Understanding the Times, Part 2

Greetings, friends and new listeners. Welcome to The Sound of Faith. I'm Sharon Knotts thanking you for joining us today because we know faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. I'm very zealous to bring you today's message, Understanding the Times.

On the surface, there are many things transpiring in our world today that seem to defy human decency, logic, and even sensibility. And at the same time, many Christians are witnessing the rapid fulfillment of Bible prophecy, while others appear to be uninformed or apathetic. In this detailed teaching, we will travel from the time of Noah to Daniel and the first coming of Jesus the Messiah, 4,000 years of human history, to this season of the rapidly approaching second coming of our Lord and the signs we are to look for in Understanding the Times. How much more today that we can tell the weather and what's going to happen. He said, you can discern the face of the sky and the signs of what weather's coming, but you cannot discern the signs of the time.

Why did he say that? Because these were people that had the Old Testament prophets and all the many prophecies that proclaimed the coming, the first coming of Jesus the Messiah. Over 300 prophecies Jesus fulfilled. And someone once did a mathematical equation to say what would be the odds of one man fulfilling all those prophecies. I don't remember what the outcome was, but the answer was beyond your comprehension. It was so many zeros after it, you wouldn't even know how to relate to it. And so he fulfilled all these prophecies and these were men that knew the prophecies.

They knew the word of God inside out. And he says, you missed it. You missed all those signs.

Here I am. You missed all those signs. And you're going to ask me to give you another sign? You want me to give you a sign? When here I am, Messiah, the Son of God.

And you missed it. Amen. And saints of God, that's exactly how it's going to be in this day that we're in. And sometimes you shake your head and say, I don't know what these people, can't they see what's going on? Don't they know that the Bible says, and you look in Daniel and you look in Revelation and you look in Matthew 24 and you look in Mark 13 and you look in Luke 21 and all the signs are just shouting at you. But they have no idea.

It's like a sealed book to them. Amen. They cannot see it, but we are not like unto them. We are like unto the sons of Issachar that had an understanding of the times.

Amen. And Paul said in First Thessalonians, the fifth chapter, the first two verses, Paul said, from the times and the seasons, my brethren, you have no need that I should write unto you. He says, you do not need me to spend time writing you a letter about the signs of the seasons and the times for yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night.

But when they shall say peace and safety, then sudden destruction comes upon them as travail upon a woman with child and they shall not escape. But ye brethren are not in darkness that that they should overtake you as a thief because you are the children of light. And so we can't tell when Jesus is coming. We don't know the day, we don't know the hour, but we're not to be ignorant of the seasons and of the times.

Amen. And we are able to understand God's ways. We are able to understand what God is doing. And some people say, well, I just don't understand it because it seems like to me that all these things that you've been talking about, it's been dragging on and on and on.

And I've been hearing about it, you know, ever since I was a kid and my grandmother and her grandmother and I'd all I hear is about it, but I don't see it. But there's a very key verse. Second Peter three eight says, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing. Somebody say one thing that one day, somebody say one day is with the Lord as a thousand years. We live in a world of time dimensions. We know that there are 24 hours in a day. There are seven days in a week and there's many other dimensions, but God does not live in our time dimensions. God does not live in time constraints. Amen. So one day to him is like a thousand years. How many people here are around age 42? All right.

I see a lot of hands. So if you're around age 42, okay, I want you to know that God, that was just one hour. I took the time to calculate a thousand years and not got it down to the hours. And so I figured out if I did it correctly, which I think I did so that a thousand days is about 42 years. So if you're about 42 years old, that's just been one hour for God.

And if you're less than 42, well, I don't even, I'm going to try to do the minutes in a second. Amen. God does not dwell in our times. In fact that Paul said to Timothy, he said, God dwells in a light that no man can approach unto. And how, how many know that a light year, if you were to go in miles, how many miles is it?

Who knows? Reach back and you know, get back there in that file cabinet up here. 186,000 miles per second is how fast light travels and God dwells in a light that no one can approach unto. Amen. So God is saying, don't you look at everything in your time constraints. And this is what we're going to do here with these glasses and these cups. This is going to represent time. And one of these is going to represent the first coming of Jesus Christ and the other is going to represent the second coming of Jesus Christ. Amen. And so our timeline is going to begin. And first of all, I'm going to quote a scripture to you from Galatians 4, 4 that says, but when the fullness of time was come, God sent forth his son made of a woman and made under the law. So we've got to get to the fullness of time in order to get to the time that God sent Jesus to be our savior and our Redeemer.

