From Adam to Tribulation: God's Biblical Timeline Explained

Hello and welcome to Through the Bible with Les Feldick. An Oklahoma rancher and farmer, Les Feldick has been teaching homestyle Bible classes for 20 years in Iowa, Oklahoma, and Texas. Les Feldick's unique style of Bible teaching has made the books of the Bible come to life. When Les is teaching, it's so interesting that people say time just seems to fly by. And now, here is Les Feldick. And again, it's good to have everybody in this afternoon and we trust that we'll accomplish what the Lord wants us to accomplish. And I always have to realize that if it weren't for you folks driving in from far and wide, why, we just couldn't do this. And you'll never know how much I appreciate that. And then for those of you now joining us on television, we appreciate so much hearing from you and that you do feel as though you're just part of this class. And so again, we just remind you to get your Bible and follow these references with us. Nothing thrills us more than when you write and tell us that for the first time in your life you're studying, because after all, that's the only reason we teach is to get people into the book. I don't necessarily expect everyone to agree with me, but I'm always reminded of a lady that was in our class, I think it was at Macalester, several years ago. And on the way out, she said, Well, I'm not sure that I agree with you, but I'll tell you one thing you've accomplished. She said, I have promised myself that I'm going to start to study my Bible. Well, see, that's all I ask. That's all I care for, because I think if I can get folk to just simply get into the book and study it, they'll soon realize that it's exciting, it's interesting, and it's not as closed a book as most people think. Now, before we actually get into our study, I want to remind our television audience again that we do have all the past programs available in videotapes. We have booklet number three now ready to mail out, so when you're ready for that, you drop us a line or call us. And in that regard, when you call, more than likely you'll be talking to my little helpmate over here, Iris. And a lot of folk out in television don't realize who she is. They see her on the tube once in a while, but they don't know that she's my wife. But anyway, she's the one who handles all the mailing and responds to the phone calls and what have you, and I thank the Lord for her. All right, now then, we'll get right back into the book, and I've decided that since we've had so many new listeners come on stream over the last few months that weren't with us when we were way back in Genesis, I want to take a half hour and just take a brief review of everything that we've covered all the way from Genesis on up to now, this period of the Tribulation. And then in our next program, we're going to try and show from Scripture why, and it is a valid question, although we don't question God and His sovereignty, but from the human point, we have to sometimes ask, well, why has the nation of Israel gone through such turmoil, so much suffering, and why are they going to have to go through that awful seven years of Tribulation that is still facing them? Because you want to remember that the book of Revelation and the Tribulation is primarily, primarily, not exclusively, but it is primarily God dealing with His covenant people, Israel. And like I said, in our next program then, we'll try to show from Scripture why all this has to happen. All right, so I'm going to go to the board and just take a brief run -up through Genesis all the way to where we are presently. And that is, we have to understand that at about 4004, now these dates we don't get meticulously hung up on them. There's always a chance for some difference of opinion. But in round numbers at least, so we can at least get a layman's view of this. Now this is what I would like to point out. We don't get so meticulous like a theologian, because they have to be. But we'll look at it from a layman's point of view. And just in round figures, see how that everything has been historically just unfolding up through human history. So Adam comes on the scene in 4004 B.C. And from those two original people, Adam and of course his wife Eve, the population exploded. Because you always want to remember that the longevity was 900 years and better, and they had children. We don't know how many, but they had more than two or three. And so by the time we get up to about 2400 B.C., or about 1600 years after Adam, the human race has gone down so far morally, and they have come into such a period of violence and what have you, that God said, I'm going to have to destroy them. And so we come into Noah's flood, and come out of the flood of course with Noah and his three sons and their wives. And once again the whole thing starts all over, but of course under a whole different set of circumstances. Everything is different after the flood than it was before. One of the main characteristics of course, and you may want to look at it. I like to use Scripture as much as I can. I told you we wouldn't look at much this first half hour, but go back with me just for a quick review to Genesis chapter 9. And we have to realize that in that pre-flood era, man as well as animals and what have you, were not carnivorous. In other words they did not kill something and eat of it, but they all had a diet of things which grew normally. The nuts and the fruits and the grass and the herbs and what have you. But now after the flood you see in chapter 9, just to show that it's a whole different set of circumstances. I guess the common way of putting it would be it's a whole new ball game. And that is in Genesis chapter 9, beginning of verse 1, where it says, "...God blessed Noah and his sons, and he said unto them, Be fruitful, multiply, and replenish the earth." In other words, fill it up again. Now watch the difference. This wasn't the case before the flood. But now he