The Trinity, No. 2

RV169-02

© Berean Memorial Church of Irving, Texas, Inc. (1993)

Deceit

The spiritual blindness of the tribulation humanity will enable the antichrist to pass himself off as God. That is exactly what he plans to do. He plans to make the bold, public declaration, on the public communication media, that he is God. He will be a brilliant man. He will be a winsome man. He will be a charismatic person. He will look like a leader. It is getting very hard these days to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Have you been paying attention and watching the kinds of suits that the communist commentators on Radio Moscow are wearing?

I saw one the other day on TV that looked better than Peter Jennings. I mean he had a suit that made Jennings look like he just bought some bargains at K-Mart. He had a beautiful tie. He looked sharp. I've been watching, and Gorbachev looks sharp. All of them suddenly look like good guys. I thought, "Where are the good old days when Khrushchev was around, wearing those cheap suits that crawl all over him, and you could tell the good guys from the bad guys, Now they all look like they're on the right side, and they even call the parliament, where Boris Yeltsin is operating from and holding out the president of Russia. They call it the White House. Have you noticed that? How much they are getting like we, the good guys? It's hard to tell the difference.

The Antichrist

The antichrist is going to be very deceptive. People are going to have to look twice to realize that this guy is really a bad guy. He's really a bad scene. He will cover up just how gross he is. But because of their spiritual blindness, many people will unbelievably accept his claim of deity. The antichrist thus will, in effect, try to claim that he is another God-man like Jesus Christ. He will not deny that he is a human being, but he will pass himself off as another God-man, as was Jesus Christ. As I told you in the previous session, he will pass himself off as the last of the Christ spirits, in the tradition of Krishna, and Buddha, and Muhammad, and so on.

It is ironic that mankind, which had no hesitancy in rejecting the humble, loving Jesus Christ, will bow before the arrogant, blaspheming antichrist. The apostle John is told that mankind as a whole will worship the antichrist. Satan's man will be viewed as one who has developed his innate potential deity, which the New Age doctrine teaches us – that all men are potential gods. That is at the heart of all Mormon doctrine. Satan has for centuries propagated the lie of human divinity from the time of the Garden of Eden when he proposed this to Eve, and she swallowed it, and brought the first enormous disaster on the human race by bringing sin upon us all.

The True Nature of God

This lie of potential human deity appeals to people, because if you are a god, then you can make your own rules. Nobody can tell you what to do, and you have no one to answer to for your conduct or your thinking. But the true nature of God is very clearly taught in the Bible. We have devoted this day to reinforcing what you know; clarifying what you don't understand; and, making it very clear that you understand the nature of the true God. Those who know the doctrine of the Godhead cannot be deceived by the antichrist and his false claims to deity.

The Bible, first of all, declares in John 4:24, the God is a spirit being. He is not, as the Mormons teach, a flesh-and-blood man. The Bible, furthermore, teaches that God while one in essence, and so He is one God, expresses that one essence in the form of three persons – distinct and equal, in the roles and offices of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Old Testament, we pointed out, frequently uses a strange grammatical arrangement. The Old Testament frequently uses the name of God in a plural form, such as the very first verse of the Bible that says, "In the beginning, God created." That word "God" is the Hebrew word "Elohim". It's a plural word.

What it says literally, if you translate literally, it is: "In the beginning Gods created," and that is the way that God the Holy Spirit indicated the plurality in the Godhead right in the beginning. But the oddity is that it not only uses that plural form, but then it attaches it to a singular verb: "In the beginning Gods created." As we said, we don't say, "We is going to do this," because "we" is plural, and "is" is a singular verb, and you have to have the two compatible. Yet, the Old Testament Hebrew regularly does this – a plural noun for God, with a singular verb, thus indicating: plurality of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit on the one hand; but, the oneness of God, on the other hand, of His divine essence.

On occasion, we have also indicated to you that God in Scripture uses plural pronouns in reference to Himself, as for example, in Genesis 1:26 when Le says, "Let us make man in our image," indicating again the plurality of the Godhead.

