What Happens to Gentiles After the Tribulation? Isaiah 24

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. Okay, good to have everybody still with us. You know, when we go all afternoon like this, I expect somebody to leave, but it looks like we've got everybody. So turn with me to Isaiah chapter 24, and we'll start with verse 1. And again, for those of you joining us on television, we trust that you can take your Bible and follow these things with us. And if we leave you with a lot of questions, why write to us or call us on our 800 number, and we'll try to clarify. Like I think I said last program, I don't claim to have any special revelations or anything like that, but we just like to teach the Word as I feel the Lord has opened it up to me, and in a way that hopefully many people can understand. I haven't mentioned for a few weeks now, remember that all the previous programs dating from Genesis 1-1 on up through the present are available on videotape. We put 12 programs or 6 hours on one tape, and we can send them out for a donation of $25 to the ministry. So if you're interested, give us a call or drop us a note. All right, Isaiah 24. Now for a little quick review of our last lesson, you remember. We come out of the tribulation, and Christ returns, and the Kingdom is now coming on the scene. And the earth, remember, will be lifted from the curse. It'll be as it was back in the Garden of Eden before sin entered. It's going to be glorious. It's going to be beautiful. All right, at His Second Coming, this escaping remnant of Jews who went out in unbelief, and remember now, this is a mixed group. They are not the 144,000. This is Matthew 24, beginning with verse 15, and you remember it speaks of those who are on the housetop and those who have children, and so it's going to be old and young. It's going to be men and women, boys and girls. It's going to be a mixed group of Jews who will escape where God will protect them for that last three and a half years, so that when Christ returns in glory, and remember we saw in Matthew 24, they're going to see Him coming in power and great glory, and then in our closing moments, we took you back to Zechariah, where they're going to see the nail prints in His hands, they're going to see the wound in His side, and rather than as we will, they will by sight believe and know that He is their King, their Messiah, their Savior. And so this group of Jews will come up into the Kingdom as the nation of Israel, and by far the largest number of any one nation that will go into the Kingdom. All right, now we've got the nation of Israel established, and they're going to be ruled by the twelve apostles ruling on twelve thrones. Now let's pick up the Gentiles. God hasn't forgotten about the Gentiles by any stretch of the imagination, even though the Age of Grace was primarily to Gentiles, yet even during the Tribulation, God has still been preparing Gentiles to go into the Kingdom in ordinary flesh and blood bodies, because you have to remember, the Kingdom is going to see a tremendous population explosion, so that by the end of that thousand years when Satan will be released to test them once again, there will be probably as many people on the earth or more than there are right now. So now in Isaiah chapter 24, we're going to pick up these Gentiles. We're going to begin with verse 1, and again it's a graphic description of the Tribulation as we have been studying it now for the last several weeks. "...Behold, the Lord maketh the earth empty, maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down." Now remember we've been talking about the cataclysmic things that are going to happen to this planet during those final seven years of human history. "...And He scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof, and it shall be as with the people, so with the priest, as with the servant, so with his master, as with the maid, so with her mistress, with the buyer, so with the seller, with the lender, so with the borrower, as with that taker of usury, so with the giver." In other words, everyone is going to come under this tremendous cataclysmic seven year period of events. Verse 3, "...the land shall be utterly emptied and spoiled, for the Lord hath spoken this word." Verse 4, "...the earth mourneth and fadeth away under these judgments. The world languisheth and fadeth away, the haughty people of the earth do language, even their wealth is not going to protect them. Verse 5, "...the earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof, because they have transgressed the laws," that is, the laws of God, the basic morality that He laid down back there in the Ten Commandments, if that's the way it makes you more comfortable, "...changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant." In other words, they have been totally disobedient to everything that God has instructed. Verse 6, "...therefore hath the curse that began with Adam, therefore hath the curse devoured the earth." See, it's because of sin that all of these things are going to come on the earth, "...and they that dwell therein are desolate, therefore the inhabitants of the earth are burned." And yes, there could be tremendous amounts of nuclear energy released. In fact it's in the