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Hello again, YouTubers, and welcome to another edition of The Daily Word. I thought I’d shift gears now. I think I’m done with the consideration of the information given at this year’s convention concerning the symposium about the things to come. There’s a few more talks on that series, but they go into Armageddon and the New World and so forth, and I really find no real issues of controversy with that. But I thought I would consider some questions and comments left on some of the videos here. As you may or may not know, I’ve been online for this September, it’ll be like 16 years @ewatchman.com. And after I began posting a few essays, people would ask questions and so I started up a column I called the Mailbag where I considered questions. There’s an archive on Blog spot of questions going back way back, and then there are dozens of questions in the mailbag on e-watchman.com. Then, I began answering questions in podcasts, but I thought I would pick it up here on YouTube. Sometimes, people leave comments that they’re asking questions about very deep scriptural things, and it just doesn’t seem practical to me to try to answer in-depth in a comment that will scroll away and be lost into oblivion.
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I mean, that’s why I started doing these regular YouTube videos. As I say, I’ve kind of burned out pounding the keyboard and writing. So that’s not to say I will not refresh myself at some point and begin writing more, but I thought this would be a good venue to consider some questions. Someone left a comment on the video of GOG and Magog the other day. Scott, I know he won’t mind me using his name because it’s on his comment. So his question here concerns, and I get this question a lot and that’s why I’m going to consider it the difference between the nation, the physical nation of Israel and spiritual Israel. And of course there is no exact verse in the Bible that says spiritual Israel, and that’s what he’s asking here. He says, “Don’t you think if it was a spiritual Israel, that the Bible would say so can you please show me a verse in the Bible where it says spiritual Israel or that Israel has been replaced by some other people, or possibly a verse that says, God is through with the nation of Israel and has nothing more to do with them. I will be waiting for your verses. I would like very much to read them.”
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Well, this is a problem that people have. I say it’s a problem; it’s a mentality. “Give me a verse. I want a verse that explains everything or maybe a couple of verses.”
A lot of my videos in the past… I wasn’t too interested years ago in getting into the deep things and the issues of Jehovah’s Witnesses; I kind of dabbled on YouTube, considering issues related to the Trinity. And so I would come across this mentality. “Give me a verse where it says…” and people get tricked that way. “Give me a verse.” Okay, I’ll give you a verse, John 1:1. The word was God, that’s it. And that’s all they need. A verse, “I’ve got my verse, this is what I want.”
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But the Bible doesn’t really work that way. The Bible, it conveys concepts and we really have to study and put things together. As I mentioned the other day, prophecies like a picture puzzle. You put the pieces together and doctrines are the same way. We have to understand the basics of what God is doing and you can’t encapsulate that in a verse or maybe you can, but it’s not in there. So God hasn’t spoken yet. But I think overall, whenever we approach anything, I think the primary thing to keep in mind is, what is God’s purpose? And if we understand God’s overall purpose and why he does things the way he does, and what his objective is, then the pieces can fall into place. Going back to Genesis, I mean, we know that God’s purpose originally was to have people live on the earth forever. He didn’t make Adam and Eve to die. He told them to fill the earth with their offspring and that’s all God wanted for them is to enjoy life and to worship him. And it’s a privilege for us to even be able to know that there is this great God, Jehovah who does everything, makes little tiny flowers and bumblebees and everything that’s just wonderful and fascinating and wondrous.
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But of course, we know what happened in Eden. Satan intervened and brought up all of these issues, and so God came up with a secondary purpose. You might say he’s still going to accomplish what he intended with the earth. God cannot be thwarted. He hasn’t given up on making the earth of paradise and allowing people to live forever and enjoy life without all the hardship and heartache and all the rest that we deal with now on a daily basis. So, part of God’s purpose is to produce an offspring who will set all matters straight. After the great flood of Noah’s day, Jehovah contacted a man, Abram, whom he changed his name to Abraham, and he tested Abram.
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As you know, Sarah was barren, but he promised that he would have a son even though he was a hundred years old and God always keeps his promise. Abraham had a son named him Isaac, and when his son had grown up, he told Abraham that your offspring will become as numerous as the stars and the heavens and the sand of the sea. And by means of your seed singular, there would be a blessing for all the peoples of the earth. So God was telling Abraham that the original seed, offspring promise in Eden was going to come through his lineage. But then he tested Abraham and he told him to offer up Isaac as a sacrifice to God and what a test that was because God had already told him that your offspring come through Isaac and be a blessing for the earth, but now I want you to kill him.
