Welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the Book of Genesis. Tonight, is study #19 of Genesis, chapter 15 and we are going to begin by reading Genesis 15:12-14:

And when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and, lo, an horror of great darkness fell upon him. And he said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years; And also that nation, whom they shall serve, will I judge: and afterward shall they come out with great substance.

I will stop reading there. We have been looking at the timeline God gives here of 400 years in which Israel (the seed) will be a stranger in a strange land. Again, we have to distinguish that there are physical descendants of Abraham and you could say, therefore, that they are the “seed” of Abraham. There was a time when physical Israel dwelt in a strange land, the land of Egypt, and God delivered them. We know that the way it works out literally in Biblical history, there is application to the physical seed of Abraham. There was bondage and there was deliverance of the physical seed.

But there is also a deeper, spiritual meaning of these verses that we have not gotten to yet, because when we look at the 400-year timeline historically, we find it was not as apparent as one might think by reading the verse. It is characteristic of how God has written the Bible and how He has hidden truth that relates to timelines, which must be searched out to find the correct understanding.

So, here we saw that God spoke of a 400-year period, but we also saw that it said Exodus 12:40-41:

Now the sojourning of the children of Israel, who dwelt in Egypt, was four hundred and thirty years. And it came to pass at the end of the four hundred and thirty years, even the selfsame day it came to pass, that all the hosts of JEHOVAH went out from the land of Egypt.

We read in Acts, chapter 7 that when Moses was a full forty years old and the time of the promise drew nigh in the year 1447BC, it was the 390^th year since their entry point into Egypt in the days of Jacob. Moses was looking at the 400-year mark, which was only a decade away, and he thought, “I had better start doing something.” He thought he was the deliverer because he was the only Jew that was in a position to do something. All the other Jews were in bondage, so he acted and then he discovered that he was wrong. The Israelites were not looking to him as the deliverer and they were not reacting in a way that would indicate that God had prepared them to be delivered in ten years and this prompted Moses to run when it became known that he had slain the Egyptian. He fled to the land of Midian where he dwelt in the wilderness for another 40-year period. The number “40” in the Bible identifies with testing and we can see that God was letting it be known that the whole situation was one of testing or temptation and a time of trial in which He would try His people Israel. That pointed to the future in our time when God would open up the scriptures and the things we are reading in Genesis 15 would have a more spiritual fulfillment at the time of the end. It was also a time of severe testing for the elect children of God, as well as the professed Christians.

One of the ways God tested Moses was by allowing him to come to a wrong conclusion. I am saying this very carefully, because God is in complete control of what His people understand and to what degree they understand it. Remember that verse in Luke 24:45:

Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures,

Christ must open the spiritual eyes or the understanding of the soul, which is connected to the mind of an individual somehow, that they might understand and comprehend the deeper spiritual things of the Bible. This is always how one is able to obtain knowledge of spiritual things because all men are naturally dead to spiritual things. We are dead in our souls and God saved certain ones and brought life to our souls, but the process of granting spiritual understanding to the child of God is all accomplished according to the will of God. God works in the life of the one He has saved and that person might read and read and read the Bible, but not understand what they are reading until God determines at certain points that He wants him to understand the trinity, election, Sunday the Sabbath, Christ having been slain at the foundation of the world or that the true judgment of God at the end will be annihilation of the unsaved and not eternal suffering, and so forth.

God completely controls what His people know and since He controls what they know, He also controls what they do not know and what they are not able to understand. It is all according to the will of God. Yes, there are some people that read and study the Bible more and obtain greater knowledge than others, but who is in control of placing that desire in the heart and mind? God is in control as He moves in His elect to will and to do of His good pleasure. If God allows one individual to attain a higher level of understanding and knowledge (perhaps, for the purpose of that individual teaching the Bible) than others, it is because He is operating in that individual by giving him a greater desire to learn. Then that individual will receive information at the hand of God so he can teach others. In other words, it is like Christ breaking the bread and giving it to His disciples and then the disciples giving the bread to the multitude. It is always a matter of God revealing truth to His people and God can do that according to times and seasons. For the church age, there were boundaries of truth that the Lord established and they could not go beyond it. They could not truly know the deeper spiritual things that had been sealed up, but in that time period God could have moved in an individual to see as much as possible while still seeing through a glass darkly. Then as we moved in to another era like the Great Tribulation when the seals were taken off the Bible, God would operate in a certain individual and that person could gain much understanding and knowledge and he could have had a teaching platform to reach a great number of others. (I am thinking of Mr. Camping.)

And, yet, God is always in control. Even during the Great Tribulation there were things that God did not want revealed. For instance, He hid the true nature of Judgment Day and the fact that May 21, 2011 would be a spiritual judgment, rather than a physical earthquake and it would be a prolonged period of judgment that spanned years. There were many things that could not have been known because it was not the will of God for the time and season of the Great Tribulation. These other things were kept in reserve for Judgement Day because God had an additional program to reveal the coming of Christ as the Judge of the world. It was His program of the revelation of His righteous judgment and it would be carried out over the prolonged course of Judgment Day. God kept this in reserve because the granting of the understanding of this information also serves to spiritually feed and nourish the sheep; they will receive it at the hands of God as He continues to open the eyes of a few and they will teach others, and so forth, and learning can take place among the people of God. All of this is according to the will of God.