These grammatical characteristics of the Old Testament Hebrew clearly convey the idea of one God in essence, in a plurality of persons. Some of the Old Testament Scriptures spell out this plurality in detail, specifically as a Father, a Son, and a Holy Spirit. You may find this in Isaiah 48:12-13 that we looked at last time, where God pronounces Himself to be the Creator. Then he goes down to verse 12, and He indicates that this Creator God has acted in reference to the Son and in reference to the Holy Spirit. Isaiah 42:1 is quite explicit about Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Judaism

It is amazing that the Jewish people still hang on to the concept of one God while reading their own Scriptures, even though, in their minds, they have a problem. They see this. They don't understand these strange grammatical uses, the strange use of singulars and plurals. But they have to hold to the rejection of the plurality of the Godhead, because that's the only way they can deny that Jesus Christ is also God, while His Father was in heaven –, that He was God the Son, and the Father was in heaven. The Jews reject the plurality of the Godhead, so they must reject Jesus Christ as Son of God and true deity.

We pointed out to the statement in Deuteronomy 6:4, which is the statement that the Jews use, to this very day, to make a summary declaration about what they believe, and how they are a distinct people in reference to their view of God. As we pointed out to you in the Hebrew text, the first word is "Shema." For this reason, the Jews talk about this as "the Shema." If you ask a Jew to give you the Shema, he knows exactly what you're saying. He knows that you're asking him to repeat the declaration of faith of Deuteronomy 6:4. Most Jewish children, who have been well taught, know the Shema, and probably in Hebrew as well. The Hebrew is very important.

And I want to review what we gave you in the previous session, because I want you to know your ground on this. Hebrew 6:4 says, "Hear, O Israel. The Lord is our God. The Lord is One." In the Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4, this word "God" is the Hebrew word "Elohim," and it is a plural word. It is literally "Gods." It is significant that it is not the Hebrew singular for God, which is "Elohai" in the Hebrew language. So, it says, "Hear, O, Israel. The, the Lord ('Jehovah') is our God. The Lord is One." There we have the plurality of the Godhead. This is further reinforced by the word "One" in the Shema: "Hear, O Israel. The Lord is our God. The Lord is One." The word "One" is "Echad" in Hebrew, and it's "one in a plurality." It is a oneness as the result of a plurality brought together, which is exactly what is true about the Trinity. It does not use "Yachid," which means an absolute oneness, a singularity.

So, we pointed out to you that when God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, he described Isaac as his "Yachid" son: his one-and-only, identifiable, singular son. But when He told a man that he would leave father and mother, and he would cleave to his wife, and that they would be "one" flesh, He used "Echad," quite appropriately, because the husband and wife in the sexual relation become one unit. They are one physically, but they are a plurality of persons in that oneness. This illustrates the beautiful quality of the language of Scripture, which God the Holy Spirit uses.

So, here in the very Shema, the very great statement of faith of Judaism, is this double whammy: "Hear, O Israel. The Lord, our 'Elohim,'" (plural). The Lord is One – a oneness as a result of plurality of individual pieces or persons.

Maimonides

We call your attention to the Spanish rabbi from the 12th century, Rabbi Moses Maimonides. Among the Jews, he is highly respected. This is a very great rabbi. As we told you in the previous session, he is the one who codified the Talmud, which is the basic book of interpretation of the Old Testament, followed by the Jewish people to this day. What Maimonides did was made a paraphrase of the Shema (of Deuteronomy 6:4). His paraphrase was, "I believe, with a perfect faith, that the Creator, blessed be His name is One." And the Jews use this paraphrase of the Shema to this day. The thing that is of interest to us is that Maimonides, knowing his Hebrew, had a problem with the word "One" in Deuteronomy 6:4 in the Hebrew text. We pointed out you that the word "One" was "Echad." And "Echad" said "a oneness of plurality," which suggested very clearly that that there is a unity, but it is a unity of a Godhead of more than one person. Thus, they were faced with the problem, in the 12th century, that this Jesus of the first century had a biblical ground for claiming that he was the Son of God, and that He was divine.

