Notice that it is a year of acceptability of salvation, but only a day of judgment. Isn't that a little like code of God? Well, my servants have picked this up. They'll understand that I want mercy. This is what I want to, but they force my hand, they provoke me, and we've been talking about that, going through the Old Testament, how the apostates would provoke God.
Tell them right out, you're provoking me. And they kept doing it. This is what happened at the resurrection, and the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised and coming out of the graves. After his resurrection, they went into the city and appeared to many. Now, if you were a witness of this, how could you tell, how could you preserve it? I mean, you couldn't take out, you know, your pocket camera and say, well, look, here's one of my relatives that passed away.
I got it on film, or whatever it's on now, pixel, whatever. Anyway, this, we have no reason to doubt these things. Isaiah said he was going to set the captives free, so he showed off some of them.
He let them show up. And the opening of the prison to those who are bound, that's where we are. Well, I don't want to leave out these words from God because I love them. You know, we love the word of God because we see its perfection. In spite of our imperfection, we can be part of this, and that's one of the, beautiful things about the word, the precious blood of Christ as of a lamb without blemish, without spot.
Revelation 7 14, when speaking of the, the modern tribulation saints, these are the ones who come out of the great tribulation and wash their robes and made them white in the blood of the lamb. Your sin is worse than blood. Yeah, I went to the eye doctor for a checkup and found out I have x-ray vision, that it's just not working right. But anyway, you know, they got these eye charts of the eyeballs. This is gross. I don't know, maybe you all like that stuff. I don't want to see the ligaments in there.
I just want it to work. Well, anyway, the blood is, you know, it is not, you know, it's the cost of sin. Revelation 12 11, speaking of the saints again, they overcame him by the blood of the lamb because without that, there would be no overcoming. And the word of their testimony, which is the scripture, their commitment to Christ, and they did not love their lives to the death.
It's unlike a lot of people, is it not? Verse 2, now we're getting close to that good comma. To proclaim the acceptable year of Yahweh and the day of vengeance of our God to comfort all who mourn. Three ages, three dispensations, three periods of time are all baked into that one verse. In verses 1 and 2 up to 2a, the first comma, you have the first coming of Christ. After the first comma, you have another clause, which is the great tribulation period to the second coming of Christ.
And then, depending on how you grammatically want to, if you want to use a comma or a semicolon, it's up to you. But part c of verse 2 is the kingdom age, all in that one verse. Well, verse 1 is part of, part of it too, is part of the first coming. So to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. Now, this is not a specific date, it's a period of time, a dispensation. It's the age that we live in. It corresponds to the day of salvation.
Well, we get that from Isaiah 49, 8, where the same language is used, and so it gives us a heads up. When we come here, we look back at how he used it before, we know what he's talking about, it's the day of salvation. That is the acceptable year. What is the acceptable year? The day of salvation, when Christ came, died for sinners, but you and for me.
The acceptable year. In contrast, this is very important, in contrast to the day of revenge, vengeance. God getting them back, executing justice, is going to happen. That's separated by that comma. To proclaim the acceptable year to the Lord, comma, rightfully placed, and the day of vengeance of our God, comma, or semicolon, however you choose. His ministry is an ongoing perfected ministry. In this section, we have seven things that the Lord has done. Of course, he's done more, but of course the seven is the scriptural way of saying, this is complete, it's finished, it's done. Preach good news to the afflicted, bind up the brokenhearted, proclaim liberty to the captives, to free the prisoners, to proclaim the year of acceptance. That is this period of grace, of salvation, to announce the day of judgment, the comfort mourners. A lot of work in Christ. This is Christianity at work.
This is all a part of what we preach and what we are doing. If he had come to earth to execute the day of vengeance, we wouldn't be here. But he did not come the first time for that. He hasn't come for vengeance yet, but it's coming. It's on the calendar, his calendar, and the day of vengeance of our God. Now that's the second clause of verse two, not yet happened. You know, if someone were to say, well, you know, we're in the great tribulation period, where's Antichrist then? He's a personal guy.