Amen. The fullness of time in this first glass, this first glass going to represent 4,000 years, 4,000 human years. And our timeline is going to begin in the Garden of Eden. And there in the Garden of Eden, and I'm not going to really go through it all because I preached it very recently, all of this, but we know that Adam sinned and he and Eve disobeyed God and ate off the tree that they were not supposed to eat off. And when they did, God banished them from the garden. But before he did, God addressed them and he said, what have you done? Curse fell upon Eve that she would have pain in her childbearing. The curse fell upon Adam and the ground that it would be hard for him now to, to till for food.

He would have to work by the sweat of his brow. Amen. And then he turned to the serpent. He didn't curse the serpent because the serpent did exactly what he planned on doing, but he did make this pronouncement.

And this is very important. Our timeline begins with Genesis 3, 15. And he said to the serpent, I will put enmity between your seed and the seed of the woman.

And he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. So the clock began and Genesis 3, 15, and then we speed ahead 1500 years. And God said that man had become so wicked that is every imagination was wicked continually. That means he didn't have any good thoughts.

Some people have a mixture. The people then were so wicked they didn't have any good thoughts. They'd become completely possessed in their minds by the evil one. And so God said, I regret, I regret that I made man, but nevertheless, Noah found grace in his sight. And so God gave him instructions to build the ark, to protect his family so that they could repopulate the earth when they came out of the ark. Amen. And then we speed ahead to the time of Abraham because God chose out of all the people on earth, he chose one man and his family, and that was Abraham. Amen. And if we go to Genesis, the 15th chapter, we read what God said to Abraham in verses 13 through 16. And he said unto Abraham, know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs and shall serve them and they shall afflict them 400 years.

Amen. And also that nation whom they shall serve will I judge and afterward they shall come out with great substance and thou shall go to thy fathers in peace. Thou shall be buried in a good old age. And verse 16 is very important, but in the fourth generation, 400 years later, they shall come hither again.

Why? For the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full. So there is a cycle.

There is a cycle. And God told Abraham, there's going to come a time when your seed are going to be in captivity. We all know what that was. We all know that when Joseph went down there to Egypt, we know that 70 people went down, Jacob and his sons and their families. But we know that it was 400 years later before God released them.

And I posed this question Wednesday night. I said, why did God allow the Israelites to suffer for 400 years as brick makers? Remember me saying that and slaves? Why didn't God free them sooner? Why did he allow them to suffer 400 years?

Here's the answer. The iniquity of the Amorites is not full. And the Amorites is one of the peoples that populated Canaan. These people were wicked. These people were ungodly. These people did all kinds of evil things. And God says, when I've had enough of their wickedness, then I will free your people and bring them back into the land.

Amen. There is a cycle in God's timetable the way that he does. So if a person, if a nation, a generation, if they will not repent when God deals with them, then they will have judgment.

And we saw that. We saw that even so God will spare the righteous. He spared Noah. Later on, he spared Lot and his two daughters out of Sodom and Gomorrah. He spared the Israelites when they were in Egypt. All those plagues, 10 plagues that came on the Egyptians, but not one of them came to the Israelites where they all had their little encampment in the land of Goshen.

Now God commanded, we're speeding ahead now. God commanded Joshua to take the children of Israel into Canaan to destroy all the heathen because now the iniquity of the Amorites was full. Some people have questioned and say, well, how could God tell the Israelites to go in there and destroy and kill all those nations?

I don't think that's right. Well, first of all, you're not God. And second of all, you don't understand because we can understand why God said to kill them.

Amen. Because of all their idolatry, they worshiped so many other gods. They offered their children child sacrifice to their gods, Moloch and Chemosh, who were made out of brass and they had extended arms and they were open here and it was a furnace in the belly and they put fire in the belly and took those babies and put them on those blistering hot arms.

And someone was beating away at the drums to drown out the screams of the babies. God said, it's wicked. And they were full of sexual perversion. And I'm talking about including that there was that God wanted to get rid of the giants.

I didn't tell you about that because it'd be way too much information. But one of the reasons for the flood was because the angels of heaven had come down and had been with the daughters of Adam and they created giants in the land and the flood wiped them out. But it happened another time.

Amen. Because that's why when David and Saul and all them came on the scene that they had to kill giants again. And so they had sexual perversion amongst them. And by now they were persecuting the seed of Abraham. And God had told Abraham in Genesis 12 three, I will bless them that bless you and I will curse them that curse you.

Amen. So the iniquity of the Amorites had come to a full and God said he was going to use Israel to judge the nations and to wipe them out of that area. Now we skip ahead hundreds of years ahead. By this time, Israel's backslidden.

They are backslidden. They have now begin to assimilate with the people and start doing serving their idols and their gods. I mean they had that wicked King Ahab and that wicked his wife Jezebel and they were actually putting up the false prophets paying for their room and board and their food 850 false prophets and they were worshiping idols.

