Flight ISA01 - Part C

If events predicted in the past have been fulfilled to that degree of accuracy, whenever you read future predictions yet unfulfilled, you should sober up and take them to heart. It's the Word of God, and if God can do that and speak of these things in advance, then the rest of it you can take to the bank. For Jesus to fulfill even 20 prophecies from the Old Testament would be impressive, but he fulfilled at least 300.

Amazing! Today on Connect with Skip Heitzig, Skip shares about the fulfilled prophecies in the book of Isaiah and what they mean for your faith today. Before we begin, here's a resource that will give you fresh insight on what Jesus' resurrection means for you. The aftermath of 2020 has left so many of us wrestling with questions about the future and wondering, what's next?

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To give online securely, visit connectwithskip.com slash offer, or call 800-922-1888. Okay, let's get into today's teaching. We're in the book of Isaiah as we begin our study with Skip Heitzig. There shall come forth a rod from the stem of Jesse.

A branch shall grow out of his roots. Jesse, the father of David. David, whose dynasty God promised blessing and eternal kingdom to. David, the tree of David, almost cut down, right? Because the kingdom was divided, split, two down south, 10 up north. Now there's a threat of captivity.

The 10 northern tribes are already gone into captivity. Now Judah is threatened with captivity and will indeed go into captivity. So if you were to look at the lineage of David and the promises God made to King David as a tree, man, that tree got chopped down. But go down to that stump and look really closely at that stump and you'll see this little stem just poking up through that deadwood, it would seem, but not dead. A little stem, a little rod coming up.

What's that? There's still life in it. And that life will blossom one day. There's going to be a branch and that branch is the Messiah, the son of David, the offspring of King David. And you say, well, how do you know it speaks of a person? Maybe it speaks of the nation because of verse two, the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, singular. The spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

So here is Isaiah predicting a future restoration under this branch, under the Messiah. Chapters 13 through 23 are a bunch of burdens they're called in the scripture. Burdens, the burden against this nation, the burden against that nation. A burden is a pronouncement.

It is an oracle. Isaiah got a message from God. It weighed on him. It was a burden to him and he unleashed his burden on the people.

He was faithful to give it to them. So there's nine nations. I'm just going to read through them, just brush through them. Nine burdens with nine nations. Here's the deal about these nations. All of the nations mentioned are nations that had some contact with the nation of the Jews, Israel and Judah.

Let's just call it Israel here. They touched Israel, usually negatively. They hassled the Jews. So God said, I'm going to hassle you. You hassle Israel, I'm going to hassle you. So chapter 13, verse one, the burden against Babylon, which Isaiah, the son of Amozah, followed by Assyria and Philistia, chapter 14, followed by chapter 16, Moab, eastern side of the Jordan River, followed by Damascus up in Syria, a superpower, chapter 17, followed by Ethiopia in chapter 18, the burden against Egypt in chapter 19, the burden against Babylon again, and Edom in chapter 21, and then chapter 23, the city of Tyre.

Go through this list. You know what comes to my mind? What we read in the book of Ecclesiastes, there's nothing new under the sun. These are the nations still hassling the Jews. To this day, many of them would love to see Israel annihilated completely, calling Israel the great Satan and the United States, the little Satan.

Not all of them, but many of them. They're occupied by people who deny the legitimacy of Israel to exist. Now, why are these burdens given? Answer, probably to reassure the Jewish people in the midst of conflict later on in the midst of captivity, that God still is on the throne, that God still has a plan. He's reassuring them of that great promise in Genesis chapter 12, whoever blesses Israel, I will bless, whoever curses Israel, I will curse.

So he's saying, don't despair. I'm going to punish Israel and Judah, the Jews, I'm going to punish them, but then I'm going to punish the people I use to punish them because they are still responsible. They are the ones saying, let's get rid of those Jews.

Let's mount siege engines against them and let's annihilate them and destroy them. So that is in their heart to do that. I'm going to hold them responsible for their choice, but in their choice, because I'm God and I'm sovereign, I'm going to actually use them as a chastening rod for my people.

Do you understand? So if you don't, let me reinforce that with the prophet Habakkuk complained to God that his own people, the children of Israel were sinful and bad and doing wrong things and God, you ought to punish them. So God says, well, Habakkuk, since you're bringing it up, I want you to know that I'm going to do something that's going to cause your ears to tingle and everybody else who hears about it. I'm actually bringing the Babylonians as my chastening rod to take your people captive. I am going to do something about it. Then Habakkuk gets all mad again at God.

God, I know we're bad, but they're worse. Why would you use somebody worse to get at somebody bad? Because it's going to work.

It's going to work. It's going to cause repentance and I'm going to bring you back into the land. And for their sin of wanting to destroy you, don't worry, I'll get them. It's an amazing display of God's sovereignty. So it's sort of like this. Let's say I break into your house.

I never would. But for the sake of analogy, you see, hey, Pastor Skip is breaking into our house. And so you call the police.

Right, rightly so. You call them to protect yourself. But when the police come to arrest me to protect you, they discover in your house a meth lab.