You're not just a group. There are people who are Antichrist, but there is a specific human being that will be demonically energized, unlike ever before, Satan's rendering of the anointed demon. Well, so far there is a gap of about 2,000 years between these two comma, the comma and the two clauses. That's the good comma. The age of salvation, the acceptable year for the Lord. It is the good news time.
In the tribulation, it's going to be, there's still good news, but there's also very, very bad news. So he read from that synagogue in Nazareth to the middle of the sentence and stopped. When he goes to Nazareth, he doesn't read this part there in Luke chapter four in verse 18.
The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent me to heal the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery to the sight of the blind, to set liberty to those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of Yahweh. Where's the day of vengeance?
He leaves it out. He says today this scripture is fulfilled. If he read the vengeance part out and said today this thing is fulfilled, that would have been it for them.
But that's not what happened. He knew he was preaching from Isaiah and applying it to himself. He is the author of those words in Isaiah and he stopped at what we call, again, what we call a comma that separates the two thoughts that belong to the same sentence, placing his whole dispensation of the time we live upon a comma. Everything the church is doing is based on that comma.
That's so good that it turned out that way. The day of grace is the acceptable year of the Lord, the church age, where you don't have to be Jewish to preach the truth of God. You have to be born again. And we've not moved beyond this point, not yet. That's where we have stopped.
And so why did he close right there? Because the rest of the sentence would carry us into the great tribulation period. After the acceptable year of salvation comes the day of vengeance. And there's more to it than this, because once the church is removed comes this tribulation period, this day of vengeance. And that's when the Lord will fight and defeat the nations, how it ends after seven years at the Battle of Armageddon. And that Zechariah 14, 3 is a good place to go to look at that. Isaiah 63, verse 4, For the day of vengeance is in my heart, and the year of my redeemed has come. So God wants to do this, but he's got other things, he said priorities.
There are things he has to do first. That, evidently, is what are more important at the moment, and that is the salvation of souls through the church, through the preaching of the gospel. When the church is no longer effective, when she's no longer filled with the Holy Spirit, why bother with her anymore?
I think the remnant will be so small. Maybe when the rapture comes, it's not going to be as many Christians as we like to think, because there won't be that many left. Maybe because the apostate church would have gained so much momentum, so much momentum that you just have places calling themselves churches, but they really aren't interested, and they really aren't moved by what the scripture says in its entirety.
They have cherry-picked the things they like, and that's pretty dangerous stuff. The Jews did that, and they, the ones that crucified Christ, they just chose the things they liked from the scriptures, and they left the other stuff behind. The fear of the Lord is a very serious thing. Anyway, as surely as he came to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, he will come to proclaim the day of vengeance, and we need to be very clear about this, but notice the mercy in this.
Notice that it is a year of acceptability, of salvation, but only a day of judgment. Isn't that a little like code of God? Well, my servants have picked this up. They'll understand that I want mercy. This is what I want to, but they force my hand. They provoke me. We've been talking about that, going through the Old Testament, how the apostates would provoke God.
Tell them right out, you're provoking me, and they kept doing it. God in mercy will shorten the day of his wrath. When we see the Lord, his love and his grace, it will be greater than what we imagined. I believe when we get to heaven, and God imparts to us more of who he is, it's going to be like the Queen of Sheba. The half of it has not been told. I came to see myself, and the half of it has not been told.
It was an expression. Solomon, what you have is far greater than what anybody could verbalize. Well, Jesus said straight out, greater than Solomon is here.
Consider the lilies of the field and how they grow. They neither toil nor they spin, and I say to you are greater than Solomon. Solomon, in all of his glory, was not arrayed as such as one of them, and I say to you, greater than Solomon is here. Well, even the prophet John could not understand the ministry of sacrifice before the ministry of sovereignty. Now, of course, God is sovereign, never gives that up. Even Christ, when he was divine, he withheld his sovereignty. It was there, but when he came the first time, if he came as a sovereign, he would have come as a king and executed judgment on his enemies, but he did not. He withheld it, restrained himself, and he came as a savior through sacrifice, and John, again, we talked about that, so the answer to John's question, are you the one or are we looking for another?
