Ep 200 | End Times Prophecies Are Being Fulfilled | Max Lucado | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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The world grows more chaotic, more scary every day.

And it goes way beyond rising prices or political tension.

We are now finding ourselves in a place where we could be actually

surrounded by countries with leaders that

are thinking about going to World War.

It's hard not to feel helpless, but Jesus was very clear in his Sermon on the Mount.

Don't worry.

Don't worry.

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Today's guest has cemented himself as a voice of calm in the terror all around us.

He has been widely described as America's pastor.

He's written 40 books, 145 million in print.

His sermons and writings have saved lives.

He is full of wisdom.

He played a fundamental role in the He Gets Us campaign, which strives to share the love of Jesus with all, right or left.

Unsurprisingly, the mainstream media was quick to label it corrupt, divisive, political, and any other number of snotty accusations.

But the far left's unquenchable desire to hurl insults won't stop him.

Today, on the Glenbeck podcast, welcome Max Lucato.

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Hi, Max.

Hi.

How are you?

We're going to make it.

We are.

I mean,

I just think it's such divine providence that you are here today.

Because

I have so many questions about being a good Christian.

I'm really having a hard time.

There's,

you know, just about

10 years ago, I swore off the word evil.

I'm not going to use evil anymore.

Because I was like, this is evil, what they're doing.

And I didn't want to make bad

evil.

Evil is something separate and apart.

What we're seeing today is evil.

And

it looks very coordinated.

If you can't see the power of evil,

I think you're pretty blind.

And I'm having a problem, let's just say, with, let's start with Israel and Palestinians.

That's evil.

What the Palestinians did was evil.

And there's a difference between

hating the Palestinians and going in for vengeance

and doing what we did in World War II against the Germans.

We didn't hate the Germans.

We hated the Nazis.

How do we navigate this when we're living in a country that doesn't

half the country doesn't understand evil or has the opposite view of evil than we do?

Yeah.

I've wondered, by the way, it's good to be with you.

I wish we had a happier season.

It is an important season.

It is.

It is.

I look at it as

an honor to be alive today, to be part of the chosen billions that he sent to Earth at this time.

Because

we're going to need to find that inner giant.

We are.

We are.

I think you were right to pull the word evil off the shelf in this case.

There is no redemptive answer to what they did.

None at all.

You can't manipulate this.

You can't massage it.

And I know we, you've seen probably a lot more than I.

I've only seen probably a quarter of what's out there.

It's no good.

It's just, you know, the atrocities

are just simply

beyond barbaric.

And

I wonder, Glenn, I'd like to test this with you.

I wonder if, let's just say decent people.

have a hard time comprehending the mind of an evil person.

I think so.

I think we are filtering all of this through a decent person's mindset.

A decent person says, well, okay,

you know, we're at extremes here, but you know what?

We can live on the same block.

We can get along.

Let's meet.

Let's talk.

Let's arbitrate.

You know, that's what decent people do.

And so the mindset when we see evil like this is say, well, let's just call a ceasefire.

You know, or let's get everybody around the table and we'll talk it out.

That's not how you respond to barbarism.

It really isn't.

I believe that scripture calls on the government to wield the sword in a case where there is absolutely declared purpose to annihilate a people.

And when that's declared, when that's a part of the written constitution,

just the typical, let's sit down and talk this out, I just don't think it's going to

get very far.

So I feel that way, though, about so much right now.

We have so polarized, and I honestly don't feel it's all the Palestinians.

I don't feel it's, you know,

on any subject.

It's all the Democrats or all the Republicans.

But we're at a point now to where

I look at things now and say,

if you can't tell me the difference between a man and a woman,

I can't, I have no place to go with you because you're so off-centered on something so easy.

How are we ever going to get back together?

And

I feel awful with that.

I feel like.

You know, because another thing

I've always promised myself to is never look at someone as if you know more than they do.

Never have your opinions so grounded that you couldn't sit and talk to somebody and say, how did you get there?

You may disagree with them all the way along, but you'll learn something by sitting down with somebody you disagree with and just saying, honestly, I want to understand how you got there.

I really don't want to understand.

You know what I mean?

I'm having a really hard time.

Well, I mean, what we have here is a classic collision of two world views.

You know,

Judeo-Christian ethics believes that there is a God, a good God, overseeing the affairs of mankind.

That's where I start in my philosophy.

I think that's where you start.

We unpack it from there.

But if you sit across the table from a person who says, well, if there is a God, he's disconnected.

But more than likely, there is no God.

So I become my own God.

I'll do whatever the heck I want to.

And if I want to say that I am, you know, female one day and male the next, that's up to me because there is no truth.

And so here one person sits on one side of the table, the other person sits on the other.

And where do you find the common ground?

It's not easy.

You can do all you can to be just respectful of a person trying to have an opinion.

But beyond that, the common ground has eroded.

Whereas when I was growing up, I get tired of people saying when I was growing up, I just said it.

But when I was growing up, at least we had this common ground.

The vast majority of us believe that there is a God involved in the affairs of mankind.

Okay, let's start there.

Now, what you say he said, and what I think he said might be different.

We can work from that.

But if we don't even have that in agreement, Glenn,

it explains

the angst that there is in the world today.

It's just an angst, a sadness.

It's as if we

are having a funeral dirge for a world that we cherished, and we're seeing it pass down the street, and the hearse just drives by, and that deep, deep sadness.

And then

I've not heard.

I have felt that way

a few times when I see big things, big shifts in the country.

