Peter Allison's sermon, 'Confronting Conspiracies with Wisdom,' explores themes from the book of Isaiah, focusing on the prophecies concerning the impending invasion by Assyria. Isaiah's message warns of judgment due to the people's lack of trust in God and their inclination to rely on foreign powers, particularly King Ahaz's alliance with Assyria. The imagery of flies and bees represents the summoning of armies by God as instruments of judgment. The sermon addresses the reality of conspiracies, distinguishing between genuine conspiratorial actions and unfounded fears. It emphasizes the importance of trusting God and adhering to His laws as a foundation for societal prosperity, contrasting the fertile land promised in Deuteronomy with the barren state resulting from disobedience. The sermon urges believers to focus on the sufficiency of scripture and resist the temptation to seek knowledge through occult means, reiterating that true wisdom and understanding come from God's word.

Our scripture reading is from Isaiah. I'd like to begin back in chapter 17. Continue through chapter 8. Or chapter 7, I'm sorry, verse 17. Hear God's word.

The Lord will bring the king of Assyria upon you and your people and your fathers house, days that have not come since the day that Ephraim departed from Judah. And it shall come to pass in that day that the Lord will whistle for the fly, and that is in the farthest parts of the river of Egypt. And for the bee that is in that land of Assyria, they will come, and all of them will rest in the desolate valleys and in the clefts of the rocks and in all the thorns and in all the pastures. In the same day the Lord will shave with a hired razor with those from beyond the river with the king of Assyria, the head and hair of the legs, and will also remove the beard. And it shall be in that day that a young man will keep alive a young cow and two sheep, so it shall be from the abundance of milk they give that he will eat curds.

For curds and honey everyone will eat who is left in the land. And it shall happen in that day that wherever there could be a thousand vines worth a thousand shekels of silver, it will be for briars and thorns. With arrows and bows men will come there, because all the land will become briars and thorns. And to any hill which could be dug with the hoe, you will not go there for fear of briars and thorns, but it will become a range for oxen and a place for sheep to roam. Moreover, the Lord said to me, Take a large scroll and write on it with a man's pen concerning Maher Shalal Hashbaz, And I will take for myself faithful witnesses to record Uriah the priest and Zechariah the son of Jeberikayah.

Then I went to the prophetess and she conceived and bore a son. Then the Lord said to me, Call his name Maharshalal Hashbaz. For before the child shall have knowledge to cry, My father and My mother, the riches of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria will be taken away before the king of Assyria. The Lord also spoke to me again, saying, Inasmuch as these people refuse, the waters of Shiloh that flow softly and rejoice in Resin and in Remaliah's sun, now therefore behold the Lord brings up over them the waters of the river, strong and mighty, the King of Assyria and all his glory, He will go up over all his channels and go over all his banks. He will pass through Judah, He will overflow and pass over, He will reach up to the neck and the stretching out of his wings, will fill the breadth of your land, O Immanuel.

Be shattered, O you peoples, and be broken in pieces. Give ear, O you from far countries, Gird yourselves, but be broken in pieces. Gird yourselves, but be broken in pieces. Take counsel together, but it will come to nothing. Speak the word, but it will not stand, for God is with us.

For the Lord spoke thus to me with a strong hand, and instructed me that I should not walk in the way of this people, saying, Do not say a conspiracy concerning all that this people call a conspiracy, nor be afraid of their threats, nor be troubled. The Lord of hosts, Him you shall hallow. And let Him be your fear, and let Him be your dread. He will be as a sanctuary, but a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense to both the houses of Israel, a trap and a snare to the inhabitants of Jerusalem. And many among them will stumble, they shall fall and be broken, be snared and taken.

Bind up the testimony, seal the law among my disciples, and I will wait on the Lord, who hides His face from the house of Jacob. And I will hope in him, here I am and the children whom the Lord has given me. We are for signs and wonders in Israel from the Lord of hosts who dwells in Mount Zion. And when they say to you, seek Those who are mediums and wizards who whisper and mutter, should not a people seek their God? Should they seek the dead on behalf of the living?

