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Warped Spiritual Knowledge (Part A)

Cross Reference Radio / Pastor Rick Gaston
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October 31, 2024 6:00 am

Warped Spiritual Knowledge (Part A)

Cross Reference Radio / Pastor Rick Gaston

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October 31, 2024 6:00 am

The LORD thru the prophet Isaiah laments for Babylon; the humiliation of Babylon is predicted as well as its fall. Though gone, the spirit of Babylon will live on and return at the end of the age to be judged again.

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He referred to Sidon as a virgin daughter and he said you will rejoice no more, O oppressed virgin daughter of Sidon.

Arise, cross over to Cyprus and there also you will have no rest. So language that the people of that day would appreciate, but what would they do with it? This imagery underlines the vulnerability and the absolute helplessness of Babylon when judgment falls. 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. But for now, let's join Pastor Rick in the book of Isaiah Chapter 47 with today's edition of Cross Reference Radio. Isaiah 47 this evening. Verse 10 says, Your wisdom and your knowledge have warped you.

That's God speaking to Babylon. When spiritual knowledge is bent all out of shape or warped, then everything is out of rhythm with God's truth. What warped them?

What caused them to be so bent out of shape? Sorcery was high up on that list. Idolatry, of course, goes with that and the outcome was arrogance.

And there are a lot of moving parts to those three things, which we'll cover this evening. Last chapter, God pronounced the doom coming towards Babylon, which at this time, again, another reminder, at this time in history, Babylon was not the world power. Assyria still was. In this chapter, the doom is detailed by the prophet. It was a kingdom of the occult. Babylon was.

I'll hit that at the end of the study a little bit more. Spiritual wickedness in high places was everywhere. It became part of society. For the Jews, of course, they're just moving along as a people in the wrong direction in spite of all that God tried to do for them, sending the prophets, always a remnant with them. There are five distinct periods for the Jews coming out of Egypt. And these little things that, you know, when a pastor brings these things up, they're not filler. They're important things.

They have to do with how we go about business serving Jesus. We look at the Jews, we try to learn from them. God got them out of Egypt. That was the period of the camp for them. It was the camp.

It was the commonwealth. And after that, the crown. And then after the crown came the captivity, and then they came back to Israel.

The letter C is the alliteration there. But at the camp, the time that they spent with Moses, you would think having Moses as your king, as he essentially was, and he was more than a king, you would think that great man of God would have just had so much more success with that first generation. But of course, they died in the wilderness, almost all of them.

That second generation, however, which shuts up that silly teaching of generational curses, because if there was a such thing as a generational curse, the second generation would never have made it into the promised land. But they did make it into the promised land, and they did well in the beginning. That was the commonwealth period of the Jews.

There was no king. They were tribal leaders. And then they wanted a king, and they got one, the period of the crown, which led to their captivity and their return. Those last three, the crown, the captivity, and their return to Jerusalem, is the time of the writing prophets, Isaiah through Malachi. And so there you have 17 writings and 16 men doing it, because Jeremiah wrote two of them. What is happening here, Isaiah being the largest of the prophets who wrote to the people, he's telling the future. Should have been a very big boost for those Jews who then had to live through this junk in the days of Jeremiah. Well, looking at verse 1 of Isaiah 47, come down and sit in the dust, O virgin daughter of Babylon, sit on the ground without a throne, O daughter of the Chaldeans.

You shall no more be called tender and delicate. Well, Babylon is personified as a delicate, well cared for maiden, woman, and a virgin in the sense that she had never been before captured. That generation of the Babylonians in the days of Jeremiah, she had seen some hard times before that, but once Nebuchadnezzar comes along, Babylon turns into this quite impressive kingdom, this empire. And it's to that generation that Isaiah is talking to, and he's saying this is all going to change because judgment is going to fall on you.

And that is the Babylonian Empire. But behind the Bible's personifications, metaphors, illustrations, parables, visions, symbols, behind all of that, there's always a greater reality, not just a symbol. Jesus said, these things I have spoken to you in figurative language, because there's greater things. Wearing a cross is an ornament. Well, the cross, the Christian cross, there are greater things behind that symbol, like the salvation of sinners, for example.

