[Ron Barker] I don’t know if you’re aware or not, but it is election season in the United States. I know you’re aware. We’re bombarded with commercials over and over. And it seems like there’s two kinds of commercials. There’s either one that’s tearing somebody down, they call that the mudslinging commercials or there’s the ones that’s full of promises, campaign promises. We’re being promised so much right now, America’s going to be made great. Or if you don’t like that, America’s going to be made better. America’s going to be kinder, America’s no good and we need to tear it down and start all over. We’re going to tax those nasty old, rich people and make sure that everything’s fair for everyone. We’re going to pay for your college. We’re not going to pay for your college. Everybody has their ideas of what needs to be done to make the world a better place. The problem with campaign promises is they don’t always mean anything.

I have no doubt that some people wholeheartedly would love to fulfill their campaign promises. I also have no doubt that some people kind of see which way the wind’s blowing and will tell you whatever they think you need to hear to vote for them. And whether they’re trying with the best of intentions and with all their might to fulfill their campaign promises or whether their campaign promises don’t mean anything more to them than anything else, in any case, an unfulfilled campaign promise is just a lie. It really is. It’s just a lie. You don’t promise something if you can’t do it. This day pictures something much more than anything that’s going to ever take place in November on Election Day in the United States of America or any other country in the world. This day pictures the return of Jesus Christ, a real leader. Let’s turn over to Revelation 11:15. Revelation 11 starting in verse 15, and we can read about this.

Jesus Christ is coming as King of kings and Lord of Lords and He’s not campaigning. He’s not asking you if He can be your leader. He’s not making you obscene promises that can’t be kept to get you to vote for Him. He’s simply coming to take the job.

Revelation 11:15-17 “Then the seventh angel sounded and there were loud voices in heaven saying, the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ and He shall reign forever and ever. And the 24 elders who sat before God under their thrones, fell on their faces and worshiped God saying, we give You thanks, oh Lord God Almighty, the one who is and who was and who is to come because You have taken Your great power and reigned.”

We can read more about this day in Revelation 19.

Revelation 19:11. “Now I saw heaven open and behold a white horse and He who sat on him was called faithful and true, and in righteousness, He judges and makes war.”

This is speaking of Jesus Christ. He’s coming back in all glory and power. He’s coming back to bring God’s Kingdom to earth. And He has to come in power and glory because mankind’s going to fight Him. Mankind does not want Him to come back. In order to bring happiness and peace to the world, he’s going to have to fight the very beings that He created. Jesus Christ is coming back to a rebellious humanity, a humanity that has been rebellious since the beginning of time. But Christ coming back as King of kings and Lord of Lords is a fulfilled promise. He promised He would come back, and He’s going to keep that promise. He’s not coming back to be elected, but He is coming back to be a leader. And He’s made other promises, not campaign promises, not something just to stir you up and get you emotional about Him, but promises, real, tangible promises that He will keep when He returns. These promises will be fulfilled.

I’d like to look at some of these promises that Christ made about His return, and what they will mean for us and the world. The first promise that will be kept is that God’s faithful servants throughout the centuries will be resurrected or changed and rule with Jesus Christ. We’ve heard something about that already today, Matthew 24 starting in verse 29.

Matthew 24:29-31 “These are the words of Jesus Christ. He says, Immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light. The stars will fall from heaven and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn and they will see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And He will send His angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they will gather together His elect from the four winds from one end of heaven to the other.’”

He’s coming back for us. We’re going to be changed. Mr. Bornhorst this morning spoke about how he looked forward to being changed so he could eat cookie dough without getting sick. And I’m sure we all have our reasons that we would love to be changed. I’d like to be able to move my arm back more than this without my shoulder hurting. And I’m sure many of you have aches and pains that you’re looking forward to leaving behind when we leave these bodies behind. This is a promise that Christ has made. 1 Thessalonians 4 starting in verse 13. A little bit more about this process.

1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 “But I do not want you to be ignorant brethren concerning those who have fallen asleep, lest you sorrow as others who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again even so God will bring with Him those who sleep in Jesus. For this, we say to you by the Word of the Lord that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with a voice of an archangel, with the trumpet of God and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then those who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air and thus we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore, comfort one another with these words.”

That is a great comfort that we have to know that this will take place. And this is more than just leaving behind aches and pains and ailments. This is becoming a spiritual part of the family of God to rule with for eternity. Revelation 5:10 says that we will be made kings and priests to our God, and we will reign on earth. Does that get you excited? What an awesome adventure to think about, Christ will keep His promise. Are you keeping your promise that you made at baptism? Will you be ready? Are you preparing? Are you learning God’s way of life? Do you know God’s will? Do you know how God wants us to live? Will you be able to teach others? Have you ever thought about how big of a job this will be? I wonder sometimes how many people does this involve, and how many people will be alive on earth that we will be ruling over?

