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CHAPTER FOUR
JERUSALEM GATEWAY TO GLORY:
A POSITIVE CITY, SYMBOL AND
LEAD TO JERUSALEM ABOVE
IN WHAT SENSE ?
Jerusalem is no more the gateway to glory than is Mt Sinai the mount to condemnation. In this respect, it is a symbolic matter.
Galatians 4:21-30 uses these symbols to great effect. Speaking to those who felt circumcision an essential, being a part of the entire catalogue of the Law, here Paul reprimands their error, since the Law had been fulfilled in its sacrificial enormity of symbolic features and foci; and its covenantal conditions, where specific to Israel, were not the repository for other nations (cf. Romans 11), though the fruits of contractual undertakings from the Lord (Genesis 17:7-9) would continue to apply in terms of divine mercy outside the centre of salvation (Micah 7:15ff., Ezekiel 36-37, Romans ). For that matter, the New Covenant, without removing what was not yet fulfilled, DID remove what was; and in the whole circumcision-baptism area, the replacement was total (Colossians 2:11-12).
What God had promised, stood (Romans 11:29); many symbols however were removed, and with divine payment for sin completed on the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, its provisions now took precedence. Indeed, Jesus became spiritually the new Jerusalem, the new site for worship, and the new Temple, the core of it, and new Sacrifice, the completion of all such sacrifice in one coup! That replaced the foregoing and its preliminary phase, such as introductory rites. Hence in Galatians 5, Paul tells them to stand fast "in the liberty by which Jesus Christ has made us free," Christ who came as Jewish in race, while always deity with grace. Paul used symbols at this point.
Consider, he urged as so led by the Lord. There were two children born to Abraham which illustrate the message. One was born, not in terms of the covenant concerning the blessing to all nations (Genesis 12), through a maid (given, for this purpose, by Sarah to Abraham with a view to getting descendants, essential to the promise and to his whole life before the Lord). This maid was named Hagar, her son Ishmael, and the other child, Isaac, was born through Abraham's wife, later. That was Sarah.
Hagar's son was NOT born according to the promise to Abraham, and typifies Mt Sinai, where the Law was given, with its stringent conditions, exhibited (as Paul shows in Romans 7), to show the exceedingly sinful character of sin. It shone like light on steel, and its exactions were to help mankind to find the cutting edge of truth, and to look for the Messiah (as in Deuteronomy 18) and deliverance (as in Deuteronomy 32). This can come ONLY from God, since reality is so holy for righteousness that without Him, you can do nothing (as in Psalm 32, 130:3 - "If You, Lord, should mark iniquity, who would stand ? But with You there is forgiveness, that You may be feared"). Indeed the entire sacrificial system expounded this in depth and in detail.
As Ishmael, Hagar's son was not born from Abraham's wife, and did not partake of the covenant, then to insist on the continuation of what Christ had already fulfilled, even in the day of Paul, was like insisting on being a descendant of Ishmael, in itself, a thing outside the specific covenantal provisions of God to Abraham. Indeed, for that matter, in Genesis 16:11-12 we find that Ishmael's hand would be against the hand of others, and that he would be an untutored man of strife. In the step of having this child through the maid of Sarah, as it were in desperation, there had been that form of desperation which wants to help God along. No child ? Getting very old ? Better do something! This is always unwise, desperation instead of faith.
GOD says it, HE will do it. God gave the promise concerning descendants: HE would fulfil it, and therefore whatever it took.
You keep the rules and wait upon Him, not making your own steps to adorn the promises, far less deviating from any righteous path. God is a Spirit and in spirit you proceed, NEVER allowing circumstances to be your King.
Then, using these two as symbols, Hagar's child and Sarah's, Paul looks at Isaac in particular. God told Abraham this, (Genesis 21:12). "In Isaac shall your seed be called." That is, here is the way in which the vast promises to the Jewish people and to the world are going to be fulfilled, as in Genesis 12. Paul's point: if you insist on the Old Covenant, now that Christ has come, you resemble those who want to share their lot with Hagar's son, not a child of promise, and this means in symbol, working things out for yourself, without underlying grant of grace. To be sure, Ishmael has a place and a racial future assured, but it was not a thing of promise in which blessing would come, but on the contrary, his hand would be against the hand of others, and he would be a wild man, surging and seeking to prevail (Genesis 16:11-12).
