Judging Him Faithful
HEBREWS 11:8-19
8 By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. (When you obey the voice of God for God’s purpose for your life, then there is an inheritance attached to your obedience to that voice)
9 By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, (the land of promise for us is the opened word that we have come into in this hour) dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise:
10 For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.
11 Through faith also Sara herself received strength to conceive seed, and was delivered of a child when she was past age, because she judged him faithful who had promised.
12 Therefore sprang there even of one, and him as good as dead, so many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which is by the sea shore innumerable. (An entire nation of people came out of this event of Abraham and Sara being in the land of promise, and then out of another event of what it looked like the promise of God had totally failed)
13 These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.
14 For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country.
15 And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned.
16 But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city.
17 By faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac: and he that had received the promises offered up his only begotten son (A type of Christ),
18 Of whom it was said, That in Isaac shall thy seed be called: (Notice the point here – If Abraham had killed his son Isaac, then to all human reasoning, how would God ever be able to keep His promise. And so this was the ultimate test of Abraham’s faith in that he had to believe that not even death would hinder God from performing His promised word to him.
Many times, if someone dies from an illness, the faith that people seemed to have had for them to be healed is suddenly gone, because they consider not that God can still perform His promise even after the full stop of death.
And this problem can affect many people subconsciously into judging that God is not always faithful to keep His word, because it looks like it had ended in total failure, and then they let their faith become damaged by that experience so that next time they believe even less – but God is always faithful and able to keep His word, even if he has to raise the person back up from the dead again.)
19 Accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead; from whence also he received him in a figure.
Abraham’s faith in God had no full stop of human reasoning attached to it because he judged Him faithful who had made the promise – and that is the faith that is to be restored to us by the ministry of Malichi 4’s message.
*We have been promised a resurrection, a body change, and a rapture in this hour – and so we are to judge the one who made that promise “FAITHFUL”.
Judging Him Faithful
HEBREWS 11:11
11 Through faith also Sara herself received strength to conceive seed, and was delivered of a child when she was past age, because she judged him faithful who had promised.
*When we look at the overall picture and theme of the book of Job. It wasn’t that Job’s three friends were necessarily wrong with the many things of what they were saying about how that God is a just God etc. (because He is).
***In fact, many things that they were saying were totally true, but what made it not true was that they were applying it wrongly in that they were misinterpreting the reason of what was happening to Job by applying their humanistic and intellectual reasoning as to answers that would explain Job’s great tragedy and loss. *And this is were we also get ourselves into all sorts of confusion as to how God is dealing with us with regards to our own lives and circumstances, and we can come up with all kinds of wrong interpretations that look so right but can actually be totally wrong.
*But then when Elihu came along at the end, he typed the eagle age prophetic (Christ) like anointing that was able to fly up higher into the thoughts of God of where the true answers lay. And the mystery of it all was to pull out a depth of a revelation of the coming redeemer, and of how that man shall rise again after death (life after death), showing that death is not the end.
*And so everyone had been accusing Job wrong because his life was being misunderstood, and Job himself also misunderstood the events of his own life – and God was being misunderstood by the way that He had been dealing with the events of Job’s life.
***And then when we see how that God delt with Abraham and Sarah with their circumstances of life, it seemed like that they also had every human justification to judge God wrongly - of Him being unfaithful to keep His promise to them, because they had reached a stage of where they were now in effect as good as dead people, and God had not yet made good on his promise of them having a baby.
***But there was a big difference with them and many others - they didn’t consider death as a hindrance to God from being able to keep his promise to them.
**There is another place in the bible of where we see someone die of a sickness of which it looked very much like you could have judged God for not being faithful – and we touch on this a little last week.
JOHN 11:1-4
1 ¶ Now a certain man was sick, named Lazarus, of Bethany, the town of Mary and her sister Martha.
2 (It was that Mary which anointed the Lord with ointment, and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick.)
3 Therefore his sisters sent unto him, saying, Lord, behold, he whom thou lovest is sick.
4 When Jesus heard that, he said, This sickness is not unto death (Notice that he is conveying clearly to His disciples that Lazarus will not die from this sickness – and so there is no confusion here as to what he is saying to them), but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby.
(We think that when someone dies of a sickness that they are dead, but not so according to God’s thinking)
JOHN 11:14-15
14 Then said Jesus unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead. (What is going on here? He had just told them that Lazarus wouldn’t die, and now he is telling them that he is dead)
15 And I am glad for your sakes that I was not there (Jesus was actually glad that He had done a “no show” in the lives of his beloved friends at their most needy hour), to the intent ye may believe; nevertheless let us go unto him.
