Well well folks it looks like we had better batten down the hatches, because the federals murdered several hundred in Afghanistan and the Sudan. The King of Sudan is so sure that the (sic) chemical plant bombed with rockets was a pharmaceutical plant that he invited one and all to come and inspect it and what it was manufacturing. But do you see that in the national news media? not on your life for it would show up their god as being a false god.
Now the media is constantly crying out that there will be terroristic attacks because of the bombings. Of course there
is going to be terroristic attacks, and the federal well know it because that is what the bombings were all about. We are sure
you know all this, but it needs to be said anyway. The bombing were deliberately done to take the heat of the liberals god
and make him the good guy again, with national backing.
We can expect several terroristic attacks in the near future, but I doubt it will be done by the Arabs, it will be
done by federal agents, and then when the deed has been done they will be eliminated so none of them can later speak out about it. Just like the more than 60 friends and work mates of the Liberals god.
Every single person who died in the bombings; and those who will die in the future in this country, are dying because
a Liberal god was about to be dethroned. So when you see some of your loved ones dying because of a bombing; diseases spread about, and etc., can thank the Liberal god for their death. Just as Herod murdered the children under three years old, so this god murders those he wishes whether they be young or old.
It has been reported that there are more than 10,000 political prisoners being given the diesel treatment where their friends, family, or lawyers cannot catch up with them to work for their freedom.
And all this because the sheeple, the asleep ones, who are not capable of thinking beyond the television tube, or
look past the neighbors wife's ass, or the neighbor woman's husband and the bulge in his jeans. It would appear that many people will be murdered while they sleep, watch television and sip their beer.
The Lord will put their deaths on the shoulders of our (Jew)deo‑Christian ministers, priests and etc., for the trouble
their teachings is mostly false, with just enough honesty in it to make it look good and acceptable to the (Jew)deos in the
pews. They have taught a lot that maybe church doctrine, but remember Christ quoted to the Pharisees (Jews) of His day those terrible words from Isaiah; "In vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men." And they teach a lot of crap today, as Christianity, that is not in the Bible.
The major (Jew)deo‑Christian churches in general, don't talk about the Kingdom of God at all; in fact, they don't believe in it. They believe in a sort of democracy of God, everybody reduced to
the same dead level as part of the masses, and if your doctrine is such that it is not going to bring in enough Negro, Chinese
or some other sort of converts then rebuke God for having been too exclusive and change their doctrines to one that will bring in these, and who will bring their false teachings with them. They will answer for that in due time, because God gave no one the authority to change His word.
Some of this sort of teaching is being brought into the Israel Identity movement because of the fear of some that they will not get enough to accept the Israel Identity teachings; so they resort to the same tactics as the (Jew)deos. So they are bringing into our midst aliens who are not Israelites and teach doctrines not found in the Scriptures
To give you a true perspective, those of us who have been peaching the Israel Identity message have pointed out that God is no politician who murders innocents to save Himself; He doesn't need the votes of the Negroes, or any other minority group. He is a majority all by Himself; and that He did pick His own people who were qualified by Him for a specific job, chosen by Him for that job, and He rewarded them with both duties and responsibilities, as well as authority, accordingly. We have tried to swing the
pendulum too far the other way. Some have been teaching that if one is born into Israel, they have just got it made, automatically. And they try to back it up with Scripture by relating this from Amos 9:9: "For, lo, I will command, and I will sift the house of Israel among all nations, like as corn is sifted in a sieve, yet shall not the least grain fall upon the earth."
Ignoring the very next verse which says: Amos 9:10" "ALL THE SINNERS OF MY PEOPLE SHALL DIE BY THE SWORD, which say, The evil shall not overtake nor prevent us." And teach it doesn't matter what your character is; you can be the worst scoundrel on earth, but that doesn't matter because, if you are an Israelite you have your predestined high place in heaven all cut out for you, and so forth.
That doctrine is comforting for those who don't feel they are morally or too cowardly to be equal to living up to their responsibilities, but the Bible doesn't back it up. With all the great offers that God made to Israel, has gone, always, the responsibility of the nation Israel and each individual Israelite to live up to these responsibilities; and that is something we personally want to accomplish.
Another of the things so often quoted as a sweeping all‑inclusive statement is this one, a portion, carefully edited out, of what Paul says in Romans 11:26: "And so all Israel shall be saved, as it is written..." Well, the punctuation is a little different even when Paul says "...all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob."
Well now, some have often enough condemned other churches for taking one verse out of context and founding a doctrine upon it, and certainly we should never be guilty of that ourselves, because we know better. In the first Place, Paul himself is not correctly quoting Isaiah, because Isaiah didn't say, ALL Israel shall be saved. (Isaiah 45:17) But if you would just read the rest of that eleventh chapter of Romans, you will see Paul doesn't intend any such sweeping statement as those few words lifted out of context would indicate.