You can't get bigger. There's nothing greater for an individual than their salvation. Therefore, the value of the symbols, the personifications, these things are useful.

Sometimes they're vital. And so personifying Babylon as this maiden is a big thing. It should have been a big thing for the Jews at that time and should have been a big thing for the Babylonians, because the Babylonians were aware of the prophecies. I'll get to that too.

I owe you two now. Hosea wrote, I have, God speaking through him, I have spoken by the prophets and have multiplied visions. I have given symbols through the witness of the prophets. We know that's God speaking, because Hosea is not giving symbols, it's God giving them. God uses these symbols, but because in back of them is a greater truth, and they come with for me to know, for you to find out, and I won't make it that hard for you to find out if you apply yourself.

So again, the literal is revealed by the symbolic and the literal is greater. John chapter 16, these things I have spoken to you that you should not be made to stumble. Well, God again does not only speak with just straight language, you know, he also uses these methods, parables, parabolic illustrations, things like that.

Sower went to sow, and he tells the story, you know, a woman needed bread, and there's a parabolic illustration there. Revelation 1, the revelation of Jesus Christ, and John goes on to say, to show his servants things which must shortly take place. And he sent and signified it by his angel to his servant John. Well, we are those servants, and he has shown us things through the symbols, through the illustrations, the metaphors, that would do something with these things.

All the time, the goal is to build our faith up more, trust God no matter what, because we need that. So God tells future Babylon, which again at this time was not a dominant kingdom, that they are going to be like this virgin daughter, but she's going to experience a radical and rude change. The prophets referred to cities in danger of judgment as virgin daughters. Isaiah did it in chapter 23, and there he referred to Sidon as a virgin daughter, and he said, you will rejoice no more, O oppressed virgin daughter of Sidon. Arise, cross over to Cyprus, and there also you will have no rest.

So language that the people of that day would appreciate, but what would they do with it? This imagery underlines the vulnerability and the absolute helplessness of Babylon when judgment falls, which Nebuchadnezzar, being so proud, you know, he didn't ever think this was going to happen to Babylon. He dodged it. We'll cover that too. That's three.

I don't remember what they are, but he's one of them. Babylon, that empire, was extraordinarily wealthy because of her conquest, you know, the riches that she would take from those that she conquered. And there in the Fertile Crescent, so many of those kingdoms, you know, she now possessed those fertile lands, and by the time Jeremiah comes along, Babylon really has nothing to worry about on a human level. But God wasn't, he wasn't playing around when he sent these prophecies out. So what we're going to get, of course, in Scripture in this evening section is not only fulfilled prophecy to us, but future prophecy.

That's four now that I owe you. Verse two, take the millstones and grind meal, remove your veil, take off the skirt, uncover your thigh, pass through the rivers. And so now this mistress of the palace, and sticking with the metaphor, is going to be turned into a servant doing menial work. Babylon is going to be stripped down. She's not going to be this great Babylon that Nebuchadnezzar boasted of.

She'll be a prisoner and compelled to do things that a slave would do. And that is exactly what happened to Babylon as a kingdom, as a people. And behind all of this, I'm eager to get to that part, we're not there yet, this Chaldean influence.

Chaldea became synonymous with Babylon. Verse three, your nakedness shall be uncovered. Yes, your shame will be seen. I will take vengeance and I will not arbitrate with a man. So verse three, taking it from the end of the verse, God says, I'm not debating this.

This is how it's going to be. This is a decree of God personifying the city, again, as exposed and humiliated and abused. And, of course, when Cyrus, when he did take down Babylon, he did it almost effortlessly. There were people, Babylon was such a big city that it went days before people realized it was a change in regime, a regime change. No longer were the Babylonians in charge, but now the Persians were in charge. Babylon was now part of the Persian Empire. And all of this came true in waves because it took centuries for Babylon to finally be erased off the map.

The days of Alexander and when Alexander died, his kings divvied up the kingdom of Alexander. In time, Babylon was completely just erased to centuries. Armies have walked over the remains of Babylon under the desert sands and not even aware that there once was a kingdom there.

