Gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each one's work will become clear for the day will declare it because it will be revealed by fire and the fire will test each one's work of what sort it is. It's a little different in Paul of course because he's saying to believers, you know, you do this work, there's stuff you're going to do that's just junk and you want to not be guilty of that. You want the more valuable service to the Lord but the principles exist.
What's going to happen in the end? This is Cross-Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through the book of Isaiah.
Please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross-Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. And now here's Pastor Rick in the book of Isaiah chapter 14 with this edition of Cross-Reference Radio. Revelation 20-10, the devil who deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone where the beast and the false prophet are and they will be tormented day and night, forever and ever. Well, where this is going according to Isaiah is not going to go well for Belshazzar, he's going to be tormented too because it has this dual application. That's what the intention was of the Holy Spirit, to point to Belshazzar and see what's going to happen to him. And it's going to happen to Satan too because I'm on the throne and I'm in control.
And this kind of behavior, this is how I'm going to deal with it. We say as a Christian, okay, it helps my theology to understand the spiritual evil, but what am I supposed to do with it? And the hope is always, you know, if you know these things, if you can say, repeat these truths without opening your Bible, you now are a journeyman Christian.
You can go to any job and work the job. You want God to bring someone in front of you who's interested in this. Because what good is it if you got all this Bible knowledge and you've got no audience? You know, you can't study commentaries, you know, really too far if you had no outlet.
You know, it just becomes after a while, entertainment. You've got to have an outlet. And if you don't, you cry out to the Lord.
You ask for one. Now there's different ways. If you can be serving in the body of Christ and engaging with people and then you're getting the outlet there, or you can have unbelievers in your life that you are interested at some point. Anyway, verse 8, well it shouldn't have passed, shouldn't a pastor always keep evangelism in the forefront of ministry? Shouldn't a pastor always be telling a congregation, hey, there are dead souls out there we want to revive or bring to life. They've never been alive.
We want to have them come to life. Paul said that to the Ephesians, you were dead in your trespasses and sins and he made you alive. Maybe I'll quote that later. Anyway, verse 8, indeed the cypress trees rejoice over you in the cedars of Lebanon saying, since you were cut down, no woodsman has come up against us. Well this is ancient language for ancient warfare. The armies in those days would strip a forest to make use of her timber to build war machines, siege towers and catapults, etc. Well, he's personifying the forest and the forest is just, whoo, glad we're rid of that guy. He's not going to start any more wars and strip us of, you know, ourselves, the trees.
So you can, it has many applications. You can draw from that in real life, the, you know, how, how some evil ruler in this world is removed and what relief comes with their removal. Unfortunately, in many places you remove one wicked ruler, you get another one behind them. Verse 9, hell from beneath is excited about you to meet you at your coming. It stirs up the dead for you, all the chief ones of the earth.
It is raised up from the thrones, all the kings of the nations. And see here, the sheol, hell, translated hell in the New King James, that first word in verse 9, sheol, it's the pit of death. And it is, what he's, the picture he's painting is that hell is loving this. Hell doesn't love anything. It's in a state of disaster. And I'm talking about right now and in the end, well, even now the inhabitants are not doing well there.
Jesus was very gentle in presenting the picture of the rich man in sheol, the underworld. And he, that guy wasn't having a good day. He wanted out, didn't want his family to come. But anyway, coming back to this, Isaiah is making a point.
He's not trying to make a doctrinal statement on the afterlife. He's saying they're going to have their own problems where you're going, Belshazzar. Hell is the ultimate place of powerlessness. It is the ultimate of lost freedom. It is everything that disturbs a human being. And it doesn't even have to try to be dramatic in doing it.
Just by what is not there is enough to make it a place to not want to be there. And Isaiah, this man of God, was given great prophetic visions, many already fulfilled, even in his day. His messianic prophecies are astounding. That makes the future generations say, what this guy is saying is true. It's like, you know, a guy who steps into the batter's box in baseball and hits a home run every time. If you were not promoting gambling, but just for the sake of making a point, if you were forced to bet, would he get a home run this time?
Of course, you're going to say, yep, he's going to get one. And so maybe that's a crude way and clumsy way of trying to illustrate that here we have the prophetic record of Isaiah. And if he says something, you better listen because his record has made him an asset to God. And this would be true with Peter. Also, the Roman centurion recognized it with Jesus, you know, Lord, you command the underworld. You say to one, come, he comes one go, he goes, you, you command the underworld.
And I get that. And I'm asking you to make a commandment on my behalf. And the Lord said, I have not seen this kind of faith in Israel. This guy connected the dots and he came to the conclusion that everybody else should come to. And so here, as we're reading this from Isaiah, we who believe in us saying, no, I'm not so sure he knows what he's talking about.
