Rejected His People？ - Part 1

If you once kept for yourself 7,000 in the time of Baal worship, if you kept a remnant for yourself in the time of Paul, then you have authority tonight to take a remnant for yourself. And so I pray that across this room here and the room that will hear me tomorrow morning, you will take for yourself a remnant. Lord, come and help us. Deliver me, I pray, from pride and self-preoccupation, self-consciousness. Grant me and all of us to be swept up into Christ, into His Word. Lord, teach us now. Make us serious on this day, I pray. Guard us from distraction. Grant faith. Bring believers into existence tonight. And on this Lord's Day, come, I pray in Jesus' name, amen. If we want to know God deeply and personally, we have to take Him on His own terms. You can't come to God and say, give me a dream, give me a list, give me a list of attributes. You can't come and say, give me an authority, give me a human authority to tell me what to believe. You have to take Him on His own terms, because if you come to God and say those kinds of things, He will say, I gave you a Bible. Go to the Bible. You will meet Me there. I will reveal Myself to you there. Know Me in the Bible. But when we come to the Bible, we have to take the Bible on its own terms. We have to take God on His own terms in the Bible. And when you come to the Bible, what you find when you take it as a whole is a story. You have a history. It begins with predestination, moves to creation, tower of Babel, dispersing of the nations, the choosing of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the period of the patriarchs, the moving down into Egypt and the 400 years of captivity and bondage for the Jewish people there, the exodus, grand event in Israel's history, the giving of the law at Mount Sinai, the wandering in the wilderness, the crossing of the Jordan into the Promised Land and the period of the judges when everybody did what was right in his own eyes, and then the great period of the monarchy with Saul and David and Solomon, and then the horrific breach of Israel and Judah for centuries, the prophetic word landing on Israel and Judah, and then the terrible, critical sweeping away into exile in Assyria and Babylon, and then the little remnant that returns, and then 500 years of silence, and then the cataclysmic most important event in history, Jesus Christ Messiah comes into the world, lives a perfect life, dies for sinners, rises again, ascends to the Father, pours out the Holy Spirit, the church begins to spread, Jerusalem is leveled in 70 A.D., and the Gospel reaches the nations, even us creating this church. That's what you find when you go to the Bible. You find a story. You've got to have God on His own terms. You will not find in the Bible a systematic theology. I love systematic theology books. But God didn't present it that way. He gave Himself in history, and then He gave a book about the events. It records the events, and it interprets the events. And in the Bible we have the decisive events of history by which we interpret all the other events of history. All of history is about God. History exists to display God. The universe exists to display God. The reason you and I, America, Iraq, Africa, Asia, South America, the reason all peoples and all history exist is to display what God is like. Romans 11, like no other chapter in the New Testament, makes this plain that God reveals Himself in the way He acts in history. The way He acts toward Israel, and the way He acts toward the nations, and the way He acts toward Israel. Again, this chapter shows that history really matters, because it's all about God. Step back and let that sink in. The Bible says that nature, the universe, the natural world, is declaring the glory of God. Psalm 19, verse 1. And it says that Israel exists in history for the same reason. Jeremiah 13, verse 11, I made the whole house of Israel and the house of Judah cling to Me, declares the Lord, that they might be for Me a people, a name, a praise, and a glory. He chose Israel to be a glory for Himself. It's the same reason Christ came into the world at the center of history. Listen to what He said the night before He died. Now is My soul troubled, and what shall I say? Father, save Me from this hour. For this purpose, I came to this hour. Father, glorify Your name. That's why He came to the hour of the middle of history. The center of all events was by dying to glorify the name of His Father. The reason the church exists and has advanced around the world is for the same thing. Ephesians 3:21 To Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus through all generations. Amen, Paul said. And it's the reason God raises up all secular rulers everywhere. For His glory. Pharaoh, Romans 9:17 For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show My power in you, and that My name might be proclaimed in all the earth. Nebuchadnezzar, the great Babylonian victor over God's people. When he lost his mind and became like an animal eating grass with fingernails like birds claws and hair like eagles feathers. What did it mean to get his reason back again? What did he say?