165 - God's Plan for Israel [B]

God's Plan for Israel. Rev. 7:4-8

Revelation 7:4 ^NASB "And I heard the number of those who were sealed, one hundred and forty-four thousand sealed from every tribe of the sons of Israel: [5] from the tribe of Judah, twelve thousand {were} sealed, from the tribe of Reuben twelve thousand, from the tribe of Gad twelve thousand, [6] from the tribe of Asher twelve thousand, from the tribe of Naphtali twelve thousand, from the tribe of Manasseh twelve thousand, [7] from the tribe of Simeon twelve thousand, from the tribe of Levi twelve thousand, from the tribe of Issachar twelve thousand, [8] from the tribe of Zebulun twelve thousand, from the tribe of Joseph twelve thousand, from the tribe of Benjamin, twelve thousand {were} sealed.

It has been pointed out that as we come to this chapter we have basically two questions answered. The first is from 6:17: Who can stand/survive? The seventh chapter answers that. There are two groups, the Jewish group in the first part of the chapter, the 144,000 who were sealed; and then there is a Gentile group, the martyrs represented by the group that is innumerable in the second part of the chapter. The church has already been raptured and what we see here is God returning to an emphasis on Israel that was left out during the church age. In the church age the issue of Israel's ethnicity is not central to God's saving work. The Jewish dispensation ended with the crucifixion of Christ, the church age dispensation began with the day of Pentecost, and in the body of Christ our physical relationship to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is a non-issue. The second question was how a loving God could pour out such wrath on His creatures—and even more on believers because we know that there will be millions who come to trust Christ as saviour during the Tribulation period. The focus is on God's character, His justice and His love. God's character is demonstrated most fully in a universe where evil is allowed to continue for a time in order for God to fully judge evil and end suffering. And God also has a purpose though we may not fully comprehend it. But we can comprehend and understand aspects of it and we are to trust in Him that HeHeHe knows what is best.

Satan is going to try to block God and keep Him from fulfilling His promises to Israel. His attempt prior to the cross was to attack the seed of Abraham and the seed of David. This fits with Revelation chapter seven and why God is calling out these 144,000 Jews and sealing them, and why He is turning His focus to the Jews at the end time. In the Old Testament Satan attacks the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob through David in terms of both of these covenants by wiping out the Davidic line. This is a rather complicated story because it involves two or three different families, unfamiliar names, unfamiliar geography, and events that happened 2900 years ago. We should pay attention to how Satan is really working behind the scenes and is using both religion and politics to accomplish his ends. By religion we mean false religion. Christianity is not a religion. Christianity is a relationship with God based on the finished work of Christ on the cross. All other religious systems put the emphasis on human morality, human good, human efforts that somehow impress God, please God, and thinking that somehow by doing a certain amount of good things we can negate the bad things. You can't negate the negative with a positive.

One of the first attacks that Satan had against the seed of David occurred about 150 years after David's death. It involved a complex series of assaults that were engineered through the family of a king in the northern kingdom. One general came to the throne by the name of Omri and it was his family which really brought evil into the northern kingdom. His son is known as Ahab, and it is through Ahab's family and his marriage that some of the most perverted forms of religion was introduced into the northern kingdom. It was the worship of the Phoenician god Baal, a fertility god, and his consort Asherah. All of this was based upon tremendous perversion of sexuality, fertility rites that occurred in various high places that they set up around the land. This was such a perverse form of idolatry that God was going to have to judge then very harshly; but before He did that evil form of religion really prospered both in the north and in the south.

So the first attempt was the attempt to destroy the Davidic seed through the false religion of Baalism. Athaliah is the centrepiece of the story. She is the only queen that ruled over the southern kingdom of Judah. She ruled from 841-835 BC about 90 years after Solomon died, so we see how quickly a civilisation can become perverted. In a period of less than 100 years Israel plunged from the high point to one of its lowest. These events are covered in 2 Kings 9-11 and 2 Chronicles 21.

When Ahab, the evil king in the north dies, his son Joram becomes king. Jezebel was still alive and was still carrying out all of her evil schemes and conspiracies. At the same time Jehoshaphat is ruling in Judah. When he died his son Jehoram became king. He was married to Athaliah the daughter of Jezebel, and she comes to the south and brings with her all the priests of Baal and the priestesses of the Asherah and introduces all of this sexual perversion and fertility religions into the southern kingdom. She influences Jehoram so that he "does evil in the sight of the Lord," a phrase indicating idolatry and rejection of God as the God of Israel. So he follows in the footsteps of the northern kingdom and now the worship of God has been pretty much outlawed and is being destroyed within God's people. When Jehoram took the throne had had his six brothers assassinated (these were all the seed of David), so now the seed of David was being wiped out and this begins to limit that Davidic line. This is seen in 2 Chronicles 21:2-4. According to v. 17 his sons were killed through various raids from the Philistines and the Arabs. Again this was an assault of the Davidic line. The seed is being narrowed and Satan is the one behind all of these assaults to try to block God from fulfilling His purposes for the seed of Abraham and the seed of David.

When Jehoram died he was briefly succeeded by his son Ahaziah of Judah (there is also an Ahaziah in the northern kingdom). He ruled less than a year in Judah before he was assassinated by Jehu, the commander of the armies in the northern kingdom. This shows how God uses one person who bad but not as bad as the other guy to wipe out the worst guy. So Jehu is anointed king in the northern kingdom and he instigates a revolt against Joram, who is just as evil as his father Ahab, and assassinates him. Joram and Jehoram were friends at this time. Jehoram who was the king of the south was up visiting Joram in the north when Jehua arrives. This scares Jehoram and so he begins to try to get back home again in the south and he hides out in Samaria. Jehu finds him and assassinates him. Jehu is a worshipper of God, but only so-so. Jehu wiped out and completely destroyed the worship of Baal in the northern kingdom. That was God's mission for him. But he left the other idolatries in place, the golden calves at Bethel and Dan, and continued that idolatry. He did not reinforce a consistent worship of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob throughout the northern kingdom.