IF, Paul is saying, you want grace and blessing, liberty and promise, THEN do NOT become attached to the Law as your means, for this is would now be a matter of wilfully proceeding on a way, NOT that of promised grace. Rather proceed by the way of Jerusalem, the blessing promised, the outcome of faith, the centre found at last for Israel, aligning with the Jesus of joy and grace. This symbolises freedom, for there He actually fulfilled the bearing of the burden of sin, applied by the law, in Himself. In symbol, this is Jerusalem the FREE, Jerusalem above, the symbol of the capital city of David, chosen to be forbear to the Saviour according to the flesh. Here sin's claim was met, sentence was given, and in the love and mercy of God, Christ faced it as Shepherd and Saviour for those who so receive Him by faith, according to His word. HERE is the covenant of liberty, with release through ransom at its outset!
Jerusalem continues to have symbolic significance. It remains a provision of grace to Israel as a nation, not as a means of salvation, which however it does symbolise in that Christ died there (Galatians 6:14), but as a keepsake from the Lord, the place where the capital of the land of the Jews had its temple which, while now irrelevant in that Christ is Himself the new temple (Hebrews 4-10), is yet the terminus for the promise to Israel. It stands for the land, and as such is the site where the Lord will come (Zechariah 14:5) personally as He institutes the millenium (Revelation 20-21).
It is a gateway to glory, then, in two respects. Firstly, it is the site of the sacrifice which alone makes blessing and peace and pardon available to mankind. Secondly, it is the site for the return of Jesus Christ, not that He is delimited in His glorified resurrection body, but He is able to take up site and rule as He will, and so He will (Micah 4, Isaiah 11).
There is however a further aspect in which this phrase is applicable to Jerusalem. It is this, from the mouth of Jesus Christ. It is a chronometer, accurate, reliable and intensively significant.
Take two declaration of Jesus Christ.
JERUSALEM THE CHRONOMETER
In Matthew 24:1-2 ( cf. 23:38), Luke 21:24 we find information point A. Jerusalem, looking ahead from His day in it, would be left desolate, the city of promise imprisoned in desolation; and it is to be squelched underfoot, ruled and controlled by unsympathetic rulers who would not even be Jewish.
That happened in A.D. 70-1967 (with part freeing in 1948), giving Jerusalem, AD 30-70, a generation to repent; and then came the ruin. It was substantially, but not entirely, the ruin of a nation untrue to its promised provisions, and moving to lapse as in Leviticus 26, with its forecast of exile.
Then you have some two millenia, two days in the terminology of II Peter 3:9, in generic terms.
Then you have the second half of Luke 21:24. This is information point B. This tells us that this treading down of Jerusalem BY the Gentiles will continue UNTIL this said time of the Gentiles is over! There is thus a phrase, one corresponding to a phase, a period in history. You could call it the Age of the Gentiles in the Gospel perspective, their time, their counterpart to the time from Abraham to Christ where Israel was called as testimony to divine truth (cf. Isaiah 43:21).
Then, this time of the Gentiles past, the crushing under foot of Jerusalem by their power, will cease. It will no more apply. It was defined as to continue only to that point. That is now past.
It will thus no more then be the case that the Gentiles have this privilege, from the Jewish point of view, a rebuke to them even permitting an idolatrous Mosque to be sitting very close to the Temple site of old. Since they are in this case yet to be converted in heart, they are simply given back Jerusalem, complete with such anomalies as may remind that they STILL as a nation have not embraced the New Covenant in their own Messiah. The Old Temple is fulfilled. So it can have anything where it was, till its time for purging comes.
