The Destiny and the Six Deceptions of the Church

1)     That God chose the Jews

2)     That the Jews are foreigners, settlers, or thieves of someone else’s land.

3)     That the Jews denied Jesus

4)     That the new covenant was for the Gentiles

5)     That God rejected Israel

6)     That the Church replaced Israel

Part of the Foundation series, to build something that is strong, good, and lasting. The foundation must be steady, secure, and strong. And so, we want to add to that foundation. We all know, according to the word of God, you can't have any other foundation than Yeshua. He's the foundation to the foundation that we're building on. This foundation we're building on is tied to understanding. Three key words are knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. So, we all have a lot of knowledge, some good, some not so good, and what we are giving you over this series is more knowledge. We hope, according to what the Lord wants us to grow in wisdom, we need wisdom, especially currently. We need godly wisdom, not the wisdom of the world; we need God's wisdom.

So, between knowledge and wisdom, according to the Proverbs, is understanding. We get all this knowledge, and if we don't understand how to rightly divide it and what to do with it, then we're not going to grow into godly wisdom. So, the title of this message, titles help us to focus, is ‘The Destiny or the Deception of the Church’. So, Matthew 24:4, Jesus said, "Watch out that no one deceives you." That was Jesus' words. The definition of the word deceives, or the meaning deceive, is to beguile, to seduce, or to cause to wander. That's the one that we focus on a lot when we're talking about going back to the ancient paths. When we think of a path, we think of walking on a path. So, wandering is a good definition to use for what we're hoping that we don't do, wander off the path. Colossians 2:8 says,

"See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world, rather than on Christ."

So, the other two definitions of beguile and seduce really could fall into this warning, that no one takes you captive through beguiling or through seducing into deceptive things that would cause you to wander. So, we have a warning right before we start out that there is an enemy out there, the enemy that uses people also, that could cause us to end up falling into this deception and this wandering and this seducing into wrong thinking, which then produces wrong understanding, wrong actions. We've done this, we’ve previously talked about having a biblical Hebraic mindset, which is opposed to our natural Western thinking, or the American English mindset.

We have this going on always in our minds, trying to reconcile and understand things, but a lot of times we get it wrong because we're seeing it through our mindset that we've had all however many years old you are. This is always going to be a struggle and a fight and a learning and an unlearning and a relearning. This again, one of the reasons that we're doing this. So, everything that we teach, you must really go back to Genesis, Bereshit (In the Beginning) you must go back, everything is connected. God doesn't only speak in words; He speaks in concepts. If you want to understand God better, understand His word better, we must find the concept that God is addressing through His whole word, because He never changes, and His word doesn't change.

So, we go back to Genesis 12:1-3. The Lord said to Abram,

"Go from your country, your people, and your father's household to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you. And I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you, I will curse. And all the people on earth will be blessed through you."

So, God told this to Abraham, and the nation of Israel had not yet even existed, but God's plan was that He was going to bring a nation through Abraham, and that nation was going to be a blessing to all nations. He gave this little warning, He said He will bless those who bless Abraham and the nation that God is going to bring through him, and He will curse those who curse Israel. There are two different Hebrew words that were translated into the one word "curse," and they mean different things. So, the first curse, the curse that God said He would do to those who don't bless Israel, that word in the Hebrew is arar, A-R-A-R, and it means to detest or abhor. The second curse that God says that we would do to Israel, for which we would be cursed, that's the Hebrew word qalal, Q-A-L-A-L, and that means just to ignore or to esteem lightly. So, what God is saying is that if anyone, especially His people, just ignore, just don't even see the reason or the place or esteem that reason or place for Abraham and the nation He was bringing, God would find that and those people detestable. So, here we have a warning right in the beginning of Genesis. Unfortunately, we have wandered away from that warning over the years, repeatedly, increasingly as we come now into what's happening in the world.