And

I mean, I feel it's better to mourn so you can move on to, you know, past your anger and everything else.

But it does feel like

everything feels like.

And again,

is that just my perspective that I grew up with this and now it's passing?

Glenn, it's not just your perspective.

How else do we explain the spike in anxiety and depression?

I mean, one statistic after another.

The most disturbing statistic I keep mentioning is, you know, suicides are up 24% since World War II.

I mean, it's just, there's a sadness in the world already.

And I think it's because the moorings that we held on to and that we aspire to hold on to, we're seeing everybody abandon.

And

what do we do?

How do we respond?

It's all changing so fast.

The speed at which the world is changing is just, I mean, we can barely even understand what AI is, and then it's everywhere.

It happens that fast.

And

I think that sends us down these

spirals of stress and anxiety.

I'm going to get all the bad stuff out first.

We're going to find some solutions.

I know, we are.

I know.

And this may, I kind of look at this as a solution.

But

if you didn't think World War II

was the possibility of Christ returning, I don't know what was wrong with you.

Except maybe you had read enough of the Bible to go, there's not enough, you know, to say it is this time.

We've got Gog and Magog.

For the very first time

conspiring against evil, against Israel.

I mean,

or is, I mean, nobody knows.

Nobody knows.

Nobody knows.

But it doesn't, it looks brother Glenn.

I mean, all the players are in place.

Okay, so the big thing, the big difference between right now and even World War II is the existence of the state of Israel.

Right.

I mean, that's the prophecy.

Nobody, I'm sympathetic with some student of prophecy from 200 years ago who says, well, this is never going to happen.

How in the world could the Jews ever repopulate the nation of Israel?

I mean, it's just the greatest miracle.

And so that miracle, that sign, it seems to me, Glenn, announced that we're in the

final days.

Because so many things, Israel has to be a nation for many of the prophecies to be fulfilled, namely the reconstruction of the temple.

And so there has to be a national Israel in order for many of these things to happen.

Well, now,

it wasn't there 200 years ago, 300 years ago, 400 years ago, but it's there right now.

And so I think

the discussion of what we're seeing on the world stage is a discussion that we need to have both politically, but even more important, spiritually.

Because something is happening here that has never happened in any generation in history.

I don't know when Christ is returning.

I don't.

No one knows.

But we are told to look for the signs.

In fact, Jesus was critical of those religious leaders.

He said, you see red sky at morning, you know it's dawn.

But here I've given you sign after sign and you have not watched.

And so

there's an expectation that in addition to viewing what's happening geopolitically, we have to interpret it spiritually.

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I will tell you that I've said so many times here recently,

you know, when the Bible was being put together,

it's not like God said,

you know, the Jesus part.

We went all soft.

Let's go out with a bang.

You know, let's freak everybody out in the last book of the Bible.

He didn't do that.

He gave that to us so we would not be freaked out.

He gave it to us so we'd look and we'd know and we'd know

that great change is coming.

Yes.

Right?

Yes.

He did these things not to scare us, but to prepare us.

He told us these things so that we would not panic.

See to it that you are not troubled, Jesus said the night before his crucifixion.

And then in the Olivet Discourse or the sermon about end times, Jesus said in Luke 21, lift up your eyes.

Your redemption draws near when you see these things coming.

So rather than panic, which

nobody faults anybody for their anxiety these days, but knowing what's next prepares us to face what's now.

And if we can know what's next, if we can begin to get a semblance of what's about to happen, then I believe that

allows us to land at a spot that says, okay, God said something like this was going to happen.

I'm going to look up.

I'm going to make sure my relationship with him is solid.

And I'm going to pray.

I'm going to pray.

And I'm going to lean heavily into God's word for help.

It may just be me, Max.

But

I don't know why everything that's good for me,

I don't like.

And everything that is not good for me, I do like.

You know, chocolate milk, not good for me.

Ice cream, not good for me.

Help me out on prayer and

scripture study.

And

it takes such discipline to do it.

And then I've been in periods of my life, long periods, where I've just been,

you know, just

voracious appetite for it.

And then other times, and it seems to go in the times when I need it the most.

It seems to leave you, yeah, yeah.

Rather than turn to it, you turn to something else, yeah.

No, or I just or turn away, yeah.

Just, I just don't

just get to the place where I'm tired of thinking about it, yeah, you know what I mean.

Yeah,

um, is that just I have no, no, no, no, no, no.

Part of our worldview says not only is there a good God, but our other part of the worldview says there's an evil being, uh, not just uh,

not just evil, but an evil being, and that is Satan.

And Satan has never told a word of truth ever.

And whenever he sees a person like you or any person

try to deal with the anxieties of life by turning to faith or turning to God, he's going to step in and sow one doubt after another.

or interrupt one with one interruption after another.

We can just expect him to do that because the last thing he wants us to do as people right now is turn to God in faith.

He wants us to turn on each other in anger.

He never, he's all for that.

He's all for division.

He's the source of all, wherever there's a division between two human beings, that's the footprints of Satan or the fingerprints of Satan.

That's why when he sees you opening your Bible, he's going to interrupt it or he's going to bring some type type of ethereal thought in and say, well, this can't be true.

Or he's going to cause doubt, or he's going to cause you to think I'm too bad to deserve.

He's got a million one tools.

But everything is settled on keeping you from drawing close to God.

Because where you are at peace with God, then you can be at peace with others.

But when we're not at peace with God, Then we see what the world sees right now, and that is calamity everywhere.