If you were to just take a wild guess, how many people do you think are elected officials just in the United States? Believe it or not, there’s half a million, half a million elected officials in the United States. I don’t think there’s going to be that many of us. It’s going to be a big job, and we’re going to have to know God’s laws. We’re going to have to know God’s will. We’re going to have to be in tune with God. That’s our job. That’s the promise we made at baptism. Christ is keeping His. We need to make sure we are keeping ours. Another promise that Christ made will change everything about the world we live in.

When Jesus Christ begins His rule on earth, Satan is going to be bound and unable to influence mankind. Boy, if we could get a campaign promise like that, right? “I’m going to lock up Satan.” I am voting this year. Christ is going to do it. He’s promised that a source of evil is going to be abolished. Revelation 20:1-3.

Revelation 20:1 “Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, having the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain in His hand.”

One thing I really like about this verse is sometimes, we start thinking of this great battle that’s taking place between good and evil, and sometimes Satan’s winning and sometimes God is winning. God doesn’t even come down and do this job Himself. He just sends an angel. Satan has no power over God. God sends an angel and says, “Okay, it’s time. Bind him, put him away.”

Revelation 20:2-3 “He laid hold of that dragon, that serpent of old who is the devil and Satan and bound him for 1,000 years and cast him into the bottomless pit and shut him up, and set a seal on him that he should deceive the nations no more till the thousand years were finished.”

Satan’s evil influence that he has been able to wield over mankind will be ended. Satan’s been blinding mankind from the beginning of time and creating this incredible gulf between God and His creation. It’s going to be removed. Another promise that Christ has made is that mankind will be healed. You know, I think about some of these things, and I wonder with the healing of some people, with the changing of nature, of animals, how much of that will be accomplished just by putting Satan away? But Christ has said, “Mankind will be healed.” Can a politician make you that promise? You laugh. Yes, they do. I had heard rumors of this and I didn’t believe it, so I went and looked it up. There’s a person who ran for president last time that said not only was he going to shut down COVID, but he promised a cure for cancer. Well, it’s been two years. We still have COVID, and we certainly still have cancer. But Christ’s promise is real. Let’s see what Christ is promising once He returns.

Isaiah 35:5-6 “Then the eyes of the blind shall be open and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then the lame shall leap like a deer and the tongue of the dumb sing, for water shall burst forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert.”

We know that Christ can follow through with this promise. We have history of Christ fulfilling this promise many times when He was on earth. He healed many. Many would come to Him with different ailments, and He would heal them. But it’s more than just history. How many sitting in this room have ever been healed of something? Yeah, I’ve been there. It’s a promise from Christ. We, ourselves have been healed, our loved ones have been healed. Miraculous healings too, ones that doctors look at and say, “I don’t understand what happened. I must have really made a mistake the first time.” If when a doctor says I must have made a mistake, it’s something they don’t understand. Cancers have gone away. Illnesses have been healed.

We know that Christ can fulfill this promise. And I’ve always thought of this promise as it pertains to people who were born with ailments or maybe who were in a tragic accident or something who might’ve lost a limb and I think, “These people will be so glad to be healed.” And they will. But when you think of this timeline of Christ returning, the great tribulation that’s going to take place before Christ returns, this promise will probably affect just about every human being that is alive at that time. The great tribulation is going to be a horrible time that’s going to cause a lot of injuries and pain and dismemberment. Just about everyone I would assume will be affected by this promise to one degree or another.

The next promise is that Christ is going to rule the world with mercy and righteousness. Mercy and righteousness.

Isaiah 9:6-7 “For unto us, a child is born. Unto us a son is given, and the government will be upon His shoulder and His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of His government and peace there will be no end upon the throne of David and over His kingdom to order it and establish it with judgment and justice from that time forward even forever, the zeal of the Lord of the Hosts will establish this.”

Justice. We like to think we live in a nation of justice, but how many times have we seen people getting away with things that you and I could not get away with? Just this last month, an elected official in some city, I don’t remember where it was, struck a person on a bike with her car and fled the scene. And she still has her job, and she’s not planning on quitting. We would be in prison. How many times have we seen those who make the laws not have the laws pertaining to them? It happens over and over again. Isaiah 2:1, in God’s Kingdom, the following of the laws will start with those who are in charge. That will be the example for all to follow. Christ isn’t coming back with a set of rules and saying, “You have to live this way,” and then He’s not going to live by it Himself. And as His helpers, as His brothers and sisters, we too will be held to those standards. The following of the rules will start with those in charge and then be taught to everyone else.