Now it's different. And they notice above your fireplace, the original Mona Lisa that you've stolen from the Louvre in Paris. And so now you're really in trouble. They've come to arrest me and they're going to get me for what I did. But you're also guilty of crime. So guess what?

You're going to probably be in longer than I am. So God is using all of that this way. Chapter 23, verse one, the burden. There it is, again, the burden against Tyre. You know, Tyre, it's right up on the Mediterranean coast, north of Israel, modern day, Lebanon, ancient Phoenicia, the burden against Tyre.

Well, now listen carefully to this prophecy. Well, you ships of Tarshish, for it is laid waste, so that there is no house, no harbor. From the land of Cyprus, it is revealed to them, be still, you inhabitants of the coast land, you merchants of Sidon, that city next to Tyre, whom those who cross the sea have filled.

Stop there. After this prediction was made, Tyre, the city of Tyre, was besieged five times. The last time it was besieged, it was destroyed by a guy named Alexander.

Yes, that Alexander, Alexander the Great. Now, it says here in verse 2, whom those who cross the sea have filled, right? So you got that before you. Now listen to this. This is another prophecy to the same city out of Ezekiel chapter 26.

God says, I will scrape her dust from her and make her like the top of the rock. Okay, hold those thoughts. Philip of Macedon, ruler of Macedonia, had a boy named Alexander. He didn't think he'd amount to much. He thought Alex was a good kid, but he's not going to really be much of anything. He's a bookworm.

He's kind of an indoor kid. That's how Alexander was at first. So Philip decides to hire a tutor for him, by the name of Aristotle, to be the personal tutor to Alexander. Well, in the midst of his education, Philip of Macedon is murdered. The murderer is blamed on Persians, but Medes in the Persian, sorry, sorry, sorry.

That happens at my age. So the Medo-Persian empire, the Medo-Persian empire is blamed for Philip of Macedon's death. Something comes over Alexander. He decides to take up his father's cause and march against the Medo-Persians. He comes to Tyre. It's a very swift amassment of troops to meet for the battle. And this battle has been made into movies, but he comes to Tyre and asks for supplies.

They reject the request. So Alexander wants to lay siege to the city. Well, here's the problem. The city at one time that was on the coast had been almost annihilated at one time by the Babylonians. So the people who were left moved the whole city to an island a half mile off the coast. So the city of Tyre is now an island off the coast. By the time Alexander the Great gets there and he sees the kind of city he's up against an island, he says, I can't defeat them.

The Phoenicians are masters at warfare by sea, I'm not. So what does he do? He builds a causeway. He builds a jetty using the materials from that city that had been destroyed. He essentially scrapes the dust and all the materials off of the city, piles it in the sea, makes a jetty and attacks and destroys the city of Tyre. So again, you merchants of Sidon whom those who cross the sea have filled, and then Ezekiel 26, I will scrape her dust from her and make her like the top of the rock.

I'm going into this detail for this reason. It should make you think logically that if events predicted in the past have been fulfilled to that degree of accuracy, whenever you read future predictions yet unfulfilled, you should sober up and take them to heart. It's the Word of God, and if God can do that and speak of these things in advance, then the rest of it you can take to the bank. And this is God's calling card, Isaiah 46. God says, I am God, there is no other.

I am God, there is none like me. Declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times, things that are not yet done. That's the awesome nature of prophecy. Well, in the midst of the prophecies of condemnation comes this little section I told you about, this intermission, the next four chapters, chapters 24 through 27. It's a parenthetical set of chapters. Think of it as a pause.

Think of it as an intermission in a movie and intermission in a movie so you can get up and get popcorn, okay, and come back. It's an intermission scholars call Isaiah's little apocalypse. The language now becomes more vague, more worldwide, more all-encompassing than the previous chapters, and they interface with, they parallel with what occurs in Revelation chapter 6 through 20, the great tribulation period on into the millennial kingdom, from the tribulation into the kingdom age. So it speaks here about the day of the Lord, and the day of the Lord is the eschatological day of the Lord, that future ultimate day of the Lord in the tribulation period.

Jesus said in Matthew 24, then there will be great tribulation such as not been since the beginning of the world until this time, no, nor ever shall be. In this little pericope, this little set of verses, this parenthetical statement is that little apocalypse. Chapter 24 verse 1, behold the Lord makes the earth empty, makes it waste, distorts its surface, scatters abroad its inhabitants. Verse 4, the earth mourns and fades away, the world languishes and fades away, the haughty people of the earth languish. Earth is mentioned in that passage that I just read three times. It's alluded to five times.

In the whole set of chapters, it's mentioned frequently. God is judging the earth. There is today, I'm going to call it an environmental atheism, Mother Earth. Respect your mother, the bumper sticker says, and it has a picture of the earth on it. Ever since 1970, I think April 22nd is Earth Day.

Hey, you know what? I'm all for being a good steward of what God put in our hands. I'm all for being a good steward of what God put in our hands. I am all for taking care of the earth because it's a stewardship, it's given by God. I believe in creation care, but not to the point where it becomes idolatrous and we worship Mother Earth or Mother Nature, as she is called.