To the law and to the testimony, if they do not speak according to this word, it is because there is no light in them. They will pass through it hard pressed and hungry. And it shall happen when they are hungry that they will be enraged and curse their king and their god and look upward. And then they will look to the earth and see trouble and darkness, gloom and anguish, and they will be driven into darkness. The entrance of His word gives light and understanding to the simple.

Heavenly Father, we ask that You would give light and understanding to us, For we are simple and we need your wisdom. We ask that you would give us faith to hear what your Spirit says to your church. I ask that you would sanctify my sinful lips that through a vessel of clay the riches of your grace and of your truth may come to us this morning through Jesus Christ. Amen. And those who trade in these conspiracies fall into a few different categories.

We might classify them as one category is those who imagine or invent fantastic conspiracies about nearly everything that happens. Every coincidence becomes, it seems, becomes a conspiracy. And these people are often pejoratively called conspiracy theorists. And secondly, there are those who through primary sources and credible documentation establish or prove conspiracies beyond a reasonable doubt. And these, they should be called historians, but they really are.

Then there are those who actually conspire together they should be called conspirators but of course they they rarely are. And a fourth group might be everyone else who doesn't believe in conspiracies, but they join with the conspirators in calling everyone who does a conspiracy theorist. Well this is something like the the difficult times in which Isaiah preached and prophesied. Rezin, king of Syria, and Pekah, son of Remaliah, the king of the northern tribes in Samaria had conspired together to affect a regime change in Judah. They wanted to overthrow Ahaz the reigning king in the Davidic line and put in a king who would join them in their revolt against Assyria.

And Isaiah came to Ahaz and informed him of this conspiracy and in the seventh chapter we saw that. And the fact that these plans would fail. They would not be able to affect a regime change. Both of these kings would be gone before Shirjazah, Isaiah's first son, would be old enough to choose good and refuse the evil. And within 65 years, he said both of these kingdoms would cease to exist so the kings would be gone before Shurjazab was old out of his infancy and within 65 years, the kingdoms would be gone and they were.

Ahaz was exhorted to believe. But he didn't. Ahaz was commanded to ask for a sign, but he refused. He refused God's very gracious offer. He didn't trust the Lord because he was preparing to cast his lot with the king of Assyria.

People like to be on the winning side, don't we? When it appears clear that the other side has all the marbles and is poised to win, these people will sometimes jump sides so that they can be on the winning side and Some people actually vote like this They look they vote for the person they think will win the race because they want to be on the winning side. So it's a big deal for them. Who do they think will win? That's who they want to vote for.

And so with a heart that was hardened by countless abominations, with hands that were bloodied by human sacrifices because Ahaz offered his sons to idols. And with eyes blinded by unbelief, Ahaz looked at Assyria and he saw that they were the dominant power in Mesopotamia and had been for several centuries and he concluded that he was safer trusting in the king of Assyria than in Jehovah the Creator, the God of his father David. And so as a result of this unbelief Isaiah tells Ahaz in verse 17 that we read, the Lord will bring the king of Assyria upon you and your people and on your father's house. And in that Isaiah goes on, in that day to come, in that soon to come day of judgment, in that day of judgment, Jehovah, he said, would whistle for both the Egyptian army, which is represented by flies that are coming from the remotest regions of the rivers of Egypt. And he would whistle for the Assyrian army, which is represented by bees from the land of Assyria.

You can picture the armies of these two great nations being summoned by the Lord like we might summon a bellhop. I don't know if that word is used anymore. But it refers to a porter who hops to attention, hops into action when summoned by a bell. And that's how the Lord is picturing these armies. He's gonna whistle for them.

Like flies and bees. A swarm of angry bees is a formidable foe if you've ever been chased by one or enveloped by one. But the only way you can get rid of them is jumping in a river, unless you're in appropriate gear, but they still are angry. Deuteronomy 1 speaks of the Amorites chasing Israel as a swarm of bees would do. And so here the people are going to be afflicted.