Isaiah 2:1-3 “The word that Isaiah, the son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem now it shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established on the top of the mountains and shall be exalted above the hills and all nations shall flow to it. Many people shall come and say, come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us His ways and we will walk in His paths. For out of Zion shall go forth the law and the Word of the Lord from Jerusalem.”

It will start at the seat of the government and go out from there. And the people will want to come and learn them because they will see the success that they bring. There will be no hypocrisy in Christ’s government. Isaiah 11 starting in verse 1 if you want to turn back there.

Isaiah 11:1-5 “There shall come forth a rod from the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of His roots. The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. His delight in the fear of the Lord and He shall not judge by the sight of His eyes nor decide by the hearing of His ears, but with righteousness He will judge the poor and decide with equity for the meek of the earth. He shall strike the earth with a rod of His mouth and with the breath of His lips, He shall slay the wicked. Righteousness shall be the belt of His loins and faithfulness the belt of His waist.”

No longer will we feel like we’re in a two-tier society where the wicked seem to flourish and do well by stealing and taking from the poor. There’ll be fairness and equity for all. Another promise, Christ will establish a happy, poverty and crime-free society.

Zechariah 8:3-5 “Thus says the Lord, I will return to Zion and dwell in the midst of Jerusalem. Jerusalem shall be called the city of truth, the mountain of the Lord of Hosts, the holy mountain. Thus says the Lord of Hosts, old men and old women shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each one with His staff in His hand because of great age. The streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets.”

This is a picture of society’s most vulnerable people, the elderly and the very young. They’re going to be safe in their neighborhoods. Wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t it be nice to let your kids go out, play in the streets, and not worry about them? And you might think, “Well, my neighborhood’s safe. I live in a good neighborhood. I don’t...you know.” This is worldwide. This is everywhere. The streets will be safe. There will be no drive-by shootings. Nobody’s going to come up and sucker punch an old man walking down the street just for kicks. Everyone will be safe and happy.

Making our city safe is a regular campaign promise. We hear it all the time. How are they doing? The District of Columbia, home to our nation’s capital, has the highest crime rate in the United States. If they can’t keep their own neighborhoods safe, how do we expect them to make our neighborhoods safe? This is a promise that it will take Christ to keep. Most of our cities have high crime rates. It’s not a gun problem. It’s not a United States of America problem. This is a worldwide problem. This is a problem of man separated from their creator. That’s where the violence and the crime comes from. That problem goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden when mankind rejected God, rejected His way of life, and said, “Wait a minute, I think we know better.” Nope, we don’t. We haven’t learned a better way and we’re not going to until we get back to being with God. People need to be taught how to get along with each other. They’re going to have to be taught God’s way of life. That’s the only way they’re going to learn.

Isaiah 30:20 “And though the Lord gives you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet your teachers will not be moved into a corner anymore, but your eyes shall see your teachers. Your ears shall hear a word behind you saying, this is the way, walk in it.”

Whenever you turn to the right or whenever you turn to the left, mankind is going to have to be taught. And again, it’s going to take more than just teachers. Satan’s going to have be put away. There’s going to have to be a willingness to want to learn God’s way of life, which will come by seeing it be successful, by seeing those who are in charge setting the example. If you really think someone could just fix the problem by always being there and telling someone, “No, don’t do that. No wait, turn away. No, you’re doing this wrong.” Think back to Cain and Abel. God, Himself came there and said, “You’re not doing right. You need to change.” And they didn’t listen. But this will be a different time because these promises that will have already been kept will start a change in mankind and start bringing them closer to God.

Another promise Christ has made is that He will abolish war and institute worldwide peace, Micah 4:1.

Micah 4:1-3 “Now it’ll come to pass in the later days that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established on the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills and peoples will flow to it. Many nations shall come and say, come, let us go to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us His ways. We will walk in His path, for out of Zion the law shall go forth and the Word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He will judge between many peoples and rebuke strong nations afar off. They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nations shall not lift up sword against nation. Neither shall they learn war anymore.”

Swords into plowshares, isn’t that beautiful imagery? There’s a spectacular statue of a man turning a sword into a plowshare located at the UN building in New York City if you’ve ever been there to see that. It’s a magnificent statue, very muscular man holding a sword and a sledgehammer, and the other end of the sword is being turned into a plowshare. That’s at the United Nations building, the UN which has an army of almost 100,000 soldiers. We don’t know how to bring peace to the world. I’m sorry they don’t call them soldiers. They’re peacekeepers, but they fight like soldiers.

