Hello and welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the Book of Genesis.  Tonight, is study #13 of Genesis, chapter 21.  I am going to read Genesis 21:8-11:

And the child grew, and was weaned: and Abraham made a great feast the same day that Isaac was weaned. And Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, which she had born unto Abraham, mocking. Wherefore she said unto Abraham, Cast out this bondwoman and her son: for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son, even with Isaac. And the thing was very grievous in Abraham's sight because of his son.

We have been learning about what the Bible teaches us about “weaning.”  We see that it is related to understanding doctrine and increasing knowledge about the Word of God, the Bible.

We looked at Hebrews 5 and we are going to turn back there now.  God had been discussing Melchisedec and is referring to Him in verse 11.  It says in Hebrews 5:11-14:

Of whom we have many things to say, and hard to be uttered, seeing ye are dull of hearing. For when for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need that one teach you again which be the first principles of the oracles of God; and are become such as have need of milk, and not of strong meat. For every one that useth milk is unskilful in the word of righteousness: for he is a babe. But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.

In our last study, we looked at this passage and we will see that it is also related to the next chapter.  I think it has become clear to us that God has likened the church age to a time when His people were babes in need of “milk.”  He has likened the time of the end to the time when He would be unseal the Bible to reveal the things that had been hidden and to distribute knowledge to His people, like Joseph distributed the grain he had stored up during the years of plenty for the time of famine, which represents the Great Tribulation.  God had sealed up His Word, hiding spiritual truths or the deep things of God. 

We have learned several of these hidden truths over the last couple of decades, like the “faith of Christ.”  Some of these things may appear simple, but they are very deep.  These things were deep enough to confound the wisdom of the corporate church world, but it has helped us to understand that salvation is 100% of the Lord; we contribute nothing to salvation.  We were nothing but stinking, dead corpses prior to God acting upon us through salvation, if we happened to be one of His chosen people. 

We also learned about the end of the church age.  It was a deep, spiritual truth that God had hidden and then revealed at the time of the end.

We learned the correct doctrine about the judgment of God for the unsaved.  We learned that God will destroy the sinners forever when they are annihilated, but there is no eternal place of torment where unsaved man will be tortured by God forever and ever.

We learned that Christ was slain at the foundation of the world.  He made payment for sins at that point.  He entered into the world, born of the Virgin Mary, to demonstrate those things by going to the cross.

We learned that May 21, 2011 was Judgment Day.  We have learned the Biblical timeline of history, which had never been known.  We learned the timeline for the church age, the timeline for the Great Tribulation and the Day of Judgment itself. 

As God is continuing to reveal truth into this period of Judgment Day, we learned that Judgment Day is a spiritual event (until the last day), in which God is pouring out His judgment spiritually, just as He did to the churches.  We have learned that God’s people will be left on the earth to go through this period of Judgment Day.  This was something unknown in all history during the church age or any other age.  No one has known these things that God has revealed to His people in our day.

We have learned that we are following the example set by Christ and we are making an appearance, a demonstration before the judgment seat of Christ.   We are learning so many things that none of the natural-minded people have learned.  For some that had claimed to know it, now it is being taken from them, bit by bit, as God is removing the truth they (seemingly) once had.

Why this progression of revelation?  We know the Bible does teach progressive revelation.  The reason is that it was God’s program to make His people grow in knowledge.  The church age was the time of the “milk” of the Word, but the time of the end would be the unsealing of the Word of God and the time for “strong meat.”  This is the time we have come to “full age,” as it says in Hebrews 5:14:

But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.

In a way, it is like physical exercise.  If we do not exercise our physical bodies, we get flabby and out of shape.  Typically, we could become sick and unhealthy, so when we exercise our physical bodies, we gain health.  It is the same thing in the spiritual realm, as we exercise our senses.  Of course, we must have been given these “senses” to exercise them.  We must have spiritual eyes and ears.  We must have life in our souls to perceive the spiritual things of God.  If you are dead in your soul, you will not perceive the things of God.  You will go along with the natural-minded teachings of the carnal teachers that present only the milk of the Word, at best.  At worst, they even pervert the milk of the Word and you are just going along with the things they say because you have no discernment.  This is the reason God said, “A wise man’s heart discerneth both time and judgment,” in Ecclesiastes 8:5.  A wise man’s heart is a born-again heart.  It is a spiritual heart able to discern spiritual things.  According to Daniel 12:10, at the time of the end God would unseal His word and knowledge would increase, and the wise would understand, but none of the wicked would understand.  They are wicked because they are natural-minded and dead in their souls.  They are dead to spiritual interpretation.  They are dead to the methodology of comparing spiritual with spiritual.  It makes no sense to them.  They cannot grab hold of it and learn from it.  Even if they managed to hold on to anything at all, God will take it from them.

However, God’s people have a new heart and a new spirit that can discern both time and judgment.  Notice that the word “discern” also appears in Hebrews 5:14:

But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.

“By reason of use” comes by comparing Scripture with Scripture throughout the Bible.  It requires a lot of activity.  You must get out the Strong’s Concordance and look up every place a specific word is found in the Bible, and you must look at the verses, allowing the Bible to define its own terms, and so forth.  The more we do this, our senses are exercised to discern both good and evil.   We do not discern just the “good,” but the “evil.” 