"Again, I ask, did they stumble," this is talking about the Jewish people in Israel, "so as to fall beyond recovery? Not at all. Rather, because of their transgression, salvation has come to the Gentiles to make Israel envious." Romans 11:11

The destiny of the Gentile church is to provoke Israel to zealousness. You could say jealousy, but that word really means zealousness, to provoke them to zealousness, zealousness towards her God, and to the covenant relationship with Him. So, that's one of our destinies. That's the foundational Genesis destiny that we just read in Romans. Salvation has come to the Gentiles to make Israel envious. Now, we think salvation has come to us just so when we die, we go to heaven. That's a given, but we have destiny while we're on this earth, we have a purpose. There's many, many different purposes, but the foundational purpose that we see right here is dealing again with God's people, Israel, Abraham, those that He told us, that if we just ignore them, we will be detestable to God. So, the body of Messiah, the church, is on a journey to fulfill her destiny, and that's exciting. We have a reason for living. We have a reason why we struggle through each day. One of the purposes is to provoke Israel, God's people, to zealousness for their God. So, every generation has a destiny to fulfill. Each one depends on the generation before it, so to speak, to pass the baton. The first church fulfilled hers, and that's why we're here. The first church went out and evangelized the nations, they kept the scriptures, they kept the word, they wrote the word, they passed down the word, they passed down our traditions. That first church, which was all Jewish, did their job. So now they pass the baton, and future churches are striving to continue what they started, so that we can finish the race good.

If past generations wandered off the path, they were deceived. If that happened, and it did happen, every later generation that came after came on that wrong path. There were always individuals. So, this is a very serious place that we're at because you don't know what you don't know. If we didn't know we were off the path, we just kept going that wrong way. The word says if a blind man leads a blind man, they both fall into a ditch, and so, we've been in a ditch. We look at the church, and we see there needs to be help, they need to be pulled out, put on the right path, and maybe some of the mess that's going on and the things that are happening is because they have ignored Israel, and they've become a lot detestable, I'm sure in the nostrils of God. Let's look at the origin and the results of this deception, what's taken us off the path. That might result in a curse, in cursing of God looking at us in a way that none of us want to be looked at. So, we're going to get very elementary here. After the fall of Adam and Eve, God put His plan of redemption into motion, which was to raise up a people for Himself, to raise up a people to bring the Redeemer through.

We read the beginning story. So, He entered into a covenant. God started with Abraham; that's a given. Always remember, God started with Abraham, a Gentile from a pagan background that trusted God. He was not Jewish; there were no Jews at that time. He entered into covenant with God. Abraham trusted God and was accredited to him as righteousness. He entered into a covenant with God, and all his descendants after him were called into that covenant. One way or another, they passed along the covenant. They didn't always do it great and perfectly, but they stayed in that line of covenant.

They became known as Jews. This group of people that God was preparing to bring the Messiah through became known as Jews, which was short for the word 'Judea', which means praisers. They were the only people at that time who praised the one God, the Creator God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So, they became known as praisers, consequently Jews. They were the first church at Mount Sinai. They are called a church at Mount Sinai. They were the first church. When we talk about a church, we must distinguish here: what are we talking about? So, the word 'church' in the Greek is 'ecclesia', and it means, in the Greek, the word 'ecclesia' is assembly, called at once, chosen to be together. Not chosen, better than anyone else, but chosen to join the church. That same word in Hebrew is 'qahal' Q-A-H-A-L. It means the same thing, assembly. Mostly when you would read it in Hebrew, you would read that word, and you would say the assembly, the 'ecclesia', the church. It has the same meaning. It's a group of people coming together for a purpose. So, the church is just the assembly of people coming together. The first church really came together at Mount Sinai. They were all Jewish then, too. They did not have the Messiah yet, but their God was leading them. He was the one they were following, this assembly. So, our first deception, we're going to go through the deceptions that caused us to wander as a church. The first deception was that God chose the Jews. And this, we've been going repeatedly, and it's very important, especially in this age of growing dangerous anti-Semitism. No, God did not choose Jews. There were no Jews. God chose a man, and He chose the man for a purpose to bring His descendants through, those that would be servants of His, and the vehicle for which the promised Redeemer, spoken of in Genesis, would come through. He needed people to bring His Redeemer through; to bring the Messiah He promised in Genesis when He spoke.