And so there she is pictured as a slave doing laundry, hauling water, doing things that she never would have expected. And much of this imagery that we're getting in Isaiah 47 this evening will show up in Revelation 18. So ancient Babylon that we're talking about is sort of the template for apocalyptic Babylon that Revelation talks about. That end time kingdom that will have just this opulence, this wealth and power and will be just as evil and influenced by spiritual, what do you call it, sinners.

People in touch with Satan, not God. And that's what characterizes the Babylonians and that will characterize Antichrist and it will be global. And never before has the world been global. Well, at the Tower of Babel, because everybody lived there and they were dispersed after. But that geographically, mankind didn't populate the planet like we do now. And we just saw this with the COVID hoax when the medical science slash overlords had people on remote islands following the COVID restrictions. It's just their reach was unlimited. People in Antarctica were affected by everybody. So we're global now, just as the Bible said it would be.

And never before has this happened. In verse four, as for our Redeemer, the Lord of hosts is his name, the Holy One of Israel. So the prophet is careful to explain that this is all Yahweh himself in control of everything. The Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel, Yahweh of hosts. Israel's God is calling the shots.

And Nebuchadnezzar found that out when he was driven mad. But now we've got time to stay on that word Yahweh, the name, the covenant name of the Lord. Usually there's too many verses. You just can't stay.

But tonight I'll take a little time on it. It's known now as a tetragrammaton, a word consisting of four letters. And it really, you don't really have to get it all, but you should understand some of it. And this tetragrammaton points to the covenant name of Israel's God. It has become a theonym.

And it has quite a history going involved with it. The original name is derived from the verb used to Moses, to be, to exist. The implication was the eternal, self-existent God. Who shall I say sent me in God? You tell them the one that is. It's hard to, you know, it's idiomatic.

But we can get there. Like I just said, the implication being the self-existent, eternal God. Exodus 3.14. And God said to Moses, I am who I am. That's the covenant name there.

It's been lost, its pronunciation, but we'll get to that. And he said, Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, I am has sent me to you. Tell my people that who we know as Yahweh, the great I Am, is the one that is sending me to you. Now when Moses goes back and he writes information in Genesis, he uses this newly acquired name to identify just who is the God that created the heavens and the earth and everything in between. So this name was not realized until Exodus, what we know as chapter 3, when God met Moses, and he has this dialogue with him. It is the most important name for God in the Old Testament, and it appears about 6,800 times in the Old Testament.

This shows up in the New Testament in its own form also. The Jewish scribes, however, in time, after the second temple was rebuilt, and that would be after the return from Babylonian captivity, in time they began to regard the name as too sacred to verbalize, too sacred to speak. So they left out the vowels of the name, and you're just left with the consonants, which is that Yahweh, who we're familiar with, the YHWH. And Moses and Aaron didn't think it was too sacred to pronounce. When Moses told Aaron, God wants you to bless the people this way.

Yahweh bless you, the Lord bless you, the Lord keep you, the Lord make his face to shine upon you. He's using the name, the covenant name, he was pronouncing the name. This was something rabbinical Judaism, another thing they've given or taken away, have corrupted.

Well-meaning, but wrong. And we Christians have to watch that we do not try to be more sacred than the Scriptures. Because again, if I were a Jew and I knew the Scriptures, I would like to think that I would say, hey, wait a minute, they can't be too sacred to pronounce. Moses, Aaron, Joshua, these guys, Isaiah, they were pronouncing the name, and they were, you know, men of God. Well, anyway, due to this increased sanctity attached to the name, as I mentioned, we've lost its pronunciation. And in time, in the Dark Ages, and they truly were the Dark Ages, the Jews, when writing this four-character name, didn't want the reader to accidentally think the name or say the name, so they inserted vowels from the name Adonai, which is Lord. And so they had that, when you read it in their writings, it would be just the vowels and the consonants of these two words combined. Well, the Christians then misunderstood and began to pronounce the Adonai vowels with the consonants of the name Jehovah, which is not accurate, and all the scholars agreed to that, and they suspect the proper pronunciation would be Yahweh, not Jehovah as the covenant name. Well, it really doesn't matter, the bottom line is that we know who is being spoken about, and we don't corrupt it any further. I like this joke to illustrate we know who the Scripture is talking about when we come to these things, to a lot of things we know.