From Romans 11:1‑8: "I say then, Hath God cast away his people? God forbid. For I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. God hath not cast away his people which he foreknew. Wot ye not what the scripture saith of Elias? how he maketh intercession to God against Israel, saying, Lord, they have killed thy prophets, and digged down thine altars; and I am left alone, and they seek my life. But what saith the answer of God unto him? I HAVE RESERVED TO MYSELF SEVEN THOUSAND MEN, WHO HAVE NOT BOWED THE KNEE TO THE IMAGE OF BAAL. Even so then at this present time also there is a remnant according to the election of grace...obtained that which he seeketh for; but the election hath obtained it, and the rest were blinded (According as it is written, GOD HATH GIVEN THEM THE SPIRIT OF SLUMBER, EYES THAT THEY SHOULD NOT SEE, AND EARS THAT THEY SHOULD NOT HEAR) unto this day."
Hear that Israel Ministers, the people are blind and deaf to the truth BECAUSE GOD HAS MADE THEM SO. Therefore, how can you teach them the truth by first telling them a lie? For when they find you have lied to them, they will flee from you because they have been blinded by Almighty God Himself.
One can’t laugh off the word “remainder” by saying; well, that is all that remain, implying that the great majority are the ones who remains: because, remember now, this is taken from the Greek, and trying to find similar English words isn’t the solution; you have to see what the Greek says.
“There is a remnant,” he said. Well, that is the Greek word “leimma” and it is derived from the root word “leipo” which not only means a few but which connotes lacking or insufficient in number. If they wanted to say “not only a few but not enough,” that Greek word “leipo” is the word they would use, and “leimma” is derived from and based on that.
Remnant.....
Greek #3005 leimma (lime'‑mah); from 3007; a remainder: KJV‑‑ remnant.
So this remainder is going to be a few, not 99 and 9/10% or something like that. Paul is not handing out any such doctrine. Neither did Isaiah say that they all were going to come through just because they were Israelites; Isaiah knew better. Isaiah knew the history of his people.
There had been a great many times when all Israel were not saved. Let us look over a few of them. Remember when Moses was up on Mount Sinai getting the law from God; after he had been gone some days, remember, up to this time, Moses was the one who had performed the miracles that God gave him power to do in Egypt. Moses was the one who stood on the shore and held his staff out over the water, and the waters of the Red Sea parted, and led them through.
Moses had led them along in the wilderness some little distance, and out there in the dessert country Moses was the leader who always saw to it that they had enough food and water. But as soon as he was gone a few days; and remember now, there was a “mixed multitude” that went with them. And that word “mixed,” used there was the Hebrew word “ereb” which means mongrel.
Mixed....
Hebrew #6154 `ereb (ay'‑reb);
or `ereb (1 Kings 10:15), (with the article prefix), (eh'‑reb); from 6148; the web (or transverse threads of cloth); also a mixture, (or mongrel race): KJV‑‑ Arabia, mingled people, mixed (multitude), woof.
In other words, some of them had mongrelized their race with the Egyptians while they were in Egypt. But here you had the nation of Israel, and a lot of them, and Moses gone a few days, so they went to Aaron and they said,” As for this fellow Moses, we don’t know what has become of him. He went up the mountain there to talk to God or somebody. Now, Aaron, you make us some idol gods to leads us.” (Paraphrasing Exodus 32)
After all that had happened: here they had seen, every day, the pillar of cloud to lead them, and at night the pillar of fire glowing within that cloud; and yet, already they wanted idol gods. Well, Aaron was a good (Jew)deo clergyman, a good representative sample: “After all, you don’t want to be so exclusive, or you will offend some of the congregation.” So you remember, Aaron got gold from them, their jewelry, and cast the golden calf. Yes, Aaron was a typical (Jew)deo clergyman. Yet if he had wanted to he could have gone with Moses and looked upon the face of God also, but he chose not to do so, and thus was placed in the same catagory of the (Jew)do clergymen of today.
Remember, when Moses came down and called him to task for it, Aaron’s excuse was, “Well, I put this gold in the fire and this calf came out.” He neglected to state who made the mold in which the melted gold was cast. So 3,000 people were killed as a penalty that came upon them for that. Plague broke out and 3,000 were killed. (Exodus chapter 32)
In the tenth chapter of Leviticus, the two older sons of Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, knew the instructions given, as to who might approach the tabernacle, and how; the instructions governing the priests. But they were ready to take over and do it their way. They offered incense and strange fire, as the Bible calls it, and they were slain by God for their transgressions. We cannot say that Nadab and Abihu were part of this mongrel mixed multitude; they were the two oldest sons of Aaron, so they were pure Israel stock, and they weren’t save, were they?