news just lately again where the Soviets are trying to stop a leak of nuclear weapons that are at the bottom of the ocean, and it could very easily contaminate and kill a lot of the fish around it. So everything that we're seeing happen, and the technology that's bringing about, is making the Book of Revelation more believable every day. Well anyway, the earth is burned, but I always have my classes underline those last 4 words. In spite of everything that has been happening, terrible cataclysmic events, yet there will be a few men left. Now I always like to emphasize and help you remember that I don't care what kind of a catastrophe people go through, there are always some survivors. I always like to remember when they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, I remember reading of one lady in particular who was right under ground zero of one of those bombs, and she survived in spite of the heat flash and in spite of all the radioactivity. You know why? She was working in a library, and all the books in that immediate explosion just literally buried her, and all that paper then became an insulation for the radioactive power and so forth, and she survived. Totally burned of course, but she survived. When we had the earthquake in San Francisco a couple years ago, do you remember when the freeway collapsed? They were working frantically lifting all that heavy concrete, but what did they find? Survivors! And so it will be at the end of the tribulation, there are going to be survivors scattered around the planet from every nation that you can think of. Now I usually let my classes, and you can do it as individuals and those of you on television, you just take a pencil and paper and use whatever figure or percentage you like to think of as a few. Now the world tonight is I think around five and a half billion people, but for sake of easy mathematics let's round it off at five billion. If the population right now is five billion people, and I think ten percent is too high for a few, personally. When I think of a few, I think of something less than five percent. Now I see some of you are already putting the pen to it. If we've got five billion people on the earth tonight, and five percent survive, how many does that still leave us? Come on you mathematicians, help me. How many? No, maybe more than that. Two hundred and fifty million, isn't it? Well let's put it on the board. You know I like that guy on public television that teaches algebra. Have you ever watched him? I get a kick out of that. All right, so we start with five billion people, isn't that right? Thousands, millions, billions. All right, now let's just set off ten percent. That's five hundred million. Let's cut it in half and go to five percent, that's two hundred and fifty million, right? Let's bring it down to one percent and you've still got five million if I'm... I hope I'm not miscalculating. I'll hear from what if I do. But anyway, just a small percentage will still be a lot of people. Now don't lose sight of the fact that when we began the tribulation period, God immediately sealed 144,000 young Jews, right? See they're not this remnant. This is a totally different group. What do those 144,000 Jews do? Well they take the gospel of the kingdom, the same gospel that Jesus began back in Matthew when He said, "...the kingdom of heaven is at hand." These 144,000 Jews, with this event of course just seven years down the road, they're going to be proclaiming to the world the King of heaven, and the kingdom is at hand. That's going to be their basic message. Now of course salvation will always be based on the cross, don't misunderstand that. But their basic message will be the King is coming to set up His kingdom. And they're going to go around the world with that, not just the nation of Israel, but it's going to go to the whole world, every tribe and tongue and nation. Now I feel that whether there'll be other Jews saved during the tribulation period other than this, I don't know. But I know that these 144,000 Jews will be ministering to the Gentile nations. Now as Isaiah 24 then says, when the final bowl judgment has been culminated, you're going to have survivors in every nation under heaven. In Great Britain, Scotland, Germany, America, South America, the South Pacific nations, there's going to be survivors. Saved and lost both. You're going to have some who believe the message of the 144,000, you're going to have some who didn't believe it. All right, now we're going to pick them up, and you who are Bible students, you know where it's at. Matthew 25. Now remember, no unbelievers can go into the kingdom, because Satan is going to be locked up, and we're going to start out with a generation of parents who are believers. There are not going to be any unbelievers going into the kingdom. Now in Matthew 25, we have the perfect description of how God's going to do it. Now always remember, we're dealing at a point in time now where the supernatural will almost become commonplace. And so, you're going to have this great gathering of these survivors, and they're going to bring them to Jerusalem. All right, verse 31 of Matthew 25. Matthew 25, verse 31, "...when the Son of Man shall come in His glory." Now watch the language here, and