The answer really is both. I am the one that's coming as a sacrifice, my first coming. I'm coming another time, my second coming, that happens after that 70th week of Daniel.
Then I will come as a king, and so he destroyed the works of the devil by the cross, and he will destroy the people of the devil at his return. Not gleeful information. This isn't like, yeah, Lord, I can't wait till you finally shut them up. It's not how we do it. We accept that this is going to happen. We do what we can to save those who are lined up for this to happen to them, to comfort all who mourn. So, resolving the violent earth problem that we're faced with, he heals the brokenhearted. He binds up their wounds, verse three, and in time, it is all the wounds are gone. The righteous go to heaven. Verse three, to console those who mourn in Zion, to give them beauty for ashes, oil for joy, and oil, let me reread that, to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, that they may be called trees of righteousness, the planting of Yahweh, that he may be glorified. Well, verse 10, we'll get back to this. The beauty here, spoken in the Hebrew, is a garland, a headdress, to adorn the head, a sign of victory and joy and delight. And the ashes tell us that fire has done its work.
It's reduced it down to nothing, whatever it may be. It speaks of complete loss. And so, he's saying, I'm going to give you a garland, a delight, a joy for the ruin, for the ashes.
I'm going to fix this. I'm going to make good on it. And what he doesn't say, what he could have said, and you're going to be impressed. He could have said that, because that's what's going to happen. When we get to heaven, it won't matter what we've been through here. What will matter is we're there. What if God told us how beautiful heaven was? We'd all be trying to get out of here.
That wouldn't interfere with a lot of things. Anyway, he has water to wine. He's going to change his sorrows into joy. His all things new are all things better. One of the great things about the letter to the Hebrews, how many times Paul says he's better. He's better. He's better than Aaron. He's better, he's better.
So I'll take one of them. Hebrews 7, 22. By so much more, Jesus has become a surety of a better covenant. Everything he brings, when he says, you know, there'll be no more sorrow in heaven. What he's leaving out is how much better it's going to be without the sorrow.
How do you even communicate that? The oil of joyful mourning. These are blessed exchanges. This verse removes sorrow. Matching Revelation 21, 4, there shall be no more death, no sorrow, no crying, and of course he goes on and itemizes a few more things.
The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. When the prodigal came home, he was heavy and he had messed up his life. And he did not know he had taken, when he took that first step towards his father's house, his life was going to get better. Barefoot with the stench of the pig pen on him.
That's how he came home. Sort of like Gomer, the wife of Hosea. Go and buy her.
She's useless now. But he went and bought her. Nonetheless, Hosea is a quite powerful story. And not only do men go through what Gomer went through, women do too. People go through these sinful things.
It's not a gender competition. Anyway, what did the father say when the son came home? Bring out the best robe. Put a ring on his hand and sandals. Barefoot. I probably would have said take off those ugly ones, but I think it's safe to assume that he was barefooted.
But even if he wasn't, he was going to get an upgrade. Things were going to get better for that son because of the father. And so our father in heaven commands that our garments be changed when we come to him. This is pictured for us in Zechariah chapter three, the first five verses, where there the high priest named Joshua is refitted in front of Satan. This beautiful section of the Old Testament. That they may be called trees of righteousness. Well, that alludes to planting, to a forest. It reverses the imagery back in chapter one where the trees that they were interested in were connected with idolatry and sin.
The word tree here in the Hebrew could be translated oaks or post or pillars, matching Revelation chapter three. And again, this is just how the language, the language is not so important as the meanings. You know, the words, words don't create the ideas. The ideas create the words. And when you get someone who tries to use the word to create the, reverse that, right, use the idea to create whatever it is I was saying, when you get someone who's not listening to the idea of what the words are communicating, you're going to have heresy.
