It was because the Jews, especially their priests, had misinterpreted the prophecies in light of an understanding that was for this world only that they rejected Him. He wasn’t the kind of Messiah they wanted. The same thing could easily happen again today as we near the Second Coming. There are so many false interpretations regarding end-time events that focus on political Israel instead of spiritual Israel. That’s a topic far beyond the scope of this blog however. The Lord did know this would happen. I recommend you take a look at Ezekiel chapter 34 in your spare time. It’s a prophecy about corrupt priests who lead His people astray and what God intends to do about the situation. Verses 11 and 12 say “For thus says the Lord GOD: ‘Indeed I Myself will search for My sheep and seek them out. As a shepherd seeks out his flock on the day he is among his scattered sheep, so will I seek out My sheep and deliver them from all the places where they were scattered on a cloudy and dark day.’”

In order to rightly understand the storyline of the Bible and prophecy in particular, you have to line up the really significant events and think beyond your own time period. Try to see the entire history of the world from God’s point of view essentially. You have Adam and Eve and the birth of sin, that’s the day in which Jesus was given to the world. Then the flood, as previously mentioned represents God showing the universe just how bad things would get under sin. We transition to Moses and the Ten Commandments then on to David. There were prophecies given through Abraham that Israel would have an earthly kingdom but the earthly success of the nation was only to provide a means for the spiritual success of the plan of salvation. Solomon of course frittered away the empire with the compromises he made for his many wives and false religion plagued the divided kingdoms. Then comes the captivity when Israel’s sovereignty was taken away. Ezekiel 21:25-27 speaks of the crown of Israel being overturned three times until the Messiah comes, who then keeps it forever. This happened; as the political sovereignty over God’s people was in Babylon’s hand when the prophecy was given and then overturned to Persia in the time of Nehemiah, and later to Greece, and finally Rome. This explains why Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world and why He said the kingdom of God is within you (John 18:36, Luke 17:21) The spiritual promise of being a new person with God’s love in your heart is always what the storyline of the Bible was really about.

Now we get beyond the time of Christ into the early church, how it went throughout the whole Roman empire sharing the truth. The falling away predicted by Paul came about as the pure church Jesus started became the Catholic Church in the Dark Ages. But God kept working bringing the truth back to light slowly through people like Martin Luther, the early Baptists and John Wesley. Now we transition into our time where the last of the truths of the Reformation, some of which are the secret keys we recently looked at, are being restored. When the full truth has gone to the whole world and everyone has had a chance to make a decision the end will come, but not without another counterfeit from Satan. This time the counterfeit will so closely resemble the truth that only those who really take God at His word and study it diligently will be able to tell the difference. (I’ll give you a hint, the true gospel has the true understanding of righteousness by faith, Martin Luther’s original point, while the false gospel doesn’t. With that true understanding comes a true understanding of how the Ten Commandments relate to practical Christian faith. With that eventually people will naturally ask themselves “why was the Sabbath changed?” The answer is that it wasn’t.)

Let’s look at 1 Corinthians 15:23,24 and add in 2 Timothy 4:1 and then have an in-depth study into the next great events that will soon come to pass. “But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming. Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power.” “I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom.”