There would be one that would come, and He would crush the serpent's head, the serpent who beguiled and deceived Adam and Eve, and the serpent we know would hurt the heel of the Redeemer. And we see that, that is what happened. So, God did not choose the Jews. He chose a man, and He chose that man for His reason alone, but we see that man proved worthy of being chosen because he trusted God. He believed God. He left everything, exactly what Yeshua tells us, to leave all and forsake all, and followed Him. That's what Abraham did. God used him, and He brought this people through.

At the appointed time, Yeshua, the Redeemer, was born into that nation. He was born, raised, and lived as a Jew. At that time, there were Jews now on the land, of course, and Jesus came as a Jew. Could have come as anything else. He could have come as a Buddhist if God wanted to redeem Buddhists, but He came to this nation that God ordained from the beginning of time that He would use to bring redemption through.

(1) So, the first deception that the church embraced and believed, and it caused a jealousy on the wrong side, is that God chose the Jews. And that you hear a lot. Why would God choose them? Why did God choose them? Well, He didn't. So, that's a deception.

(2) The second deception is that the Jews are foreigners, settlers, or thieves of someone else's land. Remember, the promise to Abraham was that God would give him a land, and so that land cannot be separated from Abraham or the people that came from Abraham. And so, this very big deception that has caused all these problems all these years was that this is not their land. They're settlers, or they stole it from someone else. So, God has assigned this nation a land for His people to live in, to cultivate, to keep, and to steward until the return of the King to rule and reign from that land, from Jerusalem. So, the land doesn't belong to anybody. The land belongs to God. He gave it to the descendants of Abraham to steward it, to watch over it, and to live in. This is the land that God placed them in. So, they didn't steal it. They didn't take it, and God's covenant is still in force. So, Genesis 15:18 says, "In that same day, the Lord made a covenant with Abraham, saying, 'Unto thy seed, I have given this land from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates.'" So, Israel has got a lot more land that God is giving them, promised them that they will possess. When the time is right, they will get this whole land. The second deception is that the land does not belong to Israel.

(3) The third deception is that the Jews denied Jesus. So, the false religious leaders rejected Jesus as Messiah. It would just be as our nation right now is rejecting God, rejecting everything. But as a nation, they are separate people in this nation. There are millions of people who love and follow Yeshua, who love God, who are true to God. As a nation, we used to call ourselves a Christian nation. That didn't mean that everybody in the nation were Christians. Now we really can't even call ourselves a Christian nation, which doesn't mean that everybody in the nation are not Christians. So, this denying of Jesus was done, but it was done by the false leaders, by the priests that were not in the lineage of the priesthood, the people that elected them. Those were the ones that denied Jesus. The individual Jews did not. And we know that for a fact because the entire first church, the early church, not the first church of Mount Sinai, the early church, were all Jewish. The entire Bible, except for Luke, was written by Jews, including the New Testament. The gospel was delivered to nations by Jews. So, to say that the Jews denied Jesus would mean that we would never know Jesus because He would have not been spoken about. The word would not have been written and handed down. So, that's a third big deception.

(4) The fourth deception is that the new covenant was for the Gentiles. This one is one that gets a little bit shaken up when we talk about it, but Hebrews 8:9, which is repeated from Jeremiah 31, says, "The days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt because they did not remain faithful to my covenant and I turned away from them, declares the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will establish with the people of Israel. After that time, declares the Lord, I will put my laws in their minds and write them in their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people." So, this new covenant that was first talked about in Jeremiah and repeated in the book of Hebrews makes it very clear that this covenant that God is making, that we're calling new, which is really a renewed covenant with better promises, with the blood of Yeshua, not sealed with the blood of bulls and goats, but sealed with the blood of Yeshua. That's what makes it new, fresh, and better. This covenant was promised to Israel and to Judah, the Northern Kingdom and the Southern Kingdom. This is the covenant that the Gentiles are grafted into. That's the fourth deception, that the new covenant was for the Gentiles. And we see, no, it was for whosoever will. It was made with Israel and Judah, and the Gentiles, as they come to the Lord, are invited with full honors to be in that same covenant.