After Jehu killed Jehoram, Jehoram was survived by the evil queen Athaliah. The first thing that she does when she gets to the throne is to have all of her grandchildren killed. All of these grandchildren were heirs to the Davidic throne. So this is the third assault we have seen in this period trying to wipe out the seed of David. But Jehoram had another daughter, and she gets this young baby Joash and takes him to her husband Jehoiada who is the high priest in the temple, and they hide Joash in the temple. They raise him in the temple and Athaliah has no idea he is alive. They reach him the Law, about Yahweh and all of the great promises God made to Israel, and when Joash is seven years old Jehoiada trots him out on to the front porch of the temple in full view of Athaliah's palace. He puts the royal purples robe on him and crowns him king. He makes sure it is a popular day when everybody is out and the temple is crowded. Athaliah just about has a nervous breakdown on the spot. Jehoiada sends the temple guards to arrest her and they bring her outside the walls of the temple and execute her. Joash is made king and as long as Jehoiada is alive Joash follows the Law, loves the Lord, and there was a genuine revival in the land. It is a high point in Israel's history.  

After Jehoiada dies Joash begins to compromise with idolatry but he is the founder of the dynasty, four generations of godly kings in Israel. The point of all this is that there is this tremendous assault on the Davidic seed at this time to try to prevent God from bringing about His promises to Israel. We have to follow that ball through history otherwise we will just get lost in the weeds. We have to understand the major panorama of what God is doing.

The next big event that Satan is also behind has to do with the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions. Around the mid-point to the late-point of the eighth century—about 740 on—Assyria has grown into a massive empire and is gobbling up all of the territory around it, and they come marching into the northern kingdom and conquer it. They deport the Jews and distribute them around their empire in order to wipe out their ethnic identity. But before they did that a number of Jews had headed south so there are still remnants of all the tribes in the south. Then there is the Babylonian invasion that comes some 120 years later. In 605 Nebuchadnezzar comes into the southern kingdom in his first invasion, then the second invasion in 593, and in 586 BC he conquers the southern kingdom of Judah, destroys the temple, and takes a host of captives back to Babylon.

God shows how He controls history because Satan seeks to destroy what God is doing but all of a sudden it turns out that what he has done is working out for God's plan all along. God is not going to allow the nation to be wiped out. Cf. Esther. One of the things that come out of the Babylonian captivity is a second key element that fits behind the purposes of Revelation chapter seven. That is a prophecy known and Daniel's seventy weeks. At the beginning of Daniel chapter nine Daniel, who is an old man by this time, is reading through the prophecies in Jeremiah and realises that according to Jeremiah 25:11, 12 that God still has a plan to restore Israel to the land and will only take them out of the land for seventy years. Daniel knows that the captivity is almost over with; he has been there in Babylon for almost seventy years. Cf. Leviticus 26:40-21 ^NASB "If they confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their forefathers, in their unfaithfulness which they committed against Me, and also in their acting with hostility against Me—I also was acting with hostility against them, to bring them into the land of their enemies—or if their uncircumcised heart becomes humbled so that they then make amends for their iniquity, then I will remember My covenant with Jacob [Abrahamic covenant], and I will remember also My covenant with Isaac, and My covenant with Abraham as well, and I will remember the land." So God sends an angel to give this remarkable prophecy to Daniel which begins in Daniel 9:24.   

What this prophecy says is that there is a future for Israel, but what it also says is that there is also going to be this future judgment from the prince who is to come through the Antichrist and there is going to be a period of time before the final seven weeks comes into account. That is why there are these 144,000 Jews saved and sealed during the Tribulation period—because the church had to be taken out so that God could return the emphasis to Israel—and they will be evangelists during this Tribulation period.

Back to the line we are following. The next is Herod's murder of the infants in Matthew chapter two. This is another attack engineered by Satan in the background to try to destroy the seed of David. His great attempt was the assassination of the Messiah. Satan really thought he had won this time: he had Jesus betrayed by Judas; He was arrested and is going to the cross; he has foiled God's plan. But this is how God works. Even when everything looks dark and defeated God is working in His grace and He will always snatch victory and glory out from what Satan thinks he has won. So it is that assault on the Messiah that ultimately seals his doom, and it is the fulfilment of the prophecy in Genesis chapter three that the seed of the serpent would strike the seed of the woman on the heel but the seed of the woman would strike the seed of the serpent on the head, a fatal wound. Satan was defeated by the cross.

Then, fifth, we have the rise of anti-Semitism throughout the period from the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 all of the way up to the present.

This is why we have the sealing of the 144,000 in Revelation chapter seven. God is working something out in history. Eventually there will be this vindication of God during this time we call the Tribulation. God will eventually judge all evil and he will destroy Satan's plan. So what we see in the chapter is really the culmination of centuries of God's plan. It is a restoration of His focus on Israel as the redemptive messenger of God in the Tribulation period.

What we need to remember as we look at all of this is that the focus is really on those promises that God made to Abraham and to David. God fulfilled them, mostly in the person of Jesus Christ because Jesus Christ was that seed of Abraham from which God is going to bless everyone.      

Illustrations