Destruction of Jerusalem!

John gives us his own testimony of the same and said, I knew he was the Messiah because I was looking for the one upon whom the Spirit of the Lord would rest upon. That was the signature of the deity, the signature of the Messiah ship of the Lord Jesus. The fact that the Holy Spirit from heaven was resting upon him.

So from that River Jordan forward, Jesus is performing miracles. He’s sharing love. He is speaking against the Pharisees because they were such tyrants ruling over the common people with their religiosity.

And so when you get to chapter 12, there’s a pivotal point halfway through that chapter. As the Pharisees are nibbling at his heels and they’re looking for a way to snare him. They don’t like his message.

They don’t like the fact that he’s gathering huge crowds and they can’t pull a crowd. They’re troubled that he has more knowledge of scripture than they do. They can’t stump him.

They can’t corner him. They’re looking for a way not only to cancel him. That’s a current word.

They wanted to kill him. How can we do it? How can we eliminate him? And so we read last week about how suddenly a group of these people, it doesn’t actually say who it was, but it says that then they brought a man to him who was both blind and could not speak to see what Jesus would do. To everybody around, this was an impossible feat.

Nothing was gonna occur here. This Jesus can’t do anything with this. They thought they had him stumped.

But in simple wording, it’s recorded and Jesus healed him. And it was obvious because obviously the man starts to see and he starts to exclaim what he’s seeing. So he literally demonstrates the fact that Jesus has solved his problem and he’s healed him.

The crowd roundabout are mystified by this because they’ve never seen anything quite like this. A person who’s controlled by the spirit of the devil is suddenly released by this Jesus. By what power is he doing this? Could this be the Messiah? They turned to the Pharisees.

Now this was a mistake of the people. They needed to pull on their big boy pants and make a decision on their own. But instead it says, they didn’t wanna decide.

They turned to the Pharisees and basically said, you determine our truth. You determine what we think. You determine what we say.

Whatever you say to us, it goes. That was not a good idea. The Pharisees thought, okay, we’ve got it now.

So they form a little committee for a moment and they come back and they say, yep, we have a conclusion. This is not the spirit of God on your friend Jesus. So they’re going against what happened at the River Jordan.

This is not the spirit from heaven. This is an evil spirit. This man is controlled not by the Holy Spirit.

This man is controlled by Beelzebub, which was a word used to describe not one of the demons, but Satan himself. This was a term that was among the Jewish people. I don’t know where it all came from exactly, but it was to describe, he’s not one of the little demons.

He’s the big one. He’s Satan himself. And Jesus speaks out and he answers them and says, you’ve committed the unpardonable sin.

You could come against me, say anything you want. You can put me down. You can call me a liar.

You can call me anything you want, but crossing the line and saying that the spirit that’s working in me is Satan himself. You have blasphemed the Holy Spirit and for you, there’ll never be forgiveness. Not now.

And he’s talking to that generation. That generation that he said, this generation, he said, you will be judged for your decision today. And that statement began something that was going to now crush all of Israel because Jesus was actually speaking of the year 70 AD when Titus would kill millions of Jewish people and level the city of Jerusalem.

And there’s something very, very unique and interesting just even to rise above all of the rubble and all of the smoke and all of the noise, all of it, look at it from the big picture. It’s an incredible picture of what is transpiring. So Jesus intimates that you’ll not be forgiven now nor in the judgment to come.

So you’ve been judged now and it’s gonna cause horrendous things upon the land and upon the people. It’s gonna bring a wave of torment like you’ve never seen before in your life. So what we have to do to understand the magnificence, the ugliness, the sorrow, the depletion that goes on in 70 AD when Titus, who was the emperor, decided I’ve had it with the Jews.

You see, at that time, there was a rebellion against Rome. They got sick of it, the people got sick of it and they rose up in a rebellion. There were huge clashes.

There was death on both sides. It was going on. And so Titus said, I’ll fix them for good.