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And Abraham as good as did, he raised the dagger. And then, of course, an angel stopped him. But that was a preview of Jehovah giving his son Jesus. And Jehovah didn’t spare him, did he? But Abraham enacted that. And so the apostle Paul years later said that Abraham is the father of all of those having faith, not just his offspring. So God’s purpose, of course, eventually produced the nation of Israel to Isaac. His son was Jacob who had his name changed to Israel. Israel, of course, had 12 sons from various wives and concubines. And those 12 sons became the 12 tribes of Israel. Jehovah brought them into the promised land. Jehovah also designated that from the tribe of Judah, this seed, this offspring would come forth. And then David, who was of the tribe of Judah became king and then Jehovah made a covenant with him for a kingdom, narrowed it down that this coming offspring would be of royal lineage through the tribe of Judah, and we know that that led to Jesus Christ. So that was the accomplishment of a very large part, the initial part, you might say, of God’s purpose to provide this seed and the nation of Israel. The law produced, you might say, this seed, and Christ is said to have fulfilled the law, not only the law but the prophets who pointed forward.
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So the apostle Paul, who was obviously a natural Jew, had this miraculous conversion. He was staunchly opposed to Christians and he was such a zealous Pharisee. He thought that these were apostates. How could they bring this corrupt religion into our beautiful Judaism? And then Jesus encountered him on the road, and he changed, didn’t he? And became just as zealous, if not more so, for Christianity. Paul showed through many of his letters that the law and the nation of Israel had served its purpose. Now, if you want a verse, I recommended in my brief comment that Scott read Paul’s letters to the Romans, his letter to the Galatians, and his letter to the Hebrews, and Paul masterfully shows how God indeed used Israel, but that’s over now. God has a new nation and it is called a nation. Christianity is called a nation.
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What did Jesus say to the Jews in his last entry into Jerusalem? He condemned the Pharisees of course, and then the entire nation, he said, “Look, the Kingdom of God is going to be taken from you and given to a nation producing its fruit.” The Jews, for the most part, they’ve rejected Jesus. Didn’t they have him put to death? And that’s why when Jesus started his ministry, he told the Jews, he says, ‘look, don’t presume to say we have Abraham for our father.’ Jesus said, no, God can raise up children from Abraham from these stones. He doesn’t need you. You’re just part of God’s purpose and you miss the purpose if you do not accept the offspring, the Messiah. And they did, of course. Well, this new nation, it’s interesting, as I mentioned, the 12 tribes of Israel, that was the foundation of Israel, the physical Israel.
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Jesus chose 12 apostles, and that’s not coincidental. They’re the foundation stones of Christianity —the new nation. It’s a spiritual nation. Now, when Paul was speaking to, I say, when he was writing to the Corinthians, he made an interesting comment, and this is 1 Corinthians chapter 10. He says, “I speak as to men with discernment, judge for yourselves what I say, the cup of blessing that we bless. Is it not a sharing in the blood of the Christ, the loaf that we break? Is it not a sharing in the body of the Christ because there’s one loaf. We, although many are one body, we are all partaking of that one loaf. And then he makes this comment, look at Israel in the fleshly sense are not those who eat the sacrifices, sharers with the altar?” That expression, look at Israel in the fleshly sense. He coined the phrase fleshly Israel, physical Israel. If there’s a fleshly Israel is there not a spiritual Israel? Do you want a verse? Put your mind around that. As Paul said, he was speaking to men with discernment. He was trying to get them to that…the old form of worship on the altar, that was just a preview of this spiritual arrangement.
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And the spiritual arrangement is permanent. It accomplishes God’s overall purpose, and that concludes God’s dealings with Israel, both physical and spiritual. And that’s what, if you read the letter of Hebrews, Paul goes into quite a bit of detail about Melek and the temple and all the things, these things prefigured, and he says, these were just a foreshadow of the things to come, the things that come having to do with Christ and the Christian arrangement, Christ being the high priest, like milk ek. So, and it’s interesting, and Paul said in connection with all these things he had written to the Hebrews about the sacrifices and the altar, he said these things, they’ve become obsolete and are near to passing away, and they did pass away rather violently. Jehovah brought the Romans in. They completely obliterated the temple. That was the punctuation point. I’m done with this.
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Of course, Israelites or Jews, fleshly Jews are certainly welcome to accept Christ. Many of them did in the first century. Probably the majority of those who were anointed in the first century were of Jewish ancestry. But God’s favor toward the Jews is over. They can accept Jesus anytime they want. Some have there are congregations in Israel right now, amazingly, but my question to you is why should God bring Israel back? What purpose would it serve? Is it going to have two organizations? Christianity is God’s new nation. Is he going to have two nations dealing with It’s ridiculous. Paul said it’s obsolete. It’s done with over.