We're simply stewards. And I'm bringing this up because you need to be forewarned if you're an earthbound, earth-worshipping whatever, that yes, we have messed up the earth. But let me just say, if you think we've messed it up, where do you see what God does with it? He will absolutely trash this planet in the tribulation period. And it's his prerogative.

You know why? The earth is the Lord's, the Bible says, and the fullness thereof. So there's going to be a point and it's fleshed out in detail, more detail in Matthew 24 by Jesus, but certainly the great detail of Book of Revelation chapter 6 through 20, that day of the Lord. Verse 19, the earth is utterly broken down. The earth is split open. The earth is moved exceedingly. The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard. It shall be removed like a cottage. The transgression thereof shall be heavy upon it and it shall fall and not rise again. I don't want to belabor this. Some scholars see in this a possible polar shift, which many scientists say is a possibility.

It's an interesting possibility. I don't know if I'm going to go that far, but I do know that in the tribulation period, there's the kind of cataclysms that are described are, well, monumental, right? Where huge population bases of the earth are decimated because of the natural phenomenon taking place on the earth. If you were to look at the moon through a telescope, you suddenly realize that our universe is not docile. You look at the surface of the moon and you see the pockmarks from all the activity of, you know, things slamming into it, making all those craters, right? When you see on the moon, they're pretty sizable.

Now, the earth has been called the inhabitable zone, that in the universe, there's just a strange thing about where the earth is positioned in the alignment of the planets. It's like it's been protected from the kind of cosmic battering that others, even our moon, have experienced. But if we just go a few miles west over the border, there's the Beringer Crater, which is a mile wide, 500 some feet deep, that is put there by a single asteroid at some point in history past. That hitting of the earth caused such a devastation, as can be seen, and I encourage you to go see it at some point.

It's amazing. The surface impact that created that great Beringer Crater is, or was, 40 million tons of TNT's worth of surface impact. In other words, when that asteroid hit the earth, it created the kind of blast equal to a thousand, one thousand times greater destructive power than the bombs that went off at Hiroshima and Nagasaki put together. In Revelation, the book of Revelation, one of the judgments on the earth is, great hail from heaven fell upon men, and each hailstone will weigh a talent.

A talent is 125 pounds. Some of you remember those old ice houses. I used to work in one as a kid. You could get 25 pound blocks of ice for a couple bucks. Anybody remember those?

No? Okay, so I do, and it was at Hugo's Delicatessen, where I worked, and I'd go out there and chip off the ice blocks and sell it to a customer. And they're like sizable chunks of ice.

Imagine a block of ice, not 25 pounds, 125 pounds. They're going to strike the earth, causing real damage. You say, now why would that happen? Well, did you know that in the Old Testament, the punishment, according to the law of Moses for blasphemy, was stoning? It's as if God is saying, because of the unrepentant blasphemy that will fill the earth, God is stoning the earth for it. Now chapters 25 to 27 are happy chapters. After all of that messy ice stuff, we get the kingdom age. It gets good. It's this little hint of coming attractions. The king takes his rightful place. It's filled with songs of praise, songs of salvation. I want to bring you ahead to chapter 26, verse 20. Come, my people, enter your chambers and shut your doors behind you.

Hide yourself, as it were, for a little moment, until the indignation is passed. A possible, I'm not saying necessary, but possible hint at the rapture. For behold, the Lord comes out of his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth, that is the tribulation, for their iniquity.

The earth will also disclose her blood and will no more cover her slain. Go down to chapter 27, verse 6. Those who come, he shall cause to take root in Jacob, Israel shall blossom and bud and fill the face of the world with fruit.

This is a prophecy of the kingdom age, the millennial kingdom, the thousand year kingdom age that the Bible speaks about, mentions in Revelation, but really is detailed in the book of Isaiah. I worked in Israel for about six months on a farm, and I saw the kind of fruit production that that country was capable of. Now that was 40 years ago when I lived there and worked there.

It's a long time ago. So when Israel became a nation since 1948, the cultivation has increased, the cultivation of land, cultivation of land from 408,000 acres to presently over 1.07 million acres, so that Israel today, not even the millennial kingdom yet, Israel today is the fourth largest exporter of fruit in the world. So I like reading this, going to fill the world with fruit. This is just now.

This is just the beginning. Can't wait to see what happens in the millennium under the reign of the Messiah and the fruit of righteousness and peace with it. That's Skip Heitzig with a message from the series, The Bible from 30,000 Feet. Now here's Skip to share how you can keep these messages going strong to connect more people to the gospel of Jesus. The Bible tells us that every day draws us closer to the return of Jesus. One day the Lord will return, and that means our time to reach others with the gospel is urgent. People need to hear the good news that changed your life and mine. So today I'm asking for your help to reach more people around the world with these teachings from God's Word. Here's how you can partner with this ministry to make that happen. It's important to wait on the Lord. Judah was able to look at a historical example of what not to do and so they said okay we won't do it.

Only for a while they will do it later on and it will become their undoing. Connect with Skip Heitzig is a presentation of Connection Communications connecting you to God's never changing truth in ever-changing times.