 Do I think we ought to hate Israel? No. Do I think we ought to love them because they're Israel? No. Because I believe that the church is the true, real, new Israel, Jew and Gentile alike. And that those people over there and that piece of land over there, they don't have eschatological significance to me. Love you, Voting, but you're wrong. You are responsible to God to get your eschatology right. It's not enough to punt. You can't do that. You've got to go in there and figure it out and when you come out, you got to know where you stand. And I think the key to getting the eschatology right is the key to getting the beginning of the story right. If your hermeneutics are the same in Genesis, you're going to be a six day creationist. If their hermeneutics, if your hermeneutics are the same in Revelation, you're going to end up with a church age, a time of tribulation, the return of Christ, the establishment of the kingdom and the new heaven and the new earth and it's just that simple. You almost have to go to school to get that unraveled. A real good friend of mine has had this little journey where he has gone from one theological view to another theological view to another theological view. Right now he is very much Calvinist. Don't have a problem with that, but the issue that I have with him and that I've tried to share this with other people is make sure that your hermeneutics, the way you read, the methodology that you employ when you are reading the scriptures, how you read the scriptures, that it stays consistent. And there's only one way that I know of to do that and that is to have a, what I would say is a dispensational hermeneutic. Doesn't necessarily mean that you have to be dispensational, though likely you'll come to that particular conclusion. It doesn't mean that you have to have all these different charts and so forth. You've got to have the same different number of different dispensations. But in truth, everybody to some degree is a dispensational list. It's just to what degree and how many dispensations that you would actually contemplate in your mind that there actually are, though the Bible doesn't lay it out that way. But the point is, how you read the Bible matters. It determines what you believe. I said I disagree with Vodibachem on his view on Israel. Now I also disagree with his Amillennialist view as well. I won't get too much into that, though his eschatology is framed by the problem. Should we love Israel because they're Israel? He says no, I say yes. Why do I say yes? Because the Bible says yes. The church and Israel are distinct. There is no getting away from that. Now, is Israel a part of the church? Yes. Is the church part of Israel? No. How do I come up with that? Because of what God is trying to do with Israel. Paul makes it clear in Romans that there is a distinction between Israel and the church. That part we can't get over. And if we look at going back to the beginnings, I think a foundational view of the Bible is paramount to understanding and to be consistent. Well, what did God say to Abraham? He said that in chapter 12 verse two, he says, and I will make you a great nation. That's singular nation. And I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing. Verse three, here it is. I will bless those who bless you. And to him who dishonors you, I will curse. And in you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed. So we are to take a literal approach in my view. Why? Remember, God calls us sheep for a reason. God didn't think that we're that smart, that we're that intelligent. We're real or not. We are, we just, we prove it over and over again how unintelligent we actually can be. And so he gives us his word in a way that we can understand it. And how they understood it then, if they understood the truth then, then whatever the truth was then is still the truth now. Remember, everything that God said to Israel, Israel took literally and every promise that he made for Israel was fulfilled, how literally, not figuratively, not by someone else becoming what Israel's supposed to be. Now, do we take part in some of the blessings that Israel also takes part in? Sure, without question, that's always been God's desire. But does God still have something for Israel? I believe that to be the case as well. When you look at the scriptures in terms of, again, keeping in line with this literal hermeneutic that we have where we don't read into something where we don't spiritualize, we don't allegorize. In other words, we don't change the way we look at it at the Bible in the Old Testament versus the way we look at it in the New Testament. And so when God says that he is going to afflict Israel in Daniel and in Jeremiah, that he is going to bring about this trouble for Israel, this tribulation, I believe he means exactly that and Israel understands that as well. How is it gonna be played out? They don't know and truth be told, we don't know fully. And this isn't so much about eschatology, it is about how you view and how you read the Bible. The hermeneutics is, I mean, if you change your rules of interpretation as you go, and particularly when you get to eschatology, you're lost. If the Bible doesn't mean what it says, then you're hopeless because how do you know what it means? If it doesn't mean what it says, well, it says you created it in six days, but it doesn't mean that, really, really. So I'm supposed to believe you, not this. The same in eschatology. I just think you have to do the work, and I think the Lord lays it out. In fact, isn't it clear that the book of Revelation starts with, blessed is the one who reads and understands this book, it isn't that difficult. You just get fogged up by people who have the wrong idea, which is the reason why you have a guy like Sproul or many others like him who go from one eschatological view to another one and shift all over the place, and keep changing. Because if it isn't what it says it is, then what it is is elusive. Now, John McCarthy at this G3 conference is making it clear that your hermeneutics matters. It shows up in the end, but it also shows up in the beginning. And if you can't be consistent, well, then now the interpretation is up to how you feel. Or it may be also how you feel about the person who read something and then how they ultimately felt about something. And I think part of it is sort of the enamoring that reform guys have had with past theologians who in the progress of