3rd Fruit of the Holy Spirit
Exodus 34:6 And He passed in front of Moses proclaiming – “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet He does not leave the guilty unpunished, He punishes the children and their children for the sins of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.”
Faithfulness is what the Lord Himself says He abounds in, and when it comes to receiving the Fruit of Faithfulness from God, the stories of deliverance and blessing in Scripture are the evidence of God’s faithfulness.
God is faithful to Himself and His Word – it means that He will do what He says and what He promised. – If it is for blessing, it will be for blessing, and if it is for destruction – it will be for destruction, and if He puts a time on it, it will manifest at that time.
To Noah, He said “My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal; his days will be a 120 years”; and at the end of 120 years, Noah completed the ark and the flood came. Had Noah been slow in completing the Ark, the Lord would have completed it for him because God is faithful, even to the keeping of time. He said through Jeremiah; “But when the seventy years are fulfilled, I will punish the King of Babylon and his nations, the land of the Babylonians…” Jer 25:12 And so after seventy years of exile, the Jews were returned to Israel and the familial line of Nebuchadnezzar was destroyed by Cyrus.
If God is faithful to the keeping of His promised time, then you can be certain He is faithful to all other things…for you and I know, one of the hardest things to be absolutely faithful in, is the keeping of time. How many of you, and how often do you meet someone exactly at the time you say. You might say but God was only speaking of years, not hours and minutes. However look at the context in which He promised this – which is keeping your time to within a year in the context of global events that depends on so many more factors!
The Lord says in Isaiah 61:8 “For I, the Lord, love justice; I hate robbery and iniquity. In my faithfulness I will reward them and make an everlasting covenant with them. Their descendants will be known among the nations and their offspring among the peoples. All who see them will acknowledge that they are a people the Lord has blessed.” This is a great verse of promise – but what is the context of God’s faithfulness? Isaiah 61 comes after the Lord had rebuked and punished Israel for their unfaithfulness, and had been put to shame by their total destruction, after His opening rebuke to Israel in Isaiah 1:2 “I reared children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against Me. The ox knows his master, the donkey his owner’s manger, but Israel does not know, My people do not understand.”
What Israel did not understand was God’s faithfulness, the fullness of His faithfulness, as the Psalmist understood in Psalm 119:75 I know, O Lord, that Your laws are righteous, and in faithfulness, You have afflicted me. He does not say – in faithfulness You have blessed me, but instead he says: in faithfulness, You have afflicted me.
Israel did not understand that when God pronounced His blessings in Deuteronomy 28 for obedience, there were curses also pronounced for disobedience; and that God in His faithfulness would mete out both blessings and curses as His word had dictated.
The lack of understanding of God’s faithfulness to Himself and to His word; and to each other: Father to Son; Son to Father; Spirit to Father and Son and Father and Son to Spirit, means that what they have said they would do, they do and they will do it in that context. The Lord said in Jeremiah 31:31-34 “The time is coming when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke My covenant, though I was a husband to them. This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time. I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be My people. No longer will a man teach his neighbour, or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest. For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.”
When God says “a new covenant”, so it is. Therefore, when Jesus fulfilled the Law and began His journey to lay down His life and shed His blood for the New Covenant, God said, “Listen to Him.” No point listening to Moses now as it is going out of style [being made obsolete], so that John 1 to John 19 was just the transitional stage for the new priesthood and the new “Levites” – that is the Apostles who were being trained.
God was so keen to let Israel know that this was the New Covenant, that He didn’t tell Jesus to appoint 12 new Prophets for the prophetic ministry was the highest in the OT; but He had Jesus appoint 12 Apostles – a term never used by the Lord in the OT. Nor did He appoint 12 Judges or 12 Kings, but 12 Apostles who would then head up a ministry team of Prophets, Evangelists, Teachers and Pastors; -- it was not prophets, Judges, Kings and Levites. The terminology was changed to designate a change of system – yet some terminology was retained; e.g. Prophets – to show the heritage of the old. Even then, it was obvious that though the office of the Prophet was retained, even the functioning of that office was changed. For now the New Testament Prophet had to work with an Apostle, and even the Prophets had to submit their word to the Apostles. The Prophets heard the message and the Apostles knew what to do with the message. That is the theory anyway. The operation of the prophetic ministry without the operation of the Apostolic is therefore not truly NT, but a throwback from the old. It is like a Ferrari with model-T ford wheels. It goes, but not as it should!
As such, at this level; understand that the faithfulness of God is not only in blessing, but in correction, rebuke, discipline and strikes. – Just ask Ananias and Sapphira [Acts 5]. If you read through all the words of and words against the Nations of Moab, Edom, Assyria, Egypt, Babylon, etc; you will see God was faithful to these as well.—They were blessed when God said He would bless and they were destroyed when God said He would destroy.