That's why I really appreciated your call to the country to return to the promises of God.

We have to.

Yeah.

What else?

We either hold on to the problems of life or the promises of God.

It comes down to that.

Yeah.

You know, our life's going to be dominated today by the problems we see or the promises we trust.

And we get to choose.

So thank you for reminding us to come back to the

covenants.

I just gave a speech a couple days ago on the covenant.

And,

you know,

I guess you're coming at a good time and a bad time because I'm right now I'm just feel like a punching bag.

You know, I just feel like,

but

I said last week,

we look at all of the problems and there's tons of them.

I mean, there is every indication that this just doesn't last much longer.

You know what I mean?

But

there was every indication in my life that I wasn't going to last much longer.

Good word.

You know?

And

it just takes a simple choice.

And then all of the stuff that we've done wrong, all of the things that our country has done wrong, once we turn it over,

he

is amazing.

It's all used for good.

There's no waste

in his world, you know?

And it gives me hope that

I've seen it in my own life.

And so I know it to be true because I know God because I saw forgiveness.

And

we just have to surrender.

You know, what if our response to this global crisis was really a nation of repentance and prayer.

I mean, what if we really got to the point where we said, Lord, we don't have any solution.

We see bitterness

in Iran.

We know that

some deranged leaders just one bad mood away from pushing a red button.

We're living in fear.

Our kids don't know their gender.

There's a suicide crisis or epidemic taking.

What if...

What if

there was just this collective desire to get down on our knees and say, Lord, we're crying out to you in desperation.

It's what is going to require.

It's going to require.

I don't know.

That's not something you can orchestrate or fake, but I believe

that's our next step.

That's our only next step.

We're not going to diplomatically talk our way through this, you know, Glenn.

This is a spiritual battle.

This is a spiritual battle.

You know, the last time I was here, I talked about my new book, God Never Gives Up on You, Jacob.

But, you know, Jacob's brother was Esau.

And in the womb, Jacob and Esau were struggling with one another.

They were fighting.

The womb of Rebekah was like a cage fight.

And so Jacob

The story, you know, was born second, but he's promoted to be firstborn.

And Esau and Jacob kind of reconcile.

But then then we learn that there's tension all the way down their bloodline.

Esau is the progenitor of the Amalekites.

And the Amalekites, can I tell about this for just a second?

Because I think it's really relevant to what we're talking about.

The Amalekites appear later in scripture when the children of Israel are coming out of Egyptian captivity.

And the Amalekites, listen to this, are the ones coming around behind the children of Israel, killing the women and the children.

They're not fighting the men.

They're fighting the stragglers.

This is

just beasts.

They're beasts.

See, we're seeing the beginning of what we're

of

this bloodthirsty Hamas tribe.

We're seeing it all the way back in the days of Moses.

Well, Moses reacted to that, not by battling the Amalekites, but by going up on a mountain to pray.

And when he prayed, Aaron and her had to hold his arms up.

You might remember that great story because he prayed so long and so feverishly that he was growing weary.

So they held his arms up.

And that prayer held the Amalekites back.

But the Amalekites just lingered around.

They were this mosquito on the children of Israel.

They kept

biting them and snapping them.

They appear later.

Glenn, you'll remember this.

Saul, the first king of Israel, was told by God

to destroy Agag.

Agag was the king of the Amalekites.

So Saul did destroy the people of

the Amalekites, but he didn't destroy the king.

Agag,

Saul kept him alive.

So there that spirit of anti-Semitism, of barbarism, is still alive and well.

The next time that Agag's name appears in scripture is in the book of Esther.

And in the book of Esther, there was a cruel despot that made Hitler look like a puppy dog.

And his name was Haman.

And he wanted to destroy the children of Israel.

And he was willing to pay King Xerxes $20 million for the privilege of killing.

This is the first Holocaust.

Well, when you read that story in the book of Esther, Haman is introduced as the son of Hamadatha, I don't know if I said it correctly, but Hemadatha, the Agagite.

So Haman himself was a descendant of Agag, who was an Amalekite.

And every time you see the Amalekites, they are trying to destroy the children of Israel.

I say all that to say Glenn.

Anti-Semitism is a spiritual issue.

I know.

Because God, from the very beginning, said through this covenant people, he was going to bless the world.

So Satan says, well, I'm going to destroy the covenant people.

Right.

And that's what he's been trying to do.

I'm absolutely convinced of that.

If Satan,

if you understand Satan as a real separate entity, which some people don't, but I do.

And if you look at him,

he thinks he can beat God,

which is arrogance beyond imagination.

He thinks he can beat it.

How many people were there?

How many people were there when a couple hundred?

And he thinks, all I have to do is just kill those people and he ceases to be God because God can't break a promise.

Well, I got to kill him.

And that's what he's been doing ever since.

How else do we explain

these millennia of anti-Semitism?

Yeah.

Nobody else, no other people group on the planet have

such

illogical hostility toward them.

I mean, we're seeing academic people.

We're seeing people that we have teaching in our universities or elected to Congress who are behaving with this

inexplicable hatred.

Inexplicable hatred.

And it's been so deeply rooted in the DNA of the human population

of humanity

that

we can only explain it by spiritual explanation.

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When you see the Lord talk about, you know,

he'll come back when the blood of the innocents is just too much.

Oh, yeah.

That even he has to say, enough.

Yeah, enough.

Yeah.

My gosh.

Except for the elect, he said.