Thus their current failure to return to the Lord Jesus Christ, may indeed be mirrored by anomalies in their landscape; but the city is theirs. The TIME was to COME when this would be so, when Gentiles would NO MORE bear rule over the city. That time has now come. The world proposed many other options, even one in another continent! and bits of land, not even in one piece, with Jerusalem an international city (brain-child of the UN, with many Islamic members). However, God acted differently, giving Jerusalem, key symbol and warning of history, back to Israel. That of course included her return to her land, which happened some 40 years before she gained the rest of the city.
Thus the recovery from the Gentiles happened in two stages, 1948, when it was abandoned by the UN, and surrounding nations invaded it in unison, and in 1967, when Israel sought to cut the noose which Egypt was constructing around its maritime throat, and succeeded in gaining the second half of Jerusalem, 1948 having given it the city, only to the Mandelbaum Gate.
Christ, then, foreseeing and forecasting, set this in a milieu, an environment. It including as in Luke 21:25, lunar and siderial signs, the former having indeed occurred once for the entire Gentile Age, in 1969 when the USA had its landing on the moon; nor is this the only aspect to be sought there, since this same moon has vast appeal to the nations as a site for war! Asteroids are now reported as being often near to the earth, and are being watched with concern, but without adequate coverage. Worse appears to be coming (Revelation 8:10-11). International turbulence, wars innumerable, threatening, happening become part of the scenario (Luke 21:9 cf. Matthew 24:6-9). We have traced these things in some detail in SMR Ch. 8, but for the present it is simply one facet which attracts our attention, that concerning Jerusalem.
It is a symbol then, as Paul uses it. But what is a symbol ? It is an intellectual item, imagined, confirmed item, which represents something else. If the symbol is correctly applied, then then the something else is in view. Secondly, if the setting of the symbol, as in an equation or historical application, is invoked, is activated, then what it represents comes into focus, moves into action. E=MC2. That is a collection of symbols. It represents something there. If now you wish to activate this, turn the E*1 for energy into the other side in mass with velocity as specified, then things happen. The realities symbolised act as depicted in symbolic form (provided the equation is true).
Jerusalem in eschatology, in the last things for our Age, as for that matter for the 'first things', those important, has a large symbolic inheritance! It IS the place where Christ died; it IS the ONE setting which God required for worship when Israel should come to its promised land*2. It IS the place where Christ is to return, a centre for rule. It is the said capital city, religious hub and centre, for the rule to come of Christ, as for the conversion of a large swath of Israel, as in Zechariah 12:10-13:1, when that land returns to the Lord in heart and in Spirit (as also in Ezekiel 37, where first the land is returned to Israel, then they are brought back to spiritual life, just as in Zechariah, the Lord Himself comes to rule, so that all realise as in Ezekiel 39, where an invasion is annihilated, that it was for their sins that Israel left it, and from the Lord that it remains now, that this is healed. He rules the nations (Micah 4, Isaiah 2).
To be sure, this time, this millenial rule also, like the Age of the Gentiles, having made its point, symbol being released into reality, will pass. The Lord's word and plan however, this will come like the dawning after the night, and none of His words will fall to the ground. Each phase has its day, makes its way, teaches its lesson, opens vision and confirms the word of the Lord, so that the Lord of the word may be trusted by those who look for Him, utterly faithful, able to do exceedingly abundantly above all we ask or think. When the God Almighty power and pity moves, look to Him: for there is safety, but in collision and confrontation, is mere headstrong self-assertion.
To the present then, let us attend. Currently, we have the symbol and substance combined, for activation has occurred, in one respect. That ? It is that the nations, the Gentiles, the non-Jews no longer have the physical rule over this land, and it is still being proclaimed as the eternal capital of Israel, by its Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
This activation means something. Set in its 'equation', that is in the historical setting of unwinding events, it means that firstly, it is to be checked for other parts of that equation, such as Luke 21 and Matthew 24 specify and itemise. As seen in SMR Ch. 8 and Answers to Questions Ch. 5, these are present in lavish proportions, almost stunningly, as was the atomic bomb when it first exploded. The EXTENT to which the surrounding members of the eschatological equation appear is staggering. That much now is also covered.