And God has not and does not change. That is His faithfulness; and when you understand His faithfulness, then you have received the Fruit of His Faithfulness. In the present context, if you do not “Listen to Jesus” –if the Church does not “Listen to Jesus” —we/they have disobeyed His command, as surely as Israel disobeyed their 618 commands. And if Israel was decimated down to a few thousand, after hundreds of years of patient waiting and persuading from God—how much more do you expect from God to the Church who can’t even keep one command, and has lived 2000 years of God’s patience….
Firstly in Matthew 8:11-12 “I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
Matthew 13:41-42 “The Son of Man will send out His angels, and they will weed out of His kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. [World]
Matthew 13:49-50 “The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” [These are fish caught in the net that is the kingdom of Heaven]
Matthew 22:13-14 “Then the king told the attendants, ‘Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ For many are invited, but few are chosen.”
Matthew 24:50-51 “The master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he is not aware of. He will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the hypocrites, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
Matthew 25:28-30 “’Take the talent from him and give it to the one who has the ten talents. For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”’
The faithfulness of God is that He will do what He said He will do – both blessings and judgments of destruction. Concerning weeping and gnashing of teeth-- He promised firstly that the citizens of the Kingdom of Israel would be thrown out to welcome in the newcomers from the East and West—and they would weep and gnash in darkness. And as the Lord sows His good seed into the world—that is, His sent and chosen ones—the devil would sow his seeds. This ranges from Seth to Noah------à James to all Christians, versus the sons of Cain and the sons of Canaan and the Nephilims-------àto the followers of Balaam and Jezebel as well as the Nicolaitians that are in the Church—the sons of the Devil, which are the bad fish. They are thrown not into darkness, but the fiery furnace to weep and gnash their teeth.
Then of those invited to the Wedding Feast, some are still thrown out. ie Some Christians are thrown out of the inner circle or invitations.--ie Those who did not dress themselves in the garments of salvation of Jesus, but dressed themselves in the rags of their righteousness. They are ‘saved’, but not invited. They are called to salvation, but not chosen to service.
Now note that the next two mention of weeping and gnashing—the context is ‘servants’ and ‘masters’. The one was not ready and the other was lazy—both are thrown out into darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.
And the final mention is ‘the narrow door’ where Jesus said in Luke 13:22-24 “Make every effort to enter through the narrow door, because many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able to. Once the owner of the house gets up and closes the door, you will stand outside knocking and pleading, ‘Sir, open the door for us.’ ” 13:27-29 “But he will reply, ‘I don’t know you or where you come from. Away from me, all you evildoers!’ There will be weeping there, and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, but you yourselves thrown out. People will come from east and west and north and south, and will take their places at the feast in the kingdom of God…..”
This last reference brings you back to kingdom inclusion or exclusion. The first mention is exclusion from Israel [Matthew 8:10] as a kingdom – the last is an exclusion from the Kingdom of God…. There is weeping and gnashing in several levels and places—
- There is a place of darkness and a place of fiery furnace.
- There is a place for sons of the Devil and hypocrites whom Jesus called the Pharisees, whom He also called sons of the Devil.
- There is a place for the called but not chosen, where it is darkness, but not where the hypocrites are.
- And a place of weeping and gnashing, that is neither dark nor in the fiery furnace.
If what God promised all the other nations of Edom, Moab, Assyria, Babylon and Egypt came to pass—and what He promised Israel came to pass—even though He did it with great patience, then this gnashing and weeping –
- in the fiery furnace
- in the darkness
- and in the place where they can see [Luke 13:27]
will also occur
- For the sons of the Devil
- For the lazy servant and the hypocrites
But the place where they can see – “There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when you see…” may well be a place that few have cared to contemplate, but may well exist…a place of weeping, but of no tears—the place where you are waiting for your judgement still, the judgement of the second death—the place where the second death still has power over you—the place of those who are waiting for the 2nd resurrection, where they can see the progress of those who made every effort to enter by the narrow door – which is Jesus—and now, beyond Jesus – made it into the First Resurrection.
The faithfulness of God is that He will judge with justice—and since to those who have been given much, much more is demanded, then to us, who have the fullness of His written word—He demands from us the effort to have read and the effort to have tried to get into the First Resurrection.—And if we have been deceived and waylaid by the riches of the Laodicean Church—then we will spend the time in heaven watching the Light Himself run the kingdom from Earth. It would almost be, as if heaven itself became dark – for God dwells in deep darkness (Psalm 18:11 He made darkness His covering, His canopy around Him) and God was now watching His Son and His Son’s brothers and sisters run Earth the way He dreamt this earth should be run—whilst all those who didn’t make it into the First Resurrection watch and even weep and gnash their teeth as they see what they missed out on.
God is faithful and He will do what He says He will do –
- both in blessing and in cursing
- In prosperity and darkness
- In light and darkness
AMEN.
To be His children of the First Resurrection, you must learn of His full faithfulness – not just half of the cup.
AMEN HOLY SPIRIT – THE FRUIT OF FAITHFULNESS!