Sometimes, some people go through the motions of comparing spiritual with spiritual and Scripture with Scripture.  They come up with a conclusion, but you are “wincing” at it. Your ear is rejecting it.  Something is not right.  It does not pass the “harmony test,” by harmonizing with the whole Bible.  It just is not striking you as correct.  What you are doing is discerning “evil,” or that which is not true and faithful and right, according to the Word of God.  We discern “evil” all the time, like when we hear certain doctrines from the churches.  We hear a “free will gospel,” where they say you must accept Christ, and they can even show you the verse: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.”  But when we have our senses exercised to discern good and evil, we realize that you cannot just look at one or two verses.  We ask, “Are we going to look at all the other verses?”  They might look at you and respond, “What other verses?”  We answer, “The rest of the Bible.”  The Bible tells us we are dead in sins.  The Bible says our souls are dead.  The Bible says that faith is a work.  The Bible says salvation is of the Lord and we are saved by the faith of Christ, and so forth.  We could look at a mountain of other evidence in the Bible that must be considered before one should reach a conclusion.  We can discern “evil.”   We know the “free will” folks have arrived at a wrong doctrine.  They are teaching a lie.  They are believing a lie and claiming a lie.  Nobody ever became saved by accepting Christ.

You see, we must discern all, not just that which is good and faithful.  God gives us that ability, too.  To discern “good” is to receive a doctrine that we recently learned regarding Christ being the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, and the works being finished from the foundation of the world.  The evidence has grown and grown.  The Bible says, “without shedding of blood is no remission.”  Then we ask, “What about all the Old Testament saints?  Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.  How was that possible without the shedding of blood?  How could his sins have been forgiven?”  Many major doctrines are impacted by this, and we realize that it must be that Christ died at the foundation of the world and made payment for the sins of His people at that time; and, thereby, the blood was available for Abel and Enoch and Noah, and all the Old Testament saints.

So, you see, this is how God’s people discern truth.  According to Ecclesiastes, God says, “a wise man’s heart discerneth both time and judgment.”  It is the same way we would discern any other doctrine.  Time paths are doctrines.  Does it come from the Bible?  Does it come from the Biblical calendar of history?  Notice that I referred to it as a “Biblical calendar,” because it comes from the Bible and it lays out the correct calendar for the entire history of the world.  When that calendar is laid out and we see the important events that transpired, we see that a great many of the dates related to key individuals in the Bible are significant, whether it be their birth year, death year or the number of years a king ruled, and so forth.  There is a pattern and we can see how the pattern locks in a time path from an Old Testament date to the first coming of Christ and His going to the cross in 33 A.D.  We see that date is absolute truth and that these time paths and timelines pointed to it.  We also know God opened up this calendar, so why cannot we project it into the time of the end of the world?  When we do that, we find tremendous similarity for the timelines that locked in the date for Christ going to the cross and locked in key dates in our time.  

And our time is not just any time, is it?  Let us be honest.  We are not living in a time when the world is conducting itself as usual.  The world has always been in madness since the fall, but because of God restraining sin, the world conducted itself in the past with some semblance of sanity, but no more!  Anyone who is honest would have to say the world has gone completely mad.  It has gone insane after sin.  It is really showing its blindness like never before in the history of the world.  Today, the people do not even know what bathroom to use in some places.  There is confusion over bathrooms, gender or whether to call someone “he” or “she.”  There is confusion everywhere, with men marrying men and women marry women.  Everywhere we turn there is mass confusion, and the churches are no better concerning their doctrines.  The churches have given tremendous indicators that they are in darkness; they are in deep spiritual blindness.  They cannot discern time or judgment and that is why they said with one voice, “No man knows the day or the hour.”  They cannot discern the slightest judgment about things, for the most part.  They cannot discern that there is not to be divorce.  They cannot discern that women are to be silent in the congregations and to be in submission to their husbands, and so forth.  We know the churches have gone after things like speaking in tongues, falling over backwards, holy laughter and everything else under the sun. 

It is in this chaotic mess of a world with the apostate, dead churches that the Biblical calendar and time paths have projected as the time of the end of the world.  When we read the Bible, what did Christ say regarding the world and the churches at the time of the end?  He said that iniquity would abound.  He said the churches would fall away and there would be false Christs and false prophets.  Read 2Thessalonians, chapter 2 where it says there must be “a falling away first,” before the day of Christ.  It all locks in.  Then we have the time path from the flood that lands on May 21, 2011, exactly 7,000 years after the flood (a day is as a thousand years).  It fell on the very day that the 23-year (8,400 days) Great Tribulation ended.  That day also had the underlying Hebrew calendar date of the seventeenth day of the second month, the same day that God shut the door of the ark.

There is enormous Biblical evidence, and God’s elect people that have spiritual eyes and ears granted to them by God to discern good and evil and to discern both time and judgment.  God’s people are the ones that desire to be faithful in every way possible to what the Bible is teaching, and we were able to see the end of the church age.  We were able to discern that God has judged the churches and congregations of the world and now He has brought judgment on the world itself.  These are not things that should be dismissed, ignored or waved away.  It will not go away.  God will not allow it.  God will not permit it.  It is all part of the “strong meat” that His people have graduated to, as we moved on from the milk of the Word.

I remember when my children were young we bought Gerber Graduate meals when they were coming out of the infant stage or milk stage.  They called them Gerber Graduates and they were “meat sticks.”  They loved those meat sticks.  And God’s elect people love the “strong meat” of the Word of God, the Bible.  It is something that delights our souls.

We did not get too far into what I wanted to look at in this study.  Lord willing, when we get together for our next Bible study we will look at a couple more things here in Hebrews, chapter 5.