We're saying, yeah, we we're totally into this. We don't need a liberal theologian. We don't need an atheist to sign off on this to approve us and approve what's being believed and said. We believe without them.
If I could be the way I am now mentally 19 years old in college, I would wipe the floor with those guys. It would be like, who cares what you think? I don't know who do you think you are? I could stop you from very quickly from some flying to us like this and bullying us.
I'm going to wait for you by your car after that. Fear has a way of shutting people up anyway. Okay.
I went a little too far with that. Well, but it's true. If you, if you told a college professor, if you don't stop lying to these kids, I'm going to beat you up. He's probably going to stop lying to them so long as you're around. Okay.
Maybe you don't come from that kind of neighborhood. I do. All right. Anyhow, chief ones of the earth, literally in the Hebrew, the he goats, leaders of the herd, Isaiah, just poetic in his language. And he's again saying, hell is going to be excited for you. Oh, King of Babylon. But it transferred to Satan.
He's saying, you know, the place you think you rule in, let me tell you how it's going to work out for you. That's not for Satan. Satan doesn't care what Isaiah is saying. We do.
We listen to this. And so, you know, this is a parabolic much of this. If you were to say, you don't think it's literal, everything he's saying. Well, I couldn't insist that it's not, but I don't think that is the idea in Isaiah. He's trying.
It's like the, when Micaiah, the prophet said, let me tell you a story about these guys that came up to Satan. He's illustrating his point. He's not trying to say this is a theological doctrine I'm establishing.
So that's what Isaiah is doing. He's trying to make his point and he, but he does present people in the underworld still able to recall things. Well, Jesus did that when he talked about the rich man.
I hope he didn't lose you on that. I just want to try to stay sober in our understanding of scripture, remembering we never have to read miracles into anything in the scripture. When the miracles occur, they pop out at you. And this is the case when we get to verse 12. It's Satan he's talking about. It's going to pop up out at us. And when you get one of those commentators that doesn't want to say it, it's like, why, why won't you step up and say, Hey, this is Satan.
Cause it can't fit any human being. We'll get to that. Verse 10, they all shall speak and say to you, have you also become as weak as we have you become like us? Well, nobody's going to be asking questions when Belshazzar gets to hell. And that's why I'm telling you, the prophet is illustrating for us.
This is the end result. And he is so much logic and appeal to this approach that he is using, causing his readers to think it through a little bit. I'll add, I think almost all of the prophecies were first preached before they were written in some form. The prophets were ahead of it before they put it onto parchment. The apostle Paul, when he wrote his letters, much of what he was saying, he had been preaching to the people where he was. Uh, so it's, it's you, if you've been a preacher that you know, that's, you're always doing that. You're, you know, you study your devotions time, you go out to have dinner with somebody and next thing you know, you're quoting what you were getting in your devotions. And um, then when they come back from the bathroom and say, did you miss it?
You should have been here. Anyway, not true. Anyway, I think that's the reality behind it. Verse 10, they all shall speak and say to you, have you also become weak as we, have you become like us? So this, I think the value of this diminishes if he's talking just to a mirror of only about a man, a human being, its full significance is applied to Lucifer. So in a nutshell, again, verses three through 23 illustrate the ultimate outcome of a mighty ruler, one whose pride has caved in on them. And the dead kings are already in Sheol. Isaiah is portraying them as mocking the new arrival. Verse 11, your pomp is brought down to Sheol and the sound of your stringed instruments, the maggot is spread under you and worms cover you.
So he's, again, he's presenting this dead individual and his end. What's going to happen to your body, Belshazz? Automatic is going to eat it. That's, you know, one of the things that's a normal process of things, decomposition of all your earthly treasures of yourself.
Everything is going to be consumed. And then what about your achievements? Well, Paul put it this way, saying the same thing essentially. Now, if anyone builds on this foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each one's work will become clear for the day will declare it because it will be revealed by fire and the fire will test each one's work of what sort it is. It's a little different in Paul, of course, because he's saying to believers, you know, you do this work, there's stuff you're going to do that's just junk and you want to not be guilty of that. You want the more valuable service to the Lord, but the principles exist. What's going to happen in the end?
For Belshazzar, he loses everything. For the Christian, we don't want to lose our rewards. We want those rewards. That's why they exist. And they should encourage us. I mean, I don't know that we should walk around thinking about them. That would be the prosperity teachers thinking about their rewards they're going to get here on earth. But we should certainly be aware that, you know, the Lord Jesus said, my reward is with me.
Well, we shouldn't trivialize that. So we get into a place where I'm not going to let my left hand know what my right hand is doing. I'm going to do the best I can do. And I'm not going to keep a tally on it. The Lord will.
