Lesson 1 of Series Revelation 1:1 ‘Must’

Lesson I: Blessings And Cursings

First, a moral God cannot lie.

The promised blessings of the Covenant had been fulfilled many times over, but God had delayed his ultimate wrath because of His longsuffering and mercy. When the people sinned in the Wilderness, He had threatened to destroy the entire people and make of Moses His nation, but Moses interceded and they were spared.

The moral dilemma in 68 AD was that the entire fleshly race of Mankind had been infected by Sin and was therefore corrupt. But the Covenant required holiness as a condition of the eternal promises. It was therefore impossible that a fleshly people could inherit eternal promises. The eternal aspect of the Covenant required that there be an eternal Heir, which could not be if the sinful fleshly nation were all destroyed because of sin. This had provided a false sense of security for the descendants of Abraham, for they thought their fleshly nation was indestructible because of God’s promise. However, they had not reckoned with God’s power to raise the dead.

Christ The Eternal Heir

Although the entire nation had gone astray, in the resurrection Christ became the eternal Heir to the promises because of His unending life, and so the promises continue in effect through Him. From the moment of the resurrection onward, there was no necessity for any other fleshly heir in order to fulfill the promises. Because His flesh was descended from Abraham, the promises to the fleshly seed became eternally effective in Christ in His resurrected body.

Curses

It was therefore possible for God to bring the promised curses upon the entire remainder of the fleshly lineage of Abraham as it was necessary to fulfill His word. The promise of cursing in Deuteronomy 29:18-21 reads:

“Beware lest there be among you a man or woman or family or tribe, whose heart turns away this day from the Lord our God to go and serve the gods of those nations; lest there be among you a root bearing poisonous and bitter fruit, one who, when he hears the words of this sworn covenant, blesses himself in his heart, saying, ‘I shall be safe though I walk in the stubbornness of my heart.’ …The Lord would not pardon him, but rather the anger of the Lord and his jealousy would smoke against that man, and the curses written in this book would settle upon him, and the Lord would blot out his name from under heaven. And the Lord would single him out from all the tribes of Israel for calamity, in accordance with all the curses of the covenant written in this book of the law,” (RSV).

Delayed fulfillment of the cursing was not to be taken as permissiveness, nor slackness, but rather as a token of mercy and grace in order to bring men to repentance. God rebukes and chastens the sons whom He loves, but when corrective measures are unheeded, the wrath of His judgment is sure, for God cannot lie. For the Jewish nation in the time of John the Revelator the time was up and they were due for repentance or judgment. The message of Jesus as well as that of John the Baptist was “Repent” to avoid “the wrath that is to come.”

 

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