says, "...the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, upon every fowl of the air, and on the fish," and so forth. And here's the reason. Verse 3, "...every moving thing that liveth shall be food for you." Now the word is meat in the King James, but it's actually food. Now this wasn't the case before. They did not kill anything for food. The wild animals, I don't believe, killed to satisfy their appetites. Everything ate of that which grew naturally. But see, now God gives man, as well as the carnivorous animals, permission to kill and eat. So, "...every moving thing that liveth shall be food for you, even as the green herb," and so on and so forth. That's a whole different set of circumstances. Secondly now, after the flood, God says in verse 5 that He's going to give man responsibility to keep the human race from killing each other, as they had just been doing. Violence had filled the earth, remember. And it was simply because there was no deterrent. There was no capital punishment. There was no law against these things. But now, you see, God institutes man's responsibility to maintain law and order by instituting, of course, human government or capital punishment. When He says in verse 5, "...and surely your blood of your lives I will require at the hand of every beast I will require, at the hand of man, at the hand of every man's brother I will require the life of man." And then verse 6, "...whoso now sheddeth man's blood," in other words, kills, murders by man. In other words, under a governmental authority now, man shall have the right to put that murderer to death. His blood shall be shed. And the reason, of course, because God had made man in the image of Himself. So this is a progression now from the pre-flood civilization where there was no law, there was no government, and yet you had this tremendous increase in population. And we saw the results of it then in Genesis chapter 6. All right, about halfway, approximately, between Noah and the sons coming out of the ark and the call of Abraham, we have the Tower of Babel. And again, it was a total rejection of God's instructions to repopulate and scatter around the world. And instead, that group of people, now coming out of the sons of Noah, rebelled against God. And rather than indeed scattering and populating the earth, they stayed in the area of the Euphrates in Mesopotamia. And then under Nimrod, they gathered at the Tower of Babel. Now here's where we have then the beginning of all pagan religions. Everything that is contrary to the one God concept as we find it in Scripture, has its roots, has its beginnings at the Tower of Babel. All your Eastern religions, all idolatry, all mythology, they all have their roots at the Tower of Babel. Well, of course, God scattered them from the Tower of Babel then, and idolatry had now taken over the human race. And then you'll remember He calls out, one man, Abraham, out of idolatry. And we've shown that from Scripture. Maybe again we'll take time to look that one up. Now turn to the last chapter of Joshua. The last chapter, chapter 24, if I'm not mistaken. Joshua 24, verse 2. Joshua 24, verse 2. And Joshua said unto all the people, that is, the people of Israel, Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Your fathers, or your forefathers, dwelt on the other side of the river, in old time, even Terah, the father of Abraham, the father of Nahor, and they served, what? Other gods. They were all idolaters. So out of that idolatrous civilization, that race of humanity now, God is going to take one man, Abraham, as we first understand him, and then he later becomes Abraham. And that is the beginning then of the nation of Israel, or as we commonly now call them, the Jew. Now I'm going to answer a question which was just asked before we went on the air. What's the difference between the Jewish religion and the Jew as a race? Or maybe I should word it a little differently. What makes a Jew a Jew? The religion or his blood? Well, how would you answer it? Both. They are first and foremost a Jew because they are out of the promised covenant line of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That makes him a Jew by blood, if he has come out of the 12 tribes. Then, of course, when we get to Moses, who comes on the scene about 500 years later, or about 1500 B.C., and God gives to the nation of Israel, not to the world, but He gives to the nation of Israel the law. So now we have then the institution of the racial people of Israel, and God gives them their religion, if we may use that word, the Mosaic system. And so from that point on then, the Jew and his religion are almost a pair that's inseparable, but yet they are. Because, you see, a Jew can embrace another religion, or he can turn his back totally on Judaism. Does that end his being a Jew? No. He can be an agnostic Jew, he can be a Muslim Jew, he can be a Protestant Jew, he can be a Catholic Jew, but he's still a Jew. But when he is a Jew practicing Judaism, of course, then he's got that which began back here, of course, in God's dealing with the nation. Now, you can also have Gentiles embrace Judaism. Now, that may make them a Jew religiously, but it'll never make them a Jew racially. But, as I pointed out as the question was asked before we went on the air, always remember that the Bible divides the whole human race into two categories, Jew and Gentile. Now, even the Arabs who are next of kin of the Jew, by virtue of Abraham and Ishmael and Esau, they are still considered Gentiles in Scripture. Only a Jew is considered a Jew in Scripture. Now, those are some basic things that a lot of people don't understand. And the Jew, or the nation of Israel, began when God called Abraham out of Ur, out of idolatry, and gave him those covenant promises. Now then, as I've already said, 500 years later, Moses comes on the scene, leads the people of Israel out of Egypt, and that's about 1500 B.C., gives them the law, and history begins to unfold biblically as it pertains to the nation of