And to drive home this point, the Lord uses another analogy in chapter 7. Assyria is called a hired razor from the Lord. A razor that's hired from beyond the Euphrates River in Mesopotamia that would shave the hair off their bodies from their head to their feet and take off their beards. To be shaven like that is a great shame. Remember when David sent emissaries to comfort the king of Ammon on the occasion of the death of his father.

He sent them out of kindness. And they were shamefully treated in a similar way by Ammon. And it brought great shame on them. And it was such a big matter that David himself personally went to greet them and suggested that they remain at Jericho until their beards had regrown before they returned home. Such was the shame of being treated by having their hair cut like that.

So God's saying that He's going to hire the barber to come and shave off their hair. But the main point of both of these images is that the Lord is the one who summoned the armies and the Lord is the one who hired Assyria. These armies are working for him. Ahaz is not simply playing against opponents on a chess board. The Lord is the one who is moving the attacking chess pieces against Ahaz.

God is with them in the sense that He is present there, but He's not to protect them. He's there to send them into captivity. And verses 21 to 25 go on to describe this captivity. The land is forsaken by the people. In Verses 21 and 22, the people have all gone into captivity leaving an abundance of milk and butter for the few that are left.

Now you might wonder how is a land of milk and honey or a land of butter and honey a judgment that sounds like a pretty good situation. In fact the the land of Israel is described as a land flowing with milk and honey a number of times. But to put this into proper perspective, to put this statement here into proper perspective, we need to read into the next few verses and compare this land with the land that the children of Israel were originally promised. In verse 23 we read that the vines that should have produced grapes, wine, and raisins worth lots of money, or as it say thousands of shekels of silver, they're gone. All these vines are gone and replaced by briars and thorns.

That's not a desirable land in which to walk barefoot in fruitful meadows. A land of briars and thorns, it says it becomes a place for feral animals and hunters. Compare this land to the condition of the land they received 700 years earlier. That land is described in Deuteronomy 8, Therefore you shall keep the commandments of the Lord your God, to walk in his ways and to fear him. For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs that flow out of valleys and hills, a land of wheat and of barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive oil and honey, a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you will dig copper, when you have eaten and are full, then you shall bless the Lord for the good land which he has given you." That's the land that they were given.

Deuteronomy 32 also speaks of the Lord enabling Israel to travel over the high terrain of the land and eat the produce of the fields. It speaks of the Lord providing honey from the cliffs and olive oil from the hardest of rocks, of butter from the herd, milk from the flock, along with the fat of lambs, rams, and goats of Bation. The fat of lambs, I think that refers to choice meats that's well marbled and flavorful, along with the best of the kernels of wheat and wine from the blood of grapes. So the land has gone from a rich land of luxurious food, of meadows that you can walk in that are well watered to a land of bare subsistence. There's a little food there.

There is still butter and honey, but all the vines are gone, all the olive oil is gone, the fig trees are gone, the wine, the raisins, the grapes, it's all gone. It's the land of briars. Now we might not immediately connect fertile soil and our luxurious land and with cultural obedience to the law of God and submission to his ways, but we should we should make that connection. When we see our land and our crop land and our farm land being decimated, destroyed, to the place where it needs extensive life support to produce crops. And that's where it is.

They have to pour extensive money into life support for the soil every year for it to produce a good crop. A good and prosperous land is the blessing of the Lord. A fertile soil is God's blessing. God, and notice how these blessings are tied to covenant obedience to those who keep his law and walk in his statutes. Remember in Psalm 107 states this explicitly, he turns the rivers into a wilderness and the water springs into dry ground, A fruitful land into barrenness for the wickedness of those who dwell in it.