Yeah.

It would continue.

My gosh, that's a lot.

It's a lot.

It's a lot.

And I'm sorry.

We've not got.

How do you find good news in such bad times?

You look for, I think,

the miracle or the planting of miracles.

It takes us to recognize them and to enact them

and be them.

But

the only thing I can think of in all of these are

We're going to see spiritual giants and

we are going to see leaders like we haven't seen in a very long time.

And we're going to see,

I really think we're going to see the maybe the whole arm of God, not just the finger of God.

I mean, I think we're going to see Moses-style miracles

because it's what will happen.

It has to happen because it's all around the world.

It is.

It is.

I got this text.

from a friend just yesterday.

He did a cut and paste and sent me this text.

Caleb Global reports that literally millions of Iranians are accepting Christ.

Thousands report being visited in dreams by a man in white with scars on his hands, and they want to learn about the man in white.

Wow.

That's an amazing report.

That's the kind of miracles.

Yes.

You know, in the darkest nights, God always has his brightest lights.

Yeah, it has to.

He always does.

He has to.

Do you know much about the Twelvers, the people that

believe in the 12th Imam, that really kind of are the clerics of

Iran?

Their

end times philosophy is when, you know, when their leadership says,

oh, Allah, give us a strength to hasten the return of the promised one.

Their promised one is the 12th Imam, and he climbs out of a well.

He's been hiding there for, I don't know, 1,000 years, 1,500 years.

And he comes out and he gathers the strength of the Middle East and he destroys Israel.

In their book, Jesus comes to back him up and says,

you know,

I'm here because this is the real Messiah and

and will behead anybody who disagrees with it.

But as you look at it, it's almost as if it was written

to freak people out.

You know, it's almost like, let's write this because I just read the Christian's ending.

Let's write this exactly like theirs, except the reverse.

There are people that are working for

the end times.

How does one make sure that you're not duped by that?

It's hard.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, it is.

For the Christian, everything begins with the resurrection, with the empty tomb.

Our Savior defeated death.

He rose from the dead, thereby authenticating everything he said and everything he would do.

And so for that reason, when I was 20 years old, a friend of mine asked me, well, what happened to the body if he wasn't risen from the dead?

And I couldn't come up with a good answer.

And it still took another couple of years for me to solidify my faith.

But I think that's the question.

So if the answer is Jesus did come out of the grave, then he authenticates everything else he has said about what he's going to do.

And that includes a period of severe tribulation.

I believe it includes a time in which Christ will call for his people.

He'll rapture us.

He'll bring us into heaven.

And while tribulation is happening on earth, toward the end, it's going to be severe.

It's going to be very severe.

That will be concluded by what we discussed, just the phrase, Gog and Magog.

The enemies from the north will come down and they will encircle Israel.

And it will appear that Israel has no help, not even

from us, because who knows where it will be at that time.

God will intervene, and that's when the return of Christ will happen.

That's when the evil will be destroyed, and that's when Christ will set up his kingdom on earth.

That hope for me, Glenn,

is what what gives me life

in really dark times.

Me too.

If all I had to do was look around and see this chaos around me,

I don't know what I would be drinking tonight.

I would be too.

But I have such faith that, well, I know the Lord is a promise keeper.

And so what he says will be, whether we're living in that time or not.

But I also know that,

you know, Bonhoeffer, I'm sure, thought he was a failure.

He wasn't.

He was an amazing man, an amazing man,

and still gives people like me hope every single day.

You know?

And Glenn, you give a lot of people hope.

You really do.

I can see on your face this is all heavy, but you're helping a lot of people.

You know, just the fact that you're talking about this from a heart instead of just a head viewpoint.

You're saying this really is heavy.

Man, we can relate.

Millions of us listening say, I get get that.

I get that.

We all have it.

We're facing crises now on every front.

We've not even mentioned North Korea.

We've not mentioned Russia and China and their collaboration.

We haven't mentioned the people who are living on the edge right now and

are trying to figure out how to make ends meet.

And their kids are going to school and being indoctrinated and maybe mom and dad have two jobs.

They can't stop this.

They don't know what to I mean, there is deep pain and despair.

Every time in the Bible, God's people got to this point,

God interrupted it with a miracle.

Now, sometimes it seemed like 400 years before that miracle would come, right, for those people in Egyptian slavery.

But you think about how God interrupted the enslaved

Jews in Egypt, How God interrupted with Joshua being able to retake the promised land with the collapse of the Jericho walls.

How God interrupted the exile of the Jews with Nehemiah being not only invited to return, but funded in his return to rebuild the city of Jerusalem.

And then, of course, for the Christian, there's the resurrection of Christ, just when it seemed the darkest, when God on earth was going to be destroyed, killed.

Look who comes out of the grave.

So, what our hope is, Glenn, what our prayer is, God, do it again.

Do it again.

But we need one more.

We need one more.

At some point, that one more will be the end of this age as we know it.

And that's okay.

Explain what the next age, because people think, oh, it's the end of the world.

No, it's not.

No, no, no, no.

I'm fascinated by end times.

I know there are many opinions, okay, so I'll preface it.

But it seems to me that the next big event after Christ returns to the earth is going to be that thousand-year reign of Christ on earth.

Have you talked much about that or thought much about that?

I've thought a lot about it.

I don't talk about it much, but I've thought a lot about it.

I think it's

one

to naturally get people to change.

I mean, we saw people change for about

maybe, if you're lucky, a week after 9-11.