Next we examine what is the outcome, on the other side of the equation. You have Israel back in Jerusalem, all of it, these 43 years, after some1900 years, as foretold; and you have all these surrounding 'terms' in the construction of events, together with it. What is the outcome on the other side of it ? It is this: the time for the personal return of the Lord Jesus Christ to this earth is now divinely designated: NEAR. That is the term on the right-hand side of the equation. That is the outcome. Yes, earthquakes, pestilences, plagues, fearful sights, signs in the heaven, all come, but there is the simple outcome. Yes, there is also to be intensive persecution of Christians, those following Him and so inheriting this 'new' name (Isaiah 62, 65:13-15), as in Luke 21:12. That merely confirms the terms.
These are terms on the left hand side of the equation. There are more. Yes there will be divine power given to testify of Christ (Luke 21:13-15) as one has found indeed to be true, and applicable by the grace of God; and there will moreover be betrayals of a cutting kind where spiritual things separate and dishonesty abounds, and all this we see, likewise. But again, what is on the right side of the equation, for the left one has many items. All this has to happen. Jerusalem moreover had to be flattened (as stated from the lips of Christ during His stag on this earth) : 21:20-23. It was. This took its place in the early phases of the Gentile rule, as an aside, as a necessary preliminary, on the way to the return of Christ. The signals were numerous, but there was this coup AGAINST Jerusalem to make way for the coup of its RETURN. You cannot restore what is not taken away, and to that Luke 21:20-23 refers.
You have to endure through all these things (Luke 21:17-19). It is not as if, amid such things, Jerusalem is first of all delivered. Not at all: for long it remains captive (21:20-23), but with the passing of the Gentile Age, it is freed and becomes free for Israel. In the interim, indeed, we see a captive Jerusalem, a destroyed Jerusalem, a ruled over Jerusalem in the hands of those who did not at the first build it up, glorious in the day of Christ, but soon to be inglorious as they seceded then from the Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9, Matthew 24:1ff.), because it did not know "the day of your visitation".
Then, in the midst of these things, there are two actions. Firstly, the signals will intensify, as in Luke 21:25-28, and secondly this one signal will be unique in KIND. As in Luke 21:24, Jerusalem is now FREED into the hands of Israel. It speaks like the voice of the hostess, as the servants complete the preparation for the State dinner! Before all these things (Luke 21:12, re 21:8-11), much was to happen, including the destruction of Jerusalem. Indeed, this was but a phase leading on to 'these things', which are to move, as they have moved, as surrounding identifying data for the return of Christ. They were to be so; they are so.
All this being so on the left side of the equation, on the right side there is but one term at this point: there is to be a new event. The return of Israel to the Jews, it is one thing, epochal, like its destruction in A.D. 70. It is to be seen in the news context of the return of Christ to the world. What is the time relationship of these two things, the first in context as given ? It is that this RETURN is now specifiable as "NEAR."
An Age has passed, and it turned out to be some 2000 years, like that from Abraham to Christ, the Jewish age (as instruments following the flood and starting with Abraham, of the news of salvation from the Lord). This Gentile Age has shown many things and is ending ignominiously, as did the Jewish Age in the crucifixion of Christ. It is, as we saw in Ch. 5 and 5 Appendix above, a time of turmoil and moral and spiritual squalor with many misleaders, who duplicate the role of the priestly disposers of Christ, seeking to turn many from Him in OUR Age, the Gentile Age. This also, this is now, with much in detail shown in SMR Ch. 8, News 121, 122 and other sites available at UNITY in the index.
TERM TIME ENDS:
REJOICE FOR THE HOLY REST COMES
Among Much Jubilation
Now then, what is this, our own day in this world ? This ? it is end of term time, exam time. It is no holiday. On the contrary, much is being examined right now. The date is unknown for getting your papers back, but the fact is that this is exam time, and the result announcements, in the form of the return of Jesus Christ, they are NEAR. It is so near that it is a time for a special change in expectation. We are now to "lift up" our "hearts" (Luke 21:28). That is, relief is near, expectation now may be intense, longing looks for its soon satiation. The resurrection, the redemption of the body (as in Romans 8:23, II Corinthians 5:1ff.) is near. The time when this same Jesus will return in a way similar to His going (Acts 1:7) is genuinely drawing near. It will be with great glory (cf. Mark 14:62).