I believe that because he says that in more than one place. And Paul comes along and says, just be careful that you don't offer up token work. You know, I'm going to go help the church out. Well, don't come help the church out.
Serve the Lord. If your motive is helping us out, if that's in the front, not a good way to go. The better way is I'm going to serve the Lord. I can see the church needs help.
And I'm jumping in. I think that is a better approach. And I say that because over the years I've come across those that felt that they were doing the church help and we don't really don't want them because they weren't in. They really weren't serving the Lord.
They just thought this was a good deed. And Christ really wasn't the fact the dominant factor. Verse 12. How you are fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning, how you are cut down to the ground, you who weaken the nations. And he's going to start, he's going to escalate from this point forward.
And he's now transitioning from just speaking about, though it's been weaved in and out even with Belshazzar, but he's going to intensify it. This word, for you are fallen from heaven, O Lucifer. Lucifer is the Latin word for the morning star. Venus, you could even say.
And the star shines but is going to be swallowed up by the light of the sun. This was a Babylonian goddess. The Babylonians worshipped Ishtar, which is Venus, and the ancient Babylon city, the Chaldeans.
They were, this was the headquarters of the occult, of occultic idolatry. Alexander Hislop's book, Two Babylons, you know, it matches scripture. And I bring it up because there have been those, just talking about this with my wife a few days ago, there are those that have said, well, the book's not trustworthy, it's been proven false. But I haven't heard anybody point to where it's proven false.
He documents a lot of his stuff. And just saying, well, it's proven false. That's not enough. Insistence is not enough. Show me the facts. Because when you read about what he says about ancient Babylon, you say, well, this is history from other sources we have today.
I don't, I don't know where the inconsistencies are, or the errors. If you find out, and you can let me know and then we'll pull it from the chapel store. But until then, it stays. You got to have the strength of two or three witnesses, a good way to go. Anyway, so maybe you've heard that. I heard it years ago, but the guy I heard it from, I didn't like, so I'm not trusting him. And I still don't like the guy, incidentally, and you need to know that. You want to know who he is? Anyhow, I don't think it's someone that you all would listen to because then I would say it.
No, I wouldn't. Anyway, Satan, of course, he tries to imitate the Lord. The Lord is the bright and morning star, Revelation 22, 16. Satan is the one that says, I will be like the Most High. And God says, no, you won't.
And so do we. And so he wanted to capture worship for himself. He is the great imitator. And Paul is careful to bring that out in the New Testament. There in 2 Corinthians chapter 11, he says, familiar passage for, isn't it interesting that these kind of passages we have no problem remembering?
Maybe not memorized, but we remember them. For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light. Therefore, it is no great thing if his ministers also transform themselves into ministers of righteousness, whose end will be according to their works.
There's a consequence, he says. There are frauds. There are those who are not apostles, but they're behaving as so.
So they can get fed and they can get a salary and they can get the attention and the authority and all those things. And they're just like the devil. And so he tells the Corinthians that because the Corinthians, many of them lack discernment, but they boasted they had it. You meet people like today, there's some people that have told me I have the gift of discernment.
I know what church and books they liked. And it took restraint to not bust out in their face laughing. It's a spell discernment because you must have a different word, language and alphabet. Anyhow, you got to be careful that you don't get pride. You get pride correcting somebody who's clearly wrong. So you know, can you not be wrong? Because then it tempts me to be proud. I guess you all have never had these experiences in your earlier days as Christians.
Not that I have, but I've watched some of you and picked it up. Anyway, what earthly king has fallen from heaven? None. This is why it moves into something other. How you have fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning. How you are cut down to the ground, you who weakened nations.
Well, Belshazzar's kingdom, the Babylonians weakened nations, but that doesn't mean that's all there is. This is global that the prophet is giving to us. And someone could say, well, he's just talking about, you know, the world as he understood it then. Well, that's true, but the Holy Spirit, certainly speaking through all the ages, this is beyond just Belshazzar because Jesus said this, I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.
He adds that touch as though he was a witness because he was. I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. So the prophet saw in here, in this what he's writing about and preaching about, something far deeper than the kingdoms of men and the thrones that are occupied by men. He sees the defeat of Satan's empire, the fall of the king of Babylon. He saw the fall of Satan, the ruler of this world. That's what the Bible calls him, the ruler of this world.
I said earlier, he's dealing with monarchs. John 12, Jesus speaking, now is the judgment of this world. Now the ruler of this world will be cast out. And that's of course a process.