Yeah.

So the change to affect that kind of change in people

means the suffering prior to has got to be

very memorable.

And then the joy of truth returning through him

has got to be

just

wonderful.

Wonderful.

Well, in case somebody has never heard this conversation,

what we're talking about is described in Revelation chapter 20.

Six times there's a reference to the millennium, and it's a thousand-year reign of Christ on earth, and it fulfills many prophecies and keeps many promises.

The reason it's really relevant to our discussion, and especially what you're emphasizing, is because the thousand-year reign of Christ announces that Christ will have his Garden of Eden.

What was established and announced in Genesis 1, 2, and 3, that God would reign in a paradise with his people.

They would reign together.

That was his declaration from the beginning.

Now, the assumption that many people make is, well, Adam and Eve blew it, so God changed his plans.

That verse is not in the Bible.

No.

Not in the Bible.

Like you said, God is a covenant-keeping God.

So he has announced this.

He has declared that this planet would be a paradise and we would reign with him.

That's what Adam and Eve were told to do.

They walked with God in the the cool of the evening.

It was intimate.

It was warm.

It was moral.

They weren't

hiding behind clothing even.

It was just a beautiful setting.

So

the teaching on the millennium says God's going to keep that promise.

And Revelation chapter 20 describes the day God does it.

And it's after he returns, Revelation chapter 19, and then Revelation chapter 20, and then Revelation chapter 21 announces the new heaven and the new earth.

And so for a thousand years in between this life and our eternal state, the new heaven and new earth, you and I will reign with Christ on earth.

And we'll be in glorified bodies.

That is to say, bodies that are made perfect, equipped for eternity.

And then there will be people who are still on earth in mortal bodies.

And I know this sounds fictional and fantastical, but it's part of the story, and I'm excited about it.

But there will be people who become Christ's followers even during that time of tribulation.

And they they will enter into that time of the thousand-year reign.

So we will, it's just like when Christ, after he rose from the dead, was in a glorified body with mortal people.

So it'll happen yet again.

I love the fact that,

at least the way that I read this, is that

you still have a choice, even when he's here.

He's not executing people who don't.

There still be people who are like, I like this guy, but I don't know, you know, that will change over time and join.

And that's exciting.

And events like this right now make us think, okay,

people are going to change.

I hear what you said about 9-11.

You know, when

on September, I guess, 13th, our church held a special worship service, and it was packed.

It was packed, Glenn.

I remember we couldn't even find hallways for people coming.

I thought, okay, this is it.

This is it.

But within two or three weeks.

Gone.

Gone.

Gone.

So, you know, we've touched on depression and sadness and

hopelessness.

Let's talk about your book, God Never Gives Up on You.

Because I think there's a lot of people that feel like he has or he's not answered or he's not been around.

What do you mean by God never gives up on you?

Well, we interpret the presence of pain as the absence of God.

That's a default human reaction to pain.

If God was here, I wouldn't be hurting.

God was here, I wouldn't be battling with this particular struggle.

So the declaration from God throughout Scripture is, no, I never give up on my people.

I never do.

And I will be there.

And Jacob's story is a picture of a person who I would think God would have long since given up on, but he never did.

He never did.

You look in the Bible at the stories of great Bible characters.

There's Abraham, there's Moses, there's Daniel, there's Joseph, there's Mary, there's Paul, there's Peter.

They just feel spiritual.

But when you look at the story of Jacob, Jacob was a scoundrel.

He was always working the system.

But he was a part of the promises that you've urged us to remember, Glenn, That promise made to his grandfather that God would bless the world through the children of Israel.

Jacob was the grandson of Abraham, the head of the 12 tribes of Israel.

And so God has to keep that promise.

And God's promise is he's going to use the children of Israel to be the courier of hope to the world, which he has, which he has.

But there was a...

The story of Jacob is a perfect example for God to abandon that promise if he was ever going to do so.

Because in the Jacob story, Jacob negotiates with God.

Jacob ends up marrying the wrong woman and then has to marry her sister.

And then he has two handmaidens and he has 12 children and they're all squabbling and fighting.

Then he has to go through an encounter with Esau, his brother, where he thought Esau was going to kill him, but they did at least reconcile.

And then on the way home to Bethel, his sons attack Shechem, a village, and it's a bloodbath.

It's one of the most ugly chapters in the whole Bible.

Every time you turn the page, you think, okay, God's done with Jacob, but he never was.

He never was.

That's why I think there's hope for people like me, you know, that God never gives up on us.

It's his grip on us that matters more than our grip on him.

Does everybody have

something as grand as Jacob to do?

Are you assigned this?

I tend to think that the example of Martin Luther King, that he was, I think, the fourth or fifth pastor that they had come to and said, hey, we need you to do this.

He was just the first guy that said, okay.

He wasn't the best.

He was just the one who

would pray on it and go,

okay, I'll do it.

Yeah.

Does everybody have a job to do?

Everybody has a unique role.

Everybody has a unique to them assignment in life.

Some respond and say yes, and it appears God blessed that with a small harvest.

Some say yes, and it certainly appears God blesses them with a great harvest, but they receive the harvest that's right for their work.

Some people just say no.

They don't want to part.

They don't believe in God.

They turn away from him.

And they really walk out on the opportunity of an adventure.

And life becomes nothing more than that little tiny dash between the dates on the tombstone.

You know, born here, died here, and that's it.

That's it.

And when you suck the godness, the goodness out of life, you're left with the bitterness and the sadness that we see in so many.