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Well, where did all this business come from of Israel being God’s nation now fulfilling prophecy in 1948 when Israel became a new nation as the Bible foretold. Don’t forget though, Christianity is a nation in God’s eyes anyway. Well, it’s part of a satanic scheme. The devil is, he’s a deceiver, he’s a mimic. He takes things that God does and twists ’em around and uses them for his own purpose. As Paul said, he transforms himself into an angel of light. It appears as if his clergymen are portraying this grand truth, that Christ is coming back to the Middle East, back to Israel. He’s going to touch down on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem to holy land. That’s why we have to fight for Israel and suppress the Palestinians and whoever else messes with God’s and nation. I mean, you have these evangelical pastors like John Aggie and they have these mega churches and they’re Zionists to the core.
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Well, really, it goes back to the British Empire. Back in the 1899s, they spun this fable that the British people were ancestors of the lost so-called lost 10 tribes of Israel and Herbert Armstrong really popularized it in the 20th century with his worldwide church of God, so-called and what’s that other guy with a big mustache that wrote Lake Great Planet Earth has a regular program. Hal Lindsey, he’s a big Zionist guy too. The Rothschild family, as he may or may not know, they sponsored the reconstruction of Israel, but Rothschild is part of this British imperial system, this financial system. And after World War I, the British and Americans were victorious and they called the tune after that. And through the League of Nations, which the British set up, they awarded themselves this Balfour declaration to oversee things in the Middle East, which they had been doing already. The British carved up the Middle East. The nations that exist now didn’t exist before the British Empire intervened in the 18 hundreds. They drew the borders of all of these nations and they used them to pit them against each other for their purpose. And Israel as fulfilled that purpose as a cockpit for war and division and obviously deception. I mean, look, these evangelicals that are promoting Zionism, these are the same guys that promote the Trinity that don’t know the difference between a father and a son. There’s nothing that they teach that is true.
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So Paul, he ran up against these Zionists back in his day, he called them Judaizers. And it wasn’t just the Jews, it was the Christians who had on the surface accepted Christ but retained their grip on Judaism to such an extent. They were aware that these Gentiles were now becoming Christians and they tried to force them to accept circumcision and to keep the law which they themselves couldn’t keep anyway, and which Paul forcefully showed to be the case. So Paul’s letter particularly to the Galatians, Paul was really incensed that the Galatians were succumbing to the influence of these judaizers, and he was so outraged. They make a big deal about circumcision, clipping off your foreskin. He said, let them even be emasculated if that’s their focus, just take the whole thing off if that’s your religion. But Paul pointed out circumcision is nothing and neither is uncircumcision.
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That’s just formality. That’s religion. And religion has a purpose, but it shouldn’t become our religion. Does that make sense? God, as used certain formalities, the law and so forth, ritualism going to the temple and all of that, but that was only temporary for a purpose as Paul said. Anyway, getting back to Galatians, Paul wrote to them, all those who want to make a good impression in the flesh are the ones who try to compel you to get circumcised. Doing so only to avoid being persecuted for the torture stake of the Christ, for even those who are getting circumcised. And I keep the law covenant as I said, but they want to be circumcised so that they want you to be circumcised so they may have cause for boasting about your flesh, but may I never boast except in the torture stake of the Lord Jesus Christ through whom the world has been put to death to me and eye to the world. And then this point for neither is circumcision, anything nor is uncircumcision. But a new creation is as for all those who walk orderly by this rule of conduct, peace and mercy be upon them. Yes, upon the Israel of God, you want a verse, what is the Israel of God to which he’s referring those who are in union with Christ.
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Paul went on to tell those Galatians that Jesus was the seed to promise seed of Abraham singular. And if you are in union with Jesus, having been anointed by Jehovah, you are that seed too. As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, we share this SCUP and this loaf where one body in Christ that’s the new creation, has nothing to do with anything on this earth. The new creation are those who are going to be with Christ in heaven as immortal spirits. Some of them were fleshly Jews, of course, but not all. And certainly God is when Jesus is on the earth and he was a Jew through and through wasn’t. He spoke of himself as a Jew and he kept the law and he went to all the festivals and he was in the synagogue regularly, even though that wasn’t part of the law. It was a religious tradition. It was the kingdom all of the first century, if you will. On one of his journeys, Jesus met a woman by the well, a Samaritan woman with whom the Jews had no dealings and the story, Jesus asked her for a drink of water and he got into a conversation with her about living water and piqued her interest. And she said, well, we know that we worship in this mountain, but you Jews worship in Jerusalem.
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And Jesus said something to her that I’d like to share with you. He said, you worship what you do not know. We worship what we know because salvation begins with the Jews, begins with the Jews, doesn’t end there begins. Jesus was the beginning. Those early Jews were given the opportunity to accept Christ become anointed. They were also the first to inherit salvation for immortality. Nevertheless, the hour is coming and it is now when the true worshipers will worship the father with spirit and truth. For indeed the Father is looking for ones like these to worship him. God is a spirit and those worshiping him must worship with spirit and truth. So Jesus acknowledged the place that the Jews held in God’s purpose, but he said, that’s changing. We used to worship in this mountain in Jerusalem, Mount Zion, and Jesus is still worshiping there up until he came into the temple the last time, cleaned out the money changers told him the kingdom is being taken from you and given to a nation producing its fruit.
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So spirit and truth, not physical visible things, that’s where the watchtower is running off of rails, God’s visible organization. And the intent of Satan is to tie believers who otherwise may be worshiping in spirit and truth. Paul said, we’re not walking by sight, but now we have this visible organization that Jehovah’s using. Yeah, he’s using it now, but again, it’s not the end of it. The coming of Christ sets up something invisible and it will require faith to make that transition just as it did for the Jews. They had to change their religion, you might say, to accept Jesus. And that’s what Jesus is talking about here with the woman at the well.
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There’s a lot more could be said about this. I would encourage people that have questions about physical Israel being done away with the evangelicals come up with this term replacement theology. It’s like Jehovah’s Witnesses have their own Bible. And I’m thinking people don’t realize that evangelicals have their own Bible too. They have their translations that they translated that they prefer, that say things that they want. Jesus is the great I am. Anyway, I would encourage you to study the Watchtower’s material on that. The insight book has a lot of material on that expression, Israel of God and okay, here’s another question left as a comment on one of the videos. Ramel Ballinger, I hope I’m pronouncing that right. Reel. Reel.
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He asked, where will the seat of government be on earth during the thousand years, if not Israel? That’s another related question. The battle of Armageddon will be fought in the valley of Hernan. He says, near the physical land of Israel, please explain this. I think he meant valley of the sons of ham, but the word Armageddon actually comes from, there was a literal place there medo, the mountain of Megiddo, and there were several decisive battles fought there. Put that word, Armageddon. It’s in Revelation right? And revelation is presented in signs and symbols. It draws upon history of people and places in the Old Testament, the Hebrews. And so this word, Guido, is used to represent this final confrontation and it’s not going to be in Israel. I assure you Satan might try to pull something off. The evangelicals are expecting literal Israel to be attacked by Russia, and that may well happen, but I assure you it will not be the fulfillment of the prophecies concerning like Gog of May Gog, even though they claim it will be. So one of the things that Jesus said, I mean when he talked about the end of this system, the most notable thing in Jesus prophecy is the deception that will be in place. Jesus sternly warned his followers do not be misled. Many will come on the basis of my name. Here’s the Christ. There’ll be many false prophets who will arise and mislead many.
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So we can expect all kinds of deception to be in place. It already is in place just waiting to be triggered. But if we have a solid foundation based on scripture, we’re not going to be deceived. Where will the seed of government be? It will be in heaven. It’s a heavenly kingdom. That’s the whole point. When Paul wrote to the Hebrews telling them, we do not have here in Jerusalem, a city that will continue, he said, we’ve approached a heavenly mountain Zion. S the Jerusalem. Above is an expression Paul used in Galatians and in Revelation the 21st chapter, it paints a picture of the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven to the earth. Now again, that’s a picture, that’s a symbol.
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Don’t expect to see this humongous cube coming down to the earth like some sci-fi movie. That’s a symbol to put in our minds that God’s government will embrace the earth. You know the disciples, they had a hard time coming to grips with the fact that this was a heavenly kingdom. They knew Jesus was the Messiah. They saw all his miracles. They walked on water. This is the son of God. But they thought as the son of David Inheritor of the kingdom, he was going to be the king. They were imagining that he was going to rule in Jerusalem. They’re in the Middle East physically. And when they asked Jesus, can we sit on your right and left, they were still thinking it was physical and Jesus didn’t even bother to try to straighten him out until he died. And then they saw him ascending to heaven even though he was a spirit at that time, he cloaked himself with flesh because they never would’ve believed it otherwise.
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They had to see him going up, up, up, okay, I guess he’s going back to heaven like he said. Wow. And then of course when they were anointed, God opened their minds up and they realized that when Jesus spoke of it as the kingdom of the heavens, he meant it was in heaven and they were going to heaven. Jehovah was taking little grasshoppers, puny little humans and going to take them to heaven to be with Christ and transformed them into these kings and priests that will rule the earth, replacing the devil and all of his demons that are ruling the earth presently.