And it was not an instant thing. In some ways it is, but ultimately it will not be until he is locked away. Lucifer, that Satan of old, seeks to energize and motivate the leaders of the world. That's why he comes into the picture concerning the kings of Tyre in Ezekiel 28, and here in the kings of Babylon. Satan is the power behind the scenes. Satan spiritually energizes world leaders, and we're seeing this. Who do you think is egging Vladimir Putin on? I mean, it's not Mr. Rogers.
What's the force behind it? You look at this guy as evil, what he's doing. You know, he wants to look out for his economy and his country, but really? The slaughter, the evil that's taking place? This is satanic. Satan doesn't need to, he doesn't just work with world rule. I don't want to reference current events, but we just saw Satan show up in Nashville. He has to have people to do these things.
This is a very real thing. That's why I started out by saying, you know, people who are naysayers about the scripture, they don't know what they're talking about when it comes to God. It's fine to tell them that. You don't know what you're talking about. You think you do. You're just making up this gobbledygook because you don't like what the Bible is saying.
So you have these dumb alternatives. Ephesians 2, and you, he made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit, who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lust of the flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others. Paul, man, I mean, how much is just in that? Then, you know, does Satan need helpers to do his evil?
He absolutely does. Principalities, plural, and powers, and spiritual wickedness in high places, and Ephesians 6-12, he assigns fallen angels to national leaders so he can influence them. Daniel 10-20, and now I must return to fight with the prince of Persia, and when I have gone forth, indeed the prince of Greece will come. So these guys, you know, he's saying there are spiritual entities assigned to Persia's kings and rulers, not just the kings, you know, the cabinet members, the generals, there are other people in the mix, and Satan is hard at work influencing them. You say, where does the evil come from? How come there are countries they throw money into and it never gets any better? The corruption is so deep, it's just a money pit.
You want to send, you know, wheat and flour to places in Africa? The armies take it all. So, you know, this is evil.
You know, well, let's go further, because we'll come to some of this. Satan is behind it all. That's what Isaiah is teaching us.
Some, continuing in verse 12, Son of the morning, you are cut down to the ground, you who weaken the nations. These are the world leaders. Without satanic influences they would be strong leaders. They would take care of their people. They wouldn't rob and oppress their people. Look at almost all of South America. I mean, you just shake your head and say, man, I don't want to live there. Why are they so poor? It's the leaders, the leadership. People might be offended at that. Then what else is it?
The water? No, there's a real devil. And I think people in third world nations are largely unfixable because of the corruption on the leadership level. And that's why Satan goes after leaders of the world and Isaiah says, you who weaken the nations.
There's a very real effect. What are we supposed to be doing in the midst of this? Saving souls. You know, again, you see Christians come to the Bible and they read Psalm 21. They say, oh, this is the Messiah on the cross. They read Isaiah 53 or Psalm 2. You can see the messianic prophecies.
How come they can't see the demonic application here in Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 that lay it all out? The Ethiopian eunuch, he knew this went beyond whoever was living in the days Isaiah wrote it. He said, does this man speak of himself or someone large or someone else? And Philip said, well, let me help you with that.
And hopefully we would have those kind of situations. Verse 13, for you have said in your heart, I will ascend into heaven. I will exalt my throne above the stars of God. I will also sit on the mount of the congregation on the farthest sides of the north. And here we have those personal pronouns of self exaltation.
I will, I will, I will. And the Bible comes along in the New Testament and says, say it according to, it's the Lord wills. Even Paul said, I'm going to come to you if the Lord wills. James said, you know, subject to the will of the Lord. So the heart is where things are embraced.
The head may figure it out, but the heart is where it is embraced. In the scriptures, the entirety of our being, that will, the feelings, the intellect, that's the heart of it. And like the king of Babylon, Satan will one day be humiliated and defeated.
Until then is damaged galore. Uh, he will be cast out of heaven and he still has audience to heaven. He does not reside there, but revelation 12 tells us the day is coming where he will lose that access and he's going to be pretty angry about that. We see him having access in the book of Job.
So he was cast out as a member of heaven, but he is still allowed. It's sort of that old saying, you know, you, you keep your enemies close and you kind of Lord telling us, I got my eye on him. Thanks for tuning in to Cross Reference Radio today. Cross Reference Radio is a ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia. If you'd like to learn more about this ministry, we invite you to visit our website, crossreferenceradio.com.
You'll find a number of teachings from Pastor Rick available there. We also encourage you to subscribe to our podcast. When you subscribe, you'll be notified of new additions of Cross Reference Radio. Just search for Cross Reference Radio on your favorite podcast app. You can also follow the links at crossreferenceradio.com. We're glad we were able to spend time with you today. Tune in next time to continue learning from the book of Isaiah with Pastor Rick right here on Cross Reference Radio.
Whisper: medium.en / 2024-07-25 09:26:26 / 2024-07-25 09:37:01 / 11