So even someone like Jacob, who, for crying out loud, as far as we know,

the one, let's see,

one of the two times he prayed, he was negotiating with God.

It wasn't a very spiritual prayer.

Lord, if you do this, I'll do that.

And he was back and forth with God.

There's never a time he preached a sermon, never really a time he gave a great message.

But you know what?

God chose to use him.

And in the end,

he was still following God.

He died worshiping, the scripture says.

So

when you get,

you know, this is one of the things that brings me back to how I,

how difficult it is to live at this time when there's so much wrong and evil.

And I think that's because

I know God's not given up on anything.

That's right.

That's right.

You know, he wants all of his kids home.

Yeah.

All of them.

Every one of them.

And he's counting on us to go help them.

That doesn't sound fun.

Well, God is up to the task, even though we're not.

You know, Glenn, I love to tell this story.

I told it last night at a church where I preached, so it's kind of on my mind, if you don't mind.

When my daughters were small,

kindergarten and diaper age, I have three daughters.

Our bedtime routine involved the very last thing after songs, after bath, after songs, after stories, after jokes, after books, you know, the very last thing, they would say, flex your muscles, daddy.

And Glenn, I used to have muscles.

I don't anymore.

I flex and nothing happens.

But there was a time I had a, you know, pretty good set of guns on my biceps.

And this one, the kids were small.

And I would go from bed.

They all had three beds in one room.

So they would all stand up and I would go pop those biceps.

And they'd put their hands on my muscles.

And they'd say, ooh, you're strong, daddy.

It's the last time I ever had women falling over my buses.

But you know, I like to think that

they slept better having just felt the strength of their father.

And I think that's what we need now.

I think we need to somehow feel the strength of our heavenly father.

I know this is terrible.

I know we're facing multiple crises on multiple fronts.

And I know that God's hand is still on Israel, though we can't quite figure out what's going to happen next.

But in times like this, the scripture says, just be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.

And the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

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All right, back with more from Max Lucato in just a second.

First, grip six.

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Let's talk about the covenant for a minute.

Because covenant is different than a promise.

A covenant is something that you don't want to take unless you're serious about it, right?

What's the difference between a promise and a covenant?

Well, a covenant

is

that is a good question.

I'm trying to find a real concise, brief.

A covenant has divine origins in it.

A covenant is more than just I agree to pay for your offense if I knock it over.

Right.

A covenant is my commitment to you for your best, to bring out the best in you.

you does that work i don't know if i've ever tried to articulate what works for you i i um

a promise to me is i'll do this if you do that yeah a covenant is i will do this and you must do that yeah yeah yeah we we cannot this one is not

there's no divorce court here on this one you take and make the covenant right and if i'm not mistaken he makes it through the generations there's only seven covenants in the scriptures.

There's like, I don't know, 3,700 promises.

But there's seven covenants.

And it always seems to center around the children that you will take this covenant and then you will plant it deep into the children so it continues on.

So it continues.

Yeah, it's a generational promise, if you will, I think.

And to abandon these covenants has consequences, right?

But to keep these covenants has promises or blessings.

So there's blessings and burdens.

We can choose life or

we can choose death.

Some of the covenants, the strongest covenants I think that govern the world right now are these unilateral covenants.

For example, here we are talking about Israel again, but God made a covenant in Genesis 12 and then Genesis 15.

He reaffirmed that covenant.

He gave Abraham this land and he gave them soil.

And then he said, through your seed the world will be blessed.

So it's a covenant of soil and a covenant of seed.

And then God affirmed that in Genesis 15 with that mysterious moment in which

there's a carcass and he passes between the carcass, the torn carcass of the animal, and there's a flaming pot and a burning flame, a flaming pot.

And it's God walking between that.

And that was the way of saying, may what has happened to this animal happen to me if I break this covenant?

And so here's God making a covenant.

Now, we can acknowledge the covenant or we can ignore the covenant, but the covenant is there.

And it's a governing principle in history.

So I think really that if you want to understand what's about to happen in the future, you go back and you look at these covenants that God has made, and you can tell that's where we're headed.

You say that burying the past is not always the best thing.

What do you mean by that?

Well,

there's an issue that so many people have that

they carry the regrets of the past.

They carry them with us.

And that's what Jacob was doing.

He knew that he had messed up with his brother Jacob, and he could not bring himself face to face with his past.

But you know, Glenn, sometimes to move into the future, we got to deal with our past.

Got to deal with our past.

And that's why grace is so important.

The grace of God washes our sins away completely, completely.

Explain why that's unique.

That's unique to the Christian gospel because every other world religion has says, you do this and God may do that.

Right.

You build this altar, maybe God will forgive you.

You keep these rules, maybe God will forgive you.

You

tithe or give this money, maybe God will forgive you.

The Christian gospel says, by contrast, we are saved by grace through faith, not by by works.

So no one can boast.

So Max can spend his life saying, I'm a sinner saved by grace.

I'm a drunk redeemed.

And I'm not, it's in the past.

It's not who I am anymore.

And God saved me not because of what I did, but because of what Christ did for me.

And that liberates me from the fear of outsinning his grace.

That liberates me from the fear of thinking I have to do more to get him to love me because it wasn't what I did to get him to love me to begin with.

So it's a whole different concept.

It's dad, he loves you.

That's right.

No matter what you do.

It's that worldview question again, Glenn.