I am saying this and I am going in to some detail because when we came to May 21, 2011, some people got angry (and this was fairly typical) at Mr. Camping, for example, because he was the main individual that God used to proclaim worldwide that Judgment Day would occur on May 21, 2011. Immediately afterwards (or a little while later) some people got angry that there was a lack of understanding. They got angry that all was not known, basically, and that all the information was not known beforehand, like the spiritual judgment and the prolonged nature of the judgment. Basically, they were upset and angry because there was not advanced understanding of some of these things. You see, here is where understanding and humility comes into view, where we recognize that God Himself controls the dispensing of knowledge and the level of knowledge, and so forth. So, when we look back and we see the many truths God opened up during the Tribulation, we find He revealed a great many things of the Bible that had been previously hidden. They are such wonderful mysteries, especially the timeline of history and the duration for the Great Tribulation. And God set the groundwork for understanding additional truth in the last stage (of history) in the Day of Judgment because God opened the scriptures to lock in the date of May 21, 2011. No error has been found, even though our physical eyes told us “nothing happened,” and this has helped the people of God because the Bible continues to insist that this date was Judgment Day, so we had better continue to look at the Bible with that conclusion in mind and see what happens. What I mean by this is that when we turn to the Bible, it does allow for a spiritual judgment. As a matter of fact, all the major judgments in the Bible (including the first judgment in the Garden of Eden; Christ in the garden Gethsemane; judgment on the churches) have been spiritual in nature. A couple of them speak of the “cup of the wrath of God” and the same cup, according to Jeremiah 25, that was given to the churches was then given to the nations of the world.

As a matter of fact, when we look at the Biblical evidence, we should have declared that it would be a spiritual judgment. But, of course, we did not because God had kept back that bit of information from us until that time passed and then we were forced by the immovability of the Day of Judgment to reexamine the scriptures to see that it had to have been a spiritual judgment. And then we saw that the Bible very strongly supports the idea of a spiritual judgment.

So, it passed that test and then we ask, “If it is true that it was Judgment Day, then why are the elect still living on the earth?” Again, with the conclusion that May 21, 2011 was Judgment Day, we turn to the Bible to see if the Bible allows for God’s people to remain on the earth in the Day of Judgment. Everything we had previously understood was that the elect would be raptured before the judgment. But now we find that the Bible has abundance evidence that the elect would be left and we would be “alive and remaining” on the earth according to 1Thessalonians, chapter 4. We are left on the earth when the inhabitants of the earth are burned “with few men left,” as it says in Isaiah 24, verses 4 through 6. And there are many other scriptures. As a matter of fact, the Bible flatly declares that God will judge the “quick” or living and “dead” or spiritually dead. He is the judge of the righteous and the wicked and one event happens to all. So, again, when we go to the Bible it is very clear. It has always been God’s plan to leave His elect people on the earth to go through the judgment.

We can even see the reasons for this:

1. testing the elect;
2. making manifest the elect, as 2Corinthians 5, verse 10 reveals. We find we are learning many things about God’s program of righteous judgment at the end of this world and everything is harmonizing and we understand these verses as never before.

So, you see, God is in control of what His people know, when they will know it and what they do not know. God was in control and He could have opened Moses’ understanding to the time bridge. I may have mentioned this in our last study, but there were four individuals God used as He kept track of time using the same method He used in past history through calendar reference patriarchs. Levi was the first and Levi was aged 60. By the way, we will look at how the Bible will support that Levi was aged 60 when he entered into Egypt and he died at the age of 137, so he was in Egypt 77 years. He was followed by Kohath who was 133 and the calendar reference patriarch in his day. He was followed by Amram who was 137 when he died. He was followed by Aaron. Remember, when a calendar reference patriarch would die, the same year the next calendar reference patriarch would be born. So, in the year Amram died, Aaron was born and Aaron was 83 at the time of the exodus in the year 1447BC. If you add 77 and 133 and 137 and 83, it equals 430.

And, yet, God held back Moses from understanding the precise timeline of 430 years and, instead, Moses was focused on the statement God gave to Abram of 400 years. This resulted in Moses being “too early” in his conclusion that he must get to work to deliver his people. It brought about his departure from Egypt and further testing from God for the next 40 years and then God would come to him and cause him to return to Egypt.

But, you see, the information was all there at Moses’ disposal, but when there is a statement like “400 years” in Genesis 15, there was also a holding back of the deeper information. This is what happened to Moses and it caused Moses to carry out exactly what God wanted to happen. It was according to the will of God for him to leave Egypt at that time. He did not want Moses to be the deliverer from the “royal court.” He did not want Moses to get the glory. He caused Moses to be a shepherd in the wilderness (for 40 years) and he would return back to Egypt as a “nobody.” Then God would use Moses and Aaron and everyone would know that it was the mighty power of God that was the deliverer and not these men. These men were just a shepherd and one who spoke for him. God arranged the circumstances. We can be absolutely sure of this.

It is also a certainty that God arranged the circumstances of May 21, 2011 and the fact that it was broadcast to the world with an “exclamation point” that said, “May 21, 2011 Judgement Day. The Bible guarantees it.” And God arranged the circumstances around the aftermath of what happened when things did not take place as the people of God had declared. Yes, Judgment Day did come, but there was information concerning the rapture and concerning a literal five-month period about which we were incorrect. God held back His people from understanding some of these things to set the stage for severe testing, trial and tribulation, just as when Moses was wrong and he had to endure 40 years in the wilderness.

Again, regarding 40 years in the wilderness, Christ spent 40 days in the wilderness. Israel spent 40 years in the wilderness. Moses’ 40 years in the wilderness identifies with testing and God is testing His people that broadcast these things to the world and that trusted in His Word. Did not Moses trust in the Word of God regarding what was said to Abram about the 400 years? Of course, he did. Could Moses have been disappointed? Could Moses have thought, “I acted upon what I knew and I do not understand why it was wrong”? Of, course he would have. It was because there was more information that God would later reveal to His people, just like He would later reveal the exact date and the exact timeline to Moses.