There was so much perversion in the land. King Ahab wanted, he saw a vineyard of one of the ordinary, you know, Israelites. He already was the king and had many vineyards and much, but he wanted that vineyard.

And he says, I want to buy it off of you. And the man following the law of Moses said, I can't sell it to you. Land had to stay within the tribe. You weren't allowed to sell your land to somebody outside of your tribe.

God wanted the 12 tribes to have their places. He said, I can't sell it to you. So Ahab went home and he's, he's moping around the house and Jezebel said, what's wrong with you? Well, I wanted to buy that, that vineyard off of neighbors, but he wouldn't sell it to me.

She said, aren't you the king? You just go and take it. Don't kill him and take it. And he had him killed so he could steal his vineyard.

This is what we're talking about. These are the things that allowed Israel to go into captivity. So now they're in captivity in the land of Babylon. We just read from Daniel, but Daniel had a contemporary prophesying at the same time of Daniel at the same place of Babylon was Ezekiel. So you will see if you read Ezekiel and Daniel that they will be both dealing with the same things going on. And Ezekiel was one of the prophets that not only prophesied that they would go into captivity, but he was taken into captivity with them.

Amen. And in his prophecies, he spoke of the exceeding. These are Ezekiel words, not mine. The exceeding greatness of the wickedness of the people. And he said, the land is full of bloody crimes. Well, that would be murder. The land is full of violence. Well, that would be all kinds of assaults and murder. The land is full of blood. Well, more blood, violence and murder.

The city is full of perverseness, all kinds of sexual perversion. And here's the clincher and they boast and they say, the Lord has forsaken the earth and he sees us not. There is a powerful principle here.

Don't be mistaken. God sees. Oh yes, God sees it all. He sees everything that's going down, but when he doesn't judge immediately and people get away with their bloody crimes, they get this false conception that it's all right, that God doesn't see it or God's overlooking it or God doesn't think it's a big deal and they only go further in their sin and their wickedness. What they don't understand is the mercy of God and that God is giving this generation, whatever generation we speak of, he's given them opportunity. He says, I send you my prophets rising up early and tarring late.

I send my word of warning. Amen. But they would not heed and they would not listen. They would not hear Jeremiah.

They threw him in jail. They would not hear Ezekiel. And so God says, I see, don't think that because it's dragging out that God is letting it go.

He said, no. He said, I am looking at when the wickedness comes to a full. That's when I'm going to judge and that's when I'm going to do something.

Amen. So saints, we can never ever think that the wicked and the ungodly are getting by. Peter said that God knows how to judge the wicked and reserve them to the day of judgment and preserve the righteous in the day of judgment.

He reserves the wicked. If they didn't get it yet, it's going to catch up to them. And then when God does judge, he's going to preserve the righteous in the middle of it all. If you're still here and you're a part of it.

And so here we have the first coming of Jesus Christ. It came to a full. And what happened? Israel went into bondage. First Israel, the 10 tribes went into bondage and 150 years later the two tribes of Judah went into bondage. Why did 10 tribes go and then 150 years later the other two? Well, because the 10 tribes were more wicked and judgment caught up with them quicker.

They were more wicked. You see, when the kingdom of Israel was split in two in the days of Rehoboam, which was Solomon's son, because God did that because of the wickedness at that time, 10 kingdoms were ruled by one king. That was called Israel. Then two kingdoms, which was Judah and Benjamin, were ruled by another king because it was the Judah tribe that was important because that's the one that the messianic line would come out of. Didn't God tell David, you will never fail to have a man of your dynasty sit on the throne. So when God judged Israel, he allowed those two tribes to stay with David and Solomon so the prophecy could be fulfilled that through the line, the father, son, father, son, the dynastic line of David, the Messiah would come.

How many understand? And so when God prophesied that this would happen, it was 150 years between the two of them going into captivity. Now, the interesting thing is they each had 16 kings.

If I got my information correct, I think I am. Israel had 16 kings and Judah had 16 kings. And you know how you read about the kings and it says, and Asa was king and he did right was in the sight of the Lord. And we see in Ahab did wicked, he did wicked in the sight of the Lord. Israel had 16 bad kings. They all did wicked in the sight of the Lord. Judah had 16 kings and eight of them did right in the sight of the Lord and eight of them did wickedness in the sight of the Lord. So I guess that's why they were 150 years later that they went into captivity. Amen. But they went into captivity. And now that they're in captivity, we're going to find out that God is going to speed us up to the second cup. All right, let's turn in our Bibles to Acts, the third chapter.