So if my worldview has a God that loves me and has paid the price so I can spend forever with him in heaven, in the new millennium and then in heaven, then

armed with that, I can face the challenges that we're going through right now.

God never gives up on you as a way to give hope and to show

that even you weren't perfect.

Go over the

main thing that you think people need to know about that's in the book.

Yeah, I think the big idea, Glenn, with the story of Jacob is here is a man who is a descendant, a grandson of Abraham, whom we call the father in the faith.

And yet before he's even a chapter or two into the story, he's already swindled his brother and lied to his father, and he's on the run away from his own family, and he has to enter into modern-day Turkey

without a penny, without a servant, even though he comes from a family of affluence and wealth.

Before we're even into a chapter or two,

he's been deceitful, he's lied,

he's on the lamb, he's a fugitive, and yet we still hear Jesus speak about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

I would have thought that Jesus may have said Abraham and Isaac and that one guy who never did anything.

Call him the asteric.

But he didn't.

He didn't.

And you know, that brings such hope to many people who are listening right now.

Maybe they're in a prison.

Maybe they're in a hospital.

Maybe they're in a rehab clinic.

Maybe.

Maybe they're recovering from making some bad decisions, and they really think God has given up on them, but he never does.

And it's the trick of our brain and the trick of Satan to tell us what the world tells us all the time.

No, there's no forgiveness because there is no God.

So there is no forgiveness.

And,

you know, even if you think it might be you and you think it might be God giving forgiveness out, you're not good enough for it.

He didn't mean for people as bad as you.

And that's why we create these legalistic systems that say, okay, I'll go light another candle.

Maybe he'll forgive me.

I'll go give more money.

Maybe he'll forgive me.

Never knowing if we've lit enough candles or given enough money.

Whereas grace says, oh, no, no, no.

When Jesus died on the cross, he received all the punishment that was due, all of humanity, on him in my place.

Wow.

And then he rose from the dead.

So he not only paid for my sin, he defeated my death.

And when I say say yes to him, he says yes to me, and I become a part of that forever family.

Now, that doesn't mean life is going to be easy now, but it does mean there's hope at the end of this life.

And without hope, that's where people really struggle.

So this is the hope that we have to turn to in a season like this.

That is the only hope that you have.

I mean, I have hope who's been dashed on the rocks in men and in institutions and everything over and over again relentlessly.

But I believe in God, and I believe in those people that you can just feel God jump off them.

You know, there's something about,

I don't know, I think there's something coming in the future that we're going to need to know just by looking to each other in their eyes.

We are.

How does this season that we're going through?

There's anything in the last 40 years you've paid attention to, I'm assuming,

or maybe longer.

Yeah, yeah.

How does this right now compare with any other tough season we've been through?

Doesn't.

It doesn't.

We're

probably in 1863.

We might be at

1863, what is it,

1793 with the French Revolution?

and World War II.

Except we have bombs now.

I mean,

we're probably at all of those inflection points where

man had to have God.

You weren't getting through it without God.

And

most people don't.

I mean, I see the polls.

They don't go to church.

They don't read the Bible.

And that doesn't make you a good person.

But...

You know, it's one of these things.

If you don't know who you are now, how are you going to stay on the right team?

That nails it right there.

Yeah.

If you don't know who you are,

if you think we're just flotsome, we're just a coincidence of molecules, then

for crying out loud, turn the party off.

I've had enough.

It makes sense to me in some ways.

If you didn't believe in that, you'd just be like, what am I doing this for?

There's no point to it.

There's no point.

There's no point to it.

You have said, you talk about how a person's truest view of God is how they see him at their lowest point.

What does that mean?

Yeah, which is kind of what we're talking about today, isn't it?

Yeah.

Is God still on the throne when my problems have me surrounded?

Is God still mighty when I feel weak?

Anybody can...

trust God on a beautiful Sunday morning or Saturday Sabbath when everything is nice and we're out in the meadows looking at springtime.

But when you see one report after another of atrocity and you see how evil and barbaric and bloodthirsty humanity can get, when we see yet again what man can do against man,

can you trust in a good God then?

I turned often to the story of Joseph in the Old Testament.

Remember the son of Jacob who was sold into slavery, but then eventually became prime minister of Egypt.

And then when he had that encounter with the brothers who did sell him into slavery, he did not retaliate because he said...

That's that part of the story.

Yeah, Genesis 50, 20.

What you intended for evil, God used for good.

What you intended for evil, God used for good.

So intended evil can result in ultimate good.

It did in that case.

And God used Joseph to actually save the children of Israel from a famine.

And so our prayer is, Lord, do that again.

We need a Joseph.

We need deliverance.

We need a miracle.

Do you think it will be a Joseph, a leader, one leader, one, or will it be several?

Can you answer that question while I think on it?

No.

I'm just wondering if...

Billy Graham said to me, it's not going to happen that way this time.

I said, where's George Washington?

Where's abraham lincoln where's the next you billy he said it's not going to happen that way this time i said what do you mean he said he's tired of giving all the credit to people like me and you know other individuals who stand up and say things he said everything i've done that was wrong in my life is me i know i made that decision he said everything that was good

It happened because I would just be obedient and do exactly what he said.

He said, this time, the Lord's going to ask for everybody to be obedient and just stand in place with whatever he tells you to do.

You might think, this isn't going to work.

This is stupid.

You know, why am I doing it?

But if you just listen to him, he'll tell you where to stand.

And he said, it's like the Lord is throwing a giant surprise party for Satan.