So, it's not a covenant made for Jew or Gentile. It's a covenant for God's people, but it's one covenant. It's that covenant. That covenant promises exactly what we know the new covenant promises. He will give a new heart. He will take out the stony heart, give us a heart of flesh. He will cleanse us from our sins. And this is that new covenant that was promised to Israel and to Judah. Ephesians 3:6 says,

"This is a mystery through the gospel, the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body and sharers together in the promise of Christ Jesus."

That was a mystery back then because Gentiles were not in any of the covenants. The Jews did not expect that there would be any participation. Anybody who wanted to follow the God of Israel had to convert to get the full-fledged recipient of the covenant, or they could just be God-fearers and not become part of Israel and not be fully receiving. So, the mystery is that Gentiles are included in this covenant. We think it's the other way around. In fact, we reject it. We think it's just for us. Here we see, according to Ephesians, that Paul is calling it a mystery, that the Gentiles were offered to be sharers in that covenant, the covenant that God made with Israel and Judah.

(5) The fifth deception is that God rejected Israel. This is one of the biggest ones that has shaped the thinking of the church. God rejected Israel. Jeremiah 31, again, we're back to that. "This is what the Lord says, 'He who appoints the sun to shine by day, who decrees the moon and the stars to shine by night, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar, the Lord Almighty is His name, only if these decrees vanish from my sight,' declares the Lord, 'will Israel ever cease being a nation before me.' This is what the Lord says, 'Only if the heavens above can be measured and the foundations of the earth below be searched out, will I reject all the descendants of Israel because of all they have done,' declares the Lord." Is that not clear enough for us? All we have to do is look, and we see the heavens are still there and the stars are still there.How do we even mouth the words that God rejected Israel when we read His word? And He even says, because of all they've done, He's not saying that they deserve it. He's doing it for His namesake, for His purposes, for His plan, for the concept He set forth of bringing the Redeemer through so that we could be redeemed, so that the nations who come to Him could be redeemed. So, did God reject Israel? Absolutely not. According to this scripture, we have heavenly proof that He didn't.

(6) The sixth deception, which follows right after that one, is that the church replaced Israel. Well, it makes sense if you think God rejected Israel, that here we come, we come in and we replace the heroes. We're the heroes. We come in, and we're going to save God's covenant. We're going to come right in there and make ourselves detestable to the Lord because that's part of the cursing of Israel. So, that word, when you hear it, "replacement theology," because a lot of times you don't even know, we don't know, I should say, that we're hearing something that is embracing replacement theology, because the word is not used. Nobody's going to stand up and say, "I'm teaching you replacement theology" because the people who believe it and teach it don't believe that this is anything out of the ordinary. They are being God's people who rejected Israel. So, that word is called really supersessionism. It's the doctrine of supersessionism. Believe it or not, it's a doctrine, it's a practiced and beloved doctrine of the majority, unfortunately, the majority of the church, that the church has replaced Israel in God's life, in God's covenant, in God's plan, in God's heart.

He rejected them like we read, and He replaced them. So, Romans 11:25 says,

"I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers and sisters, so that you may not be conceited. Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in. And in this way, all Israel will be saved. As it is written, 'The Deliverer will come from Zion, and He will turn godlessness away from Jacob. And this is my covenant with them when I take away their sins.' As far as the gospel is concerned, they are enemies for your sake; but as far as election is concerned, they are loved on account of the patriarchs, for the gifts calling of God are irrevocable."

