Hey, podcast listeners. Thanks for streaming today's podcast, From Pathway to Victory. Pathway to Victory is a nonprofit ministry featuring the Bible teaching of Dr. Robert Jeffress. Our mission is to pierce the darkness with the light of God's word through the most effective media available, like this podcast. To support Pathway to Victory, go to ptv.org slash podcast and click the donate button or follow the link in our show notes. Now here's today's podcast, From Pathway to Victory. Thanks to the horrific attack on Israel, I've written a brand new book called, Are We Living in the End Times?
Go to ptv.org to order your copy. The fact is, the end times are about God completely fulfilling that unconditional covenant that he made with Israel. And you will never understand the end times until you understand God's plan for Israel. When it comes to the end times, it truly begins and ends with Israel.
And that's what we're talking about today. Welcome to Pathway to Victory with author and pastor, Dr. Robert Jeffress. You know, back in October, the nation of Israel was egregiously attacked.
Since then, tensions and violence have only increased, and Christians around the world are anxiously pondering the implications of this volatile situation. Today on Pathway to Victory, Dr. Robert Jeffress considers the connection between what's happening in Israel and the end times. Now here's our Bible teacher to introduce today's message.
Dr. Jeffress. Thanks, David, and welcome again to Pathway to Victory. For the last 10 years or so, marketing experts have sounded the death knell on printed magazines. But we felt God calling us to provide devotional material to our Pathway to Victory friends in a magazine format. And the response to Pathway magazine has been nothing short of astounding. Pathway magazine is one of our most highly requested resources. And today I'm prepared to send you a complimentary copy. It features daily inspirational insights from me. Plus, Pathway magazine includes helpful articles on Christian living as well. Be my guest today and request your very first edition as a gift from me and Pathway to Victory.
Just follow the simple instructions at ptv.org. Well, the news broke on October 7th that Hamas had brutally attacked innocent families in Israel. These horrific acts of violence accelerated the number of people asking me the natural question, are we living in the end times? In response, I jettisoned my pre-planned preaching calendar so that I could present to you a time-sensitive teaching series.
It's the one we're sharing on our broadcast right now. Plus, I wrote a companion book for you and I'd like to send you a copy when you give a generous gift to support the ministry of Pathway to Victory. My book and my teaching series are titled with the question, are we living in the end times?
More about my book and other resources will come after today's message. But right now, I want you to hear this urgent presentation that I titled with the question, what role will Israel play in the end times? Now look at Genesis 12 one, now the Lord said to Abram, go forth from your country and from your relatives and from your father's house to the land that I will show you, underline that word land. Look at verse two, and I will make you a great nation and I will bless you and I will make your name great and so you shall be a blessing.
And I will bless those who bless you and the one who curses you I will curse and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed. Well, you notice the three components of this promise, this covenant God made with Abraham. First of all, it began with a land. The promise was a land. It also, secondly, God promised a nation. He said, I will make you a great nation.
Now, I need to stop here and answer a very important question. God made this promise to Abraham and his descendants. Who are the rightful descendants of Abraham to whom this land belongs? Look at Genesis 17 verses 20 and 21.
Here's the basis for the conflict in the Middle East. As for Ishmael, behold, I will bless him and will multiply him exceedingly. He shall become the father of 12 princes and I will make him a great nation. God said, I am going to bless your son Ishmael and all of his descendants. The Arab people today have been blessed by God.
Look at that mound of oil they're sitting on over there. God has definitely blessed Ishmael and Ishmael's descendants. But, verse 21, my covenant I will establish with Isaac whom Sarah will bear to you at the season next year. The Bible says, yes, I'm blessing Ishmael, but this promise Abraham, I've made to you of a land to seed and a blessing, it's not going through Ishmael. It's coming to you through the son, Isaac, who is going to be the inheritor of this promise. The promise that God made to Abraham belongs to Isaac and his descendants, the Jewish people. The Muslims say it's Ishmael. They say God made the covenant between Abraham and Ishmael.
No, the scripture says it is Isaac who will be born next year. He promised a land, a nation. Thirdly, God promised a blessing.
Look at this in verse 3. In you all the families of the earth will be blessed. Now, people have wondered, what is that worldwide blessing that would come through Israel? We don't have to wonder about it or speculate about it. God is very clear that worldwide blessing was a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who offers salvation to anyone of any nation who believes.