So, Rabbi Maimonides deliberately changed the word "One" in his paraphrase to "Yachid," which means an absolute oneness of a singularity. He was trying thus to eliminate the concept that God is One in essence, and a plurality of persons, and thus legitimatize the claims of Jesus Christ to being God incarnate.

So, the nature of God is quite clear in the Old Testament. We have just given you some basics, but I think you can see, if you though, that is a pretty powerful statement in the Old Testament that the oneness of God is his essence, but there's a plurality of persons, and even explicitly three persons in the form of the Father, a Son, a the Holy Spirit.

The Trinity in the New Testament

When we come to the New Testament, the doctrine of the Trinity is just as strong, if not in some respects, even more explicit.

Mark 1:9-11

Open your Bibles to Mark 1:9-11. Here you have one of the clearest demonstrations of the entire Godhead present at one time: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is upon the occasion of the water baptism of Jesus: "And it came about in those days that Jesus came from Nazareth and Galilee, and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And immediately, coming up out of the water."

Baptism is Immersion

I want to stop here. I must stop to have you know what he said: "He came up out of the water." That means that Jesus had to walk down into the Jordan River. You've seen those pictures which indicate the problem of people who think that baptism is a sprinkling of a little bit of water on you, which has no symbolic significance whatsoever. You see these pictures of Jesus kneeling in the Jordan River, and John the Baptist is pouring a little water on his head. The reason Jesus was down in the river is because the method of baptism of the Jews was immersion, and it was very naturally the method which they understood, and was carried over into the Christian symbol of being placed in Christ, in death, and being raised, coming up out of the water, to a newness of life.

Then, in Mark 1:10, "Then Jesus came up out of the water, and He saw the heavens opening, and the Spirit (God the Holy Spirit), like a dove, descending upon Him (God the Holy Spirit in a form, descending upon Jesus Christ), and a voice out of heaven, saying, 'You are My beloved Son. In You I am well pleased." So, here you have God the Holy Spirit, descending upon the Son in the form of a dove. Here you have the Son standing there by the riverbank, having just been baptized, and the voice from heaven of the Father declaring the authenticity of Jesus Christ as the Messiah Savior of Israel. I don't think you could have a clearer declaration of the plurality of the Godhead – the plurality of the One God, specifically as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

John 14:16-17

In John 14:16-17, you again have all three members of the Trinity referred to: Jesus says, "I (there is the Son) will ask the Father (God the Father in heaven), and He will give you another Helper (referring to God the Holy Spirit), that He may be with you forever. He is the Spirit of Truth (now explicitly identified as the Holy Spirit, whom the world cannot receive because it does not behold Him or know him. But You know Him because He abides with you, and will be in you." This is a most amazing statement. No Jew could ever conceive of God living in His body. Do you realize what He is saying? The disciples must have looked wide-eyed at Jesus when He said that.

He says, "None of the world is going to understand that. They're going to think you're crazy. They'll not be able to relate to the power of God the Holy Spirit working in a human being. But I want to tell you that when I came into this world, I came as a human being, and My Father provided me the two things I needed to survive victoriously in the devil's world – the same things that will work for you. He gave me the doctrines of Scripture, and I learned those from My youth up, so that they were second nature in My mind, and stored in My human spirit. And he gave me the indwelling Holy Spirit to guide and to shine the light of doctrine upon My life and upon my operation."

Prayer

That's why those of you who know how to function on this power system – when you pray, things happen. The results come because you know how to pray. You don't pray for things that you shouldn't pray for. God the Holy Spirit leads you. When you have a problem, and you need a solution, it just pops up.

I recently traveled from here to Florida and back for a couple of weeks. I cannot tell you how many times the power system of prayer unraveled unbelievable things, having to mention and having to present it to the Father in heaven. The computer started clicking; the answers came out; and everything fell together. I mean it was just amazing. Well, I can't get into it now. I wouldn't be able to do anything else, because it was such a string of things. These are not accidentals. These are functioning things. These are the product of functioning on the power system. If that doesn't click with you, then you're out of it. You have not put the system to work. The power system in the inner circle of temporal fellowship is unbeatable. And this is the work of God the Holy Spirit.

