Good evening, and welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the book of Genesis.  Tonight is study #42 of Genesis, chapter 24, and we are still reading Genesis 24:48:

And I bowed down my head, and worshipped JEHOVAH, and blessed JEHOVAH God of my master Abraham, which had led me in the right way to take my master's brother's daughter unto his son.

From this verse, we have been looking at what the Bible has to say about the right way and the wrong way, and it has a lot to say about it, as it is very important to know the right way.  There is no entering into heaven if you are going the wrong way, and if you are going the broad way that leads to destruction, you are not going the narrow way that leads to life.

So in our last couple of studies, we have been looking at what the Bible has to say about this.  Last time, we were discussing the fact that the right way is not well-spoken of, as some might think.  It is not a direction or a Gospel that will be looked upon favorably by the world or those that are still within the churches and congregations at this time of the end when they have been bundled as tares.

The Bible says that because it is the right way and the true way of God, evil men will not understand it and, therefore, they will speak evil of it.  We looked at a few verses in Peter, Jude and Proverbs, and we saw that this is typical of the reaction of the natural man to teachings that are spiritually discerned from the Bible.  They cannot perceive it and they are troubled by that and, as a result, they speak evil of those things that they understand not.  That is what the Bible says.

This was also true, of course, of the Lord Jesus Christ when He entered into the human race in the flesh and He dwelt among us.  He was among His people Israel, and the people of Israel were a people that God had redeemed for Himself, delivering them out of Egypt.  He established them in the land of Canaan.  He gave them His Word, the Holy Oracles, and He entrusted that Word to them.  The Lord set up the worship system of Israel and the sacrificial system.  He set up the Levitical priesthood.  It was all done by God.  The Lord was also the one who sent prophets, and through prophets He anointed kings like Saul and David, and so forth.  So God was completely instrumental in practically all facets of life within Israel, and they proclaimed themselves to be waiting for the Messiah who would come and establish a great kingdom. 

You know, God had also held Israel responsible for being faithful to His Word, and over the course of their history they were unfaithful to Him, time and again, and often God would send prophets and judgments upon them.  It got to the point where God judged Israel in the North, after the North and South had split, and He judged them by raising up the Assyrians.  Then about a hundred years later, Judah in the South likewise went apostate, and God raised up the Babylonians and King Nebuchadnezzar to utterly destroy the temple and carry them away captive.  At that point, God cursed the line of the kings, and Israel was without a king for several hundred years. 

Then the Lord Jesus Christ, the Messiah and promised King of the Jews, entered into the picture.  He was born of the Virgin Mary and dwelt among them.  We see that even with His birth, Herod and all Jerusalem were troubled by it, so there was a deep-down problem with the people of Jerusalem and the Israelites.  Why were they troubled by the news of the birth of the Messiah?  Later on we would find out, as Jesus as baptized in 29 A. D. and then went about His ministry of three and a half years, and we see the assault from the leadership and authorities within the nation of Israel against JEHOVAH God in the flesh.  You know, there is no doubt that Jesus is JEHOVAH.  Remember, it says in Isaiah 43:11:

I, even I, am JEHOVAH; and beside me there is no saviour.

It is very, very clear.  It cannot be misunderstood.  JEHOVAH God is saying that He, alone, and no one else is JEHOVAH the Saviour.  Then came that glorious day when Jesus was born into the world, and we read in Luke 2:11:

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

It cannot be another – it can only be JEHOVAH of the Old Testament.  The name “JEHOVAH” is used a couple of thousand times, or more, and the nation of Israel was, supposedly, worshipping, serving and waiting for the Messiah.  And now He had come.  Jesus is JEHOVAH.  Jesus is the eternal God of the Bible.  He is the truth, the way and the life.  He is everything, all in His glorious Person, and He had humbled Himself and emptied Himself of His glory so He could walk among His subjects.  And out of all the people of the world, these people were those that claimed to be His people and servants of JEHOVAH.  So, certainly, when He spoke, they would listen and when He declared something, they obeyed, and they would sit with rapt attention whenever Jesus would say a Word, being completely subservient to His every desire.  Is that the way it worked out?  Absolutely not.  Absolutely not.  They were constantly opposed to Him.  They were in opposition to Him.  They were contrary to everything He said.  They spoke against Him evilly.  It says in Mark 3:22:

And the scribes which came down from Jerusalem said, He hath Beelzebub, and by the prince of the devils casteth he out devils.