This was rough going, this travel through the desert; there were some hardships and, remember, the people began complaining about it. They said, “O, we wish we had stayed in Egypt and remained as slave there; at least we ate well.” (The hard trek through the dessert is a demonstration that to be a true Christian is not an easy one, and that one must face many trials and tribulations along the way)
What were they doing? Here was a rebellion against what God had told them to do. Sure, they were Israelites, but He gave them a job to do; He gave them a tough job and they weren’t equal to it; they were ready to quit. As you read this, Numbers 11:1-2: “And when the people complained, it displeased the LORD: and the LORD heard it; and his anger was kindled; and the fire of the LORD burnt among them, and consumed them that were in the uttermost parts of the camp. And the people cried unto Moses; and when Moses prayed unto the LORD, the fire was quenched.”
So here were some Israelites, not saved. Well, they still grumbled about their food (this is the same eleventh chapter of Numbers). Now god had promised them, through Moses, that they would have plenty to eat, and they were complaining that they didn’t like this manna, they wanted meat. He said, “I will give you meat till it is running out of your nostrils.” Therefore, God sent them quail, more than they could eat; but with it, you notice, he also sent a great plague which killed a great many of them. (Numbers 11)
Before they had completed their forty years of wandering, they were ready to turn north into Palestine, and remember they sent out a group of spies to look the land over and see how they should go into it, to occupy it. Those spies came back; and only two men out of the batch said, “God promised it to us and that is sufficient, we can conquer it if He says to go in there.” All the rest said “It is a wonderful land, we never saw anything with fields so productive, but all these people there: here were the giants, we can’t go in there, and there are all these big fortified cities.” So the people were not willing to go (Numbers 13 and 14)
This is the way the people are today when the federal murder some of their number, they are afraid of the government and what it might do to them, so they remain silent and let it happen.
When the people rebelled, only three wanted to go ahead: Moses, Joshua, and Caleb, and all the ret of them were condemned to wander out there in the desert until they died. God said, “Not one of this generation which has rebelled are going to enter that land or set foot in it. Your children will, because I promised it to them, but you who have doubted My word and refused to obey Me will not.” (Paraphrasing Numbers 13) All Israel saved? No! All but three of them died in the dessert.
In the sixteenth chapter of Numbers, Korah, who was a Levite, led a rebellion. He was ambitious: he wanted to take over the position that Moses and Aaron had, of leading the people. Remember, before the whole assembly he said to Moses and Aaron, “You take too much upon yourselves, setting yourselves up above the people like this,” and he said, “Well are as holy as you and all fit to be priests.”
Moses replied, “All right, tomorrow, you, Korah, and those who follow you, are to come here with your little metal censers, in which you have fire and incense, and Aaron and his sons will be here with theirs, and you can each offer incense before the tabernacle of God, and let us see who God accepts.”
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Korah and his accomplices, the leaders of them, were swallowed up by the earth; it split open, and they fell into the crevice, and it closed upon them; and the rest were killed by fire from God. There were a lot of the people who didn’t reject this rebellion, they were just middle-of-the-roaders, they were going to wait and see what happened. If Korah had gotten away with it, they would have followed him. But they didn’t take an active part in the rebellion, they didn’t have courage enough to be on either side; so plague broke out among them and 14,700 of them died of the plague.
This is the way it is now in America, the patriots and although few in number only a small portion of the total number, the Israel Christians are laying it all on the line, just like they did during the revolution to gain independence for America, the vast majority did absolutely nothing, yet they were certainly willing to reap the benefits of the revolution; when there was no danger to them.
This was no mere accident; this was a punishment sent by God. All Israel saved? No! At no time in the history of Israel when all Israel were saved. There are plenty of examples such as many of them died in the wars with Assyria and Babylon, plenty of them killed in their fighting with the Philistines and so on. Now as we know, god can bring His Own followers safely through danger, so when great numbers of them were slaughtered on those occasions, you know they had it coming to them. Sure, they were born Israelites, but they weren’t living up to it. Therefore, we can’t let ourselves be carried away by the idea that all we need to do is just be born. We have to do more than that, we have to live our lives as Christians.
We have a bigger opportunity open to us than anyone who is not God’s people Israel, no question of that: but you have to take an active part in getting it. In all this business of a remnant coming through, it is interesting to look up the words that are used in the original languages. Let us go back to Isaiah 10:20-23: “And it shall come to pass in that day, that the remnant of Israel, and such as are escaped of the house of Jacob, shall no more again stay upon him that smote them; but shall stay upon the LORD, the Holy One of Israel, in truth.”
That word “remnant” there, “shar,” means a remainder.
Remnant....
Hebrew #7605 she'ar (sheh‑awr'); from 7604; a remainder: KJV‑‑ X other, remnant, residue, rest.