this is Jesus speaking. "...and all the holy angels with Him, then..." In other words, this is His Second Coming. "...then shall He sit upon the throne of His glory." And we've established in previous lessons that that will be in Jerusalem. See? Verse 32, "...and before Him shall be gathered all nations." Now of course, the biggest thing is that the biggest percentage of the nations are gone. They've been killed. They've been devastated. But what have we got? We've got this small percentage of survivors who are representatives of their nation. In other words, America, where there are 250 million or more, and if 2.5% of them survive, again, what are we coming up with? Well, I don't want to figure that in my head. But anyway, you're still coming up with quite a few people that will be representatives of the United States of America, saved and lost. Are you going to have the same thing with all the nations of the world? Because that's why the word is plural. All these survivors, then, will be supernaturally brought to Jerusalem and before the King. Verse 32, "...and before Him shall be gathered all nations. And He," that is the King, "...shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides sheep from the goats." In other words, He is providentially going to sort the believers from the unbelievers. Now, the analogy here, remember, is sheep and goats, only for sake of illustration. Verse 33, "...so He sets the sheep on His right hand, the goats on the left. Then shall the," what's the next word? "...King," see? He's already on the throne. His Kingdom is at its beginning now. It's on the earth, and He's getting ready to get the whole thing moving. "...and so then shall the King say unto them on His right hand," that would be the sheep in the analogy, "...Come, you blessed of my Father, inherit the," what? There it is, see? How this word, Kingdom, just keeps coming up. "...inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world." Now, that's nothing new to you, is it? What does Ephesians 1 tell us? When were we chosen? When were we in the mind of God? From before the foundation of the world, see? And so it's nothing different. God in His foreknowledge knew exactly which one of these Gentiles would hear the Gospel of the Kingdom from the 144,000 and believe. So He can say honestly that this was prepared for them before the world was ever created. Now verse 35. Now remember, this isn't what saved them. This is what distinguished them as believers. "...I was hungry," Jesus says, "...and you gave Me food. I was thirsty, and you gave Me drink. I was a stranger, and you took Me in." Let me add the verb, "...I was naked, and you clothed Me. I was sick, and you visited Me. I was in prison, and you came unto Me. Then shall the righteous," that is these believers now, "...gathered from all the nations of the world. Then shall these righteous answer Him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee hungry, and fed thee? When did we see you thirsty, and gave you something to drink? When did we see thee a stranger, and took thee in, or naked, and clothed thee? When did we see thee sick?" Now verse 40. "...And the king shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren." Now that's the secret here. Jesus is speaking, and in the flesh He was a Jew, so His brethren have to be Jews. So who is He referring to? 144,000. And it wasn't their good deeds that saved them. It never is good works that saves anybody. They were saved by their faith in this message, and as soon as they experienced salvation, what were they willing to do? Help these people who had brought it to them. And the best example I can give of that are the believers and the Christians in Europe during Hitler's terror against the Jew, and those believers were the ones who hid Jewish people and helped them escape the onslaughts of Hitler and so forth. Why? Because it's a Christian's nature to do things like this. And so here is where Jesus is showing that these 144,000 are going to suffer privation all through their ministry. Now let's stop a second. I hope we have time. Let's go all the way back to Revelation chapter 7 again. Revelation 7, come down to verse 3, just for sake of time, where the angel says, "...Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, until we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads." In other words, that was just simply like, I suppose, when God put a mark on Cain that no one could take his life. Now it's the same way with these 144 ,000. They were sealed so that no one could take their life. And you come down and you see all the 12,000 of each one of the twelve tribes, and they go out then and they proclaim the gospel of the kingdom. Now to see also how this fits with Matthew 25, come down to verse 16. These are the privations that believers, as well as these 144,000, will suffer during this seven-year period. They shall hunger no more. Now you want to remember, we're coming back to that mark of the beast in the forehead or the palm of the hand that we talked about several weeks ago. If people have that mark of the beast, they will never succumb to the gospel of the kingdom. If they don't have the mark of the beast, they will be eligible for this salvation, but they'll not be able