The Silent Years Pt.3
EZEKIEL 37:1-14
1 ¶ The hand of the LORD was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the LORD (Like John in the book of Revelation was carried in the spirit to this end time age), and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones,
2 And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry.
3 And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord GOD, thou knowest. (Notice here – can these bones that have been laying in silence for many years in the hot sun be resurrected to life again)
4 Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the LORD.
(These bones could not have experienced a more silent condition than the condition of having been laying on the surface of the earth and drying out in the hot sun for all those years – it doesn’t get any more silent.)
5 Thus saith the Lord GOD unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live:
6 And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the LORD.
7 So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking ((Notice here – when the prophecy was about to come to pass, there was a noise, and that noise began to break the silence of all those previous years), and the bones came together, bone to his bone.
(We are going to notice here that each stage of restoration came by and after the prophecy of when the voice of a prophet of God had spoken – and it is also in this age of what we are living in now of where we have seen and heard a prophet’s prophecy that has been spoken over us concerning of a resurrection in this day – and so these dry bones are showing us something of how that we must first endure a certain amount of the years of silence and dryness before the resurrection will come – in other words, there will be years of silence that preceded the fulfilment of the prophecy, and so this connects to our own personal lives also of what God has ordained for us. It’s like the barren woman of the bible – they had to endure a season of bareness first.)
8 And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them.
9 Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.
*Again, we notice how that each layer and the advancement of life could only come after the prophecy was spoken by the voice of the prophet.
Resurrection follows the voice of a prophet.
AMOS 3:7
7 Surely the Lord GOD will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets.
The Silent Years Pt.3
Continue reading from EZEKIEL 37:9-14
Picking up from verse 9 again…
9 Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.
10 So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.
11 Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts. (This is a place that many people will come to at some point in their lives)
12 Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel.
13 And ye shall know that I am the LORD, when I have opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up out of your graves,
14 And shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land: then shall ye know that I the LORD have spoken it, and performed it, saith the LORD.
**We want to briefly look into a little more of the history of what took place during these 400 years of silence that we have been talking about in previous services, of what took place between the time period of Malachi and Matthew because there is a great lesson in this for us.
Firstly, there was actually around 450 years between the time events of Malachi and Matthew, but has been traditionally rounded off to 400 years for the sake of simplicity.
This “silence” of these 400 years between Malachi and Matthew is not referring to an absence of events, but it is referring to the absence of a prophetic voice of God speaking during that time that was able to be accepted as scripture. In other words, there had been no prophet that God had raised up during that time that was able to conveyed the voice of God to the people.
*But we know that during those four centuries, history was being very busy in that it was readying the stage of which the Gospel of Matthew would open up in of the world of the New Testament.
And this world that the New Testament would be opened up in would be a very different looking world to the world of what we saw 400 years earlier in Malachi.
**And so all the details of the history of what took place during those 400 silent years – we saw how that it was God preparing the stage for the first coming of the Lord.
*During those 400 years, temples were built and destroyed, books were written, armies marched and conquered, and theology was developed along with new institutions that would forever change the religious landscape and that would define the religious world for the next 2,000 years.
*And this is why that when you leave Malachi and open your bible (one page latter) in the book of Matthew, the entire scenery had changed, because now in the New Testament you begin to read words like “Synagogue” of which was a Jewish religious gathering place that became the forefather of our churches today. And the word “Sanhedrin” which was the Jewish judicial assembly (they were the Jewish legislative body that condemned Christ), and also the words “Pharisees” and “Sadducees” of which none of these words or groups of people existed back in the Old Testament in Malachi’s time.
*And so Matthew opens up in a completely new world of cultural and religious order that God by His great providence had taken 400 years to set that stage up for the specific purpose so that all the scriptures concerning all the prophecies of the life of Christ that had been written about him in mystery form throughout all of the Old Testament could be fulfilled to the letter.
*During those 400 years we saw the development and spread of the Greek culture, language, philosophy, customs, and education due to Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire thus bringing Greek culture and language to the entire region. It's what they called Hellenization and is known as the Hellenistic period.
*Hellenization is the historical and cultural process in which non-Greek people adopted the language, religion, art, architecture, and social customs of ancient Greece.
**And so that part of history wasn’t like a war with army’s fighting each other, but it was a war of an overwhelming cultural flood, and this is what we see the repeat of in our time today – an overwhelming cultural flood that is spreading and uniting the whole world in sin and in unbelief.
And so because of all of that, the Greek language became the international language of the known world from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, and it was actually this language that prepared the world for the spread of the gospel of Christin the New Testament.
*It was during this time between Malachi and Matthew that the Hebrew Old Testament scriptures were translated into the Greek language called the "Septuagint" around 285–246 BC.
The word Septuagint comes from the Latin word for seventy (septuaginta), meaning the translation of the 70, reflecting the account that 70 or 72 Jewish elders of whom were chosen to do this translation, and it was this translation that became the primary Old Testament of the early Christian Church and of which the New Testament authors frequently quoted directly from this Greek version rather than from the original Hebrew text.
In fact many Jews (depending on where they lived) had almost forgotten how to speak Hebrew, as Greek was the most commonly used language of the day to communicate in.
*But then also during those silent years, the same Greek culture that prepared a language for the gospel to be spread by at the time of the New Testament had also tried to destroy the faith of Israel.