They're twisting the words. But when you just read them for what they say, Revelation chapter three, verse 12, he who overcomes, I will make him a pillar. There's that word that the meaning doesn't, it says in Greek, but the meaning is the same in the temple of my God. Now, he's not going to turn us into a column, a pillar structure, like, oh, I'm stuck.
But the language is beautiful right there on the surface, and he shall go out no more. I will write on him the name of my God and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem, which comes down from heaven from my God, and I will write on him my new name. So he makes that distinction between the new Jerusalem on earth versus the new Jerusalem that comes down from heaven, because the new Jerusalem on earth is run by people who are outside of a glorified body. They can still die, but the ones that come down, the saints, the church, the saints of the Old Testament, we come down in the new Jerusalem, we're not glorified bodies, which we're never going to die again and be susceptible to elements. So coming back to Isaiah chapter 61, verse 3, that they will be called trees or pillars of righteousness, strong, impressive, useful, fruitful, because we have work to do when we come back.
That idea about we're up on a cloud playing a harp is, it's just, I don't want to harp on it, but it's dumb. Anyway, in Jeremiah 23, the Messiah directly says Yahweh to Sid Canoe, Yahweh to Sid Canoe, the Lord our righteousness. And then later in Jeremiah, in chapter 23, he says Jerusalem is the Lord's righteousness. And here we are, the Lord's righteousness. Just like he said, I am the light of the world. And then he says to the church, you're the light of the world.
So he said on the hill, can't be hidden. Let your light shine before men that your father in heaven might be glorified. Basic Christianity is beautiful Christianity. It doesn't need to be embellished. It doesn't need to be modified.
And if it's boring to you, that's your problem. You should take it to God to get it fixed. But anyway, the planting of the Lord that they may be glorified. Well, when we plant something, we envision its contribution to the landscape. When you plant a tree or something, you say, well, it's going to look nice over here. You know, God has done that.
He's thought it through. It's a personal labor. When you plant something, your hands are on it. You have contact with it.
You're touching it. And God's hands will handle us in a very personal and precious way. Verse four, and they shall rebuild the old ruins. They shall rise up from the former desolations. They shall repair the ruined cities, the desolations of many generations. Well, now that I've spent time on the good comma, we're going to kind of move faster.
That's the plan. So all this here in verse four about the rebuilding the cities, this is in the kingdom age. This is by people who were born in iniquity, but changed, made righteous. Now the Spirit of the Lord is upon them. Ezekiel says this, thus says Yahweh, the Lord, on the day that I cleansed you from all your iniquities, I will also enable you to dwell in the cities and the ruins shall be rebuilt.
What ruins? Well, Armageddon, the great tribulation period, Gaza, Hebron, Nazareth, no longer unsafe, unpleasant cities that they are now. These are the Arab strongholds in the Promised Land and those are not places that are just very nice to be in. I enjoy in Jerusalem the Jerusalem quarter most. There's the Muslim quarter, the Christian, just the Jewish quarter is just the nicest place.
There's some good pizza shops there also. But anyway, God's going to take back the land. Jerusalem will be rebuilt and what Antichrist and Islam have ruined in God's land with God's people, God's people will restore it. All of Satan's tunnels destroyed, never a threat again. And those giant hideous windmills, I don't know if Israel has any of them, but I hope they're removed from the earth. They just, they look like a Picasso on the landscape. I don't know, I just, what I think of when I see those.
You know what, on those windmills out there, the new energy, like, 300 feet tall, killing birds and stuff. Anyway, back to this. Today, we are living now in a parenthesis between Daniel's 69th week where Messiah is cut off and his 70th week, which starts the tribulation period, that last seven years, and between the beginning of the acceptable year of the Lord and the day of vengeance. That's where we are, right there, kind of like just hovering between the first and second coming of Christ. 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.