He said, pretty soon, somebody is standing there in the dark because he's making you step out of the light, his guidance light, or your comfortability light,

and step out and trust in him and stand there holding something you may not really believe in, you know, as part of it.

And

he said, you're going to stand there and somebody's, you're going to say, what am I doing here?

This is so stupid.

And you'll hear somebody else standing right by you.

Is there somebody else here?

Yeah.

And he said, that's when the lights come on.

Right.

And he said, it'll be a mosaic that only the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob could have done.

He said, that's when every knee will bow.

He said, God wants all the credit this time, and he's going to get it.

Found that interesting.

That's wise.

That's wise.

So I think that

urges us to try to come up with some coping strategies because it's going to get worse before it gets better.

And I think you just mentioned mentioned one of them.

Rather than despair, just do the next decent thing.

Right.

You know,

if there is such evil in the world, then right now I have to decide, okay, I'm not going to treat people that way.

And perhaps the best way to

mount a personal resistance toward this flood of evil is for me to be kind to the person at the grocery store, you know, or to give up a parking spot

to generate a season of decency.

And some of the listeners who aren't even, who are not spiritual,

you're saying, well, I can do that.

Yeah.

Good.

Yeah.

Let's all start right there.

Let's be the most decent people that we can be to one another.

You know, my faith,

we are told to be peculiar people, and I think we got that down.

But

that's not the way they mean it and I was just talking to a group of people a couple weeks ago and I said

all Christians need to be way beyond a peculiar people

we need to be really so odd

that the rest of the world doesn't understand

because the rest of the world is going to be angry and confused and in chaos and we need to be

so in line with him that we are happy,

we are comforters, we are helping hands,

we stand out from the crowd.

I remember reading a story, Glenn, of some chaplains on a ship, on a battleship in World War II that had been torpedoed and the ship was going to go down.

And the chaplains were going to the soldiers saying,

you take the life jacket because we can die better than you.

Yes.

One of the great quotes, we can die better than you.

Christians can die better because we know what's next.

That doesn't make it easy.

It doesn't mean there's no fear.

But because of that, we are a peculiar people.

We're not excited about the evil that's going to come, but we do believe that Satan is going to get a big surprise.

The Nazarene Fund is the organization I put together to save

persecuted religion, Christians, anybody who's persecuted for their religion, and help get them to safety.

And

we use that mission to help get people out of Afghanistan.

And I was just with one of the guys in his family that we saved.

And he was Muslim,

but he was one of

one of the guys who was helping one of our commanders

stay alive

and heroic guy.

And he sat in my office and I said,

so what do you think of America?

Because he lives in Virginia now

and he lives right next door or right down the street from the guy who saved him.

And

he said.

I really find it a wonderful place, but I'm having trouble with one thing.

I said, what's that?

He said,

I don't understand

why

you Christians

would save people like me.

Why would you go to all of this trouble to do this?

It's pretty remarkable.

Pretty remarkable.

Was he asking for an answer or are you just speculating?

Just wanted to know.

No, he wanted to know.

And my answer to to him was,

because you're my brother.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You're really, literally my brother.

And

even if you're a brother who

is misbehaving,

Dad wants all of them home.

That's our worldview.

Every person is created to be an image bearer of God.

You know, Adam and Eve were made in God's image, and that includes Glenn and Max.

Now, that image has grown tarnished and tainted many times in many of our lives, but that image is still there.

So, the way you see

the person is that, regardless of their faith, they deserve to be rescued, they deserve to be respected.

I know, deserve to be cherished.

I know, Max, that with my kids, and I've really struggled with my kids in the last couple of years.

We've had suicide attempts and just horrible stuff.

And

I know

when one of my kids does something stupid to the, you know, to one of the others, or they feel like, you know,

you're being selfish, you know, you're hurting the whole family, you're being selfish.

I say to my kids all the time,

don't leave a mark.

Don't leave a mark.

Because

I, like my heavenly father, I want all my children.

And if my children are not, if they leave a mark on each other, it will cause a rift and division and it will get bigger and bigger.

And in the end, family's all we have.

It's all we have.

And

I know

my heavenly father.

I know him.

And

he won't be happy if I come home and go, dad, I'm home.

He's going to say,

did you see how many brothers and sisters you left marks on?

What did you do?

What did you do?

Would you pray?

No, I will.

And this will.

Thank you again, Glenn.

No.

Thank you for just all you do and the tone you set.

You're a good man.

You're putting it out there for all of us, and we struggle with you.

Thank you.

Well, gracious God, we come to you in this hour of great, great need.

Great need.

We feel whiplashed by what we're going through.

I feel like we just came out of the pandemic.

We're catching our breath, and then one crisis after another comes our way.

But we see you coming.

We see you walking on the water.

We see you making provision when there is no provision.

We see your ability to heal, to answer, and to solve.

So we cry out to you.

As your people, we cry out to you.

If you don't help us, we don't have help.

But when you help us, we have plenty of help.

So we ask you.

I thank you for my brother Glenn.

I thank you for

even the heaviness on his heart because he represents all of us, Father.

Our hearts are very heavy at what we see.

We pray that those who would bring evil against innocent people would either be converted or or eradicated.

Don't let that happen, Father.

Don't let more innocent people suffer.

Let your righteous rule occur.

Let your kingdom come.

And let there be once and for all peace on earth.

We turn to you, our Savior Jesus, for strength.

We pray, in the name of all that is good.

Amen.

Just a reminder, I'd love you to to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.