And so we notice in verse 4 that Jesus told His disciples that Lazarus wouldn’t die from this sickness, but then in verse 14 He is announcing to them that he had died from his sickness, and so we must realize that both answer are true in that the first one is God’s language of His higher realm of reasoning, and the second one is man’s language of human reasoning.
We could all ask ourselves a question here – whose reasoning do you think was the true one, God’s or Man’s?
Remember our other scriptures from last week…
PSALM 10:1
1 ¶ Why standest thou afar off, O LORD? why hidest thou thyself in times of trouble? (This was Martha’s and Mary’s experience - and it will also be our experience at times)
Psalm 42:7
Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterfalls: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me (that was certainly Job’s experience).
And in this story with Martha and Mary, Jesus had literally stood afar off and had allowed the great waves of the ocean as it were to billow over this little family of Martha and Mary and their beloved brother, yet it was all for a greater purpose that was unknown to them at the time, and that purpose was to pull out and reveal a deep that was deeper down inside of them.
And this is why that God will often use times of trouble to bring out the deep that is hidden down within us and to reveal His truth to us in a deeper way.
**Look at Matha’s response because of how the word for that hour had lifted her reasoning up into a higher realm of reasoning of where she judged him faithful under such conditions of what would appear to be the greatest disaster of their lives.
JOHN 11:21-22
21 Then said Martha unto Jesus, Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died.
22 But I know, that even now, whatsoever thou wilt ask of God, God will give it thee.
This is showing us the level of faith that we are to come into in this day just before the resurrection can take place in this hour – a faith that is able to judge Him faithful under the most unreasonable conditions of human logic that would humanistically accuse God of being unfaithful.
There is a wonderful hymn written by Thomas Chisholm in 1923…
Great is Thy faithfulness, O God my Father
There is no shadow of turning with Thee
Thou changest not, Thy compassions, they fail not
As Thou hast been, Thou forever will be…
In our opening scripture a few weeks back, we read:
PSALM 36:5-9
5 ¶ Thy mercy, O LORD, is in the heavens; and thy faithfulness reacheth unto the clouds.
6 Thy righteousness is like the great mountains; thy judgments are a great deep: O LORD, thou preservest man and beast.
7 How excellent is thy lovingkindness, O God! therefore the children of men put their trust under the shadow of thy wings.
8 They shall be abundantly satisfied with the fatness of thy house; and thou shalt make them drink of the river of thy pleasures.
9 For with thee is the fountain of life: in thy light shall we see light.
“In Thy light (and His light is the revealed word of God) shall we see light”. **When we begin to walk in the revealed word of this hour of the light of the concepts of God of the higher realm of His eternal purpose and thoughts, then we begin to realize answers to some of the questions that we have had of our own lives and struggles and of the past ages of other people’s lives and struggles. Because it has already been written of us in the word, and just as God was faithful with all the believers of the scriptures that have walked this same walk that we are now walking, then He will also be faithful with us now.
**It is important for us not to forget that in each case of how God deals with a person’s life, it is always going to be uniquely different for each individual, and this is why that only God can truly know the perfect reason and purpose as to why certain things happen – and this is why we must come to a place of full confidence to know that He is faithful to work it all out at the end for our good, and when He reveals it all to us on the other side, we will be so amazed and grateful for His dealing with us in the way that He did.
***We must realize that often Gods ways of how He deals with us are far more complicated than we could ever understand on this side – but if we would only “Judge Him Faithful” like Abraham and Sarah did, and like Job did, and like Joseph did, and like Rahab did, and like king David did, and like Matha did, as well as many others, then we can be certain that there will always be a very good reason for every disappointment of life, and that He will work that disappointment out for an ultimate and lasting good.
II TIMOTHY 4:16a
16 ¶ At my first answer no man stood with me, but all men forsook me: (We would ask ourselves – how could this be good?)
**Last week we spoke about how that Paul’s ministry looked like the power of God had left it. It looked like that God’s faithfulness had failed in his life, because Paul appeared to have become so weak to the point that it looked like God had left him.
*The coppersmith had run him out of town.
*He had left his friend sick.
*His companion Demas had forsaken him.
*He only had one coat (and so on).
*And yet we see how that God had used him to write most of the letters of the New Testament of which was the opening of the word of a prophetic gift. And so when Brother Branham gets towards the end of 1962 (on the 8th and 9th of September 1962), he preaches a series of 3 services at his home tabernacle of which we spoke of last week. On the Saturday night he preaches “Present Stage of My Ministry”, then “Countdown” on the Sunday morning, and then “In His Presence” on the Sunday evening.
*First the rejection of what looks like everything has failed and that God’s power had left his ministry, but then the chemicals of the word are to be put together in order for a people to be able to leave this earth by a countdown and go into His presence.