We're going to go ahead and get right on into the lesson tonight. This is an abbreviated afternoon-evening service. One song, and I'm very careful to say short sermon because I've lied before. I'm going to try. Look, I didn't print it this time because if you have last week, you have a little bit of it. We're only going to cover this part and this part. That's it. That's it. So I didn't print this part here. Sorry. It's a short one. All we're looking at is the assurance of Christ's return. The assurance of Christ's return. If you have your books, it's page number 794 of the Landmarks of Baptist Doctrine. At the very, very bottom of the page, we did cover all of point A, right? I was just making sure that we were like fighting the 794. We were like fighting the the computer, the computer back there. Yeah, so. Yep, 794, the assurance of Christ return just real quick to make sure we're all on the same page. We are. Well, I told you 794, but. The lecture, we're looking at eschatology, that is the study of last things. And the lecture is called the course of this age. And so we've looked at the characteristics of the last days. And then we are now looking at the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. We've looked at the fact of Christ's return. We're going to look at now the assurance of Christ's return. Remember that as we're talking about this, we're dealing with the return of Christ in a general way. So please understand that we're talking about the return of Christ in a general way. We're not talking about necessarily specifically the rapture or specifically the revelation. We'll get into that a little bit later. But when we talk about the return of Christ, we're saying it in general, OK, that he is coming back, whether it's at whether we're talking about the rapture, which happens before the tribulation or the revelation. which is his return on the ground to the earth at the end of the tribulation. both many passages which refer to his coming can apply to both. Okay, does that make sense? That's why there's a lot of confusion about whether the rapture happens before, middle, or after the tribulation, because people look at things that actually are talking about the revelation and they apply it to the rapture when it really doesn't apply. So we look at those things, but we can look at it in a general sense, and then we start specifying, okay, this is talking about this, this is talking about that. Make sense? Tonight we're just focusing on the fact that it's it's a for sure thing. It is a sure thing. It's not a maybe it's not a you know it's a. It is a hope so thing, but it's a hope so not like you know, I hope I get promoted or something. It's a hope so thing that is a steadfast hope. Like an anchor to the soul as I skipped the song that Brother Bella chose, we have an anchor. So our assurance of the certain fact of Christ's return rests in the fulfilled prophecy relating to his first advent. All right, so. Y'all remember what the word advent means? What's it mean, Jareth? You don't remember advent? Man. All right, Emma, do you remember what advent means? You guys weren't in here last week. I forgot you guys were at youth group. So I can't pick on the youth for that. Maybe they need to learn that at youth group, so. Advent, anybody? Anybody that was here last week? Advent, yes sir? Coming, coming. So that's return or coming. Sorry, we started early. Y'all can come on in. You can either join us in here or you can go eat. Whatever you want to do. Come on. There's dessert downstairs. That might be better than this. I'm still preaching the morning service here. No, I'm just kidding. Yes, sir. Brother Holderman. Make room, y'all. I was just wondering if the reason you were coming is because it comes in the clouds Yeah, well advent is just a simple his coming. So the the the the concept we're talking about the the assurance of Christ's return, the assurance of Christ's return. So, many Old Testament prophecies were fulfilled literally and accurately. This is what we base our assurance of the return of Christ on the fact of fulfilled prophecy of His first coming. Does that make sense? That's our premise here. And that's really what we're dealing with today. And then we'll be done. Y'all can have dessert and there you go. So the premise it is we base our assurance of the return of Christ. On the fulfillment of his first coming. As I as I read already, we're going through landmarks of Baptist doctrine, Ecclesiastes, not ecclesiology. We did ecclesiology for a long time, like four years. Eschatology in time stuff. All right. So Many Old Testament prophecies were fulfilled literally and accurately. For example, Micah 5.2. Turn over there real quick. Micah. Anybody have it memorized? You should? It's in the Bible. You should. Micah 5.2. How does it start? But thou. It would not be one that you probably memorize commonly, okay? Micah 5.2 says, but thou Bethlehem, Ephrathah. Though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall come forth unto me that is, to be ruler of Israel, whose goings forth have been of old from everlasting." What's that a prophecy of? The birth of Christ, right? You can jump over to Luke chapter 2. Maybe I'm going to the wrong place. It's not in the book. Alright, I'm going to cheat. Who's got one of those cheater's Bibles that gives you the parallel next to it? Micah 5-2, where's your parallel? Sorry. I don't think it's Luke. Yeah, it's a cheater