Now, we've even taken that scripture, and we've twisted it around, and we've applied it to ourselves as gifts and callings, whether I have the gift of healing, whether I have the gift of prophecy, no matter what I do, I could stop serving God. But we use this word to say, "I still have that gift." That's how we ended up with a lot of witches and things like that, because people who have had gifts and callings have walked away from the Lord and have believed that and used the scripture, which is a scripture, that they still walk in that gift and that calling because it's irrevocable. But if you understand, again, the right placement of the concept of the scriptures, and you leave this connected to what it's talking about, it's talking about, again, that God did not reject Israel because He called them. He called them for a purpose. He gave them gifts of evangelism, gifts of different things, and they are not revocable because He's going to use them. He didn't change His mind. So, God's gifts and His call are irrevocable. So, God did not replace Israel with the church. As far as that scripture, because we want to be able to understand where we fit in, we can use all of God's scriptures to Israel if we put them in the right place and understand what the original meaning was. This way, we won't get into trouble using them wrong, praying for something that maybe we're using a wrong scripture. So, this scripture that is meant to talk about God not rejecting Israel, we can walk in it and claim it, understanding that this scripture was for a purpose, for a plan, for a time, and for a season. Romans 9:4 says, "The people of Israel." So now we're talking about the Jews. They became the descendants of Judah. The people of Israel, theirs is the adoption of sonship, theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship, and the promises. Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of the Messiah, who is God over all, forever praised. So, it goes back without Israel, without God's covenant with Israel, and without God keeping His covenant with Israel, we have nothing. We have no foundation at all, because theirs is the adoption of sons. There's the glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, so that they can pass it down to us. Even worship, temple worship, to understand what that is. That's where we get the word service from. We have a service in church, go to church or synagogue, wherever, we have a service. That word service is, we got that out of this; it's a temple service. It's what the priest did in the temple. They gave God service. That's where that word service comes from.

We'd have nothing if it wasn't that God stayed true to His covenant, and He gave it to a people to steward it for Him. So, these deceptions have led the Gentile church away from their destiny, which is to provoke Israel to jealousy, to zealousness. They also resulted in the persecution of the Jews by the early church fathers. Now, we're reading here in Romans that God keeps talking about the patriarchs. These are Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all those that came forth. Unfortunately, the Christian church has used for their doctrine their patriarchs, and we call them the church fathers, the early church fathers. We don't even realize when we talk about the church fathers that we're talking about Catholics, the Catholic church, that had the early stewardship after it was taken away from Israel to become the purveyors of doctrines. And so, what happened with this is they wandered off the path, and the enemy used them. I want to read now, it's going to take a little time, some of the statements of these church fathers that have caused the church to have an attitude and to bring persecution on God's people. So, I'm just going to read a few of the statements. There are tons of them. You can buy books on this, but this was the cause of Christian antisemitism. So, some of these people you might recognize, some of them you might not, but they were well known. They wrote books, they preached sermons, and they were quoted repeatedly.

So, Justin Martyr was one of the first to accuse the Jews of inciting to kill Christians. I don't know if you've ever heard the terminology "Christ killers," but "Christ killers" was used a lot. This was coming from, again, that false doctrine that the Jews killed Jesus. So, Justin Martyr made this to be almost a doctrine that the Jews killed Christians, and he incited people, just like we see what's happening now, people getting incited with every lie and everything, and getting murderous.

So, Origen, I don't know if you've ever heard of him. He's one of the church fathers. You could look them all up. He accused the Jews of plotting in their meetings also to murder Christians.

Eusebius alleged that Jews each year at Purim, engaged in ceremonial killing of Christian children.

St. Hilary of Poitiers said that the Jews were a perverse people forever accursed by God.

St. Ephraim wrote many of his early church hymns, some of which maligned Jews, even to the point of calling the Jewish synagogues "whorehouses." These are in his hymns.

John Chrysostom said that there could never be expiation for the Jews. In other words, they can never be forgiven, and that God had always hated them. He said it was incumbent upon all Christians to hate Jews. They were assassins of Christ and worshippers of the devil. In one of his homilies, this is in church, a homily, a message, Chrysostom said, "The synagogue is worse than a brothel. It is a den of scoundrels and the repair of wild beasts, the temple of demons, devoted to idolatrous cults, the refuge of brigands and debauchers, and the cavern of devils." So, that was John Chrysostom, and him you might have heard of. He's famous.

St. Cyril gave the Jews within his jurisdiction the choice of conversion, exile, or stoning.

St. Jerome, he's the translator of the Latin Vulgate, one of the translations of our Bible. He stated that the Jews were incapable of understanding the scriptures and said they should be severely persecuted until they confess true faith.

St. Augustine said the true image of the Jew was Judas Iscariot, forever guilty and ignorant spiritually. St. Augustine decided that Jews, for their own good and the good of society, must be relegated to the position of slaves. This theme was later picked up by St. Thomas Aquinas, who demanded that Jews be called to perpetual servitude. According to Professor Talmadge, St. Augustine believed that because of their sin against Christ, the Jews rightly deserve death. Yet, as with Cain, who murdered the just Abel, they are not to die, for they are doomed to wander the earth, the witnesses of their iniquity, and of our truth, the living proof of Christianity.