And he attacked the city, besieged it for some time and absolutely destroyed it. And Jesus had said to his disciples when they were making a big deal about, wow, this is a beautiful temple. He said, yeah, it is.

And not one stone will be left in its place. Do you know that the average tonnage of each stone in the temple was 30 tons? And he said, not one will be left upon another. How the Romans and brought in slaves and whoever, whatever it took, they literally dislodged every one of those stones and knocked them down.

Incredible. But what we really need to do is go back in time so that we can get a better understanding of even what’s going on when they reject Jesus and they say he’s of the devil himself. He’s the devil.

Of course, Jesus argues and says, how can a house divide against itself stand? You’re saying that I have the spirit of Satan and I just cast the demons out. Like that’s not even making sense, but nothing made sense for those people anyway. So it’s interesting that the Lord God comes to a man named Abram.

I double checked on this and there’s two possibilities where the city, U-R, Ur, two possibilities. The strong possibility is it was in Baghdad, just outside of Baghdad, the city of Ur of the Chaldeans. The other possibility is it could be Turkey and none of that really matters to us except that kind of thing kind of gets my attention because I wanna know who Abram was.

Abram was an Iraqi, it looks like. He was an Iraqi. Are you okay with that? You’ve gotta be.

He was an Iraqi. In other words, he was of Arab descent. Hello? And so Abram, now when we talk about, I say Abram descent, when I say Arab descent, the Arabs proceeded from Abraham.

So by the way, I came to this conclusion this week and I thought about it before, but it’s riveted to me very much. I’m on the favor of the Jews because the Bible says bless them, but I can’t condemn all the Arabs because they are the sons of Abram just as much as the Jew is. And the Lord said to Abram, I will bless your seed.

Well, the Arabs are his seed and there’s gonna come a day when there’s gonna be a revival and the Arabs are gonna turn to Jesus and they’re going to acknowledge him. They’re going to acknowledge him. But that’s just an aside.

So Abram, a single person, has an encounter with God. One man. We don’t have an indication that Sarah was a part of that conversation, however it took place.

We don’t know if Jesus showed up, if the Lord showed up as an individual person, like a theophany. We don’t know if it was an angel, but somehow or other Abram come to understand this is the Lord God and he’s calling me. So Abram had a relationship with God and he had to tell Sarah about it, I’m sure.

Abram responds to the Lord’s invitation and he travels a long distance and he ends up in a place called Bethel. I looked up on a map at six o’clock on this morning, I just thought, where’s Bethel? It’s in the West Bank. Hello? United Nations is voting on something today.

Bethel is in the West Bank, not far from a place called Ramah. April and I went by bus through Ramah a few years ago. We went to Israel and we got stoned.

These young fellows of Abraham’s seed, descendants of Esau, they were throwing rocks at our bus and our driver became filled with fear, slammed on his brakes and there’s rocks all in the way of the road. He can’t even go ahead with his bus and these were teenagers out there and the stones are bouncing off of our windows. I ran to the front and I said to the driver, we can’t sit here, there’s gonna be more of them coming.

And he said, I don’t know what to do, there’s nowhere to go. I said, open the door. He said, they’re coming in.

I said, no, I’m going out. No, you can’t, open the door. So he opened the door.

I don’t know how the Lord preserved me. I got off there and I cleared the rock. The kids were throwing rocks at me somehow and I got on the bus and we drove on.

Have I been to Ramah? Yeah, am I going back? Not unless they’re serving non-Arabic coffee. So Jesus, so Abram, watch this, Abram ends up in a town called Bethel and the Lord says, I’m giving everything here that’s to you. So I looked up what God was promising Abram.

We think of the little postage stamp called Israel, right? You got Gaza along one side, you got Jordan on the other. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What God promised Abram, I’m giving it to you.

It was that area that we think of Israel, including the Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, all of it. The Lord said, I give it to you. But God is only talking to one man.