We have this spiritual intuition based on being trained from Scripture. And here's the man that would walk by a newsstand every day on his way to work. Now, for those of you who don't know what a newsstand is, a little booth on the sidewalk sells magazines and newspapers and candy and tobacco products, things like that.

I miss them, they were very nice. Anyway, he walked by and this parrot, the man had a parrot there, and the parrot would see this man and he would say, Mr., you're really dumb. Every day, at first the man thought this was amusing, but then it began to irritate him, and he told the owner of the newsstand, your parrot is insulting me every time I come back, calling me dumb, every single time. The man said, don't worry about it, I'll fix this, he'll never do that again.

The next day he's walking by the newsstand and the parrot makes eye contact with him, and the parrot says, you know what? We can know things, it doesn't have to always be explicitly stated. We're smart enough and God knows that. And so when we come to the covenant name of God, we have Jesus, we know his name. We know by the facts presented that Jesus is the Yahweh of the Old Testament, and we've been going over that repeatedly. Acts chapter 4, verse 12, nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name given among men by which we must be saved. We've been reading there is no other God, there is no other Savior, and the New Testament picks that up and applies it to Christ, and says that Yahweh was born of a virgin, humbled himself, allowed humiliation, but he humbled himself and he came as a human being.

100% human in the flesh, 100% God in essence. He never stopped being divine. He yielded his sovereignty for a while. So when he says, I could call 12 legions and see who's withholding that sovereignty, he still could do it.

Fortunately for them, he wasn't a show-off. Well, he says here in verse 5, so now if you understand, when we come to the all caps of the name Lord in the Old Testament reading, it's Yahweh, that covenant name. Some Bibles will italicize the word Lord to let you know that this is the covenant name. And it's very significant, it's not a little thing, it is God getting personal with his people. And so when Christ comes, he becomes very personal with people, such as the 12 apostles, Mary and Martha of Bethany.

I mean, he loved to go there when he was in town. In fact, we don't read about him spending the night in Jerusalem, except when he was 12. We read about him staying out in Bethany, and when he was 12, you know, hey, where's Jesus? Something's missing here.

And three days later, they found him. It's a comical story, unless you're a parent and you see yourself in that story, it's terrifying. Verse 5, though, of Isaiah 47, sit in silence and go into darkness, O daughter of the Chaldeans, for you shall no longer be called the Lady of Kingdoms. Well, again, the analogy goes back to verse 1, still personifying Babylon as this delicate maiden, and she'd lose all that. Verse 6, I was angry with my people, I have profaned my inheritance and given them into your hand.

You showed them no mercy on the elderly, you laid your yoke very heavily. So again, here's the prophet once again, speaking of a future event as though it already passed. How do you get such assurance? This is imparted. Isaiah doesn't wake up and say, today I'm going to really try to be faithful.

He may have done that, but that doesn't work too well, if that's all you have. So here, of course, the Lord imparts this faith to the prophet. You might remember when the apostles said that they wanted to increase the Lord, increase our faith.

He really doesn't answer them. You're waiting for Jesus to say, well, you do these three things, kid. And it really, he goes into another zone, sort of just continuing the upholding of righteousness and drawing close to God.

That's how you build your faith, and it is a battle. Back to this, verse 6, where he's talking about being Babylon, being an instrument of his judgment. God was angry with the people, Judah, of course, and all the judgments were, you're going to go into captivity for this, the temple's going to be wiped out. And Assyria served the same purpose for the northern kingdom, which is already gone by this time. Isaiah chapter 10, woe to Assyria, the rod of my anger and the staff and whose hand is my indignation.

So God is saying, I'm using Assyria, I'm allowing Assyria to conquer the northern kingdoms. 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 editions 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 / 2024-11-01 08:33:08 / 2024-11-01 08:42:17 / 9

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