However, here you see Jesus the Son addressing the Father to send the Holy Spirit to do his work of guiding the believers. That is quite clear,

The rabbis, the chief priests, the Herodians, the Sadducees, the Pharisees – the whole gang was together on one occasion with Jesus, and they were asking Him questions to see if they could pick Him up because He was cleaning something. He told them, "I'm God, I am God incarnate. I'm a God-man." He would twist their noses by saying, "If I am God, then I'm sinless. I challenge any of you to accuse me of any evil. I guarantee you that gang, if they had anything on Him, would have been quite ready to declare it. They couldn't say a thing. They could not criticize it in any way. And yet, because of their false view of the nature of God as an absolute singularity, instead of a oneness of plurality, they could not conceive that God, the Lord (the Lord God, the Father) was in heaven, and the Lord God the Son was here on this earth – that there were two persons, and they were both part of the Godhead.

Matthew 22:41-46

So, when, on this occasion, they had no more questions to ask Him, Jesus gave them one in Matthew 22:41-46: "Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them a question, saying, 'What do you think about the Christ (that is, the Messiah). Whose Son is he?'" He poses the question to them such that He knew they would readily know the answer from Old Testament Scripture: "What does the Bible say will be the relationship of the coming messiah? He will be a human being." They knew that. And He says, "Whose Son is He going to be?" They said to him, "Oh, that's easy:" "They said to him, 'The son of David.'" They all knew that. He was going to be descended through the line of David, through the Nathan Lane, and that was going to be the Messiah.

"Then Jesus said to them, 'Then how does David, in the Spirit (David, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit), called Him Lord, saying?" What Jesus does now is quote an Old Testament song written by David under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, Psalm 110:1. He quotes the psalm. He says, "How could David say, 'The Lord (up there in heaven, the Father) said to my Lord," another deity: "The Lord (the deity in heaven) said to my Lord (the deity that I'm associated with – which would be Jesus through the line of David in His humanity), 'Sit at my right hand until I put Your enemies beneath Your feet?" If David then calls Him Lord, how is He his Son? How could David call one of his own descendants Lord?

Now the word "Lord" in the Hebrew here is the Hebrew word "Adonai," which is a term for God. So, when he says, "Lord," he is saying "Adonai" (God). He said, "How can David talk about My God in heaven? How could he say to My God, 'Here, next to Me, I want you to wait? Sit here at My right hand (which is what Jesus is doing now until He brings down Satan's world), and all of your enemies, and I make up your footstool. You'll stand on their necks like Tarzan in one of his conquests.'" That's what Jesus is waiting to do now. How could he be the Son?

Well, He had put them indeed in a quandary with that question, because the only answer was that there has to be two persons in the Godhead. There has to be a God there who is speaking about a God down here. Furthermore, David spoke this under the guidance of God the Holy Spirit. So, you have all three included.

The result in verse 46 of the wisest; the most educated; and, the most knowledgeable of Old Testament Scripture and language – What was their answer? "No one was able to answer Him a word, nor did anyone dare, from that day on, to ask Him another question. Jesus had stumped them because the only answer was that He was the Lord God about whom David's Lord Father in Heaven was speaking. And they couldn't tolerate that. They could not accept that. The Jewish rabbis, therefore, because they did not understand the Trinity nature of the Godhead, accused Jesus of blasphemy because He claimed equality with God as the Son of God.

John 5:18

You have this, for example, in John 5:18: "For this cause, therefore, the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him (Jesus), because he not only was breaking the Sabbath, but also was calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God."

You know, it really is pitiful and ludicrous when the liberals say, "Jesus never claimed to be God." They try to evade and get away from the clear deity of Christ by saying, "That was other people who said He was God. He never claimed that." But the Jews who stood there had no doubt about it. When He claimed to be the Son of God, that was a term that clearly was in terms of being in a relationship of identity with God. He was the same, and He was God. And for that, they wanted to stone Him, because under the law, that was blasphemy.