This was there response to God in the flesh?  You know, it is not as though Jesus did not prove He was God in the flesh.  It was not as though He was just a normal person who had no real power or authority.  What had He been doing?  He had been performing miracle, after miracle.  He was showing forth His tremendous power and His almighty nature as He gave sight to the blind, ears to the deaf, legs to the lame and life to the dead.  He raised the dead.  He walked on water and turned water into wine.  He did incredible, miraculous, supernatural things, one after another, clearly proved He is God – not just “of God,” but He is God.  And they saw it.  They recognized it.  “Never man spake like this man,” some soldiers told the leaders of Israel when they were sent to capture Him.  Never spake a man like this.  He spoke with authority, and He showed forth the power behind that authority with numerous miracles.  Again, without question, there was no doubt that He was showing and proving that He was the God of the Bible, the promised Messiah, of the kingdom of heaven, or else He could have done none of these things.  They knew that.  They were aware of that deep down within and, yet, it is the nature of man to be against God right from the beginning in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  When God came calling, what did they do?  They hid themselves, and they fled from the presence of God.  And this is why all Jerusalem was troubled in the time of Herod when they heard from the wise men from the East that the promised Messiah had been born.  Man, in his rebellious state and unregenerate condition, does not want to be with God.  He does not want the light that is God Himself, the light of truth.  Man flees from the light and scurries into the darkness.

So, too, this was the situation with the chief priests, scribes, elders, Pharisees and Sadducees.  They had all the titles and the flowing robes and the respect of the people and, yet, they were dirty rotten sinners.  They were desperately wicked sinners that were unregenerate; that is, their hearts were stone and they were set against God in their hearts.  So it did not matter what the Lord Jesus did in their presence in performing the tremendous miracles that could only be done by God; they still resisted Him.  “Oh,” they said, “by the prince of the devils he casts out devils.  That is how he does these things.  It is by Satan.”  What a horrible lie.  It really shows the ugliness of sinful man, which we are seeing in our time at the end of the world as God has lifted His hand of restraint off the wicked heart of mankind, and we are seeing what has been there all along.  This is what it means to have rebelled against God. 

So they were confronted by the Light, and it was shining upon them, and they fled from the light.  They had to extinguish the light and put it out so they could continue in their phony religious system of worship and their phony religious scales of justice based on works.  It was all a sham.  It was all a shell, and Christ was revealing the true nature of their religious system and the true nature of these men and, therefore, they hated Him.

And the same type of men have existed all throughout history, and all throughout the church age, and all throughout our present time of Judgment Day at the end of the world, and they hate the right way of God.  They hate the truth of the Bible.  They still hate the light, although it is not in the bodily form of Christ, but the light of the Gospel is in the Word of God and it is carried by God’s people as messengers of the truth.  We are messengers of the light, and that is why it says in 2Corinthians 11 that Satan comes as an angel or messenger of light.  He comes looking like Christ.  How did he do that?  It was through misguiding, misleading and lying about the Word of God and, yet, trying to look as close as possible to Christ through their misuse of the Bible. 

But when the actual Christ comes (and Christ and the Gospel are synonymous), or when the true Gospel comes, it is like the true Christ is coming once again, showing Himself in His Word.  And that is why people lash out, dispute, argue, criticize and attack.  In other words, nothing has changed since the days of Christ.  It says in Matthew 10:24-25:

The disciple is not above his master, nor the servant above his lord. It is enough for the disciple that he be as his master, and the servant as his lord. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more shall they call them of his household?