So he has a son, Isaac. And we have to believe that he was telling Isaac, this is what the Lord has done for us. But they end up traveling a little bit and they don’t end up living in Bethel.

We’ll leave that alone for now. And Isaac himself eventually is the leader of the family. He’s the new patriarch.

And it says he dug a well at Bethel. He had an encounter with the Lord at Bethel. Then he has a son whose name is Jacob.

And you know the story of Jacob, his brother Esau, he betrayed him and now Jacob’s on the run. And where did he end up on this very first night? He ends up at a place called Bethel. And the Lord appears to him at Bethel and says, I’m giving you the West Bank and Jordan and Lebanon and Israel and all the rest of it.

The Lord made that promise. But only to one man. But through that one man, a whole nation were gonna become involved because Abraham’s seed is gonna be blessed and you’re gonna bless many nations.

And by the way, the promise eventually was this, Jerusalem will become the capital of the world. It’s going to be the capital of the world. And the word of God through the prophet said, and all the nations will flow unto it to worship the Lord in the city of Jerusalem.

Jerusalem has gotta be a Jewish city. Then Jacob’s family end up moving to Egypt. We’re taking a helicopter ride here.

We’re looking from above. We’re trying to get a picture, the big picture. So you had one man named Abram.

He knew God and he told his family about it. His son Isaac knew the Lord and Isaac said, this is what grandpa Abram told me about the Lord. But when do we get to meet God? Well, I don’t know, but it was the Lord speaking to one man, Isaac.

And then the Lord speaks to Jacob through that latter experience. And then on another night, when Abram is heading home to face Esau, he sends a family on ahead and he stays behind and he goes to a place where he could spend time with God. And he wrestled with God that night.

And by morning, he had a new name and the Lord called him Israel, which means he who wrestles with God. Israel means he who wrestles with God. Oh, bring the day when Israel will live up to her name and again wrestle with God.

But it was one man. It was one man. God was walking by times with one man.

Now it wasn’t that Jacob or Esau, Jacob or Isaac or Abraham had a daily. We knew that they would pray. We knew that they had some kind of a spiritual life, but we only had that one time that God came and spoke to Abram and said, let’s go.

And there were other times when the Lord visited him. You remember at the time of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Lord appeared to him in another way, but God’s visits with these men, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, it was short. He was always nearby, but confrontation one-to-one.

It was one man. So they end up down in Egypt. And for 400 years, they live in Egypt.

They’d been driven down there because of climate change. There was a drought, climate change. And so it wasn’t gonna be a short-lived drought.

So they made their way down to Egypt and the Lord had seen to it that Joseph was there and the family was received. So then the pharaohs changed and that generation passed on. So 400 years of people being born and passing away, a new pharaoh, a new pharaoh, maybe a few new pharaohs, and the whole story of Joseph and how he had saved the country if not having saved that part of the world from the drought because God prepared him for the preparation of the drought.

God prepared him for that. But that whole saga, that whole story is now forgotten. And the new pharaoh did not know anything about Joseph.

And he’s being harsh with these Hebrew people, desperately harsh, harsh. They’re nothing but slaves. And the Lord God picks a man, again, one man, not a committee, not a congregation, not a group of the elders.

One man, God calls upon him through a burning bush, a burning bush. Every time the Lord shows up, it’s a little bit different. It was Jacob, it was a ladder.

We don’t know how he visited Abraham in the first place. It doesn’t matter, but you can’t say, well, God met my need at that chair there. Don’t ever move that chair so I can always go back because I used to live that way when I was a young fellow.

God, I had an experience with the Lord at the altar. And when the pastor would say, come forward, I’d rush up to get my spot. This is where I met God.

This is my Bethel. This is where I met with God. We’re all built that way.

I’m glad you have your chair. Nick, that’s the first chair you sat in. And unbeknownst to you, I’ve changed the chair a couple of times and you didn’t even notice.

So that you were creatures of habit. But through a burning bush, Moses then goes to the children of Israel, they who wrestled with God. And he says, God has appointed me and I’m gonna go to Pharaoh and I’m gonna tell him what the Lord God says.