Revelation 1:8

At the very beginning of the book of the Revelation, in Revelation 1:8, God the Father speaks. He says, "'I am the Alpha and the Omega,' says the Lord God, "who is, and who was, and who is to come – the Almighty." God the Father says that He's the beginning, and He's the end. He presents Himself with the quality deity: is; was; and, is to come; that is, He is eternal.

Revelation 22:12-13

At the very end of the book of the Revelation, notice Revelation 22:12-13. These two verses are speaking about Jesus Christ: "Behold, I am coming quickly, and My reward is with Me, to render to every man according to what he has done." Isn't this amazing last. This is almost the last verse of the Bible – the final words of Jesus Christ. What did He talk about? The one thing churches don't talk about – that heaven is going to have rich Christians and poor Christians, because some will be rewarded and some will not be. Some will have wasted their lives; and, some will have invested them for eternity.

He said, "I'm going to come and bring my reward." He's talking about the bema seat, the Judgment Seat of Christ. In verse 13, Jesus says, "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and last" (the beginning and the end). These are the identical words which were spoken, and addressed, and applied to God the Father. What this tells us is that, here again, Christ is deity.

So, when the antichrist comes on the scene, those who understand the nature of God (oneness of essence and a Trinitarian presentation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), they will not be deceived by him. The antichrist, as a false Christ, will not be able to fool those who know this doctrine. The eternal, infinite God of creation is the standard for moral rules. That's why the antichrist doesn't like the true God. The one true God, separate from this creation, is the reference point in the universe by which all truth is determined. The antichrist wants to determine his own truth. He does not want the Creator God out there, and His Son Jesus Christ, telling him what is right and what is wrong. What he wants people to believe is that they are all gods. That's very attractive. If all men are potential gods, then each person is his own reference point. Each person may do his own thing without condemnation because he makes his own rules. If you are God, you can do no wrong.

Pantheism

Pantheism, in which everything is said to be God (material and immaterial). Pantheism leaves one without any meanings. It leaves one without any value system. It leaves one with no purpose in life. There are no absolute truths. Worst of all, pantheism leaves you with no hope.

Love

The basic nature of the true Creator God is, of course, love, and this is expressed within the Trinity of persons. As we pointed out in the previous session, it takes three people for you to have a full expression of love. You cannot just have maximum expression of love between two people. You have to have two people. That is all the combinations of love that are possible. 1 John 4:8 tells us this about God: "The one who does not love, does not know God, for God is love." Who is the person who's going to love? The person who is going to love is the born-again believer, and specifically, those who are in temporal fellowship.

1 John 4:16: "And we have come to know, and have believed, the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him." When you abide in the inner circle of temporal fellowship, you're at the heart of the love of God.

The Antichrist

The antichrist cannot claim to be the Lord Jesus Christ of the Trinity who took on human flesh. All the false views of God, that are promoted by Satan, can be incorporated very readily into the antichrist's world religion. But he cannot incorporate the doctrine of the Trinity. That is the one thing he cannot bring into his system of world religion. That is because the doctrine of the Trinity says that God is a Spirit; God is One in essence; that God is the infinite, eternal self-existent; He has always been that; that He exists in three persons; and, that the son of God has taken on human flesh and come into this world. The antichrist, therefore, denies the eternal; self-existent; and, Spirit being –, the Son of God of the Trinity. He denies that God the Son came in human flesh as the Lord Jesus Christ.

Therefore, in 1 John 2:22, John points out: "Who is the liar, but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? That is, that Jesus is the One who was promised as God coming in human flesh: "Emmanuel" (God with us). "Who is the liar, but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, the one who denies the Father and the Son." So, the antichrist will have to deny the true nature of God if he is going to try to claim himself to be deity.

Jesus is Eternal

Jesus was not just a human being who became God by His worthy life and good works. That's the teaching of Mormonism. Jesus did not begin as a human being who then went to deity, which is what the New Age doctrine and the antichrist will be claiming. Jesus was God Almighty, "very God of very God," and then took on human form in the human flesh through the birth in Bethlehem.

