Good evening and welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the book of Genesis.  Tonight is study #10 of Genesis, chapter 22.  We are continuing to read the first couple verses there, in Genesis 22:1-2:

And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am. And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.

We have been spending a good deal of time looking at what the Bible has to say about “temptation.”  And, remember, the Bible refers to a “time of temptation” in the parable in Luke, chapter 8.  The Lord’s Prayer includes the phrase, “And lead us not into not into temptation.”  God identified Israel’s 40-year wilderness sojourn as a “day of temptation.”  We have seen how we can relate the 40-year period, the day of temptation, to a 40-year Day of Judgment, beginning in 1994 with the official judgment upon the churches and continuing to 2033, which is 40 inclusive years.

Before we go back to Genesis 22 concerning the interesting account of God commanding Abraham to offer his only son Isaac and the execution of that command, let us spend a little bit more time to look at this 40-year period because a lot of Biblical evidence is coming together when we understand that there is 40 years.  The number “40” has special significance, and it ties into several things in the Bible, like time paths, and so forth.  One example was the “day of temptation” in the wilderness, which we know was 40 years long.  God also says in Numbers 14:33-34:

And your children shall wander in the wilderness forty years, and bear your whoredoms, until your carcases be wasted in the wilderness. After the number of the days in which ye searched the land, even forty days, each day for a year, shall ye bear your iniquities, even forty years, and ye shall know my breach of promise.

God said, “You searched the land for 40 days.  I am going to judge you by causing you to wander in the wilderness one year for each of those days, or 40 years.  In this, you will bear your iniquities.”  That was the judgment upon them.  Now let us turn to Ezekiel, chapter 4 where we are going to find similar language.  There the Lord speaks to Ezekiel and calls him “the son of man.”  It says in Ezekiel 4:4:

Lie thou also upon thy left side, and lay the iniquity of the house of Israel upon it: according to the number of the days that thou shalt lie upon it thou shalt bear their iniquity.

This is similar to what the Lord said in Numbers 14: “…shall ye bear your iniquities, even forty years.”  But, here, in speaking of Israel, we will see it speaks of 390 days in the next verse, in Ezekiel 4:5:

For I have laid upon thee the years of their iniquity, according to the number of the days, three hundred and ninety days: so shalt thou bear the iniquity of the house of Israel.

But when he has accomplished or finished doing this, then God adds this command, in Ezekiel 4:6:

And when thou hast accomplished them, lie again on thy right side, and thou shalt bear the iniquity of the house of Judah forty days: I have appointed thee each day for a year.

So we see the language of “bearing iniquity.”  We see a similar reference to 40 days,  and something else in common with Numbers 14 that God has appointed each day for a year.  But in Ezekiel it refers to 390 days, as well as the 40 days, so we may not see the connection right away.  But one thing we should see in the way the Lord laid this out is that He intended the days to be “consecutive,” with 390 days on one side; and then he was to turn 40 days on his other side.  How many days in total?  It is 430 days.  “I have appointed thee each day for a year.”  We can relate that to 430 years that Israel was in the land of Egypt.  But before we say, “Oh, there is the solution,” but that is not quite right.  Ezekiel was a prophet that lived several hundred years after Israel had already come out of the land of Egypt, so it would not apply in a historical or spiritual way to that time, but God is making an identification with that 430 years because He is relating it to the entire span of history in which He would deal with national Israel as His outward representation to the inhabitants of the earth.  It also relates to the time God would use the churches as His outward representation in the New Testament to the inhabitants of the earth.

In a couple of Mr. Camping’s books, he laid out that time path.  He said that God was speaking of Israel regarding the 390 years, and in 1907 B. C. Jacob had his name changed by God from Jacob to “Israel.”  Then he added 3,900 years to 1907 B. C., because the Bible allows for that kind of calculation.  If the Lord speaks of “390,” it could be an actual 390 days, or it could be 390 years (each day for a year), or it could even be 3,900 years.  The (spiritual) meaning of the number does not change when we add multiples of ten.  So Mr. Camping developed that time path, which was a sound time path that ended in the year 1994.  And it was a very good time path, because from 1907 B. C. through 1994 A. D. would contain both periods of time as represented by Israel of the Old Testament and the churches of the New Testament in which they were the outward representatives of the kingdom of God to the inhabitants of the earth.  Therefore, it was the time in which Israel bore their iniquities, because they had always been unfaithful on many points.  That is the reason God judged Old Testament Israel.  That is also the reason He officially judged the New Testament churches and congregations in 1994.  So there is a direct time path that encompasses both entities and the time when both periods would come to an end.

But then regarding the 40 days that Ezekiel would lie on his right side, Mr. Camping said we could back up from 1907 B. C. to 2007 B. C. when Jacob and Esau were born.  In a sense, he said that could be the beginning of Judah because Jacob was the father of Judah, and from there we could go 4,000 years, which also falls in the same year of 1994.  Now Mr. Camping developed this two-fold time path prior to 1994, and at that time he thought that 1994 would (possibly) be the end of the world.  So we can see why at that time, his mind would have tended to think that everything had to fall on 1994.  However, we can see that the idea of going from the starting point of 1907 B. C. backwards one hundred years to 2,007 B. C. is not in keeping with the language of Ezekiel 4, which commands Ezekiel to accomplish certain days on one side and then start certain days on the other side – we can see that it should be consecutive.  He would lie 390 days, and then he would lie for 40 days.  He did not lay on his left and right side simultaneously.  He had to perform one, and then the other.  This would mean that he could not fulfill or carry out God’s command until 430 days had passed; that is, the “390” plus “40” had to be performed before He had accomplished what God told him to do.  We have the vantage point because we have gone beyond 1994 and  beyond May 21, 2011, so now we can look back at this and see that the time path of 390 days (3,900 years) brings us to 1994, and now we “lie on the other side.”  We start the 40 days, which in this case would be an actual 40 years, because 400 or 4,000 years would not fit. 