*In 175 BC Antiochus iv took the Seleucid throne and imposed Hellenization by force upon the Jews. He banned them from circumcision, and from the keeping of the Sabbath, and even from the study of the Torah.
In 167 BC, he desecrated the temple in Jerusalem and erected an altar to Zeus, and then sacrificed a pig on the altar.
But Israel fought back. The Jewish priest Mattathias and his sons started the revolt known as the Maccabean Revolt (also known as the Hasmonean Revolt). Mattathias refused to comply with the decrees of king Antiochus iv. And after killing a royal official and a Hellenized Jew who stepped forward to offer a pagan sacrifice, Mattathias and his five sons fled into the hills, sparking a successful guerrilla war for religious freedom and political independence. *Following Mattathias's death, leadership of the rebellion passed to his third son, Judas Maccabeus, also known as “the hammer”; under his leadership the Jews retook Jerusalem and purified the temple in 164 BC.
*And it was this rededication of the temple that gave rise to the festival of Hanukkah mentioned in John 10:22.
22 ¶ And it was at Jerusalem the feast of the dedication, and it was winter.
*After this victory, the Maccabees founded their own dynasty, the Hasmoneans. And for the first time in four centuries, Israel had again become an independent nation until the Maccabean dynasty formally ended in 37 BCE when Herod the Great (backed by Rome) executed the last Hasmonean ruler and seized total control for Rome.
**And so in hindsight we see how that it took all of these very complex events of history to transpire in this exact way in order to set the theatre and the stage along with all the right actors and all the right props being established before the events of the prophecies concerning the coming of Christ and all the events of his life could sit upon that historical background and foundation in order to fulfil scripture.
***And so if God is so particular about every little detail of dealing with world events in this way, then this is also the pattern and the way that he does for each of our lives also – and this is why we can know for sure that all of the struggles and the problems, and all of the things that often look so wrong in our lives that we face along the journey of our lives, that God is in full control of every detail of it for the purpose to have us come into a position to fulfil the prophecy of the word concerning our lives.
*And so we must learn to enter into the “rest” of what the knowledge of that revelation brings to us, and to learn to wait and trust with expectation in knowing that God is working all things out for our good – because that is the knowledge of where our strength is renewed from.
*All the problems in the world today is just the stage being set up so that all the scriptures concerning this end time hour can be fulfilled.
ISAIAH 30:15a
15 For thus saith the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel; In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength:
**Ruth and Naomi’s life had come to a place that life seemed to have become very barren and unfruitful, of what seemed like God was not involved in their lives to the point that they thought that they were living under some sort of curse. But the fact was that all of their previous history had brought them to a place of where God would use their lives to reveal a prophecy of future peoples.
RUTH 1:19-22
19 ¶ So they two went until they came to Bethlehem. And it came to pass, when they were come to Bethlehem, that all the city was moved about them, and they said, Is this Naomi?
20 And she said unto them, Call me not Naomi, call me Mara: for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me. (Notice – she has misunderstood God. She thinks that God is against her – but He wasn’t.)
21 I went out full, and the LORD hath brought me home again empty: why then call ye me Naomi, seeing the LORD hath testified against me, and the Almighty hath afflicted me?
22 So Naomi returned, and Ruth the Moabitess, her daughter in law, with her, which returned out of the country of Moab: and they came to Bethlehem in the beginning of barley harvest.
*There is one thing that we can be certain about as message believers, and that is that we are living at the harvest time of where the prophecy of the fulfilment of what the mystery of this story is conveying to us is taking place.
In other words, this harvest time part of this story of the book of Ruth is being fulfilled right now, because we already see that Naomi’s part is fulfilled, because Israel is back in their homeland. And we see how that Boaz’s part is being fulfilled, and so we know that Ruth’s part must also be right now in the process of being fulfilled too.
*And so if Christ is fulfilling the Boaz part, and Israel is fulfilling the Naomi part, then there must be a people on earth right now who (just like Mary), who will wake up to understand the mystery of their lives that has been written of in the bible for this hour, and to see the level of what their relationship with Christ is ordained to be in the time and season they are living in.
*And so in this hour, we must come to understand how that Ruth’s position changed when Boaz gave her the six measures of barley, because the giving of those six measures of barley signified His unfailing words of promise to her. “I will finish the thing this day - All that thou requirest of me, I will do it!”
And we have been given 6 measures of barley also – the opening of the 6 seals – Christ himself being the 7th seal of the unveiling of Himself.
RUTH 3:17-18
17 And she said, These six measures of barley gave he me; for he said to me, Go not empty unto thy mother in law.
18 Then said she, Sit still, my daughter, until thou know how the matter will fall: for the man will not be in rest, until he have finished the thing this day.
*We have been talking about how that the prophecy of scripture is the most powerful thing that governs and overrules everything else in the universe, because it is the thought and word of God that is actually the fundamental thing that controls everything else that exists right down to the last atom and particle.
THINGS.THAT.ARE.TO.BE_ RIALTO.CA V-4 N-6 SUNDAY_ 65-1205
31 You were all pre-planned by God. Nothing happens by chance, with God. He knows all about it. It's all pre-planned, planned for many generations back, so that you could be here tonight. Did you know that?
LETTING.OFF.THE.PRESSURE_ JEFF.IN V-5 N-11 SUNDAY_ 62-0513E
145 … Nothing happens by chance; everything is ordained of God. No matter what happens, all things are going to work together for good.
HABAKKUK 2:3
3 For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie: though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry.