Welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the Book of Genesis. Tonight, is study #6 of Genesis, chapter 15 and we are going to read Genesis 15:1-4:

After these things the word of JEHOVAH came unto Abram in a vision, saying, Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward. And Abram said, Lord JEHOVAH, what wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless, and the steward of my house is this Eliezer of Damascus? And Abram said, Behold, to me thou hast given no seed: and, lo, one born in my house is mine heir. And, behold, the word of JEHOVAH came unto him, saying, This shall not be thine heir; but he that shall come forth out of thine own bowels shall be thine heir.

I will stop reading there. We have been spending some time in verse 1 and I think it is good for us to look at these statements because these are the kind of statements we see scattered throughout the Bible, especially in the Psalms. They are very encouraging declarations coming forth from the mouth of God as He speaks to Abram. Historically, that is true, but He is also speaking to you and to me and He is telling us the same thing. He said, “Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield and thy exceeding great reward.” We spent some time discussing how God is our shield and how God is our reward. It is our expectation, according to the things the Bible says, and since the Bible is absolute truth and everything in it is true and faithful, our expectation is not just some “pipe dream.” It is not just some hope that someone might have. Someone might need money and they hope that they get the mail and receive a lot of money, but that money never comes. No – the expectation of the child of God is based on the promises from God Himself. It is the promise of the “seed,” who is Christ, and all those counted as the “seed” in Him and He will be our exceeding great reward.

Yes, we tend to think more in terms of eternal life as our exceeding great reward and, yet, we must remember what we read in John 17:3:

And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.

Knowing God is eternal life. So, He is our exceeding great reward. Jesus is the bread of life. God is life. When the Bible speaks of granting eternal life to the one God has saved, it is really saying that you will have God and He will be your exceeding great reward. Remember, Jesus also said, “I am the resurrection, and the life,” so when we rise from the dead or if we are raptured on that last day into the new heaven and new earth, we will come face to face with life, God Himself, and we will dwell in His presence and this is true “living.” It is true life to be connected to God, as mankind was originally connected to God in the Garden of Eden before the fall. It means to be energized by God and to have that life flowing forth from Him to us, because even in our new resurrected spiritual body and soul it is still God who will be, as it were, giving us the “breath of life.” As we live in this world, we know that God tells us He puts the very breath in our nostrils. We live according to His will. He controls our lives. He gives us each heartbeat and the breath of life, on a day-by-day basis, as we live out our days on this side of eternity future to come. When He has completed our salvation by equipping us with new resurrected spiritual bodies, we should not think we will be independent from God. No – we will still be dependent for life on the ever-existent One, the Almighty God who is the essence of life itself. He will give us life for evermore. He is the resurrection and He is the life.

If anyone has an idea that their eternal future and eternal expectation is somehow removed from God Himself, you do not know what you are thinking. The reward God has in store for His people is Himself: “I am thy exceeding great reward.” Your reward will be great in heaven, Jesus said in the Beatitudes, because there we will encounter Him, the One whose Word we have in the Holy Book, the Bible. Just think of that. The Word was handed down through the generations and was delivered to us in printed form in these bound books we call the Bible. We delight in it and it is able to comfort us, strengthen us and satisfy our souls. It is just the Word and it does reveal “bits and pieces” of God’s glory and His glorious attributes and, yet, it still largely conceals Him. We do not have a full revelation and it is as if it reveals only His “hind parts,” as we read of the glories that are able to shine forth from the Bible as God opens it to our understanding. But on that day, we will see Him as He is, in the fulness of His glory, because there will no sin in us that would cause us not to be able to enter in to the glorious presence of God.

Anyway, God told Abram, “I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward.” We saw this in our last study, but I want to turn there again to Isaiah 40:10:

Behold, the Lord JEHOVAH will come with strong hand, and his arm shall rule for him: behold, his reward is with him, and his work before him.

You see, God has come in judgment, just like He came in judgment on the churches and congregations. Nobody saw Him – that is what it means when the Bible says that He would come as a thief in the night. He is an expert “thief” in that regard as He robbed the spiritual riches from the midst of the churches. This is what He did when He departed out and allowed Satan to enter in and they did not even know it for those 23 years. They still do not know it, even though that judgment has come and gone.

Likewise, Christ came as a thief in the night on May 21, 2011 and caught the blind and ignorant world by complete surprise, because they could not see in the spiritual realm. That requires “eyes of faith.” So, once again, God came as the Judge and this time it was as the Judge of all the world and He presently rules with a “rod of iron,” according to Revelation 19:15. His arm shall rule for Him and His reward is with Him; that is, He has that reward in His possession, but He has not yet bestowed it upon the ones that will receive it because His work is “before Him.” This is repeated in Isaiah 62:11:

Behold, JEHOVAH hath proclaimed unto the end of the world, Say ye to the daughter of Zion, Behold, thy salvation cometh; behold, his reward is with him, and his work before him.

Christ is called “salvation” because He is the embodiment of salvation. He is salvation, just as He is life and salvation and life are very closely related. He comes to judge and He has His reward with Him, but His work is still before Him. This “work” that is before Him can be seen in several verses. For instance, it says in 1Corinthians 3:11-14:

For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble; Every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward.

Now this is important because Judgment Day is a time when the “work” is before the Lord Jesus Christ who has come as the Judge. We could also look at 2Corinthians 5:10:

For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad.

When you do things that are “good or bad,” what is another term the Bible uses for that? Things are “good or evil.” We all appear before Him to receive the things we have done and the reward for our work can be positive, where we will receive the blessing of eternal life; or, it could be negative, where we will receive the condemnation or judgment of God. The word “reward” in both the Old Testament and New Testament has that kind of application, where it is sometimes used in a way that we would say is rewarding the sinner with wrath. So, all appear before the judgment seat of Christ. He comes and His work is before Him. And now let us go back to 1Corinthians, chapter 3 where we see the work is to see if we are “gold, silver, precious stones” or “wood, hay, stubble.” The “gold, silver, precious stones” identify with those that are truly saved and the “wood, hay, stubble” identify with those that are not saved. All is “work” and some is good work and some is bad work or evil work. The good work would only be a result of the Lord Jesus saving His people by washing away their sins and ordaining them to walk in good works that He had laid out for them to do – they do not get any glory. God gets all the glory. The bad work identifies with people left to themselves without a Saviour and, perhaps, they did the best they could, but whatever good works they attempted were as “filthy rags,” without a Saviour.

So, Judgment Day unfolded on May 21, 2011 and the spiritual fire was lit and God’s wrath began to burn upon the inhabitants of the earth. The “works” were subjected to the fire and “the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is.” The fire is put to all the people, including all the professed true believers that came out of the churches because God had already bundled the tares for burning within the churches and congregations. They already had their “test” during their period of judgment for 23 years when judgment began at the house of God. At the conclusion, all the people that remained in the churches were bundled as tares and cast into the (spiritual) fire of Judgment Day, so it is not those professed Christians that are appearing before the judgment seat to see whose work is “good or bad” or to see who is “gold, silver, precious stones” or “wood, hay, stubble.”

But there were a vast number of people that came out of the churches (we do not know the number) and they were in the world during the last part of the Great Tribulation and they are the ones that now have the fire put to them to determine what substance they are of through their endurance, as it says in 2Corinthians 3:14, “If any man’s work abide,” and what are they abiding? They must abide the “fire” of Judgment Day. The word “abide” has the idea of enduring. That is why it says in Matthew 24:13, “But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.” The one who continues on, trusting the Word of God and abiding in the doctrine of Christ and not “jumping out of the frying pan,” as the saying goes about putting a fire to a frog or a crab in a pan (laugh). Well, I cannot remember what it was, but if you put the flame very hot it would jump out of the pan, but if you gradually turned the fire up and the water gradually comes to a boil, they would stay in the water and boil to death. But that is the idea – God has put the fire to them and any that attempt to remove themselves from the fire by going back to the world or back to the churches or former doctrines, they are showing what they are made up, which would not be “gold, silver precious stones.” They could not abide the flames, so they are “wood, hay, stubble” and their turning back to former things would be as if they are burned up because there is no salvation in the world and there is no salvation in the churches.

That is not where God’s elect go – we do not go back to drinking and drugs and going to bars on weekends and doing whatever we want. That is a definite indicator of being under the wrath of God. Nor do we return to the churches, which have been handed over to Satan for their destruction. God’s furious anger was upon them and there is no blessing there of any kind. That is another indicator that you are under the wrath of God. Nor do we try to walk the fence and while we do not go back to the churches, we go back to church doctrines and teachings of theologians, and so forth. Well, that may not be as great an indicator, but it is still a “falling back” and it is not abiding or enduring sound doctrine to the conclusion of this Judgment Day period.

God’s people may have some confusion, perhaps. Others out there may not have heard the things the Bible has been bringing forth through EBible Fellowship and some may not be aware of us. We expect that the Lord will reach out to more and more people as time goes on, but for individuals that are confused, there is nothing wrong with that. When we are confused, we do not go backwards. We do not conclude, “Well, this is all a mistake and I do not trust the Biblical calendar of history,” just because we are confused about a step or two in God’s program. No – when a child of God is confused, that is when they stop and they say, “You know, I am not sure about this, so I had better pray and search the scriptures and dig in to the Bible even more!” That is how a child of God responds to situations like these. Admittedly, it is a very unusual situation we are in during this time in Judgment Day at the end of the world, when God is severely trying His own people and we are making an appearance before the judgment seat of Christ. This does not happen every day and it has never happened to any past generation of believers, so we have nothing to go to in looking at the history of the church or the history of national Israel. This is something that is unprecedented. We have been chosen to salvation and we have been chosen to the time period in which we would become saved, so it is according to God’s will that we are to go through these dark days after the Tribulation in Judgment Day. It is through enduring and abiding the fire that the work of God concerning us will be determined, whether we have done “good,” which would mean we had been saved and all our sins had been washed away or whether we have done “evil” and we fail to endure and we do not remain “stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord.” God has nothing good to say about someone that turns back, whether it is Lot’s wife or someone that put his hand to the plow and then turned back. There is nothing good the Bible has to say about this, like the Jews in the wilderness that wanted to go back to Egypt. It is the “wrong direction.” The Bible looks “forward.” Remember what it says in Philippians. It does not mention looking back or going back, but it says in Philippians 3:12-14:

Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect: but I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus. Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.

If you are looking back to Egypt (the world or the churches) and you are longing for those church socials and the comradery or if you are longing to return to the former doctrine of “Hell” or the doctrine of Christ having paid for sin at the cross in 33AD, then you are going the wrong way. We continue to check out these things and we continue to search the Scriptures, of course, but what I am saying is that some people turn around and go back because they are experiencing affliction or because they do not like the circumstances that have unfolded in the Day of Judgment. Or, people begin to doubt the timeline, not because they have studied it in more detail, but just because time has moved on and it seems too long now. It has been a long time since May 21, 2011. But what kind of evidence is that to turn about and go the other way? It is no evidence at all, but it is simply because an individual that had “signed up” and hung on for a period of time and now they no longer wish to do so. They are tired of it and they just want to get away. We cannot stop anyone from turning back. God permits people to turn back because it reveals their character, whether they are “gold, silver precious stones” or “wood, hay, stubble.” And this is what it is all about, as Christ’s work is before Him.

Let us look at just one more verse in the context where it says, “and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still,” because everyone’s condition is established and fixed because it is Judgment Day. It says in Revelation 22:12-13:

And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.