Israel. Then you see Babylon came on the scene and took the Jews captive out to Babylon. And while in Babylon, Daniel writes his tremendous book of prophecy. And maybe we can now flip to that. Go all the way up to Daniel, chapter 9, which is one of the basic Scripture references to our approach to eschatology, as one gentleman called yesterday. And he said, I guess that's the big word. And I said, well, that's the way I look at it. It's the big theological term for what we would normally as lay people call end time. End time teaching is simply eschatology, the study of end time events. All right, so now in Daniel, chapter 9, remember, beginning with verse 24, here we have the prophecy concerning God's timetable with the nation of Israel. And there's going to be 490 years, 490 years from the time that Nehemiah would be given instructions to go back to Jerusalem and rebuild the city wall. Israel, of course, has already been there some time before and rebuilt the temple. But now when Nehemiah goes back to rebuild the city wall and the gates and so forth, from that day, from the day of that decree by King Cyrus, that Israel can now not only have the temple, but they can have the city wall rebuilt until Christ would finally end His dealing with Israel and His covenant people would be 490 years. Now we know from history and we know from Scripture that 483 of those years were consummated at His first coming. And so this is where we get this whole idea of a final seven years, is that out of that 490 years prophesied in Daniel concerning the nation of Israel, 483 were consummated at the time of His first coming at the cross, which means that there are seven years that were never completed. Now then, when Israel after the crucifixion and after Pentecost continued to reject the offers of the Old Testament promises of the King and the Kingdom, and her role to literally be the evangelist to that pagan world around her, we notice that Israel begins to just, you might say, go down the tube spiritually, and finally in 70 A.D., which is 40 years after Pentecost, remember, or after the crucifixion, God permits sovereignly the Roman army under Titus to come in and destroy the temple, the city of Jerusalem, and uproot the Jew out of the Promised Land into the dispersion that carries on to our very day. And it was all because, of course, their rejecting of the promises. They rejected their Messiah. They rejected their King. And so God dispersed them, took away their temple, took away their religion, if you want to call it that, and turned then to the Gentile with what we call the Age of Grace. Now you always have to remember, as I've said in past weeks and months, that all through the prophetic program God deals in specific time frames, just like here. He says, 490 years are determined upon thy people. That's the verse here in Daniel chapter 9. Well, we've already stated that 483 were consummated, and then there's a break. Now we pick this up in the same chapter then, when you come down to Daniel 9, verse 27. Then all of a sudden we find that final seven years, the 483, are broken down in verses 25 and 26. We won't take time for that. But now in verse 27, the prophecy turns to the one week, and He that is the Antichrist, who was picked out as the Prince that shall come, in verse 26, the Antichrist will confirm or make a treaty or a covenant with Israel for one week, seven years. And in the middle of the week, see now this is where we have to base everything on our teaching concerning the tribulation. Way back here, Daniel has already, by inspiration, laid out the format that this seven year period of time is going to be divided in half. There's going to be the first three and a half years, and then the last three and a half years. Now I know I was reading a book by one of our famous authors the other night, and he kind of called the first three and a half years a time of real peace and prosperity. Hey, don't you believe that? It's going to be short-lived. It will for a little bit. The Antichrist is going to come on the scene, and it just for a little while is going to seem as though he's keeping his word, that he is bringing peace and prosperity. Israel will enjoy again her temple worship, and she's going to enjoy fear from her outside enemies. But then as we've already studied in the past several weeks, that shortly after that seven years begins, now I'm already jumping the church age, and I'm doing it for sake of time, because, well, through the Bible, I guess I better explain to some of our late coming listeners, as we came up through the Bible, of course, we stopped short of going into the New Testament. We stopped short of studying Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and the book of Acts, and Paul, because we had such a demand to go ahead and study Revelation. So what we'll do, when we finally finish the book of Revelation, if the Lord tarries so long, then we're going to come back and pick up where we left off, and we're going to come through Matthew and the Gospels and the book of Acts as we did the Old Testament. But we're skipping over all that just because we wanted to get on into the prophetic things of the book of Revelation. So anyway, this seven-year period of time, Israel did not respond to the offer of the king and the kingdom, and so this has been shoved out into the future, and in between we have the calling out of the body of Christ, the church age, the age of grace. Now we feel like we're getting awfully close to the end of that period of time, when the Lord will take it out, because always remember, God did not deal with the church back here when He was dealing with Israel. It was Jew only. Here, in this period of time, He's dealing primarily with the Gentile, and the Jew is out in a dispersion. So before He can come back and deal with Israel again in this final seven years, the Gentile body of Christ, I feel, has to be removed from the scene, because God does not deal on both sides of the fence at the same