Then he goes on in Isaiah 10:22: “For though thy people Israel be as the sand of the sea, yet a remnant of them shall return: the consumption decreed shall overflow with righteousness.” The word there, translated “consumption,” is the Hebrew word “killayown,” and it means destruction. “...the destruction decreed shall overflow with righteousness.
Consumption....
Hebrew #3631 killayown (kil‑law‑yone'); from 3615; pining, destruction: ‑consumption, failing.
You bet, righteousness sometimes can only manifest itself as punishment and destruction. For the God of hosts shall make a consumption...And here it is a little different word: it is “Kalah,” and its meaning really is to consume completely; it is more emphatic than merely destruction. “...For the God of hosts shall made a destruction, even determined, in the midst of all the land.”
Also in Romans Paul refers back to that; Isaiah also cries concerning Israel: “Though the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, a remnant shall be saved.” (Romans 9:27) Now that word remnant (we are getting into the Greek here, with Paul, because these were Greek manuscripts it was translated from), it is “hupoleimma” which means a few. We can’t paraphrase that into all, everybody that remains “...a few shall be saved.”
Remnant....
Greek #5763 hupoleimma (hoop‑ol'‑im‑mah) or hupolimma (hoop‑ol'‑eem‑mah) (as Westcott and Hort have it); from 5295 and 3005; found only in Rom. 9:27: a remnant. This Greek word was not included in the original Strong's Dictionary but is found in other Greek lexicons. Alphabetically it belongs between Strong's number 5274 and 5275.
Then Isaiah 46:3-4: “Hearken unto me, O house of Jacob, and all the remnant of the house of Israel, which are borne by me from the belly, which are carried from the womb: And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you.” That, “all the remnant,” is “sheriyth,” which means that which has escaped. Now when an army is routed, those that manage to escape with their lives generally are few and disorganized.
Remnant....
Hebrew #7611 she'eriyth (sheh‑ay‑reeth'); from 7604; a remainder or residual (surviving, final) portion: KJV‑‑ that had escaped, be left, posterity, remain (‑der), remnant, residue, rest.
Again in Zephaniah 3:13: “The remnant...” (Again that word “sherlyth”) “The remnant of Israel shall not do iniquity, nor speak lies; neither shall a deceitful tongue be found in their mouth: for they shall make them afraid.” That is where you get your remnant, those that are not deceitful. Can you trust all of our people today? You know you can’t, and that is why not all are going to be saved.
Again Jeremiah 31:7: “For thus saith the LORD; Sing with gladness for Jacob, and shout among the chief of the nations: publish ye, praise ye, and say, O LORD, save thy people, the remnant of Israel.” Again it is that word “sheriyth,” those who have escaped.
Then Joel 2:32: “And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of Yahweh shall be delivered: for in mount Zion and in Jerusalem shall be deliverance, as Yahweh hath said, and in the remnant whom Yahweh shall call.” And that now is the word “sariyd,” a survivor.
As we know, we have a nation of over 250 million people here, and if 1,500 died of an epidemic of Asian flu, one does not speak of the rest of the 250 million as survivors. It is when most of them are swept away, and a few are left, that one refers to them as survivors. So the lesson that goes with this is, that special privileges bring special responsibilities, rewards beyond anything we can imagine, if we live up to it; Don’t ever think you can dodge your responsibility.
Remember what Joshua said to the people of the two and a half tribes who wanted to take their land east of the Jordan. He said, “If you plan just to stay here and not go on as part of the army, to help conquer the rest of the land west of the Jordan, as God told you to; if you do that, you are sinning against God, and be sure that your sin will find you out.” (Paraphrasing Joshua One) So always this responsibility has to be met.
What about all Israel? You can divide all Israel into three classes; one class are the hopelessly wicked, and there are plenty of them today, as we have had in every generation that we have had a record of, and they have been periodically destroyed for their wickedness, not saved; destroyed. Then there is on the other extreme the relatively good remnant. And then in between there is the great mass. They are generally not extremely bad, and they never are extremely good; they are kind of half-way between; and what about them? It is easy enough to classify the two extremes, and see what is going to happen to them.
The evil group are among us; why? Simply because we, the rest of the nation of Israel, are violating God’s commandment that we should destroy those people out of our midst. Go back and look where the various commandments of the law are given, through Moses, you will find one after another of the sins listed there, that the person doing that shall be put to death, so all Israel shall see and fear and shall no more commit such sins. Did we do it? No! We never have done it more than haphazardly, and these people have multiplied among us, and now we find, on the part of public figures, such as our attorney general of the United States who are saying that even imprisoning them is a wrongful injustice against somebody who merely robbed and raped and murdered, because it is all society’s fault that he/she chose to behave that way.