How do I know that? Look at what the word of God says in Galatians 3, verses 6 to 8. Even so, Paul writes, Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. Therefore, be sure that it is those who are of faith who are the sons of Abraham. The scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to whom? To Abraham, saying all the nations will be blessed in you. Paul said that promise of a worldwide blessing. God was preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ to Abraham.
That is the worldwide blessing. Now, I want you to notice something in verse 7 that's very important to understand. Paul says, be sure that it is those who are of faith who are sons of Abraham. The people to whom this Abrahamic covenant applies are Jews, yes, but it is believing Jews. You don't get to be an inheritor of the Abrahamic covenant by just being a physical descendant of Abraham.
You know who said that? Jesus. Jesus in John 8 was talking to the Pharisees and they prided themselves on being Abraham's physical descendants. He said, no, no, you have to be a spiritual descendant of Abraham.
That's what Paul is saying here. It is those who are of faith who are sons of Abraham. When Paul says all Israel will be saved, he's talking about all believing Israel. God has a special promise for Israel. It's not the same promise as the church. It's a unique promise, but it's for believing Israel that these promises apply. We've talked about the components of the Abrahamic covenant. God said, I'm going to give you a land, I'm going to give you a nation, I'm going to give you a blessing. Now, I want you to notice the characteristics of this covenant.
First of all, the promise is a literal promise. God actually said, I'm going to give you a literal land to go to. You know, a lot of people want to try to spiritualize the land. They'll say, well, it's not a real piece of real estate over in the Middle East.
Nobody cares about that. The land is heaven. Canaan is referring to heaven. Abraham was looking for a heavenly fulfillment.
Ultimately, he was. Hebrews 11, 10 said he was looking for a city whose architect and founder is God. But that didn't negate the fact that he was looking for an earthly land as well to go to.
How do I know that? Look at what Abraham did after receiving this promise. Verses 4 and 5 of Genesis 12. So Abram went forth as the Lord has spoken to him, and a lot went with him.
Now, Abram was 75 years old when he departed from Haran. And Abram took Sarai, his wife, and Lot, his nephew, and all their possessions which they had accumulated, and the persons which they had acquired, and they set out for the land of Canaan. Thus they came to the land of Canaan. Abraham believed he was going to a real place. He loaded up his family, loaded up his possessions, and headed toward the promised land. When they got there, somebody said the crowd looked like the Beverly Hillbillies coming into town with all their stuff piled high.
They had accumulated for 75 years. Why go to that trouble if you weren't going to a literal land? It was literal. Secondly, God's promise was eternal. Look in Genesis 13, 14 to 15. The Lord said to Abram, after Lot had separated from him, Now lift up your eyes and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward.
For all the land which you see, I will give it to you and your descendants. For how long? Forever. You know forever is a long time. Have you stopped to think of how long forever is?
Somebody said it this way. Just imagine Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world, Mount Everest. Just imagine once every thousand years a little bird comes and lands on the top of Mount Everest to sharpen its beak, rubs it on the mountaintop a couple of times, and flies away for another thousand years. Every thousand years it comes to sharpen its beak on the summit of Mount Everest. By the time that bird has worn down that mountain completely, eternity will not have even begun. That's how long forever is.
And that's how long this land belongs to Israel. I will give it to your descendants forever. This promise is literal, it's eternal, but here's the most important part. It is unconditional.
It is unconditional. You know there's some Christians who will say, okay, I concede, you're right, God gave a promise to the Israelites. And it would have been theirs if they had obeyed God. But when they rejected Jesus as Messiah, God canceled the promise.
And he transferred it to the church. And so the church of Jesus Christ is the new Israel. All of the blessings that belong to Israel now belong to the church. That land, it's now a heavenly land, heaven. That organism is no longer Israel, it is the church. We are the new Israel.
Now what are we to say to that? What are we to say about Israel's rejection of Christ? Did it have any consequences? Of course it did.
Of course it did. But that doesn't negate the fact that God made an unconditional covenant with Abraham and his descendants. You see, there are some promises in the Bible that are conditional. They are conditioned upon our obedience to God. But there are some promises that are unconditional.
They are separate from anything we do or don't do. There is no doubt that God made some conditional promises to Israel. We see one of those in Deuteronomy 11, verses 26 to 28. Before the people finally entered into the promised land, Moses said to them, See, I'm setting before you today a blessing and a curse. The blessing before you today and a curse.
The blessing if you listen to the commandments of the Lord your God, which I am commanding you today. And the curse if you do not listen to the commandments of the Lord your God, but you turn aside from the way which I am commanding you today by following other gods which you have not known. In other words, Israel, if you obey the commands of God when you enter this land, you're going to be blessed beyond imagination. But if you disobey God, you're going to suffer. And you look at Israel, her whole history has been a blessing and curses. When she followed God, God blessed her. When she disobeyed God and worshiped other gods, God punished Israel.