to buy or sell or transact business. Consequently, seven years is a long time. If you can't buy groceries, seven years can be a long time if you can't pay your rent or make a house payment or buy gasoline or pay a doctor bill. You can do nothing if you don't have some means of exchange, and they're not going to have it. And so they're going to end up hungry, thirsty, naked. Now then, come back to chapter 25 in Matthew, and so these 144,000 are going to suffer these same privations. No one can take their life, but they'll be thrown in prison, they're going to be hungry, and so the only sustenance they have is these believers now realizing what a salvation these Jews have brought them, will sacrifice no doubt whatever little bit they have to help these 144,000. And now then, Jesus said, "...inasmuch as you did it unto them, you really did it to Me." Now this is the only setting that fits. You can't put this into anything else. It's just simply the response of these believers who have survived the awful, awful events of the tribulation, and Jesus now says, come on down to verse...oh, let's see, I guess I've got to go all the way down to...oh, I'm not seeing it. Yeah, verse 46. I knew it had to be down there somewhere. Verse 46, "...now to the unbelievers, to the goats, who expressed the same thing, but we didn't ever see you hungry, we never saw you in jail." And what's Jesus' answer? Well, since you didn't do it to these 144,000, it was as if you didn't do it to Me. Now then, you come all the way down to verse 45 and 46. "...then shall He answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as you did it not to one of the least of these," that is the 144,000, "...it was as if you did it not to Me." And then 46, here's where I pick up the one I was looking for, "...and these," that is the rejectors, "...shall go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous," those who believe, go where? "...into life eternal." And of course the Kingdom, even though it's stipulated as a thousand years, it's still the beginning of eternity. In fact, I had a gentleman call the other night, and he said, now Lance, he said, I've got some problems between what takes place in the Kingdom and what's going to take place in eternity. And I said, well, you're not alone. There are a lot of great theologians who I have seen debate the issues in their books and so forth as to what's in the Kingdom age and what's in eternity. And I can just sort of oversimplify that, I guess, by simply saying, always remember, at least as I see it, that all of the situation concerning the Kingdom is just an introduction to the eternal. It will be interrupted. There will be a new heaven and a new earth, but I think eternity is going to be based on pretty much the same set of circumstances that we have in the thousand years. And so when Jesus tells these people who are going into the Kingdom that they're going into eternal life, indeed they are. That's really the beginning of eternity, even though it is still in that time frame of the one thousand years. All right, now I've got a couple more minutes left. Let's go back and look at a couple more attributes of the Kingdom, and then it will be time to quit, and for those of you here, we can go home. Isaiah 11. I think we have time to just start at verse 1. Isaiah 11, verse 1, "...and there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots." Now, of course, Jesse was the father of David, and Christ is always considered the Son of David, and so we are speaking of the branch here as the Messiah, the Christ. Now verse 2, "...and the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the Spirit of wisdom, and understanding, and counsel, and might, and the Spirit of knowledge, and the fear of the Lord." Now those are all attributes of the Spirit that are also indicative of the Christ. Verse 3, "...and they shall make him of quick understanding, and the fear of the Lord. And he shall not rule after the sight of his eyes, nor reprove after the hearing of his ears, but with righteousness he shall judge or rule the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth." You know, I reminded you here several weeks ago, what do those words remind you of in the New Testament? The Beatitudes. See, this is where the Beatitudes become then the very Constitution of the Kingdom. Alright, read on, "...and with the rod of his mouth, and the breath of his lips, he shall slay the wicked," which of course he did there at Armageddon and the final hours of the Tribulation. Now verse 5, "...and righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins." Now look at verse 6, "...and when animal lovers ask me, Are there going to be animals in heaven? Yes, the wolf will dwell with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf, and the young lion, and the fowl together, and a little child shall lead them." Where did that little child come from? From believing parents, see? "...and the cow and the bear shall feed, their young ones shall lie down together, the lion will eat straw like the ox, as it was before sin entered, neither shall they hurt nor destroy, and all my holy mountain for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord." 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.