The wicked are here because we have allowed them to be. Some people ask, “Why is it that God allows evil to exist?” Well, the answer is given in the Bible. He allows it to exist because we allow it to exist. We were not put here to be passive spectators, to get in some spiritual foxhole, in a drama worked out by somebody else. We of all people were put here to be the active participants in this thing, to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth. And so few of our people have been willing to recognize that responsibility, that they have never had the numbers, the authority, the power to do it; so the nation as a whole has had to pay the penalty.
Some of you are wondering, right now, “What can I do, I am only one person?” Here we have been telling you about all this responsibility, now what is expected? Great things? Are we to change the course of history and make nations behave and all that sort of thing, big spectacular things? No. Only a very few of these many generations has anybody reached that point. But God has a way of bringing about His purposes through people who don’t seem to be outstanding, but just the same, in their own quiet way they are doing the things that He put them here to do, and those are the people who are the real elect of Israel.
We have been told before, that in the Hebrew different words are used, with very different meaning, which have been lost by inaccurate translation into English. When the entire nation of Israel was spoken of, the Hebrew word used was “edah,” but when the select leadership group, the ones upon whom God could rely, those who had the spiritual capacity to respond to Him, when those were spoken of, a very different Hebrew word, “kaw-hawl,” was used. In the King James Version, both edah (or ed-daw) and kaw-hawl are translated, sometimes “congregation,” sometimes “assembly,” with no consistency, no attempt to preserve a distinction between them, and no comprehension on the part of the translators that there was any distinction.
Congregation....
Hebrew #5712 `edah (ay‑daw'); feminine of 5707 in the original sense of fixture; a stated assemblage (specifically, a concourse, or generally, a family or crowd): KJV‑‑ assembly, company, congregation, multitude, people, swarm. Compare 5713.
We are part of that Kaw-hawl, but what sort of things can you do? We want to point out that God has used the most insignificant of people to accomplish some pretty great things.
About 892 B.C., the Syrian king Ben-hadad with an enormous army besieged the city of Samaria, the capital city of the northern kingdom of Israel, and he stood there besieging it until there was extreme famine in the city; they were at the point of starvation, all the food they had had was used up. And the Syrian army was so enormously greater than the army of Israel, cooped up in Samaria, that they didn’t dare go out and meet their enemy in battle. Now the prophet Elisha was there in that city. (2 Kings 7) So here they were now, surrounded by this enormous army. The army outside could live off the country; their foraging parties were going out, wherever food existed, and scooping it up and bringing it in. They weren’t short of anything. It was only the people in the city that were reduced to starvation.
So Elisha said in 2 Kings 7:1: “Then Elisha said, Hear ye the word of the LORD; Thus saith the LORD, To morrow about this time shall a measure of fine flour be sold for a shekel, and two measures of barley for a shekel, in the gate of Samaria.” Well, that measure was about two quarts, and one couldn’t have bought a measure of flour for ten thousand shekels in this besieged and starving city. So “tomorrow about this time a measure of fine flour shall be sold for a shekel, and two measures of barley for a shekel, in the gate of Samaria. Then a lord on whose hand the king leaned answered the man of God, and said, Behold, If the Lord would make windows in heaven, could this thing be? And Elisha said, Behold, thou shalt see it with thine eyes, but shall not eat thereof.” Take notice that when anyone challenges God in that way, they have taken on themselves a big contest, and they are apt to lose it. “And there were four lepers at the entering in of the gate...”
From the earliest dawn of history, leprosy has been regarded with a special horror; no cure for it was known. Of all the diseases it is the most spectacular; a person literally rots away as they live. They reach the point where the joints of their fingers rot and fall off, because the disease has destroyed the circulation system. And while they are living, bit by bit their body dies and falls apart; a spectacularly horrible thing. Anyone who got leprosy was driven out, they couldn’t enter into the city or into a camp, they had to live on the outside. They couldn’t engage in commerce: nobody would buy anything that they had touched, for fear the plague would be carried with it. From a safe distance they might toss him a coin, and that was what was left to him of his life.
2 Kings 7:3‑9: “And there were four leprous men at the entering in of the gate: and they said one to another, Why sit we here until we die? If we say, We will enter into the city, then the famine is in the city, and we shall die there: and if we sit still here, we die also. Now therefore come, and let us fall unto the host of the Syrians: if they save us alive, we shall live; and if they kill us, we shall but die. And they rose up in the twilight, to go unto the camp of the Syrians: and when they were come to the uttermost part of the camp of Syria, behold, there was no man there. For the Lord had made the host of the Syrians to hear a noise of chariots, and a noise of horses, even the noise of a great host: and they said one to another, Lo, the king of Israel hath hired against us the kings of the Hittites, and the kings of the Egyptians, to come upon us. Wherefore they arose and fled in the twilight, and left their tents, and their horses, and their asses, even the camp as it was, and fled for their life. And when these lepers came to the uttermost part of the camp, they went into one tent, and did eat and drink, and carried thence silver, and gold, and raiment, and went and hid it; and came again, and entered into another tent, and carried thence also, and went and hid it. Then they said one to another, We do not well: this day is a day of good tidings, and we hold our peace: if we tarry till the morning light, some mischief will come upon us: now therefore come, that we may go and tell the king's household.”