So only one man knows what God said. His name is Moses. This is important now.

He goes to the Pharaoh and he says, I’m here as a spokesman for the Lord God, Jehovah, the God of these Hebrew people. And this is the message that I have for you, Pharaoh. God says, listen to this.

God says, let my people go so that they can worship me. Not so they could go to the promised land. Not so they could be rich and famous and have a brand new job worth $3 million.

Let my people go so they can get close to me. My people feel so distant from me. They don’t hardly know who I am.

When Moses was confronted by God and the Lord said, I want you to go. Moses says, hold the phone. What’s your name? Let my people go.

They need to know my name. Let my people go. I wanna get close to them.

I want them to worship with me. I wanna be close to my people. 70 AD, the temple’s destroyed.

That’s coming. They get out in the wilderness and even Moses’ brother and sister betray him. They start carrying on.

You know, all we need is a miracle and the people are gonna rush to the Lord. No, miracle after miracle after miracle, the Jews experience and they turn to idol worship. Moses is up on the Mount.

One man, watch this. One man alone with God. These people had not experienced God.

They were listening to Moses. But when he had let go of the leash and he said, I gotta go and spend time with God, they turned to the devil. They started worshiping the golden calf.

They paid for that. So the miraculous is not necessarily the pathway to glory and majesty because we don’t seem to learn. The more we get blessed, it seems, the more opportunity the enemy has to dislocate us and have us walk away.

One man, Abraham. One man was Isaac. Only one man, Jacob.

Now a man stands alone, but he’s leading the people out and he has told them, come with me. The Lord wants to draw nigh to you. The Lord wants you to know his name and he wants you to have the freedom which you never had in Egypt.

They couldn’t worship God down there. You know, the Gestapo would come and stop them. So come on out into the wilderness.

The wilderness journey was to take 40 days. It took 40 years. A few golden calves got in the way.

Here the people were. So Moses is up on the mountain and the people hear God speaking to Moses. Fire, brimstone, lightning, thunder, and God’s voice.

And when Moses came down, the elders came to him and said, there were 6 million of them, right? It’s believed there were something like 6 million Jews, 400 years, they were multiplying like rabbits. There were a lot of people. These people are scared to death of the voice of God.

They’ve asked Moses, will you talk to God and then you tell us what God said? Don’t talk to us direct. And God’s answer was, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I’m not listening, I’m not listening.

God says to Moses, okay, here’s what we’re gonna do. You’re gonna build a tabernacle for me, a tent. Make it movable.

You gotta be able to fold it up in a matter of a couple of days and move it again. I wanna dwell among the people. I want them to sense my presence and I don’t want them to be afraid of me.

I’ll turn it down. I’ll reduce the power on my microphone. I don’t wanna scare them.

I wanna be their friend. I wanna be close to them. And so he was.

The power and the glory of God inside that holy place. There were a couple of courts inside this tent. There was the outer court.

Then there was the Holy of Holies. Only the high priest went into the Holy of Holies once a year. So we know that once a year, the people were going to somehow have a, I’m gonna call it a physical experience as well as a sense of spiritual experience.

Physical how? His presence oftentimes will show up in your physical being. I’ve been in services where people were literally shaking and others got worried about the shaking. What’s this going on? When God comes close, we got a couple of people sitting here this morning.

Remember, was it Eva? Was her last name Reese? Eva Reese. My mom tells me, I come home from Bible college. She says, David, we have the most unique experience.

I said, what’s that? Oh, we got this new lady in our church. And she said, she’s a beautiful gal. I checked her out.

Eva was a beautiful gal. And she said, here we were in a service. And she said, people came, Pastor Mulligan called the people forward.

They came around the altar. And all of a sudden somebody hit the floor like that. She said, Eva jumped out of her chair, ran to the altar up there, dropped down and started giving mouth to mouth.