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There’s a verse, you want a verse? There’s one in Jeremiah chapter 23 for those who think that this battle of Armageddon will be in some little locale through Jeremiah Jehovah speaks of this coming storm. It says, A noise will resound to the ends of the earth. This is Jeremiah chapter 23. For Jehovah has a controversy with the nations. He will personally pass judgment on all humans, and he will put the wicked to the sword, declares Jehovah, this is what Jehovah army says. Look, a calamity is spreading from nation to nation. Didn’t Jesus say nation will rise against nation, kingdom against kingdom? A great tempest will be unleashed from the remotest parts of the earth, a great tribulation, and those slain by Jehovah and that day will be from one end of the earth clear to the other end of the earth. They will not be mourned nor they be gathered up or buried. They will become manure on the surface of the ground.
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So that’s the end of those who are fighting with Gog and may Gog, right? Yesterday’s video considered. And that’s what it says again in Revelation 19, those slaughtered by Jesus will be carcasses falling on the battlefield, not in the Middle East from one end of the earth to the other global calamity. That’s arm gut. Okay, I woke up this morning. I’ve been getting up Uber early to do these programs to try to beat the traffic outside and it gets kind of warm in the barn here in the summer. So I said the other day, this is a barn, it’s a mini barn and it’s not a big lumbering thing. Anyway, I got this email this morning from a friend says, Robert, this may seem way out there, but just something that came to me. When war breaks out in heaven and Michael is battling his angels, it must be something dynamic and inconceivable when they’re cast to the earth or hurled, a tremendous amount of invisible spirit energy is landing or injecting into planet earth. Would it be feasible to think that the earthquakes in one place after another are due to these spirit forces striking the planet? I can only imagine when Jesus throws a football is like a meteor, I would imagine no doubt it would take a little time to come to talking about the demon shake their head and the dust off as it were, but as the visible would feel a tremor in the force as it were. Please don’t laugh. This is a serious question. Well, I appreciate that.
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It is nice to be able to say to a question, I don’t know. No one does really. We can have opinions, we can try to surmise things, but my thinking is that spirits, of course, their energy, but they have no mass. There wouldn’t be an impact on something. Physical spirits, we can’t comprehend it. But I guess the Bible says that Jehovah likens his angels to fire flames of fire. So that tells us that they’re not material and that they are energy forms like Jehovah, the Great Spirit. So there’s energy passing through us all the time, little neutrinos or whatever. It goes right through the earth as well. But obviously the demons have superhuman power. Nothing compared to Jehovah’s Almighty power, but to us little grasshoppers, they seem powerful. Like in the days of job when Jehovah gave Satan permission to attack job, he says he called caused fire to fall from the heavens. We don’t know if that was literal fire, flames of fire or lightning bolts. In any case, it would mean that Satan can control the weather to some extent if Jehovah allows it, he can do all kinds of miracles that are inexplicable. He can make people see things that, so it’s possible that the demons could create earthquakes, I would imagine.
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Here comes the traffic anyway, it is also possible for humans. I mean, if you, there’s been a lot written recently. There is an increase of earthquake activity around the world and in some places where active earthquakes have not been known, and some people are attributing that to fracking, putting this high pressure fluid into the earth. And I mean it is bound to have an effect, right? I mean, there’ve been a lot of earthquakes in Oklahoma in the United States and the panhandle of Texas where all this fracking is going on. So there is human activity involved in this. Fortunately, none of these have been really big quakes and most of the quakes are confined to the rim of fire around the Pacific. And that is of course, a natural phenomenon of these plates running up over each other.
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There’s also a possibility of humans creating earthquakes through this experimentation known as harp, the high frequency, forget the acronym, high frequency Aurora project or something, using frequencies to manipulate the weather and they can cause earthquakes, put it that way. And there’s nuclear devices going off underground tests. Who’s to say that if they get into a nuclear, I’ll say a limited nuclear confrontation, that there won’t be literal earthquakes caused from that. We’ll have to wait and see, but I don’t think when the earth starts shaking, we’re not going to care too much how it came about, right? So, well, that’s it. That’s all the questions I had for today’s daily word. If you have questions, please email me or you can leave them in a comment on one of the videos here. Just make sure it’s formatted as a question and preferably not too wordy because if there’s a lot of information there, the question kind of gets obscured or if there’s a lot of questions. So keep them simple and concise and I’ll consider them and we’ll take it from there. Okay? So thanks for watching and see you tomorrow.