So they went to the gate of the besieged city, and they had a tough time getting the guards to let them in, and this was terrific news. They said, “Take us to the king!”
Finally they were taken tot he king, and the king of Israel wouldn’t believe their story. As long as it was daylight, he could see out there a few hundred yards away, the camp of all these Syrians, and now, a little before midnight, in come these lepers and say that the whole Syrian army has disappeared; he wasn’t going to fall for such a trap. But finally they persuaded the king to send two scouts out, to go to the camp and see whether this was true or not, and they found that it was just as the lepers had reported. The Syrians had fled in such panic, they left their food and weapons and everything behind. Here was a deserted camp.
Now remember this nobleman who sneered at this: “Could God do this, even if he opened the windows of heaven to drop this down to us?” Morning came and the people prepared to rush out to the camp of the Syrians, because here was food, and everyone was hungry. It had been weeks since anyone had had a good meal, and it had been several days since most of them had had any food at all, and here was a wild mob ready to storm out. But this nobleman who had sneered at the idea, here he was at the gate, and the moment the gate swung open, out came this terrific rush of people who trampled him to death. He saw the coming of it, but he didn’t get to eat of it. The lesson here is do not doubt the power of God in anything; just wait for His deliverance, for He will deliver His people from the anti-christs, and their other enemies.
Who could have found, in all the nation of Israel, more insignificant than these four lepers? They were not important landholders or farmers, they were not business men, they weren’t bankers, they weren’t statesmen; just four poor outcast lepers (disabled men), and with them God saved the kingdom. In a few days those starving people would have had to open the gates and let the Syrian army come in. So God chose those people to save the kingdom of Israel. There have been examples such as this before in the Scriptures and even in secular history.
Because of their apostasy God allowed the twelve-tribed nation of Israel to be conquered and ruled hy the kingdom of Midian for seven years, and they were pretty roughly treated. Then God commissioned Gideion to save Israel. Well now, Gideon said in Judges 6 and 7: “Who am I that I should save Israel? My father’s family is unimportant in one of the small tribes, and I am the least of my family.” (Paraphrasing chapter 8) He was doubtful about his.
Then Gideon asked for a sign, a test, whether this was true. He said, “I am going to leave a sheep’s fleece out overnight, and if this thing is really true, tomorrow morning let there be dew on the fleece, but none on the ground around it.” And the following morning, that was the way it was: Dew was on the fleece, but no place else.
But Gideon was a skeptic: he said, “Please give me one more try at this. Tomorrow morning, let there be dew on the ground all around, and none on the fleece.”
God was patient with him for He had picked Gideon to do this job. He knew how astonished Gideon was, because it was a job Gideon couldn’t do. Gideon didn’t realize that God was going to do the job Himself and He had just picked Gideon to get the credit for it. So the second day, Gideon got the sign he had asked; then he had the courage to come out to lead them.
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Gideon gathered together an army of 32,000 men “...and Yahweh said unto Gideon, The people that are with thee are too many for me to give the Midianites into their hands, lest Israel vaunt themselves against me, saying, Mine own hand hath saved me.” So God told him to send all the cowards home; and then he was really afraid to go into battle, 22,000 out of the 32,000 went home.
This business of getting up a volunteer army isn’t as easy as it might seem. They had to have draft laws int hose days also. Well, here were 10,000; and God said to Gideon, “That is still too many.” God told Gideon to “Take them down to the creek for a drink. Some will bend down and lap up the water directly from the creek, some will scoop it up in their hands and drink out of their hands. Now the ones that lap the water up directly out of the creek, those are going to be your army” and there were only 300 out of the 10,000 that did. God said, “Send the other 9,700 home.”
Here was a nation, the Midianites, militarily powerful enough to have conquered and ruled for seven years the entire nation of Israel, and God said, “Three hundred men are all that you shall take out into battle.” This was what Gideon was told to do. The Midianites were camped in a huge camp out there, and Gideon still had some misgivings. He was worried when he had 32,000 men, now he had 300; and here were scores of thousands of soldiers out there in the camp of Midian.
God said, “If you still have doubts, you sneak down in the darkness till you come to the edge of the camp, and see what you observe.” So he sneaked up within hearing distance of one of the tents, and some of the soldiers of the Midianites were talking there, and one of them said, “I had the strangest dream...” (Have you ever seen any of this Near East Bread? It is an unleavened bread baked usually in round, big flat sheets) He said, “I saw a loaf of barley bread come rolling down the hill into this camp, and it knocked down tents right and left; it was just smashing the whole camp.”