That is a good question.  JEHOVAH God is standing before them as the Creator of all things, the Almighty, and this is what they call Him?  They say He has “Beelzebub” and that He is under the power of the evil one?  You cannot get any more arrogant and prideful and wicked than that, so it is nothing in comparison to us as lesser servants. On a comparison scale, we do not even register because God is infinitely holy and glorious, and we are sinners and former children of wrath even as others, but it was just by the grace of God that He has saved us according to His mercy, His goodness and His good pleasure.  He chose us when we did not deserve it, so who are we?  Who are we?  Even after salvation, even though all our sins are forgiven, we still remain in bodies of flesh.  We have weak bodies that have seen corruption and continue to sin and, therefore, those that we witness to can see us messengers of the Bible as unperfect and as sinners.  So, of course,  they are going to despise us.  Of course they are going to ridicule the things we say, and they will attack us and come against us and say we are heretics or of Satan, and whatever else they can think of.  They will speak against our motivation and speak against us and whatever they can find against us.  If they have done so to our Lord and Master, the perfect God who has always been perfect, they will do it to us.  They not only said these things of Jesus, but they held a council and they tried Him and found Him guilty of blasphemy, and they turned Him over to the Roman authorities for crucifixion.  So they put the Lord of glory, the Holy One of Israel, to death for, supposedly, breaking their laws.  Remember when Jesus would heal someone on the Sabbath Day, it would really infuriate them because the doctrines of the church were held to with zealous rigor.  They adhered to their own laws, not the Law of God, and they put Christ to death for what they considered to be violations of their law.  And, yet, He was the one who gave the Law.  He is the Lawgiver.   Imagine that.

So we can apply this to ourselves at the time of the end of the world when God has opened the Scriptures to shine the light on the teachings of the Bible.  He gave the Bible to the churches over the almost two thousand years of the church age and they were caretakers of the Bible, but they added all kinds of “high places” and they inserted their errors in their confessions and creeds, and their theologians “etched them in stone,” as it were.  The churches worshipped these things, but at the time of the end God revealed the truth of the matter concerning this doctrine and that doctrine.  And you know those doctrines: Christ was slain at the foundation of the world; the doctrine of hell; the doctrine of the end of the church age, and all the other many things we have learned.  And these truths are destroying the falsehoods, like good King Josiah with a vengeance went all about Judah ridding the land of their high places.  So the light of the Gospel in our day is shining on the wickedness that had infiltrated the churches and congregations of the world over many centuries.  And they responded as evil men typically respond, in anger, fury and disdain, and they lashed out at the people of God who brought the message that dared to say that the churches had been worshipping and serving falsehood.  “How dare they!”  They acted as if we were talking against God and the Word of God, but it was not that way at all.  It was the doctrines of men that God was correcting and tearing down every “high thing,” as it says in 2Corinthians 10:4-5:

(For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;) Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;

So the people of God at the time of the end of the world have turned away from the churches and from the high places, and we embrace the Word of God, the Bible, completely and fully, as had not been done for thousands of years.  Now God’s people again go directly to God and no longer go through an outward corporate representation like Israel of old or the New Testament churches, but we go to God directly through His Word.   And, again, this infuriates them, and it causes them to speak evil of “that way,” because they understand it not.  It is the typical reaction of the unregenerate sinner against the truth of the Bible.  It is the reaction of rebellious man when God shines the light in his direction.  So that is what we see here.

Lord willing, when we get together in our next Bible study, we are going to continue with this a little bit more.  We will continue with this theme where the Lord Jesus told us that if they speak evil of the Master of the house, then how much more of the members of His household, the servants?  And, again, we have to arm ourselves with this mind: this is what is to be expected.  In the world, we will have tribulation.  There will be affliction.  There will be those that come against the truth of the Bible.  We will look more at this, Lord willing, in our next Bible study.