I immediately felt faint and said, where’s Eva now? And so she’s giving mouth to mouth. And somebody came over. Somebody came over and said, Eva, Eva, wait, wait, wait.

This person had been overcome by the power of the Holy Spirit. And Eva thought they were dying. There were a lot of young guys in our church who were feeling faint often.

They experienced the presence of God when the Lord came into that tent. And they had a pillar of fire at night, kept them warm. You know, it gets desperately cold in the desert at night.

And in the daytime, there was a cloud. The cloud in the day said, I’m here. The fire at night said, I’m here.

The tabernacle was to be a place where they sense the presence of God. But there was a contingency to it. The Lord said, I’m with you, I’ll walk with you, but you’ve got to obey me.

I’ve given you my word. I’ve told you how I want you to live. And if you forsake me and you turn to wickedness and you start going back to idols and carrying on like idiots, I’m gonna leave you, 70 AD.

I’ll walk on you. And I’ll teach you a very, very hard lesson. They moved the tabernacle into the land called Israel, the people who wrestle with God.

And first of all, the tabernacle was set up, the tent. And for years, that’s how it functioned. You went through King Saul, who was replaced by King David.

King David had a heart after God. David longed for the presence of the Lord. He loved what was going on in the tent, but God put it in his heart, somehow build an established house for the Lord.

David was not allowed to build it. His son Solomon built the temple. And on the day when they had the dedication of the temple, it was absolutely incredible.

The number of animals that were slain that day and the blood was drawn was absolutely, they said blood ran in the streets. Some of you say, that’s an icky religion. No, it’s a religion of sacrifice.

So desperate is the condition of the heart of man. It takes a million dead animals. Like it just, we don’t understand how desperately wicked we are.

Right to the core, the prophet said, even our head is sick all the way down to our feet. We’re pathetic. But the glory of God hit that place to such a degree that the priests ran for their lives.

And so now the temple, it took seven years to build. It was quarried from underneath the temple mount. They dragged those rocks up there, probably 30 tons each.

They rolled them on logs. It just sounds like an impossible feat, but they did. And it was one of the wonders of the world.

The queen of Sheba came just to see it. Inside was all covered with cedar. And then the cedar was over covered with gold.

The cherubim were upon the Ark of the Covenant inside. Solid gold, gold, gold, gold. There the Lord would be among his people.

You start with a man, Abram, all alone, who knew the presence of God. And then his son, Isaac, and then Jacob, and then Moses, and then the congregation. And now they’re in the promised land, and a permanent temple is built.

The problems way back in Egypt for 400 years, we languished as we were slaves. All of that is behind us. The challenges that we experienced going through the wilderness and those dirty rotten Amalekites who came, they didn’t, they were cowards.

They were cowards like October the 7th a couple of years ago. They didn’t come and face you head on and fight with you. No, they came and they attacked the women who were children.

They attacked the old men and the old women on canes. That’s where the Amalekites came from and attacked them from behind. And God said, on that day, write it in a book, Joshua, the day is gonna come, the Amalekites have to die.

I’ve traced, I’m running down rabbit trail. I’ve traced the lineage of the Amalekites. And you know who ends up at the, you know, this one begat this one, this one.

Do you know where that story ends? The night that Jesus is betrayed, Herod stands before Jesus. It’s like Esau is standing before Jacob. You took my, you took my plague.

You took my privilege. You hurt me, but I have you now where I want you. It was Esau’s spirit that was taking on Jesus.

And Jesus stood there and said nothing because this was in the glorious plan of God. Jesus said to the disciples, this temple is gonna be destroyed, but the temple I’m talking to you about will be destroyed, but it will rise again on the third day. And that temple will be the habitation of the Lord.

And so you see, Jesus stood there. Why did he stand there speechless? Because this was the plan of God. The people had become immoral.

Israel was, Israel was bankrupt spiritually. They’d lost everything as Jesus stood there. How do we know they lost everything? To the Pharisees, well, what do you think? This man just healed somebody, that’s impossible.