Bible. Yeah. All right. Matthew two. Matthew two. Verse number six, but now Bethlehem in the land of Judah, what's he referring to here? The location, the location of. The birth of Christ, right? We have. We have a prophecy here in the Old Testament. We have it fulfilled in the New Testament, right? This is again part of our assurance. By the way, we're not going through every single one there like. There are lots of prophecies about Christ's first coming that he fulfilled. Lots of them. So the idea, though, is just to lay out the the fact of his first coming and the prophecies that are related to his first coming in very. Surface level to give you the basis for assurance of his second coming. So Isaiah chapter seven, verse four, anybody? Behold, Oh, is it and? And said unto him, Behold, right? Take heed. Why don't you hold on? Fourteen. Seven fourteen. Yeah, you get me. Get me all mixed up. Therefore, the Lord himself shall. OK, yeah, I'm skipping like the whole first phrase. Therefore, the Lord himself shall give you a sign. Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bring and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel. And then we see in the New Testament exactly that happening. I'm just going to leave it with that. We'll we'll look at him here in another place. But Zechariah nine nine. Zechariah 9.9 Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, He is just and having salvation lowly and riding upon an ass and upon a colt, the foal of an ass. That's fulfilled roughly a week before they crucified Him. Right? He rides into Jerusalem on a donkey. Right? So, when was Zechariah written? Was it before or after Jesus came? Way before, yeah, hundreds of years before. We have Isaiah written, what, roughly 700 years before. A virgin shall conceive. That's what happened, right? Psalm 22. Psalm chapter 22. Again, this is not intended to take a long time. We're about a third of the way through right now, at least. Psalm 22, verse number 16, says, For dogs have come past me, and the assembly of the wicked have enclosed me. They pierced my hands and my feet. How about Isaiah 53? This one could take a while, but maybe not. Isaiah, chapter 53. Man, I knew I shouldn't have turned that heater on. People are like, it's cold, it's cold, and I turned the heater on, and it's not even running. It's not even running. Yep. It's already 10,000 degrees in here. I'm just turning to the beginning of Isaiah, then to the end of Isaiah, then back to the beginning of Isaiah while I'm talking about how hot it is. It just kicked back on? Let's turn it down. There we go. All right. Isaiah 53. Who hath believed our report? Now, when's this written? About 700 years before Christ. Who hath believed our report, and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of dry ground. He hath no form nor comeliness, and when we shall see him, There's no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid as it were our faces from him. He was despised and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. Yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned every one to his own way, and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth. He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter. And as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. He was taken from prison and from judgment, and who shall declare his generation? For he was cut off out of the land of the living. For the transgression of my people was he stricken. And he made his grave with the wicked and with the rich in his death, because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth. Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him. He hath put him to grief. When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. He shall see the travail of his soul and shall be satisfied. By his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many for he shall bear. their iniquities. Therefore will I divide with him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he hath poured out his soul unto death, and he was numbered with the transgressors, and he bare the sins of many, and made intercession for the transgressors." Who's that talking about? Yeah. Did he fulfill that? Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, he fulfilled it in person right here. Well, not right here. Right here on the earth. Right here on the earth. Fulfilled it in person at Calvary. There in Judea, just like it was prophesied. Psalm 16. It says, for thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thy holy one to see corruption. This is later referred to in the Gospels, referring to his resurrection, right? He wasn't left in the grave to see corruption, but he rose again. So there are eight times more prophecies relating to the second coming Christ than there are relating to his first coming eight times more now that just just so you know right after we have Psalm 1610 here in the text or in our in our study stuff it says etc so there are others lots and lots of others referring to prophecies referring to his first coming but there are more like multitudes more, eight times more about His second coming. Several Old Testament prophecies involve both advents. Remember as we said before, what was it that I told you guys? I'm going to stand over here and we're looking across the mountain peaks, right? You have stuff about His first coming, stuff about His second coming. Same prophet. Sometimes the same