 

 

So we have the “once more,” now how does this all look when you diagram it out?  A friend of mine, George Meisinger, once did a study on the day of the Lord and he worked this out, studied every reference that the “day of the Lord” is used in the Bible and he came to this conclusion: that the day of the Lord is used for divine historic intervention; time after time after time it can be used.  It is used sometimes of the great tribulation, it is used sometimes of the Second Advent at the end of the Tribulation, it is used sometimes of for the final renovation.  The “day of the Lord” is a term that, by itself, is not precise…is not precise.  The day of the Lord we can prove from the Old Testament usage just meant any time that God intervened into history. 

 

So, why the prophecy in Haggai then?  The prophecy in Haggai  looks at history back, generations ago. Here we are down here in 1975; okay, Haggai is looking at history back from this point; it’s inspired Scripture, yes, but the definition of inspiration, remember, go back, definition of inspiration, what was it?  What is an element that we always need in the definition of the inspiration of Scripture.  Who’s the ultimate author?  God.  What does He do in the process of inspiration?  He works through men’s own vocabulary and experience…own vocabulary and experience.  So when He speaks through Haggai who’s vocabulary and who’s experience is He working through?  Haggai’s. And so Haggai’s prophecy is a prophecy looking at history from his point of view, and although the events of the cross, that’ number one installment, and say the tribulation is here and the end of the millennium is here, second and third installments he sees all lumped together, and that is the “yet once more.”  That period he sees as together.  Why?  Because just like all prophets he’s speaking out of his situation into and about the future.

 

So this verse, back now to Hebrews 12, “Yet once more” is not teaching amillennialism; it is simply saying that at one more period of history I am going to shake the earth and when I do I will shake the powers of heaven.  Now in addition to the renting of the cross on that first installment, the renting of the earth, what else happened, again apparently only locally.  You remember a phenomenon that occurred the day that Jesus day?  The sun just stopped; the light went darkness, so you have the powers of heaven. Now you see why we believe the Bible’s inspired.  You see, these men just didn’t get together in a big plot to write the Scriptures.  These little details all fit together; now we know why that mysterious darkness occurred, it was to cover sin, yes, but it was all in prophecy.  If it hadn’t occurred we’d have a problem because according to Haggai when God speaks again He’s going to shake the heavens and the earth.  So if Christ’s death is the first installment and we have the earth quaking, we’ve got to have something happen to the heavens and something did happen to the heavens the day Christ died; there was darkness. 

 

So those two phenomenon are kind of a down-payment on what’s coming. That was just mild, that probably occurred over a few square miles in some mysterious way but the second one, the second installment during the tribulation won’t be any private showing.  [someone says I’m kind of confused at this point…] Now, when he says “yet once more” he’s referring, Haggai is looking at it from his point of view centuries and centuries and centuries before.  From his point of view he can’t separate these three events; to him it’s all a cluster, it’s a packaged deal for him.  That’s something you all have to learn about prophecy, the prophets cannot distinguish, they’re what we call… what do we call it, they have very poor depth perception at that distance in history, so in events like this, they look like they’re one in back of the other, but as you come upon them in history you suddenly see that there are separations.  The First and Second Advent of Christ were packed together in prophecy.  But obviously they’re spread apart by at least 19 centuries. 

 

[more said]  No, it progressively gets worse.  See, the first installment affected local areas of the universe.  That is, in a small area on planet earth, and the reason it did so was because when Jesus Christ died, who was shook up?  Satan was; and where was Satan located when Jesus Christ died?  He was located right there in Jerusalem, and therefore that was the place that was affected.  Now, during the tribulation Satan has his hordes controlling what?  They’re controlling the planet earth and apparently the atmosphere around the earth and apparently the universe by this time; this is their last-ditch deal.  They’re spread out and they’re organized. To smash through, Jesus Christ when He returns again, is going to just like a plow, He’s going to plow right through it.  And when He does so it’s going to trigger off geophysical disturbances in the universe. 

 

Now in the first one, what was changed, what was new; the new creation began as the first install­ment, what was part of the new creation at the first installment?  Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead.  So with the first installment we have the first part; that is one, Christ in resurrection.  Okay, and of course we have the completion of the body of Christ but the second installment, when this happens again, what now has been completed by the time we pay the second installment on this prophecy. The body of Christ.  So we will be there, we will have resurrection bodies, and so now the Church is finished.  The second addition to that which shall not be shaken.  Third addition over here, all believers of all ages, and the New Jerusalem will be finished and so you’ve got that and the new heavens and the new earth.  So the thing gets worse and worse as it goes on in time because we’re getting a bigger and bigger new creation.

 

[more said] But it’s a different demonstration to the humanity; right now the sin you see in the world is due, in part demonic forces and in part the sin nature.  During the millennium the sin that men see is just strictly sin nature, because you see, after all the disturbances of the Tribulation Christ, when He returns, He’s going to plow through all this angelic business, and the human race going into the millennium are going to be just normal people.  I mean, don’t get too spooky about it, people that inhabit the millennium are going to look just like you and I, you know, wear clothes and probably a few will smoke and they’ll have a little beer around once in a while and they’re going to go on in the millennium that way and they’re going to be talking, see, their tendency will always be to blame evil Satan because history, humanity, corporately has just has this tremendous cataclysmic experience, it’s going to be fresh on the mind of the human race. Well, then what God is going to demonstrate is that society will constantly screw up, just on the basis of the sin nature of man.  And in the millennium people are going to see what the sin nature is like because they can see it very clearly then because there’s no demons around, there won’t be any holy rollers or anything like that. 