He fed the 5,000. Some would say, well, I was there for this. I was there for that.

I saw all of these things. Well, what do you think? Well, let’s ask the priests about it. You see how spiritually decrepit they were.

Some years ago, I had, we had a revival going on and there was young people. I’m not gonna name the denominator. A whole bunch of young people came to our church.

God, we were having baptismal services every month. First Sunday in the morning was communion and the first Sunday night of every month was water baptism. We were baptizing between 40 and 50 every month.

These young people there on Sunday night, they went to their own church in the morning, came on Sunday night. They were awestruck by what was going on. They sensed the presence of the Lord, our worship.

There was no one standing on the platform leading. The congregation just sang whatever the keyboards played. We had a piano and an organ.

Nobody was saying, we’re gonna sing this song next. Nobody had to say, church, stand up. Nobody had to say, sing louder.

It just flowed like a river for up to an hour. Singing in the spirit, people were getting saved and healed in those services. And these young people were captured by that.

They’d never seen anything like this. So they came to me and said, can we be baptized? There were about 15 of them. I said, you better go home and talk to your folks.

Well, these are young adults. These are probably average age, 17, 18, 19. I said, you go and talk to your folks about it.

So they went back, they talked to the folk. The folks went to the pastor and said, our kids are attending this church and are watching water baptism. And our kids wanna get baptized.

Now we sprinkled them when they were babies. But these kids, think about this. Look, kid, you were sprinkled with your baby.

It’s all taken care of. And an 18 year old says, but what about me? Was it a wonderful time when you sprinkled me? Oh, it was wonderful. We had butter tarts and we had coffee and tea in the church.

It was wonderful. You should have been there. Well, you were, but you were like this.

What about me? What about now? Those young people were told, you stay out of that church. These young people felt separated. Their parents knew something about God or whatever, but it was just liturgy for them.

It was empty. It was an empty boxcar. There was nothing in the boxcar.

These kids wanted to experience God for themselves. They came and I baptized them in water. I thought I’d get a horrendous phone call from the big shot from the other church, but it was too late.

Too late. The kids were wet. It was glorious to think that now the Lord was in their presence.

Abraham alone, Isaac alone, Jacob alone. Moses was the only one that saw the burning bush, but a whole congregation saw the cloud. Whole congregation saw the fire.

They heard his voice to the point they said, oh, just his voice is gonna kill us. Please, let’s slow down. Moses, we’ll listen to you.

It’s gonna be okay. And they get to the temple and the whole country, can you imagine building this majestic structure to celebrate God? They brought cedar from Lebanon. It was the talk of the then known world.

People came by the thousands just to see it. The message would be, it’s beautiful as you see it because nothing is too good for the Lord our God. He comes and he visits us.

He visits us. The priest ran for their lives. We sense the power and the glory of his presence.

The temple was not memorial. It was not like Disneyland, a place to go and sing, it’s a small world. It’s not a piece of antiquity.

I love to go to old museum. April and I went to England a few years ago. We went to all these burned out churches that were bombed by the Germans.

I’m sorry, you Germans are okay. But war, really rad. But we went into all these wonderful museums and everything.

The temple was not designed to be a museum. It was where God and the people would come. Sacrifice on the altar was burned by the presence of the fire of God.

It was glorious. But Ezekiel spoke up, the prophet as did Isaiah. As did Zechariah and said, you’re wandering from the Lord.

You’re slipping into idolatry. You’re doing some pretty weird things. You’re having an awful lot of conversations with people from the countries all the way around.

And you’re bringing home some pretty weird things. And the prophet said, your heart is far from God. See, the Lord made it his business to come close and they backed away.

The Lord made it his business to come close to have relationship and they backed away. April and I visited an elderly couple who love this church. And they can’t come anymore because they’re physically not stable.

And so we sat the other evening and had a wonderful visit with them. And she, I’m leaving names out, that’s okay. She brought it up and she said, you know, I have a brother that’s just, I thought that she said a year or two older than herself.