dogma over the history of time hadn't lived through the development of some of the clarity which we have for eschatology. But reading books can be healthy. Reading books can be good, but also reading books and giving an improper emphasis on who you read can be unhealthy at times. I love to hear what someone else thought. I love to hear what often the early church fathers thought. I love to hear what earlier theologians, theologians in the eighth century, in the 10th century, in the 14th century, in the 18th, 19th, the 20th, I love to hear what they think because it gives me an understanding of, am I seeing this right and how do they see things? But I'm gonna place emphasis on two things. One, the actual text itself, and then two, the languages. Why? Because the languages shed light because they were written not in English, but in Hebrew and Greek with some air make. And so it's helpful to see what this word means, especially, and there are times where the plain reading, sometimes you get to another reading and you apply the plain reading to that, it may seem like these two don't quite make sense, which is where the languages come in. You rarely hear me bringing up any older theologian. Why? Because I don't wanna give too much emphasis on what they think. The scriptures, I believe, are clear and I believe the languages make them clearer. And so if my hermeneutic is correct and it's consistent, then I don't see where I would go wrong. This is where I think a person like a Vodibhatm has gone wrong. This is where a person like John MacArthur would rebuke and correct someone for having this inconsistent way of reading the Bible. You read it one way today, and it makes perfectly good sense, but then you change it and you only change it because you think there's a deeper meaning. Well, if there is a deeper meaning, if there's another meaning, if the plain understanding doesn't make sense, well then guess what you're now subject to becoming? You can become charismatic or Pentecostal. You can become any of these different views. You can even become something very heretical because now you're seeing it differently. And God did not place confidence in how you see things. He placed confidence in how he worded things and what he said. The biggest issue, though it always shows up, oftentimes shows up in how we view eschatology, the end times, is in our soteriology, in salvation. Because the foundation of what we believe as a church, the foundation was laid before the cross. What God is doing hadn't changed. His methodology may change. It's not that God has decided that I'm gonna do about faith. I'm gonna correct my course and change everything. No, he's not. God is still providing for atonement. How he's done so in a previous dispensation, namely the whole covenant, is how he's done so with Israel now in this new covenant, as well as how he's done so with Gentiles, with the rest of the world. He has provided atonement by the blood and removed sins by the scapegoat and it's mediated by a priest. That's how it was done in the old and that's how it was done in the new. But your salvation is not based on you, but it's based on your faith in the person, namely in this case, Jesus Christ, who is the mediator between us and man, as well as the scapegoat, as well as the sacrificial offering, the substitutionary atonement. And we have confidence that, unlike the way it worked under the old covenant, where this was temporary and had to be performed yearly, now this is done once and it is everlasting. And we come to this understanding because we have a good hermeneutics, a consistent literal hermeneutics. And there are times where we do not read things literally, but the Bible gives us keys, especially in a book like Revelation, where it tells us, I saw this and it was like. And so we know he's given metaphors because he cannot fully explain what he's seeing to people who can't understand what he's trying to describe. But as John MacArthur states, the way Revelation is laid out is actually pretty simple. There is a sense in which we can be as specific as the Scripture is. And I think the flow of the book of Revelation in particular lays out an unmistakable eschatology. And if you follow the flow of the book of Revelation, it becomes very obvious because the sequence of events is church age, all of a sudden you're in heaven, the saints are in heaven, all of a sudden you have all these horrible things on earth at the end of that period of time, which is a seven year period of time, Christ returns, you have a thousand year kingdom, the destruction of the creation and the new heavens and the new earth. It's the simplest chronology of any prophetic book in the entire Bible. So I don't think it's difficult. I think people get confused because there've been historically so many voices. And so it is straightforward how we believe, I believe that God is going to take the church out of before the tribulation shows up, there is going to be this time where he is going to afflict Israel, which is what he said he was going to do, the whole point of this. And then after this reign and after this battle, then there is going to be this new heaven and this new earth and we are going to reign here forever with God. I think he lays it out pretty simply. And so not to make this a point about eschatology or even a point about soteriology, it is a point about the whole of the Bible and how we read it. If you cannot be consistent, then you are guaranteeing that you are going to misinterpret scripture because now it's no longer up to and subject to the words, it's up to and subject to your understanding or what you've read or even how you feel. This is where experiences come in. And I can take my experience or my thoughts and make them fit into the words or make the words fit into what I believe or what I feel, but the words are meant to be what they say. And so when someone disagrees or even if I have a little bit of confusion with what I'm looking at, I'll always go back. What is God saying? What has he been trying to say? And how does this relate to what's been said? And am I being consistent in how I'm reading this? Friends, you want to make sure you're the exact same way. What do we call a person who says something one day but then changes his thoughts the next day or behaves differently one day from the next? We call that person hypocrite. Well, we don't want to be hypocritical in the way that we interpret the text. Amen.