Good evening, and welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the book of Genesis.  Tonight is study #8 of Genesis, chapter 28, and we are going to read Genesis 28:6-9:

And when Esau saw that Isaac had blessed Jacob, and sent him away to Padanaram, to take him a wife from thence; and that as he blessed him he gave him a charge, saying, Thou shalt not take a wife of the daughters of Canaan; And that Jacob obeyed his father and his mother, and was gone to Padanaram; And Esau seeing that the daughters of Canaan pleased not Isaac his father; Then went Esau unto Ishmael, and took unto the wives which he had Mahalath the daughter of Ishmael Abraham's son, the sister of Nebajoth, to be his wife.

In our last study, we looked at Matthew 24:30, especially at the language of the people that see Christ coming in the clouds.  I will read that verse again.  The previous verse tells us that this will happen immediately after the Tribulation.  Then it says in Matthew 24:30:

And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.

We looked at the word “clouds,” and Numbers 9 identifies the “cloud” with God’s commandments.  So the tribes of the earth are mourning when they see the sign of the Son of man “coming in the clouds.”  When they are hearing the reports from the Bible that they have been hearing since May 21, 2011, they have heard that He has come as Judge of the earth, and on that date the door of heaven shut, and God ended His salvation program because He had saved everyone He intended to save.  There were no more people to be saved.  Therefore, He shut the door.  And this is “seen” by the unsaved people.

I mentioned last time that right after May 21, 2011, Mr. Camping had an Open Forum and all the news media was there, and he had opportunity (before he had his stroke a few weeks later) to say that it was Judgment Day and there was no more salvation.  Shortly thereafter, Family Radio shut down the printing press as far as printing the “Does God Love You?” tract and their ministry changed from one of bringing the Gospel encouraging people to cry out to mercy that God might save them to one of “feeding sheep.”  That was the direction that God was leading His people right away, and EBible Fellowship has continued that direction over the past several years since that time.  And when we are sharing information about a spiritual judgment and a prolonged Judgment Day, what we are saying is that Christ has come in a “continual coming” and the Bible is revealing it.  We have talked about that verse in Romans regarding the revelation of His righteous judgment; God is revealing the spiritual coming of the Lord as the Judge of the earth, and in that way, He is fulfilling that verse.

And as people hear these things…and not everyone needs to hear it at once, but we are continuing to go out with tracts that are saying these things, and people are finding us on Facebook or YouTube or on our website.  And more and more people are hearing, so they are “seeing,” just as the high priest of Israel saw Jesus at the right hand of the Father, as the high priest heard the revelation coming from God.  That is the way in which he saw.

There is another passage that relates to this in Luke 13.  We have read and discussed this before, but it is fitting, given what we are looking at in the Genesis study where Esau “saw” that his brother receive the blessing, and so forth.  It says in Luke 13:23-28:

Then said one unto him, Lord, are there few that be saved? And he said unto them, Strive to enter in at the strait gate: for many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in, and shall not be able. When once the master of the house is risen up, and hath shut to the door, and ye begin to stand without, and to knock at the door, saying, Lord, Lord, open unto us; and he shall answer and say unto you, I know you not whence ye are: Then shall ye begin to say, We have eaten and drunk in thy presence, and thou hast taught in our streets. But he shall say, I tell you, I know you not whence ye are; depart from me, all ye workers of iniquity. There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when ye shall see Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets, in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrust out.

We can see, especially, that the last verse I read fits in with the language of Matthew 24:30.  It fits in with Esau “seeing” that the blessing was given to Jacob, and also his realization that he did not receive the blessing.  And, here, the Lord says, “There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when ye shall see…”  It is just like we saw a little earlier in Genesis 27, where Esau was weeping with strong crying, as Hebrew 12 tells us.  He was seeking repentance carefully, with tears, so we know that he “saw” the blessing and realized that he did not receive it, and there was weeping involved.  What about the “gnashing of teeth”?  Actually, we are going to look at “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” and how it does apply to Esau when he was so angry that he wanted to kill his brother.

But before we look at “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” let us first notice that Christ is speaking to those that are shut outside the door.  The master of the house has risen up and shut the door.  And this has everything to do with salvation, because the question was raised in verse 23: “Are there few that be saved?”  Then the Lord spoke these words indicating that the door was shut because everyone that was to be saved had already become saved, and verse 28 confirms this: “…when ye shall see Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets, in the kingdom of God.”  Again, Christ spoke in parables, and without a parable He did not speak.  Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the patriarchs and men of faith could by themselves represent all the elect, but God goes one step further and He says, “…when ye shall see Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets, in the kingdom of God.”   Yes, a prophet can be one that had the official role in olden days when the Lord would come to someone like Jeremiah and Isaiah and they would carry out the task of prophet in declaring the revelation of God to the people, but in our time…and there are prophets in our times, because the book of Acts when quoting from the book of Joel says, “in the last days your sons and daughters will prophesy.”  No – we do not have that official role of a prophet like Ezekiel, Isaiah or Jeremiah, but “to prophesy” simply means to declare what the Bible says.  We proclaim the prophecy of the Bible.  The whole Bible is the prophecy of God, so when we proclaim any part of the Bible, we are prophesying, and we are prophets in that sense.  All of God’s people are prophets.

Therefore, when those who are outside the door and have been shut out of the kingdom “see” within the kingdom Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and all the prophets, then they know that all the Lord’s true elect people have been brought into the kingdom.  That is the reason the door is shut.  It is the reason the master of the house rose up and shut to the door because everyone had been safely brought in, just as Noah, his sons and his sons’ wives were brought into the ark (with the animals) and God shut them in.  Everyone the Lord intended to deliver from the flood was inside the ark.  Once safely delivered within, the door shut, and when the door shut, it left the rest of the world outside. 