She said, he loves me. But she said he got hurt by a congregation years ago because he stumbled. He stumbled and the congregation became aware of it and they turned on him.

They ridiculed him. The congregation became the secretary of heaven and they hurt him. He’s never darkened the door of a church since.

And she said, I say to him, I’m praying for you. I don’t wanna hear about your God. You see, there was a time, she said he was raised in church.

He knew the Lord, he knew God’s presence. God came near to him, but because the people hurt him, he withdrew. People can use any kind of a crutch.

Haven’t you been hurt in a church? I’ve been hurt. I’ve been hurt desperately as a pastor. I’m not gonna go into that.

My life was, I had a deacon say, there’s a certain little preacher, if he doesn’t do as I’m telling him, his family’s gonna get hurt. I thought he was challenging me to the dukes. He was, I got hurt desperately.

I had a stomach problem with it because my nerves just tore me to shreds. You can get hurt in the house of the Lord, but that’s not an excuse to walk. That’s not an excuse to take a long walk.

But God watches those he loves and you can’t get so far away from him that he won’t pursue you. He will come after you with a vengeance. And from the day that I got saved, I haven’t always walked a perfectly straight line.

I’m meandered by times, but God by his spirit brought me back. So I showed up in church and I held the hymn book and I played the game, but in my heart, I had not left. There was a time when I watched the church falling apart and I determined I’m leaving this place and the Lord wouldn’t let me go.

I wanted to go. So we know that people go through difficult times. What’s challenging is when a person walks so far away from the Lord that they don’t seem to be able to find their way back.

We, as God’s people, need to love and care for people who know the Lord and are drifting for whatever reason. We spoke this, I spoke this morning with one of our members who remembers very, very well when a certain young lady came to know the Lord in this church and I baptized her in this water. This is gonna ring a bell for some of you and she and her husband, he got saved.

Can we renew our vows? And the whole service was all about marriage. It was a beautiful time. It was a precious time.

Then a few things happened along the way. We’re not sure. I don’t think they got hurt among us.

I can’t, how could you get hurt in this place? This place is so full of love. It’s gooey. This place is like flypaper.

I don’t know how you can even manage to get out of here on Sundays. Like it really, I’m stuck on you. I hope you’re stuck on me.

What’s beautiful is we can call her and we did so last week. We had a beautiful time, a beautiful chat. And for those of you who know what I’m talking about, she might be here next Sunday and I’m counting on you to be so loving, make her sick, just be so loving and careful.

I’ve wandered way off my topic, I guess. I got so much more that I feel to share, but I’m gonna stop right now and tell you that Jesus said to them, you’re in trouble. This is a generation that are gonna suffer because of the decision made in Matthew’s gospel, chapter 12.

He said, you’ve crossed the line. He didn’t just say to the Pharisees, he said, this generation. When Adam and Eve did their failure, who did it affect? One failure.

And did it not even cause trouble on the earth? There were no thistles to look out for. There were no barbs on the raspberry plants in the garden of Eden. There’s a curse came upon the world because of the failure of Adam and Eve.

And I believe that there’s, I don’t like the word curse, but there’s a problem has happened even to the land of Israel, even though it’s blossoming like a rose. There’s bombs falling all over the place. People are living in bombshell.

They last week, the people were running every direction because the Houthis were firing on them again. The land is being pummeled with missiles. Get on a bus and somebody blows himself up in the seat beside you.

The land is troubled. The people are troubled. The hearts are troubled.

But I have a promise from the word of the Lord. He said, the graves of the Old Testament saints are gonna open and they’re gonna come back to life. Did you know there’s gonna be a general resurrection of the Old Testament saints? We’re gonna get to meet them one-on-one.

Hello. And they’re gonna look upon him whom they pierced. They’re gonna say, Jesus, how can you forgive us? It’ll be like Acts chapter two.