Then another soldier said, “That is an omen from God: that barley loaf represents Gideon and his men, it shows we are going to be defeated.”
Well, the other things hadn’t quite convinced Gideon, but this did. He went back and got his 300 men. God told Gideon, “All right, this is what you do: each of your 300 men is to take a lamp...” We are sure you have seen pictures of the lamps they had in those days. It looked like a small and rather flat and shallow teapot; it had a little handle on one end, and had a central spot where there was oil, and in the spout of the teapot there was a cloth wick down in that, a bit of cord which soaked up oil; and then the end of it was lit.
God then told Gideon, “Each of your men shall have a lamp. Light it. Then get an earthenware pot, and put the lamp down in the bottom of that pot, so that the light of it can’t be seen; until your 300 men can surround about three sides of the camp of Midian. Sneak up on them in the darkness, and then, suddenly, when you give the signal, Gideon, every man will smash this earthenware pot, so all at once the Midianites will see this circle of light surrounding them, and every man will shout, The sword of Yahweh and of Gideon!”
It is a startling thing to be awakened out of sleep that way, isn’t it? After you have already been told in your dream that you were going to be defeated, and that certainly startled these Midianites. In their panic they jumped up: they didn’t know whether the army of Gideon was already among them. Here it was dark in the camp, so whoever found another man scurrying around near him, supposedly an enemy, he slashed at him with his sword. The Midianites killed about half of their own forces that way, and the rest fled in panic.
So it didn’t take the leader of an enormous army, it didn’t take a statesman, it didn’t take a man of importance. Here was a man who wasn’t even among the important members of his own family, but God said, “You go out and do your job, and see what the results are to be, for I will take care of that end of it.” Moffatt’s translation of 1 Samuel 14:6, is especially good and clear: “...the Eternal never has any difficulty about delivering his people, by means of many or by means of few.”
So as far as the leadership group, the kaw-hawl, is concerned, they aren’t being required to do great and heroic things, ordinarily; that is not the way God usually does it. Our job is to live up to our ideals. Our job is to be somebody God can depend upon to be faithful to Him, someone He can depend upon to see that these ideals are not lost before the next generation comes along.
What about the great mass of people? We cannot interest them; we could talk about this, day and night for the rest of our lives, and if we could compel them to stay and listen to us, but there wouldn’t be any converts; and they are born Israelites. What is their part in this thing?
Their part is that it took a nation to demonstrate what God wanted to have proven here on earth. If God had sent an angel or a few angels down here to live in perfect personal conduct and to use their tremendous angelic powers to put down trouble wherever it came in the world, what would He have proven? For most of humanity, nothing. He would have proven that angels were a different order of being from ourselves, that they have different powers and capacities, and they can get results we can’t; and as far as people are concerned, it wouldn’t prove anything to them because
God has blinded them so they cannot see.
Suppose that god took just the elect, those that in the Old Testament He calls the “kaw-hawl,” and He didn’t bother producing any other people in Israel. That would prove that God had a few favorites, it would prove that He took good care of them, it would prove that He rewarded them highly. But for the ordinary run-of-the-mill sort of person, he would say, “Well, what does that prove about me? I am not one of them, I am not able to do what they can do, I don’t get special favors from God;” what has been proven? For that person nothing would have been proven at all.
There had to be a nation in which the ordinary dumb sheeple could live better than the people of other nations, not because they had brains enough to bring it about; because they never had, but because he at least had good sense enough to follow those few who constitute God’s elect, the kaw-hawl, and be led into obedience to God’s law; that is what the nation was for.
To the people of Israel, remember how often in the Old Testament, especially Isaiah, God says, “Ye are my witnesses,” when He was speaking to the nation of Israel. We were to be His witnesses to the world, that if the nation would live according to God’s rules (and it always took the policeman’s club and the executioner’s sword to keep them living that way), that if the nation lived according to these rules, then they would demonstrate to the world that here was a nation which had prosperity such as no other nation which was not afflicted by plagues that came upon the others; they had good health, they had long life. Here was a nation which had liberty such as none of the others had.
2 Corinthians 3:17: “Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.”
One of our famous statesmen, Benjamin Franklin, said, “If a people will not be ruled by God, they will certainly be ruled by tyrants” and that is the lesson the world has had to learn, and we here in America are certainly learning that lesson now. The laws of God give the greatest freedom that any nation can ever have. So that is why the great mass of people, all Israel, were put here. They were put here with the responsibility to-do what they were told, with regard to obeying the laws of God; and when they haven’t lived up to it, when they became an obstruction instead of a tool in the hand of God to accomplish His purposes, they weren’t saved, they were put out of the way, scores of thousands of them at a time, over and over and over again.