It has two phases, one most blessed for His OWN people, Jew or Gentile, who have the New Covenant relationship with Him, which is part of the faith. As shown in the last two Chapters, this is expected when the Jewish nation is transformed by a new faith in the crucified Messiah. But there is this phase quite clearly demarcated, that of removal (Matthew 24:32-51) of His spiritual troops, the soldiers for Christ, who loathe violence but in peace seek to display truth in love, rescuing the lambs, feeding the sheep.
The saints, the troops for truth, the Bible purveyors, the preachers, teachers and believers in the Christ, unchanged, will be removed, as it were, on holy holiday (to the "wedding of the Lamb" as in Revelation 19:8).
The final clamour is to be among disclaimers, those who reject Him, who are not saved, who have not found Him, all these. Vast is the conflagration (Revelation 19), met by the same, and intolerable to sin is the flame and fire of truth from the Word of God (Revelation 19:13-20, II Thessalonians 1). Judgment ensues on the battle leaders, beast and false prophet, and Christ enlightens the world; and when this is done, so is it all demonstrated; and then this world and these heavens have no more place: the world HAS been around a while, but it goes, like an old car. This one had a lot of meddling done with it.
Possess then your possessions if you are a Christian. It is a Jerusalem-back-in-Israel world today, a NEAR world to the end of the Gentile Age and the withdrawal of His troops, when the number is complete (Revelation 6:10-12). Rejoice then, and as Christ exhorted, LIFT UP YOUR HEARTS. This TIME is part of your possessions, a time of delicious expectation, fearless and forceful testimony, undying love, rich concern, of a sense of privilege to be ALLOWED to be on this earth at the cross-roads of history, where at last good and evil, the former defined as alone it can meaningfully be, as the ways of God, and the latter in parallel, the ways of opposition to Him, His word and His ways, come to their separation. It is as in Matthew 13, where the wheat and the weeds, having had a measure at times when young, of similarity (for example, cunningly enlightened self-interest in the presence of actual goodness), now are seen to be utterly dissimilar in reality. It is the day of reality attestation, of revelation of actualities! and of judgment on the exponents of evil, their ways and their wiles, from the heart of divine wisdom and power (Isaiah 11,Micah 4, 7, Isaiah 59:20, Romans 11).
Rejoice! then, lift up your hearts; do not be a lap-dog which knows nothing of reality: proclaim His name. It is His day which is coming.
It is, then, simply this. God will act, as always, at His appointed time. In the case of the death of Christ, He predicted from some 600 years BC, its date; in the case of His return in regality, the exact date is hidden (Acts 1:7-8), but its REGION OF TIME IS NOT HIDDEN. Prepare for ejection from this earth, if you are His, the calling from this earth to Himself at the right time, the resurrection of the body; and continue in the interim with all PATIENCE.
If you are not yet His, then prepare for perdition, or else prepare to visit your King as Saviour by faith, and find grace in His sight through the availing mercy to be found in the cross of Christ. It too was wood, though what happened upon it is to the point, in eternal redemption for sinners seeking Him in faith; and it can be seen as symbol of salvation. However, it needs to be activated for the case, where you seek for results, and this BY FAITH. It is applicable; but it MUST be applied (Romans 10:9, John 10:9).
NOTES
Actually, it is far easier to turn moving masses into energy, as in the atomic bomb, than energy into mass and motion, each with its multiplied myriads of aspects and forms, features and specifics. That is the difference between household maintenance, and creation. You can explode what is there; but to make it, that is another matter!
Deuteronomy 12:5-11, 14:23, 26:2, Joshua 9:27. I Kings 8:29, Psalm 78:68, 132:13-14, and II Chronicles 7:16, 33:4