Відео

The Creation and the Fall When God made the heavens and the earth, they must have been beautiful, perfect, and pure. In the Garden of Eden, however, through a denial of the Word of God and through a deception of the woman, our first parents fell. Eve was deceived, but Adam chose to die by the side of the woman whom God had created and placed in his arms. When the Lord came to visit the man and his wife in the cool of the day, He could not find them. They were afraid and hid themselves from the Lord because they were naked and ashamed. To hide their guilt, they made for themselves aprons of fig leaves, but when God looked upon the covering, He said, “This will not do.” Covering for sin (atonement for sin) cannot be woven by human hands. Therefore, somewhere in the Garden of Eden, the Lord took an innocent animal, and before the eyes of Eve and Adam, God slew that innocent animal as the ground drank up its blood. This is the beginning of “The Scarlet Thread of Redemption.” Through the slaughter of an innocent victim, God took coats of skin and covered over the shame and the nakedness of the man and his wife. This is the first sacrifice, and it was offered by the hand of Almighty God. When Adam saw the gasping, spent life of that innocent creature, and when he saw the crimson stain which soiled the ground, it was his first experience of knowing what it meant to die because of sin. So the story of atonement and sacrifice begins and unfolds throughout the Word of God until finally in glory we shall see great throngs of the saints who have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. This is “The Scarlet Thread of Redemption.”

From the Seventh Day in Eden to the Call of Abraham In the Garden of Eden, as the Lord covered over the nakedness of the man and the woman, He turned to Satan and said, “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel” (Gen. 3:15). For centuries the rabbis studied that word of the Lord God to Satan. The Seed of the woman. Seed is masculine. The rabbis contemplated the promise of God that the “Seed” of the woman would bruise Satan’s head. We now know that the promise is related to the long conflict and struggle between the hatred of Lucifer and the love of God in Christ Jesus. It speaks of Jesus at Calvary. Jesus suffered. His heel was bruised. But in that bruising, He defeated once and for all the power of that old serpent, the devil. He bruised his head. As the man Adam and his wife, Eve, made their first home in earth cursed for their sakes, after a time there were born to them two sons. One was named Cain and the other Abel. In jealousy and insane fury, the older brother killed the younger brother. But the seed of God would be preserved. The Lord, therefore, gave to Eve another son, named Seth. Seth was a man of faith, as Cain was a man of the world. When the children of Seth, the godly remnant, intermarried with the children of Cain, the people of the world, the result was a fallen progeny that filled the earth with violence. Finally, God said it was enough. One hundred twenty years later, He would destroy the world by a flood. But a member of the line of Seth found grace in the sight of the Lord. His name was Noah. To preserve the righteous seed, God told Noah to build an ark; and into that ark of safety, salvation, and hope Noah brought his family. After the passing of the awesome judgment of the flood, the earth once again began its story of redemption through the life of this one man and his three sons. It was not long, however, until the ravages of sin began to waste the select family of God. Instead of carrying out the great commission of the Lord for humankind to inhabit the whole earth, the people drew together into one plain and announced their purpose to build a tower around which they were to center their civilization and their collective, communal unity. When God looked down and saw their pride, He confused their speech and caused them to “babble.” From this “Tower of Babel,” therefore, the different parts of the human race, being unable to understand each other, scattered in different directions and so fathered the nations of the earth that grew up from those three great family lines of Noah.