With God’s favor goes the tremendous responsibility of living up to it, when we are selected for this sort of a job. We may never have the opportunity tod o the great heroic things that are recorded in history, but remember how those four lepers: not one of them led an army, not one of them routed that big besieging force of Syrians, not one of them led a rescue force to bring food into the city; all they did was go out to the camp of the Syrians, find it empty and go back and report what they had seen. The least of all the people around, and what appeared like the least spectacular job of all, and yet they saved the kingdom, as far as any human being accomplished the saving of it.
So, whatever our particular walk of life is, we have the responsibility of showing the good character that God requires of those who are His favorites. We must not lie to the people, we must not cheat them, we can’t live a wicked life without paying a higher penalty than the ordinary run-of-the-mill individuals who were never called upon to be anything but just part of the mob. But that isn’t too much to ask of us.
If we lead the sort of life where we are demonstrating the way God meant people to live (and that doesn’t mean to act a coward and be afraid to fight when necessary), we are loyal to Him, we are trying to learn what His will is, and to conform to it; we don’t have to do these big historic tings. Our part is a small one, but it is an important one, because God generally accomplishes His purpose through the little people. The ones like Napoleon and figures like that who say “I led the army and I conquered this nation, and so on,” they are not working for the glory of God. Each is working merely for his own personal glory, and that is why God hardly ever leaves anything like that up to them. He does His work through the little person like those of us here on the boards and elsewhere, because we are not trying to be the important one; we realize the importance is God’s.
So don’t let anyone fool you and make you believe that merely being born into Israel, in and of itself, is all it takes to be saved. We can take one verse out of context, but if we go back to the Bible and see where it fits in and what it is based upon, it doesn’t uphold any such idea. Those in Israel who have been saved have been the faithful ones, and the times when the bulk of the nation were that way, the nation had peace and prosperity, everything good; and sometimes there were only a few.
Remember when Elijah came back to try to save Israel from Ahab, there were just 7,000 men left in the whole nation of Israel who had not become apostate idolaters, worshiping Baal; that is how few there were. But God saved the nation because of the few.
Remember, when God came down to destroy the city of Sodom and He told Abraham about it, and Abraham was worried because his nephew Lot, and Lot’s family, lived in Sodom, and remember how worried Abraham was. Well he said, “Yes, it is a pretty good sized city and the people are mostly bad, but there might be fifty good people in Sodom. Would you destroy the whole city, including these fifty good people, because the others were bad?”
God said, “No, if there are fifty there, I will spare it.” And remember how Abraham wanted to drive kind of a hard bargain. (Sometimes God is surprisingly patient) Abraham continued by saying, “Well, perhaps there are forty, or thirty, or twenty,” Finally God said, “If I can find even ten good people in Sodom, I won’t destroy it, for the sake of the ten.”
It turned out that there weren’t ten in Lot’s family, and the rest of them weren’t worth saving; in fact, not all of Lot’s family really were worth saving. But the city had to go. God took care of those who didn’t merit the destruction. But always it is the few on whom He relies, the few who have measured up to the test of character. We are not going to be judged by big thoughts.
Perhaps you can remember who said, “When you stand before God’s judgment seat, He is not going to look you over for medals or diplomas, but for scars.” Have we been out there in the battle for right? And that is always a tough one. We are having to take a lot more than we can dish out. But have we stood fast, for the good things? If we have, that part of Israel is going to be saved, not only saved but put right up on top; we are going to be the icing up on top of the top layer of the cake. We think it is worth working for.
If God has been gracious enough to open your eyes so you may see, and your ears so you may understand the Israel Truth, BE GRATEFUL FOR WE HAVE BEEN BLESSED ABOVE ALL THE OTHER PEOPLE IN AMERICA! Always remember the following:
2 Timothy 2:1‑15: “Thou therefore, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. And the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also. Thou therefore ENDURE HARDNESS, AS A GOOD SOLDIER OF JESUS CHRIST. No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life; that he may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier. And if a man also strive for masteries, yet is he not crowned, except he strive lawfully. The husbandman that laboureth must be first partaker of the fruits. Consider what I say; and the Lord give thee understanding in all things. 8 Remember that Jesus Christ of the seed of David was raised from the dead according to my gospel:
Wherein I suffer trouble, as an evil doer, even unto bonds; but the word of God is not bound. Therefore I endure all things for the elect's sakes, that they may also obtain the salvation which is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory. It is a faithful saying: For if we be dead with him, we shall also live with him: If we suffer, we shall also reign with him: if we deny him, he also will deny us: If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself. Of these things put them in remembrance, charging them before the Lord that they strive not about words to no profit, but to the subverting of the hearers. Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”
You say you love the Lord then obey His Laws, Statutes and Commandments, for this is what the Scriptures say. If you do not do this then you do not love the Lord and are none of His.