time. And so as the church age winds down, and the final Gentile is brought in, then we find the church taken out, Israel back in the land, and ready to be dealt with then, as we've been seeing in the tribulation events. Now, we've already come this far. As we've studied this seven years, remember I've been emphasizing, you always want to get straight in your mind the events that take place at the very opening. Then disseminate the things that take place at the midpoint, and then we can pick out, and we will in the future now, the things that take place at the end of the seven years, and then we fill in the details. Alright, now if you'll remember, just for review, that this verse in Daniel 9, you're still there, aren't you? Alright, in Daniel 9 verse 27, this is the triggering mechanism to start that final seven years. In other words, during the church age, God's time clock has stopped. No one knows when it will end. It's a hidden time that only God knows. But that final seven years will kick in gear, and it's going to be on God's time clock, even as the period of time in the Old Testament. So verse 27 says, "...and He will make the covenant with Israel for seven years," one week of time. "...and then in the middle of the week, He shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to stop." Now what does that tell us? I mentioned that, I think, when we taught it before. In order for something to start, it has to what? It has to start. So they have restarted temple worship. We don't know how long, but they're going to have the temple operating. They're going to be worshiping under the supposed protection of the Antichrist for three and a half years. All right, but then what happens? He moves in, and for the abominations that He's going to accomplish, "...He shall make it," that is, the temple and the temple worship, "...desolate even until the end," until everything is fulfilled. So then, we find from this that for the initial days of the tribulation of the seven, in the opening days, Israel is going to almost think that He was indeed the Messiah. At the very same opening, we found that God sends the two witnesses to the nation of Israel in the area of Jerusalem. Now, I don't put a name on them. A lot of them do. They'll call it Elijah and Moses, or Elijah and Enoch. But since the Scripture doesn't name them, I'm not going to. And I think out of the preaching then of those two witnesses that come to the nation of Israel right here at the beginning, we're going to have the 144,000 young Jewish men sealed and commissioned to go out and take the gospel of the kingdom around the world. Now, remember, the gospel of the kingdom is the good news that the King is coming. And, of course, they'll be saved on the merit of the cross, but the message will be, the King is coming. Then we found that just shortly after, and we got this from Revelation chapter 6, do you remember? The appearance of the white horse, the Antichrist. And then we had the red horse come on, and I like to think that that's going to be the great Russian invasion from the north. And that precipitates then the war and the famine and the disease and pestilence that the other three horsemen of the apocalypse depict. Then all of a sudden Israel is going to begin to realize that they're not in the utopia they thought they were, but they're still going to be permitted to have their temple worship. Then after the war, famine, and the pestilence brings us to the very midpoint. Now we know the midpoint is when another series of things take place, and we're going to be looking at that probably the program after the next one. But one of the things that we've already covered is that these two witnesses who come on the scene and by virtue of their preaching, the 144,000 begin to go around the world and preach the gospel of the kingdom, they're going to be put to death. And the world is going to be thrilled at the very thought that those two men who caused so much turmoil by their preaching are now dead, and then they're going to be resurrected, they're going to be brought back to life, and they ascend back into heaven. And the Scripture says the whole world is going to see it. And we've pointed out that that of course is what satellite television is going to accomplish. Then as we come into other events of the midpoint, after the two witnesses are resurrected and ascended, and we're going to see this now in the coming program, the Antichrist is going to come to the temple as we saw here in Daniel, and he's going to defile it, and he's going to force the Jew to stop their temple worship, stop their worship of Jehovah, and worship Him as their God. And this of course will trigger the awful, awful persecution on the Jew in that final three and a half years. Then we're also going to find in one of our coming lessons then, that one of the other big events at the very midpoint of the tribulation is a tremendous earthquake. That's in chapter 6 and again in chapter 11 of Revelation. And this great earthquake then will trigger or set in motion the final events of that last three and a half years. Then after that's run its course, Christ returns to the Mount of Olives, and we'll be looking at all these in the future, and then He will set up His Kingdom. The curse will be lifted, and Israel will be the top nation of the nations, and all the rest of the world is going to come under the blessings of the people of the covenant that was given to Abraham. And all of Israel is looking for that glorious day. Thank you for watching Through the Bible with Les Feldick, a weekly Bible study. If you would like more information about the Les Feldick Ministries, a Bible study in your area, or about this program, write to Les Feldick Ministries, Route 1, Box 760, Kinta, Oklahoma, 74552. That's Route 1, Box 760, Kinta, Oklahoma, 74552. Through the Bible with Les Feldick is viewer supported, and your gift is appreciated. Thank you, and be sure to tune in next time for Through the Bible with Les Feldick.