verse, right? Why do we have them right next to each other? Because that's what they saw. But we're living over here somewhere in this valley, right? And so, we get to see all the stuff that's going on in the valley, right? And they're not standing on the mountaintop. That's why, by the way, the New Testament gives us some of the stuff that's going on in the valley and then also the second coming stuff. Because you have the guys in the New Testament, they're standing on this mountaintop. They're looking at the next one, but they can look down and see some of the things in between, right? So you have lots of those prophecies that involve both. Since one part of the prophetic verse has already been fulfilled literally and accurately, we may confidently expect the other part also to be fulfilled just as literally and accurately. Now and before we close on this, I want to mention a couple things about prophecy. So prophecy throughout the Word of God. God gives a prophecy and then typically what happens after God gives a prophecy is the devil tries to fulfill it. I'm saying this on purpose because I've heard even this week somebody's talk about how Christians take the world stuff and we like. steal their holidays or we this or that or whatever. But the reality is God made a prophecy and the devil tried to fulfill it and then God fulfilled it. And then people look at, well, the pagans were doing this before the Christians were. Yeah, that's because they were trying to fulfill the prophecy and not doing it. And then Christ fulfills the prophecy and then we recognize it and we celebrate it and then we're accused of doing what they were doing. No. we're actually just doing, we're just celebrating the actual fulfillment of the prophecy, not the false fulfillment of the prophecy. And so whether you're talking about Christmas or whether you're talking about Easter or whatever you want to call it, Resurrection Day, you know, whatever those are, those are hotly debated because, well, the pagans celebrated this. Well, yeah, they celebrated it because the devil tried to fulfill it and it failed. And then when God fulfilled it, then we say, see, then we celebrate it right it's fine all right and praise the Lord so also about prophecy there are times also that God fulfills prophecy partially as a shadow For example, there are many prophecies about Jesus that Solomon fulfilled partially, but not fully, but then Jesus fully fulfilled them. There were some prophecies about Jesus that David partially fulfilled, and then Jesus fully fulfilled them. There were some prophecies about Jesus that Moses partially fulfilled, and then Jesus fully fulfills them. There are prophecies about multiple different leaders of Israel that are partially, I'm sorry, they're prophecies about Jesus, but they're partially fulfilled in these other people and other times. But then fully fulfilled, fulfilled, yes, fulfilled by Jesus. And so you see the same thing, by the way, in prophecies of the Antichrist. You see, we could look back at history and say, that guy, he was definitely an Antichrist. And if he had the opportunity, he definitely would have been the Antichrist. But he wasn't. He didn't fully fulfill it, right? You've got Antiochus Epiphanes, you've got Hitler, you've got et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? None of them are the Antichrist, but many of them or all of them are an Antichrist. And so we see partial fulfillment in those things. But when it gets fully fulfilled, we'll know. And well, we won't be here to see it, but we'll know about it. Amen. So, for example, though, looking at at different passages, you know, Isaiah 61, you have the statement here, the Well, it's restated in Luke 4 there. The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted. Jesus reads that from Isaiah. And He's reading the prophecy of Himself. And He hands the book back to the minister and says, Today, this day, this prophecy is fulfilled. And so they... that you see multiple times of this, right? Like I said, Luke 4, 16 through 21. There you see Micah 5, multiple things mentioned and various other places. And so we can base the fact that, first of all, the prophecies that God has fulfilled accurately and completely throughout the Word of God is our assurance of salvation. We have assurance of salvation because Jesus fulfilled the prophecies about His first coming. We have assurance of salvation because God has fulfilled hundreds of prophecies throughout the Word of God. That gives us assurance of our salvation. It also gives us assurance of the other promises of God, that He'll never leave us nor forsake us, that He will work in us both the will and the do of His good pleasure, that He will work all things together for good to them that love Him, who are called according to His purpose, Conform us to the image of His Son. All of these things, these promises that He gives, and then the promise of His return. We can be assured of the promise of His return because He's always been faithful to fulfill His promises. And so we can look forward to Him being faithful to fulfill the ones yet to be fulfilled. Amen. Amen. Brother Travis, why don't you close in prayer? I just thank you, Lord, and praise you for your son, Jesus. Lord, when we didn't have a way, you made a way, God. And we thank you for assuming him to die on the cross for our sins, Father. And just as he rose from the dead, we can raise from the dead, too, Lord.