The Crusaders herded Jews into the great synagogue in Jerusalem. When they were securely inside the locked doors, the synagogue was set on fire. The misguided Crusaders, with the lies, perverted sermons that they received fresh in their ears, sang as they marched around the blaze, "Jesus, we adore You." Martin Luther said the Jews should not merely be slaves, but slaves of slaves, that they might not even come into contact with Christians. He also said the Jews were ritual murderers and poisoners of wells. He called for all Talmuds synagogues to be destroyed. Luther later wrote, "What shall we do? What shall we Christians do with this damned, rejected race of Jews? Since they live among us, and we know about their lying, blasphemy, and cursing, we cannot tolerate them if we do not wish to share in their lies, curses, and blasphemy. We must prayerfully and reverently practice a merciful severity."

Now, that was Martin Luther, who was really the father of Protestantism. So, this was the foundation that our understanding and faith was built on. This is a curseable doctrine that we've wandered off the path, and whether we know it or not, we've embraced some of it, if not all of it.

Encyclopedia Judaica comments on Luther's comments, and they say, "Short of the Auschwitz oven and extermination, the whole Nazi Holocaust is pre-outlined here." Indeed, Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the Almighty. By defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." That was Hitler's beginning. He justified what he was doing by what the church fathers said. That was the reason that Hitler could do what he did and say what he said, and it hasn't really changed. This teaching still, whether you hear it that way, that blatant, the understanding of it, the mindset that it's brought into the church is that mindset, whether we know it or understand it, or if we don't even know how to quote things, we have to understand that we have done the opposite. God called the church; our destiny is to provoke His people, the Jews, to zealousness. The church has done the opposite. It provoked murder, death, hatred, fear. So, we are the recipients. Every generation is the recipient, like we started out with, the generation before it. We are dealing with trying to bring these deceptions to the forefront to understand that we're on the wrong path here. If we want to walk on the right path with God, we must get back to the ancient path, back into the covenant, but we must understand it.

So now, we're going to go forward to understand from the New Testament how God gave the destiny to the church, how we put it in a way that we can understand it today. Luke 15, this is the parable of the lost son. "There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, 'Father, give me my share of the estate.' So, he divided his property between them. Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had and set off for a distant country. And there he squandered all his wealth in wild living. After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. So, he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything. When he came to his senses, he said, 'How many of my father's hired servants have food to spare? And here I am, starving to death. I will set out and go back to my father and say to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy of being called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants."' So, he got up and went to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion. He ran to his son, threw his arms around him, and kissed him. The son said to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.' But the father said to his servant, 'Quick, bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let's have a feast and celebrate, for this son of mine was dead and is alive again. He was lost, and he is found.' So, they began to celebrate. Meanwhile, the older son was in the field. And when he came near the house, he heard music and dancing. So, he called one of the servants and asked him, 'What's going on?' 'Your brother has come,' he replied, 'and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.' The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So, his father went out and pleaded with him. But he answered his father, 'Look, all these years I've been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you have never given me a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours, who has squandered your property with prostitutes, comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him.' 'My son,' the father said, 'You are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we must celebrate and be glad because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again. He was lost, and he is found.' Most of the time that you've heard the scripture, it's presented, well, either in a very personal way about our children, and we can use it like that. But it's been presented, who is this elder son, and who is this younger son, becomes the heart of this story. If we understand it correctly, we can see who this younger son is. The younger son is the Gentile church, and you know that because they went to the pigs. The Jewish church would have never went to the pigs at that point. So, we understand that this was the younger son. He was called in alongside; both sons were equal. But the younger son did not know what to do with this treasure that was preserved for him, his inheritance. He took his inheritance and went and squandered it. The word "prostitute" is used here because God uses that a lot when He talks about His people having false idols or not worshipping Him in a holy way. So, the Gentile church took the blessings, took the covenant, took everything that they thought was theirs, and then they didn’t keep it in the way God gave it. They didn’t understand it. They did not use it. They squandered what God had given to be holy in just wild living, and they came to an end. They came to a place where they were detestable, accursed, and they decided, they came to themselves and they went to the Father. Now the son, the elder son, who is Israel, the elder son, got jealous. The elder son got jealous and said, "I was always here. I never left you. I never converted. I stayed a Jew. I was always here. I followed the covenant, and yet you've never done for me what you've done for this squanderer." God said, "You were always here. All you had to do was ask." That's the point of the story. When the fullness of the Gentiles comes in, that we just read, they will be understanding. They will come back. We are not going to provoke God's people to zealousness with the way that we understand Torah, with the way we understand those deceptions. Embracing those deceptions is never going to be used to provoke Israel to jealousy. It will provoke another Holocaust. If we want to stay in our destiny, we must understand this younger son has to come back to the father, come back to the covenant, come back to the ancient paths, come back to embrace the truths that are clearly in the scriptures. When we do that and God's people see that we are loving the God that they love, serving the God that they serve, it will provoke them to jealousy, to zealousness, to inquire, however God's going to work it out, but that's God's plan. We see He already set it in motion. He said to His son, "You were always here with me. All you had to do was ask." Well, they didn't know what they didn't know, so they didn't ask, but there will come a time when they're asking. This dead younger son that came back, we understand from the grafting in, when the Jews get grafted into their tree, that will be revival, life from the dead. That will be the whole one new man coming together, revival of the Gentile church, coming to the Father in the covenant that the Father set, and then it will be one new man, the Jews coming in, the Gentiles coming in, and then we will have fulfilled our destiny, and Israel will have fulfilled her destiny. And then Yeshua can come and rule and reign from His land in Jerusalem.