 

[someone says something] Then you’ll see a big long valley, maybe five miles between, or longer. Sure, that’s the problem and prophecy is like that.  [more said] There’s going to be death, capital punishment.  Capital punishment will be the means of death in the millennium.  If you obey the Lord and obey the laws of society you’ll live, and if you don’t you die.  So needless to say the penal experts will not be in control of the millennium.

 

We’ll go on to verse 28, “ Wherefore, receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved, let us have grace,” now here’s the final application, “receiving a kingdom,” notice it is present tense which means what?  Does it mean we’ve already received it or that we are in the process of receiving it.  It means we are in the process of receiving it; it obviously means we haven’t received it all yet.  See, installment plan again. “ Therefore, we, in the process of receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved,” implication being we haven’t received it all yet, we are in the process of receiving it, “let us have grace,” present tense, let this be a life style, let this be the modus operandi in which you operate.  This is nothing more than grace orientation.  “Let us have grace,” and notice that he uses our exact same terminology, orientation to grace “whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear.” 

 

Now why does he go back to orientation and grace, why does he say only that, “whereby we can serve God?”  Because one, to be oriented to grace means you have to have at least two things on your mind; you have to understand that God alone is God, that God has a certain essence, He is sovereign and you are not, that your volition operates within limits, and God’s sovereignty overarches the whole thing, and that history’s outcome is not due to you or any of your designs.  You’re entire future conformity to Jesus Christ is not your design; it’s the result of God’s sovereign design through the body of Christ.  God is righteousness and God is just; to be oriented to that fact means to realize that there is only one qualified person to set standards and it’s not society, it’s God.  That God is love, and if you’re looking for the perfect love in somebody you’re going to be very badly mistaken; not one creature is going to love you with a perfect love.  God alone has sufficient love.  God alone has enough love to satisfy every member of the human race.  This enables you to be lonely and relaxed about it.  And if you can’t be relaxed about it there’s something wrong in your perception of God’s love.  Then omniscience, God knows everything and that means that He knows something perfectly.  And as we have been facetiously saying, God is the only person who has never learned anything.  So next time you hear somebody make some remark, you’re in school or something, say you never learn anything, say well neither did God.

 

God is omnipotent that He is able to solve every single difficulty that comes your way; that He alone has the strength that you need in your daily life.  That God is omnipresent, we could go on, you ought to train yourself to do this, I shouldn’t have to do this for you, that’s being oriented to God as the Creator, that’s what we mean when we say the doctrine of divine essence, is the basis for all doctrines, is the basis for your stability in life, is the object of your faith technique.  The fall, the fact is that this guy has been turned completely off of you and you have no way of changing him, the change has to come from top side down, it can’t come from bottom side up.  And grace means that God still loves you, the attribute now becomes grace.  Why?  Because now He loves what He doesn’t have to love.  He is under no moral obligation to love us; in fact He should hate us by all means, with His righteousness and justice.  And the fact that He goes on loving us with an everlasting love is grace, grace all the way, and that’s what it means to be oriented to grace; it means to have the proper view of God. 

 

And you see how this author is getting the proper view of God?  How is he generating in the imagination, which is the battleground of our soul, how does he generate in these depressed, discouraged, downhearted believers a might view of God’s character?  Isn’t it by catastrophism?  See, catastrophism breathes a powerful majestic view of God and this is precisely why Satan wants uniformitarian systems of thought, because they even it out and they make God appear afar off and detached, and impotent.  A catastrophic view immediately places you face to face with God.  Why do people, do you ever stop and think of this, why is it that there’s a hidden desire on the part of men to inflate the age of the universe? 

 

Now just think, there’s a spiritual reason for this.  We have, say seventy indicators of the age of the earth, varying form say 4,000 years on up to four billion.  And why do men always want the indicators that indicate the long time rather than the short time. Why is that?  Do you know why it is?  Just visualize a line, a time line out from  your eye.  If God is way, way, way down there, four billion years down the line, isn’t He far away from you?  Of course He is.  But if you hypothesize that the universe has been created recently, what happens to God on the time line?  He comes very close to your eye, doesn’t He.  And that puts Him too close.  And those are why people hate catastrophism and they hate short ages of the universe; it puts man too close for comfort to the God of the universe.  And this author is deliberately attacking the whole cosmology of our world, the world of our educational system and establishment. He’s saying that only as you attack this framework can you have a magnificent, Biblical, powerful view of God. 

 

Then he says “let us have grace,” see, you can’t even have grace apart from catastrophe, apart from smashing through this human viewpoint.  Then when  you can you can you can have grace and that’s the way you “serve God acceptably with reverence and fear, [29] For our God is a consuming fire.”  And we’ll get to that verse next time.