He sent Israel into captivity. Blessings and curses, conditional promises. But those conditional promises that Moses spoke of, they in no way invalidate the unconditional promise of God that came 430 years before Moses to Abraham. You can have both conditional and unconditional promises at the same time.
Let me illustrate that for you. When our second daughter Dorothy was born, our girls were very little, we decided to visit our attorney and to change our will. And we decided we wanted to leave whatever estate we had left, a large portion of it, to our two daughters. Now, we didn't really know our daughters that well at that time. They were itty bitty kids.
We didn't know how they were going to turn out. So we made this decision not based on what they would do or not do, we based it on our love, our care for them. As our girls grew up and matured, they started to live under their own system of blessings and curses under the Jeffers Covenant.
And it worked this way. If you obeyed your parents, there were blessings. You got an allowance. You might get a car.
You might get extra privileges of staying out late. But if you disobeyed, there would be a curse, the forfeiture of the car or the allowance or special privileges. They lived under blessings and curses the whole time they were in our household. But never once, well, maybe once, no, never once, when they disobeyed, that Amy and I say, we're going to go to the lawyer and change our will and ex them out of the will.
That would never have crossed our minds. It was an unconditional promise. It's the same with God. God has made some conditional promises to Israel and to us as well. But that doesn't invalidate the unconditional promise that God made.
How do I know that? Listen to Galatians 3, 17 to 18. The law, which came 430 years later through Moses, does not invalidate a covenant previously ratified by God so as to nullify the promise. For if the inheritance is based on the law, it is no longer based on a promise. But God has granted it to Abraham by means of a promise. The Abrahamic covenant was unconditional. The psalmist said that in Psalm 89. The psalmist said, if David's sons forsake my law and do not walk in my judgments, if they violate my statutes and do not keep my commandments, then I will punish their transgressions with the rod and their iniquity with the stripes.
If Israel disobeys me, they're going to suffer the consequences, severe consequences for doing so. But, look at verse 33. But I will not break off my loving kindness from him, nor deal falsely in my faithfulness. My covenant I will not violate, nor will I alter the utterance of my lips. Once I have sworn by holiness, I will not lie to David, his descendant shall endure forever, and his throne is the sun before me. It shall be established forever, like the moon and the witness in the sky is faithful. God said this is an unconditional covenant.
Regardless of what Israel does or doesn't do, I'm going to keep my promise because I have sworn by my own faithfulness to do so. Perhaps the greatest evidence that this covenant was an unconditional covenant is the way that covenant was ratified. In the Old Testament times, people had a way of signifying, of ratifying a contract between two kings.
They had a way to seal the deal, if you would. Once they had agreed on the terms of the contract, if it was a bilateral contract, each responsibility was enumerated that each king had to follow. Once they had finished to ratify the covenant, they would take a group of animals, different animals, and they would slice those animals in two. And they would place one half of the animal on one side, the other half on the other, and leave a pathway in between. And then the two kings would each take a flaming torch, and they would walk side by side between the animal pieces to ratify the contract.
They were signifying that this contract depended upon the faithfulness of each party to the contract. So in Genesis 15, when it came time to ratify the Abrahamic covenant, God told Abraham to do something he already knew, to take the animal pieces and slice them in two to create the path between the animal pieces. But then something happened.
Look at Genesis 15, 12. Now when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and behold, terror and great darkness fell upon him. Abraham fell asleep. Now look what happened next, verse 17. And it came about when the sun had set that it was very dark, and behold, there appeared a smoking oven and a flaming torch which passed between these pieces. In other words, when Abraham was sound asleep, God alone walked between those animal pieces, signifying that the ratification of this covenant didn't depend on anything Abraham would do or not do.
He was asleep. This covenant depended on the faithfulness of God himself. How do I know that?
Am I reading too much into it? Listen to what Hebrews 6, verses 13 to 14 says. For when God made the promise to Abraham, since he could swear by no one greater, he swore by himself, saying, I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply you.
God said, there's no other name I can swear by, so I'm swearing by my own faithfulness that I'm going to do what I've promised to do for Abraham and his descendants. Now you're probably thinking, what in the world has this to do with the end times? I thought we were studying the end times. What does this have to do with the end times? Everything.