Peter finished his sermon. And I believe it was thousands started to, I believe it was noisy. I believe that thousands of people began to wail standing in the streets.

Dear God, what have we done? Men and brethren, what shall we do? He convinced them by the power of the word of God, by the presence of the Holy Spirit. You crucified Jesus, the only hope. Men and brethren, what shall we do? Mighty revival broke out right then and there.

Israel will cry one more time, but they’re gonna have to go out to the woodshed and take a lot of licking before that’s gonna take place. And that’s what’s so sad. The book of, I finish, the book of Revelation, as frightening a read as it appears to be, it’s all about Israel.

It’s all about Israel. All of those plagues, all those terrible things. It’s written in the Old Testament.

I will send plagues among you. I’m gonna hurt you. I’m trying to get your attention.

He came with love. You say, well, why doesn’t God just show them love? Does he have to do the book of? He sent his son, Jesus. Oh, how he loves you and me.

Oh, how he loves you and me. He gave his life. What more could he do? Oh, Israel, who wrestles with God.

Oh, how he loves you. Oh, how he loves me. Oh, how he loves Gentile and Jew.

I told you a few weeks ago, the neighbors across the street open on Sundays. They’re Jewish. They close on Saturday.

That’s their holy day. But I’m friends with them. I’ve told them I’m the husband of April.

She ever comes in this door, you don’t know her, and you gotta know her credit card’s no good. I know so. So I had a call.

This is true. I told you I was gonna try and communicate with them, but I wasn’t sure how am I gonna do that? Every day I’ve looked at that store and said, go there, David. And I thought, how do you do this? She called me.

She said, are you Pastor David? Yes. Over the years, apparently this store’s had a wonderful relationship with the church. I said, indeed.

She said, we’re having a sale. I’m just wondering if we could use. I said, yes.

Never got her sentence finished. I said, this parking lot is yours whenever you want it. She said, that’s wonderful, David.

I said, you need to know we’re your friends. She said, yes, I understand that. I said, no.

I said, we know who you are. And I said, your heart’s gotta be broken. You’re Jewish.

Israel, they who wrestle with God. And I said, you need to know, in our church, we pray for you. And I said, and not just on Sundays, we live it out.

Please know, we’re praying for you and we’re praying for the people of the promised land. She said, David, that’s awesome. I said, and don’t forget it.

Don’t forget it. Tell people wherever you are, tell them. Jesus loves them, okay? They deserve to hear it.

And it’ll do you a whole bunches of good to tell them. Heavenly Father, as we’re pausing and the service is about to close, Lord, is there somebody in this room who’s kind of wandered away from your majesty? They were warm for you. They had a heart after God, but somehow they’ve been drifting and somehow this morning, suddenly the Holy Spirit’s tugging at their heart.

I sense your presence and you’re tugging at them. Lord, I pray for whoever that person or persons is, are, that they will pursue the tugging and surrender to Jesus. His heads are bowed, eyes are closed.

I’m not gonna ask you to come forward. Don’t be afraid, please. Heads are bowed, eyes are closed, nobody’s looking.

David, you’ve been talking to me today and I feel like I’ve kind of walked away from the warmth and the relationship that I’ve had. Or maybe you’d say with a raised hand, I’ve never had it. David, I give you permission for the next seven days to pray for me.

Just slip up a hand, quick, real quick, and then we’re gonna say goodbye. Anybody who would raise a hand, say, Dave, I think God’s talking to me. Last call.

Father, somehow I feel that there’s somebody who needs to, wants to, but there’s a heavy weight on that hand. But I pray there will not be a heavy weight on their soul and on their heart. I pray, Lord, that in their heart they’ll cry out and say, Jesus, I know I need you.

Draw me close to you. I pray that prayer in Jesus’ name. And everybody said, amen.

God bless you. God put his arms around you and comfort you and tell you, you’re not alone, I’m here for you. God bless you, that’s my prayer.

Pass that prayer along to somebody else as you’re going.