Think about the economic benefits of no war. A fighter plane costs taxpayers somewhere right around $100 million dollars for one plane. Now, the government’s pretty good at saying, “Well, this is what it costs.” But really if you go back into the R&D development of it and all the time and energy spent in it, the actual cost of a fighter plane is somewhere around $350 million apiece. That’s a lot of money that you have spent on airplanes for war. Then not to mention, it costs somewhere around $8,000 an hour to fly it, one plane. Now our church hall in Dayton is close to the Air Force base, and sometimes when we’re there you can hear some of those fighter jets firing up their engines and taking off, and you can hear them flying around. I never really thought about it before. That’s $8,000 an hour it’s costing for that plane to fly around. Could you do something better with that money? Is it possible?

So, what if these beating swords into plowshares were taken literally? What if we took all the money it took for just one plane, let’s say the F22, and we took all the R&D money, and we took all the development costs and all the cost of manufacturing it and all the manpowers, all the time spent on it, and we put all that into developing a farming tractor. What would that look like? Everybody would be lining up to be a farmer. That’s just one example of where resources are spent on war. Under Christ’s leadership, the causes of war will be removed. James 1:4 tells us that wars are the result of people not being satisfied, always wanting more, never being happy with what they have, lusting and desiring for everything else.

Christ also promises us that His rule will be a time of prosperity and agricultural abundance. Prosperity and agricultural abundance. Now, these promises are dependent upon each other. We need not to have wars in order to keep our lands productive. Ukraine has been called the breadbasket of Europe and Russia, and yet because of the war that’s going on there now and the destruction of their ports and their fields, now we’re being told there’s going to be great food shortages from the people that they supply food to. The potential prosperity has been greatly diminished by the effects of war. Amos 9:13. Amos 9:13, we read about this time when Christ says it’s going to be agriculturally amazing.

Amos 9:13 “Behold the days are coming, says the Lord when the plowman will overtake the reaper and the treader of grapes, him who sow seed, the mountain shall drip with sweet wine and all the hills shall flow with it.”

God can increase the yield of a land by healing it and by blessing it. Remember when Moses sent spies into Canaan? It took two men to carry one cluster of grapes. I don’t know if it was like, giant grapes the size of a cantaloupe or if it was just like a million grapes on a cluster, but it took two men to carry one cluster of grapes. So, some of this agricultural abundance will be the result of the healing and blessing of the land, and some of it will be because the government will have common sense. Yes. We don’t have a whole lot of common sense in the government right now. The United States government pays farmers not to farm 25 million acres of land, and yet, we hear about how people are starving in Africa and Asia, and other parts of the world where they don’t have the land that we have. At the very least, why don’t we just farm that and give the food away? That shows you the difference of man’s government and a government based on love.

Another promise Christ makes is that the nature of hostile animals will be changed.

Hosea 2:18 We read, “In that day, I will make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field, with the birds of the air and with the creeping things on the ground, bow, and sword of battle, I will shatter from the earth to make them lie down safely.”

This is an incredible change that will take place. And again, sometimes I wonder how much of this will take place just by taking away Satan’s influence. Because I’m sure Satan has done his best to destroy everything that God has created. I don’t know if Adam and Eve had to fear the lions in the Garden of Eden. Some seem to think this is an impossible task to change the nature of the animals. I think this would be much easier than making mankind not be violent because animals do what they do out of nature. Mankind does it out of the hardness and the meanness of their heart.

Isaiah 11:6-9 We read, “The wolf shall also dwell with the lamb. The leopard shall lie down with a young goat, the calf and the young lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.” It’s not a situation where any of us would put our children today, is it? But in God’s Kingdom there will be nothing but safety. “The cow and the bear shall graze. Their young ones shall lie down together, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play by the cobra’s hole and the weaned child shall put his hand in the viper’s den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”

Because the earth will be full of the knowledge of God, nothing will be violent, nothing will be dangerous, not animals and not mankind. It’ll be total peace even within the animal kingdom.

Government has been described as a necessary evil. Christ is showing us that government is necessary, but government does not have to be evil. When it’s based on love, it will be beneficial to all bridging the gap that has separated man from God since the beginning of our history. So, as we continue on with the fall Holy Days, consider these wonderful changes that will take place, these wonderful promises made by Jesus Christ.

I look forward to the time when this world is under the rule of Jesus Christ, not under the rule of these people who are going to be making all these campaign promises to us. Over the next month or so, we’re going to be bombarded with campaign promises and we know in our heart, we know most of them are not meant to be fulfilled. Jesus Christ’s promises will be fulfilled. They are true. So, consider the wonderful changes that will take place under the leadership of Jesus Christ when He returns and fulfills all these promises.