Everything. Because the end times are about God fully fulfilling his promise, his unconditional promise, to Israel. Now, this covenant has been partially fulfilled, but not completely fulfilled. For example, Israel is in the land right now, but not all of the land.
They're not in all the land right now, but one day she will be. Israel is a great nation, no doubt about it, but Israel is not living in the peace that God promised, but one day she will be. Jesus Christ, the savior of the world, the worldwide blessing did come through Abraham's descendant. He came, he died on the cross for our sins. He rose again for our justification.
He came, but he's not sitting on the throne in Jerusalem yet like God promised, but one day he will be. The fact is, end times, the end times are about God completely fulfilling that unconditional covenant that he made with Israel. Now perhaps you're thinking today, well, that's great if you're a Jew, but I'm not a Jew. Why should I care about this covenant? Well, the fact is, if you're a Gentile believer like I am, we get grafted in to the tree of blessing, Abraham's blessing. We don't replace the Jewish people, but we get some residual benefits of a savior who has saved us forever.
But here's the more important way even that this applies to us. Just as God has made an unconditional promise to Israel, he has made some unconditional promises to you and me that depend completely on his own faithfulness. In John 10, 28, Jesus said, I give eternal life to them and they shall never perish. No man shall snatch out of my hands those whom the Father has given me. In Hebrews 7, 25, it says he shall save to the uttermost those who come to God through Christ. Hebrews 13 says, I will never leave you, nor will I ever forsake you. Now how do we know God's going to keep his promise? What if we die, we stand before God in judgment, and he said, now I know, I told you earlier, you're gonna be saved by grace and not by works, but I've changed my mind. I've decided that's letting you off too easy. I'm gonna judge you by your works, regardless of what I said. I get to make covenants and change covenants if I want to, and so I'm gonna change the deal. I'm gonna judge you today by your works. And he opens the books and says, hmm, not good enough.
Depart from me, I never knew you. What is it that keeps God from changing his mind and changing the covenant? It is his faithfulness.
Romans 11, 29 says, for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. And because we can trust in God's faithfulness and the promises he has made to us, so it is also because of God's faithfulness that God will fulfill his promises to Israel in the end times. Friends, this is one of the seven questions that I address in my brand new book, What Role Will Israel Play in the End Times?
Given the chaos that pervades the Middle East right now, many people are asking this natural question. For a short period of time, Pathway to Victory is making my book available to you. A copy is yours when you give a generous gift to support the growing ministry of Pathway to Victory. Again, my book is titled, Are We Living in the End Times? In recent days, we worked tirelessly behind the scenes to get this book written, edited, printed, and ready to send to your home. All you need to do is reach out and let us know that you'd like to receive a copy of Are We Living in the End Times? My book addresses seven questions like the one I talked about today. Other chapters include, Why Has God Delayed the End Times?
and How Do I Prepare for the End Times? With your gift to Pathway to Victory, perhaps you'll decide to become one of our valued Pathway partners. A Pathway partner is someone who agrees to automate their giving so that Pathway to Victory receives your gift every month. As a Pathway partner, you clearly demonstrate that you are dedicated to piercing the darkness and you are committed to spreading the truth of God's word. For those commitments, I'm personally grateful for you.
You see, I'm devoted to teaching the Bible with boldness and clarity, but I can't do this alone. We need Pathway partners to give flight to the daily radio programs, our television programs, and the resources we provide online. It's a privilege to link arms with our Pathway partners and all those of you who support Pathway to Victory as together we pierce the darkness with the light of God's word.
David? Thanks, Dr. Jeffress. You can become a Pathway partner by following the easy steps online at ptv.org. Now this month, we're aiming to sign up 1,200 Pathway partners, and we need your help to reach that goal. And when you do give your first monthly gift or when you give a generous one-time gift in support of Pathway to Victory, you're invited to request the brand new book, Are We Living in the End Times?
It's written by Dr. Robert Jeffress. And when you give $75 or more, you'll also receive the complete collection of audio and video discs for the brand new teaching series, Are We Living in the End Times? Plus, we'll also send you The End Times Illustrated. Call 866-999-2965. Again, that's 866-999-2965.
Or go to ptv.org. You could also write to us, P.O. Box 223609, Dallas, Texas, 75222.
Again, that's P.O. Box 223609, Dallas, Texas, 75222. I'm David J. Mullins, inviting you back next time when we answer the question, What events will signal the end times? That's coming up Wednesday on Pathway to Victory. Pathway to Victory with Dr. Robert Jeffress comes from the pulpit of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas. You made it to the end of today's podcast from Pathway to Victory.
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