Malachi 4 also sets a little picture that we must understand. Malachi 4:5, "Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse." There we have the curse again. This word "curse" here is different. That curse that God was going to bring to the people who ignored Israel was to find them detestable. This curse at the end will be done if we don't do what we're supposed to do. That word is C-H-A-R-A-M, Charam, and it means to destroy. That will be at the end. He will destroy. Elijah the prophet, and we know that John the Baptist came in that name of Elijah the prophet, is to turn the hearts of the fathers, not just our earthly fathers and the earthly children, but to turn again, as we saw with the elder son and the younger son, to turn the heart of the people of God on all levels back to God's people, and to turn God's people's hearts back to them. Again, that we would be one people. God wants one people.

He died for the whole of His people who receive Him. So, if the fathers don't turn to the sons, which is the Jew and the Gentile, and the sons don't turn to the fathers, again, the Jew and the Gentile, that will be standing in a place of destruction. We have a tall order here to get back on the path because we have been led off the path of our destiny by following false doctrines and teachings that led to cursing instead of blessing. Those doctrines are not getting weaker; they're getting stronger. Those doctrines are being used by people who aren't even Christians. The church should be the ones that are standing up and refuting them, not the ones that are espousing them. So, we're going to end with this one scripture that puts it all in a nutshell. Isaiah 51:1–4, "Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness, who ask the Lord, look to the rock from which you were hewn and to the quarry from which you were cut. Look to Abraham, your father, and to Sarah who gave birth to you. When I called him, he was only one man, and I blessed him and made him many. The Lord will surely comfort Zion and will look with compassion on all her ruins. He will make her deserts like Eden, her wastelands like the garden of the Lord. Joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the sound of singing. Listen to me, my people. Hear me, my nation. Instructions will go out from me, and my justice will become a light to the Gentiles."

So, God is giving us encouragement and an exhortation. Look to your father Abraham. Come back to the rock from which we were cut out, which is Israel, which is God using Israel. You cannot separate it. If we don't come back, we will stay wandered off the path, and we will be online for destruction and cursing. So, Father, we thank You, Lord. We thank You that You will never leave us or forsake us. We thank You that You desire that we know the truth, and the truth that we know when we practice it will set us free and put us back on the path that You have set us on before we wandered off. We ask for Your help. We ask for understanding of what we should do, what we need to do, and what we have done that we should not have done. And we give it to You. We thank You, Lord, that You are a merciful, just, holy, loving, and faithful God. We trust you to bring us to the place that You desire for us to be. B'Shem Yeshua. Amen.