The Resurrection of Jesus

The resurrection of Jesus Christ is further denied by the antichrist because it makes Jesus Christ the true Christ – one who is physically alive in heaven. He is not a reincarnated Christ, which is the claim of the antichrist, but a physically alive Christ in the same body in which he went into the grave. The Lord Jesus Christ will be identified before all the world at the end of the great world war at the end of the tribulation. He will be identified as the true Christ by the wounds and the marks on his body that he bore on the cross.

Zechariah 12:10 points this out. The Jewish people, at this point in time, are going to be hanging on by their teeth. The greatest all-time persecution that ever was laid against this people will now be in full force by the antichrist. Hitler called it his "final solution" – to sin every Jew into the crematoriums. The antichrist will have his "final solution." The objective will be the same: Kill every Jew on the face of the earth. Don't let a single one of them be alive to go into the millennium, and thus frustrate God's plan of Jews alive in their natural bodies in the Millennial Kingdom. Zechariah 12:10 says, "And I will pour out on the house of David, and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplication, so that they will look on Me, whom they have perceived. God the Father will send God the Holy Spirit to open the eyes of those Jews. There will probably be that group probably holed up at Petra, as the fortress enclave, in which they're surviving the persecution, and suddenly the scales will be removed from their eyes.

The Blindness of the Jew

Remember that the Jew has a double-whammy blindness. He has a blindness because he is born with a sin nature like all of us do. Pilate said, "What shall I do with Jesus?" And because the forefathers of the Jews shouted out, "His blood be upon us and our children," God in Heaven says, "So, be it," and He put upon them the blindness toward Christ that has plagued the race since then. So, they have not only the blindness brought upon them by the rejection of the Messiah, but they have the natural blindness of the sin nature as well. Suddenly this is removed. As we told you recently, nobody looks seriously at the Christian life until the blindness is removed. You're a dolt; you're a dunderhead; and, you're an intellectual, but you cannot see spiritual things until God the Holy Spirit brings the blindness down. That's why there were three crosses on Golgotha's hill – to show how, at the last moment, God the Holy Spirit can remove the blindness of a desperate person as he did that one thief, and he gets born-again just before he checks out.

"They look on me, whom they have pierced, and they will mourn for him, as one mourns for an only son. And they will weep bitterly over him, like the bitter weeping over a firstborn."

The Jews will really reap. They will cry, and they will wail as they never have. I suspect that part of the reason they will cry is because they will realize how many millions of their countrymen went into the lake of fire because they rejected this One whom they pierced on Calvary's Hill – the true Messiah Savior. And they will realize how their leaders, like Maimonides, deceived them by giving them a paraphrase of their fundamental statement of faith in which they carefully change the word "One" so that it did not suggest a oneness made up of a plurality of persons, even though the very word for God in that same statement very clearly was plural.

In Zechariah 14, we are shown that this great recognition of Christ as the true Savior, and not the antichrist who is claiming to be the true Christ, will be will take place at the Second Coming of Christ, at the end of the tribulation. Zechariah 14:1-4: "Behold, a day is coming when for the Lord when the spoil taken from you will be divided among you. For I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem to battle (the last great world war), and the city will be captured, the houses plundered, the women ravished, and half of the city exiled. But the rest of the people will not be cut off from the city. Then the Lord will go forth and fight against those nations as when he fights on the day of battle. And in that day his feet will stand on the Mount of Olives (which is in front of Jerusalem on the east), and the mouth of olives will be split in its middle from east to west by a very large valley, so that half the mountain will move toward the north and the other half toward the south."

We find it very interesting that the geologists tell us that right through the mouth of olives goes an enormous fault line on which the mountain can be split to the north and to the south. This will be the antichrist's "final solution" for the Jews, but Jesus Christ will come and will frustrate that. Notice Zechariah 14:9: "And the Lord will be the King over all the earth in that day. The Lord will be the only one, and His name, the only one. How the amillennialists can read that verse and say, "This takes place in heaven," beats me. This is Jesus Christ, the King upon the face of this earth.