It does not mention it here, but in a few places where it speaks of “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” it also speaks of a place of “outer darkness,” and that is because the world has been made “black.”  The sun has been darkened, the moon is not giving her lights, and the stars have fallen from heaven.  Or, as it says in Revelation 9, smoke from the pit rose up and darkened the sun, thereby bringing the condition of “hell” to the earth above.  The nations are turned into hell, as Psalm 9 declares.  So God turned the world into “hell” or into a place of “outer darkness” because the world is without the kingdom of God, even though there are still elect in the world.  That is, that great multitude the Lord saved out of Great Tribulation remain, for the most part, although some may have physically died.  But we remain on the earth to go through the judgment, but we have light in our dwellings – we have the Holy Spirit within.  The world does not have the Holy Spirit, and the world no longer has “the light of the world” in the world.  Christ has gone out of the world, in the sense that there is no more grace and mercy in salvation.  The light of the Gospel has been put out, and darkness has engulfed the earth, spiritually.  And this is the picture here.

I said we would look at the phrase “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”  The Greek word translated as “weeping” is Strong’s #2805 and it is found nine times, and a few times it is very similar to this.  It says in Matthew 8:11:

And I say unto you, That many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven.

Just take note that it says “many” will come from these directions, and it does not say “all the prophets,” and that is because “all the prophets” and these “many” coming from various directions are one and the same.  Again, it says in Matthew 8:11-12:

And I say unto you, That many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven. But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

So we can see the similarity between this statement and Luke 13:28.  Again, all those God has intended to save, the whole company of the elect, have been brought into the kingdom. 

The children of the kingdom are cast out into outer darkness.  God ended the church age, and He bundled those in the corporate churches as tares for the burning.  I do not know the latest census, but some have estimated that it is as many as two billion people, and they were bundled for the fire of Judgment Day.  As soon as May 21, 2011 came and they had not come out of the churches, God just took that tremendous bundle of tares and cast them right into the spiritual fire.  There is no question because the Holy Spirit was not in their midst, and they could not have been saved within the churches during the Great Tribulation, and then God also stopped saving outside of the churches on May 21, 2011, so it is done.  They are cast into outer darkness and, again, there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Now we are not helped in understanding what “weeping and gnashing of teeth” means because it is similar to our other verse, and we are not given too much of an indicator here.  But let us go to Matthew 2, where we will read the same word translated as “weeping” in these other verses we were looking at, and this is a Scripture that describes Herod’s terrible sin of slaying the children of age two and under.  It says in Matthew 2:18:

In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.

This is in a different context, and that helps us because we are trying to understand what it means when Judgment Day comes and the door of heaven is shut and then there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth” when those outside the door “see” that the elect of God have received the blessing, just as Esau saw that Jacob had received the blessing.  Rachel is weeping for her children; that is, the mothers in Israel are weeping for their children because they were dead.   They had been killed.  They “are not” because they are no longer alive, and they could do nothing to change that.  That is the tragedy of death – you cannot bring them back.  Does that help us in our understanding?  Let us just keep that in mind and go to another verse.

In Acts 20 this word translated as “weeping” is found in Acts 20:36-38:

And when he had thus spoken, he kneeled down, and prayed with them all. And they all wept sore, and fell on Paul's neck, and kissed him, Sorrowing most of all for the words which he spake, that they should see his face no more. And they accompanied him unto the ship.

They all wept sore and the thing that made them so sorrowful and to weep so grievously was the fact that Paul said they would “see his face no more.”  That is, it was a final parting.  It was a goodbye forever, as far as this earth is concerned.  “I will see none of you ever again.  I must go to Rome.”  He was leaving them, and he would not return.

That is similar to the idea of the mother or Rachel weeping for her children because once the children were slain by evil Herod, then the children were gone – they were not.  They would never see their children alive and laughing and playing, and because they loved them, they wept.  That is what brings tears, when a loved one dies and we will see them no more, and it is almost as if the Apostle Paul was saying he was “dying,” with that statement.

That helps us because we now have two Scriptures that are not part of the pattern.  That is, it is the same word “weeping,” but the word “gnashing” is not here, and it is not necessarily the same context of Judgment Day, but what it is teaching us is that this kind of “weeping” happens when there is something that is final.  There is a strong sense of finality in the situation, and that is the case when the Lord rose up (May 21, 2011) and “shut to the door.” 

At various times in history, God has caused specific periods of spiritual famine, like the 2,300 evening mornings virtually no one was saved.  It is as though the door of heaven was shut temporarily.  And that is grievous enough, but God rose up to shut the door of heaven to end His salvation program, but prior to that date through the whole history of the world there had been at least some hope for people that God might save them.  But now, no more hope, and no more opportunity for salvation.  The door is shut and, as a result, it says, “When ye shall see Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets, in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrust out.”  Then there is weeping, due to the finality of it.  Indeed, it is what makes it so grievous and terrible, because the Bible is teaching that this is not a temporary situation.  It is not that God has shut the door of heaven for 2,300 days or for 23 years or even for 70 years, but it is shut until the end of time and the end of this world.  It is Judgment Day, and it is the time of the wrath of God.  Therefore, these people are realizing what is being said, and that is leading to the “weeping.” 

And as far as “gnashing of teeth,” I think we will just go over that in our next study.  I do not just want to throw a bunch of verses out there when we just have a couple of minutes left.  This is something we need to spend some time on and consider what the Bible is telling us with the use of this language.  And, of course, it is not something pleasant.  It is extremely sorrowful, but it is the Word of God and it is according to the perfect will of God.  Therefore, it is something that is a necessity.  It must take place, and it is taking place now.  Finally, the judgment of God has come upon the world.