From the Call of Abraham Through the Times of the Judges We begin the story of Abraham in a dark era. The whole world had been plunged into abysmal idolatry, but God called out this man to leave his home, his place, his country, and his family to go into another country which he would afterward receive for an inheritance. In obedience, Abraham left the Mesopotamian valley and came as a pilgrim, a stranger, and a sojourner into the land of Canaan. There he dwelt, and there God gave him two sons. But the Lord God said to Abraham that Ishmael, the son of a slave woman, would not be the promised seed. When Abraham was a hundred years old and Sarah was ninety years old, God miraculously placed in the arms of the parents the child of promise, whom they named Isaac. Isaac was the father of two sons, Esau and Jacob. The Lord, refusing Esau, chose Jacob whom He renamed, after a deep conversion experience, the “prince of God” or “Israel.” Because of a severe famine in Canaan and because Jacob’s son, Joseph, was in Egypt, the entire household of Jacob went down to live in the land of the Nile. Later, there arose a Pharaoh who “did not know” Joseph. The chosen family became slaves to this new ruler of Egypt, and their heavy groaning mounted up to the ears of the Lord God in heaven. The Lord, therefore, raised up the mighty prophet, Moses, to deliver his people from the bondage and slavery of the Egyptians. God worked this deliverance by a miracle called the Passover. For the Lord had said, “When I see the blood, I will pass over you and will spare you and your home.” This way of salvation, through the blood, is once again “The Scarlet Thread of Redemption.” After the Lord God delivered the chosen family from Egypt, He brought them by the leadership of Moses through the parting of the Red Sea into the Sinaitic Peninsula to the base of Mount Horeb. There, for forty days and forty nights, Moses was with God, and there the Lord gave to Moses the pattern of the tabernacle, the ritual instructions of holy worship, and all of the other marvelous things in the Book of Leviticus that portray and prophesy the sacrifice of the Son of God. After the death of Moses, Joshua went over Jordan and led the wars of conquest. In the first confrontation, at Jericho, an incident happened which gave rise to the title of this summary. The scouts sent out by Joshua to spy out Jericho were saved by the faith and kindness of Rahab. The men of Israel promised life and safety, both for her and her father’s house, if she would bind a scarlet thread in her window. This she did, and, when Jericho fell into the hands of Joshua by the intervention of God, Rahab and her family were spared because of that scarlet line, “The Scarlet Thread of Redemption.” After the conquest of Canaan, under Joshua, we have the story of the Judges. The difference between a judge and a king was that a king gave to his son his throne by inheritance, but a judge was raised up in a crisis and endowed with special gifts from God for a period of time. The days of the Judges end with the birth of Samuel.

From the First of the Prophets to the Founding of the Kingdom During the time of Samuel, the people began to cry for a king. It was the purpose of God in the beginning for the children of Israel to have a king (Deut. 17:14-20), but it hurt the heart of the Lord that the request should come in so vain and rebellious a way as they presented it to Samuel. But according to the word and instruction of God, Samuel anointed Saul to be king over Israel. In his beginning ministry, Saul was a mighty man and carried out the mandates of heaven, but he soon fell away from the instruction of Samuel and fell into gross disobedience to the will of God. The Word of the Lord, therefore, came to Samuel that he must anoint a man after God’s own heart. That anointing was directed toward a lad from the shepherd field, a son of Jesse by the name of David.

David and the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah The first part of David’s life as king of Israel was magnificent. Then, in the very prime of his life, at the very height of his glory, he turned aside from the will of God and became self-indulgent and lustful like other Oriental kings. This brought to David an infinite tragedy, one by which the name of God was blasphemed. Nevertheless, God forgave the sin of David and chose him to be the father of that marvelous Son who would sit upon His throne as King forever. A type of that glorious Son of David was the immediate son of David, called Solomon. Solomon also began his reign gloriously and triumphantly, but like his father, Solomon also fell into tragic decline. Upon his death, the kingdom was divided. Thereafter, the people of God were divided into two kingdoms: that of the north was called the kingdom of Israel, and that of the south was called the kingdom of Judah. The northern kingdom of Israel was taken away into captivity by the cruel and ruthless Assyrians in 722 b.c. The southern kingdom was carried away into Babylonian captivity in 587 b.c. In the days of the Babylonian captivity, Jeremiah prophesied in Jerusalem while Daniel, the prophet-statesman, and Ezekiel, the holy seer, comforted and strengthened the people of God in Mesopotamia. Out of the Babylonian captivity came three great establishments by which God has blessed our world. First, the Jews were never idolatrous again. Second, the synagogue was born, and from the synagogue came the church. The services of the synagogue are the same type of services we have today. Third, from the captivity came the canon of the Holy Scriptures. Out of tears and suffering came our greatest blessing, “The Scarlet Thread of Redemption.”