Notice verse 11: "And the people will live in it, and there will be no more curse for Jerusalem will dwell on security.' They will live in this new earth which the King Jesus will put together.

Israel will see Jesus the Messiah alive from the dead, bearing the marks of His crucifixion. The antichrist may try to counterfeit those marks. With what they can do in Hollywood now, in theatrical productions, he could mimic it, but there will be something about the marks on Christ that will be real, and the people will see it is real, and they will recognize that what they're seeing in the antichrist is pure Disneyworld, imitation delusion. The Jews will believe in the Lord Jesus Christ when they see Him on this occasion. The result will be that the nation of Israel will be saved; that is, it will be preserved.

In Romans 11:25-27, the apostle Paul points this out. But please remember when he says, "All Israel here will be saved," he does not mean that every Jew will be born-again. It means that the nation (in terms of the way the word "saved" is used in the Old Testament) will be preserved from destruction. Paul says, "For I do not want you, brethren, to be uninformed of this mystery, lest you be wise in your own estimation. But a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fullness of the gentiles comes in." He says, "A partial hardening," and you probably may suspect that the word "hardening" is our Greek word for "blindness," such as we have any Ephesians 4. This blindness comes upon people who are out of the temporal fellowship circle – the hardening upon the facets of the soul. Here is a blindness that has happened to Israel until the fullness of the gentiles comes in. But the blindness is partial. What he means is that some Jews believe in Jesus Christ and become saved. There is always a remnant of born-again Jews.

Verse 26: "And thus all Israel will be saved." The nation will be preserved at this point described to us in Zechariah, when Jesus Christ will return. They'll see the marks on His body; they will realize that this is the Son of God who has been raised from the dead, and who has returned from heaven; and that He is their true Messiah: "The deliverer will come from Zion." These are Old Testament quotes now. He will remove ungodliness from Jacob, and this is My covenant with them when I take away their sins." God will take away their blindness. They will trust in Christ. He will take away their sins.

Therefore, Satan, has so falsified the nature of the Godhead that the rulers did not recognize Jesus Christ as the true God. Satan was so capable, through all those years, of looking at these few simple things that we've shown you this day in the Old Testament Hebrew, that they did not catch on. They were so dull of hearing.

In John 10:30, Jesus says, "I and the Father are One." He claims deity. But the Jews never saw Him as "very God of very God."

In 1 Corinthians 2:8, Paul says, "The wisdom which none of the rulers of this age understood." This included the wisdom about the Trinitarian nature of God: "For if they had understood it, they would not crucified the Lord of Glory." They had understood the Trinity, they would have understood that Jesus Christ was indeed true God – part of the Godhead.

So, the people in the tribulation, in their enormous spiritual ignorance, will worship the antichrist as God, who will be nothing but a mere sinful human being. He will be strictly a low-life type. He will be strictly a scum ball. But he will be educated; he'll be cultured; he'll be smooth; and, he'll be verbal. Remember how we learned that by the Greek word: he will have a way with words. He will be able to create mental images and emotional reactions, and people will follow him like they follow a low-brow, low-caste politician today who can manipulate them.

Therefore, anyone who rejects the doctrine of the triune nature of God, in the oneness of essence, is in fact rejecting the God of the Bible. The unique concept of Christianity among all the world's religions and cults is God: one in essence; and, three in persons.

John tells us, in Revelation 13:8, that those who do not understand the nature of God, as we have reviewed and reinforced and learned it this day, will be open to believing the antichrist's lie of his claim the deity. And the result for them will be a tremendous, irreversible tragedy. Their names will not be in the Lamb's Book of life. In fact, we find from other Scripture that their names have been in the book of life, but they have been erased. What on earth could it mean to say that your name is in life, and it has been erased? It is not in the Lamb's book of life, and therefore you are with the doomed. Is it possible to lose your salvation? I'm glad you asked that question. Please join us next time, and we shall find the answer to the rest of verse 8.

Dr. John E. Danish, 1991

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