By the way, when God gives us leeway with numbers like this, He does expect us to consider context and all the other Biblical information that may relate, and we know the world will not continue for 400 or 4,000 years from 1994.  That leaves us one option, which is 40 years, and when we apply that option we come to the year 2033, inclusively.  The Bible also allows for counting years inclusively.  (I could give examples, but we do not want to take the time to do that right now.)  Therefore, we suspect we have found the solution to God’s command to Ezekiel to lie on his right side for 390 days or 3,900 years, and then to lie on his right side for 40 days or 40 years.  And during that time he would “bear the iniquity of the house of Israel,” because it is the time of God’s judgment.  God’s judgment began at the house of God and then was carried over into the world.  It has everything to do with bearing the iniquities of our forefathers.  That is the reason God judged the churches, as well as our forefathers back to Adam and all mankind.  That is the reason God is judging the entire world and, therefore, the elect do not escape this time.  We were not raptured before the Tribulation – we went through it.  Likewise, we were not raptured before Judgment Day is complete – we will go through it and, therefore, we are bearing the iniquities.  And to do this, we must bear them for 40 years.

You see, this is how we build upon doctrine or develop doctrine from the Bible.  We take one piece of information, which was the “day of temptation: in the wilderness, which was 40 years long.  We have already talked about how we can relate that to 1994 and then go 40 years from that time.  Now here is a second time path that comes from another part of the Bible, and it also leads us to the same two interesting years – 1994 and 2033. 

But we will not stop there.  Let us also turn to Deuteronomy 25:1-3:

If there be a controversy between men, and they come unto judgment, that the judges may judge them; then they shall justify the righteous, and condemn the wicked. And it shall be, if the wicked man be worthy to be beaten, that the judge shall cause him to lie down, and to be beaten before his face, according to his fault, by a certain number. Forty stripes he may give him, and not exceed: lest, if he should exceed, and beat him above these with many stripes, then thy brother should seem vile unto thee.

Here, the Lord is laying down a law for judges in sentencing: there must be a limit.  In this case, God chose to use the figure of “stripes.”  We can see why, as it says in Luke 12:46:

The lord of that servant will come in a day when he looketh not for him, and at an hour when he is not aware, and will cut him in sunder, and will appoint him his portion with the unbelievers.

So, clearly, Judgment Day is in view.  It goes on to say in Luke 12:47-48:

And that servant, which knew his lord's will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes. For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.

Here, God refers to those that knew His will and, yet, they are beaten with stripes because they are the unsaved in the corporate church, and to those that did not know His will and are beaten with lesser stripes; those are the unsaved in the world.  Importantly, both are beaten with stripes, so that helps us to understand that God began to apply His wrath in this figure of “stripes” upon the churches and congregations.  They began to receive “stripes” back in 1988, but it was official in 1994.  But on the Day of Judgment, there was a transition from the wrath of God being exclusively on the churches to include all the unsaved inhabitants of the earth.  Then God began meting out “stripes” upon all unsaved individuals including all those unsaved people in the churches, so those in the churches received stripes for 23 years, but officially since 1994.  (I want to be careful to include that.)  And, after receiving those stripes, they are still in the world when God is punishing the world, but it still affects the churches, too.  So God lays down the principal of “forty stripes,” so if we were to relate it to years with the official judgment upon the churches from 1994 to 2033, it is 39 actual years or 39 stripes.  Of course, if we count it inclusively, it would be 40.  This is another reason we repeatedly see these interesting numbers of “39” and “40.”  Remember when the Apostle Paul recounted the times he had received “stripes,” as we read in 2Corinthians 11:24:

Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one.

He was sentenced to 40 stripes, but they gave him only 39 because they were very much aware of that Law in Deuteronomy 25, and they did not want to transgress by going beyond it.  They thought they were righteous judges, but applying it to the Apostle Paul was completely unrighteous.  But, still, they carefully tried to stay within the bounds.  Remember that God is also under His own Law, so that is a very good reason why the Lord would bring a sentence of 40 years in which He would judge, but then He allows it to be 39 actual years.  According to the number of stripes, this fits into the “day of temptation” being 40 years long and with the 40 days/40 years we read about in Ezekiel, chapter 4.

There are a few more time paths and key Biblical information that relate to “40” that tie into this time period from 1994 through 2033, where we can see how it all fits.  But I think I am going to wait until the next Bible study because I do not want to overload you with information.  For now, you may want to check out what we were just talking about regarding the 40 years of the “day of temptation” in the wilderness, the 40 stripes, and how Ezekiel was commanded to lie on his left side for 390 days, and on his right side for 40 days; and how each day was appointed for a year.

Then, Lord willing, when we get together in our next Bible study, we will examine at least three more (time paths) that come together, without being forced, to fit harmoniously with this new time information we have been learning about.  You know, the year 2033 and its placement in the timeline has helped to open up a great deal of Biblical evidence concerning the overall timeline for God’s judgment program.