I know I'm giving you a lot of information and I'm hoping that I'm not giving you way too much for you to absorb. I like to preach like this on Sunday mornings because your mind is fresh. If you try to preach this sort of thing at nighttime, people have had too much activity and they can't, it's too much for them.

Amen. So Acts, the third chapter, let's look at verse 19. Repent ye therefore and be converted that your sins may be blotted out when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord and he shall send Jesus Christ, which before was preached unto you. This is the day of Pentecost. This is Peter preaching to the Jewish people. Jesus has already come the first time.

He already died. He already was buried and he already rose again and ascended onto heaven and now Peter says he's going to send him again. So now we're looking for the second coming and he shall send Jesus Christ, verse 21, whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things which God had spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began. The times of restitution. Do you know that in the old testament there are actually more prophecies referring to the second coming of Christ than there were of the first.

Amen. God has prophesied of the restitution of all things and it began on the day of Pentecost. We saw in verse 19 the refreshing that shall come from the presence of the Lord. How do we know it began on the day of Pentecost? Because he's referring to Isaiah 28, 12. This is the rest wherewith you may cause the weary to rest and this is the refreshing with stammering lips and another tongue will I speak.

This is the time of refreshing. So the second taking us to the second coming of the Lord began on the day of Pentecost. The time when the Holy Spirit came and filled them and they began to speak in tongues and they began to speak in many languages the wonderful works of God.

Amen. And now we know that Jesus had ascended on high but here's another thing we just read. The heavens will not release Jesus to return until the restitution of all things. Isn't that what we read in verse 21? He said we're waiting for Jesus to come but he's not going to be released. God is not going to say Jesus go and get your people until the restitution of all things.

There are a lot of things you could read Matthew 24 as I said Mark 13 and Luke 21 but there I want to just give you some tidbits. Time is moving along exponentially. We understood that technologically. We understand that but now we're going to see in the spirit time is going faster. This second cup is going to get filled much quicker than the first cup. The first cup took 4,000 years to fill.

This second cup is 2,000 years and Jesus is at the door. Amen. God's time clock is the nation of Israel. You cannot watch the news or read the newspaper without there being many articles in there about what is going on with Israel.

Amen. And God said that we are in the time of the Gentiles when God began to open the door through Apostle Paul and others that Gentiles were saved and now we're in the time of the Gentiles and for the most part the Jewish people are blind. You can read the 9th chapter, 10th chapter, 11 chapters of Romans. You find out he says they're blind. They did not, they missed it. We saw they missed the second coming of Jesus and so they did not receive their Messiah so now they're blind and they still don't receive their Messiah but the day is coming when the scale will fall from their eyes and things are now beginning to go exponential as God deals with Israel. You know, technically the United States is not in the Bible. We cannot get this mindset that the prophecy is dependent on what happens in America. God's fulfillment of prophecy does not depend on what we do in America or don't do in America.

The lynchpin to everything is the nation of Israel. Amen. What a revelatory overview of the biblically significant day we are in when understanding the times is of paramount concern for Christians who desire to be informed and relevant in these prophetic end times. Jesus rebuked the religious leaders of his day saying you can discern the face of the sky and even predict the weather but you cannot discern the signs of the times. Because of this, they missed his coming, their long awaited Messiah although he had fulfilled over 300 prophecies that foretold his coming. Scripture declares when the fullness of time had come, God sent his son.

That entailed 4,000 years of human history and the very calendar was changed to AD in the year of our Lord. Scripture further tells us that the heavens will not release Jesus to return until the times of restitution of all things. Now, this began on the day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit was poured out and it is rapidly approaching the climax when Jesus will return for his people.

It will come suddenly and without notice as a thief in the night. But while we do not know the day nor the hour, Apostle Paul said that we are not ignorant of the season. God gave the prophet Daniel a panoramic view of human time from his day to the future tribulation and reign of the antichrist. He was told to seal up the book until the time of the end when knowledge shall increase and many shall be purified and made white and tried but the wicked shall do wickedly. But the wise shall understand.

They will be like the tribe of Issachar who understood the times and knew what Israel ought to do. Saints, if we ever needed those who understand the times and know what the church ought to do and this nation, it is now. This teaching, Understanding the Times, can be ordered on CD for a love gift of at least $10 for the radio ministry. Request SK115.

That's SK115. Mail to Sound of Faith P.O. Box 1744 Baltimore, Maryland 21203 or go online to soundoffaith.org where you can also order on MP3. But to order on CD, send a minimum love gift of $10. Request or offer SK115 to P.O. Box 1744 Baltimore, Maryland 21203. Till next time, this is Sharon Maranatha.