He turns a wilderness into pools of water and dry land into water springs. There he makes the hungry dwell that he may establish a city for the dwelling place and so fields and plant vineyards that they may yield a fruitful harvest. There's a connection there, a direct connection between the fertility of the soil and the cultural obedience to the law of God. The blessings and sanctions of the covenant in Deuteronomy 28 also involve the soil. Deuteronomy 28, if you diligently obey the voice of the Lord your God, to observe carefully all His commandments, which I command you today, that the Lord your God will set you high above the nations of the earth.

And all these blessings will come upon you and overtake you because you obey the voice of the Lord your God. And one of those enumerated blessings is, blessed will be the fruit of your body, the produce of your ground, and the increase of your herds, the increase of your cattle, and the offspring of your flocks your ground will produce. And these same aspects are included in the sanctions a few verses later in Deuteronomy 28. And again it's tied to their disobedience of the law of God. But it shall come to pass if you do not obey the voice of the Lord your God to observe carefully all his commandments and his statutes which I command you today that all these curses will come upon you and overtake you.

Cursed shall be the fruit of your body and the produce of your land and the increase of your cattle and the offspring of your flocks. And one of the ways that God brings that as we saw in Psalm 107 is that he turns fruitful land, rich land, oases, as he turns them into barren land that can't bear food. The fruit, the produce of your land becomes cursed, The produce of the land becomes toxic and harmful. I think the fact that our nation has prospered for so long, even serving as the breadbasket of the world at times in the 20th century, After having rejected the first table of the law of God in the 18th century and rejected the word of God itself in favor of so-called science at the end of the 19th century, The fact that we have continued so long is only the patient mercy of the Lord and the fact that he is slow to anger and that he does delight in mercy. Chapter eight goes on to enlarge then on the judgment that God would bring on Judah.

And Isaiah is told to put the message of Chapter 7 into a visible sign, a big sign as it were. Isaiah is said to as it were put this message on a billboard, something that would be legible to everybody that passes by. Take a large scroll and write on it, he says. Write these words. And the Hebrew word that he was to write are transliterated in verse one as concerning maher shalal hashbaz and that loosely translates to something like hasting to the booty, hasting to the spoils, swift to the prey.

Hasting is he, meaning the enemy, hasting is he to the booty, swift to the prey. And similar to Isaiah 7, where Isaiah brought his son, Shir Jazab, whose name meant, a remnant shall return. And it was a testimony to the promise that God gave in chapter 6 that there would be a remnant left in the land. Isaiah and his prophetess wife have another son whose name also reflects Isaiah's message. That same message that Isaiah was to write on the billboard.

He was to name his son, Mahershalal Hashbez. And as just as in Isaiah 7 where the infancy of Shirjaz of or possibly the Messiah was made this measure of time before the kings of Samaria and Damascus would be removed. So here this infancy of Maher Shalal Hashbaz is made the measure of time that would elapse before the king of Assyria would devastate Damascus and Syria. But Judah would not be spared either and God explains his purposes in all this in the remainder of chapter 8. So because Ahaz did not believe Jehovah, God brought judgment on him through both the Assyrians and through Syria and Samaria.

Ahaz had rejected Isaiah's prophecy. He despised the Lord. He turned instead to Assyria for help. And the protection of God is symbolized there in verse 6 as by the waters of Shiloha. In saying that Judah despised the waters of Shiloha, Jehovah is saying that they despised him and they despised his protection.

Ahaz also rejoiced in the destruction of Assyria that came on Damascus and killed Reznan in the process. And he rejoiced in their ravaging of Samaria. And so the Lord explains that for both of these reasons, God would bring Assyria in judgment on Judah as well. And the history of all these events is given in 2 Kings 15 and 16 and 2 Chronicles 28. It's basically this if we could summarize it a little bit and because I think it's significant to understand this history, to understand the significance of this prophecy here in chapter eight.

Remember after Syria and Samaria had tried to attack Jerusalem, we saw that last week, an effective regime change. Ahaz had rejected Isaiah's exhortation to trust in the Lord and he sent messengers to Tiglath-Pileser, pledging himself to this Assyrian king. His message was, I am your servant, I am your son. Come up and save me from the hand of the king of Assyria, and from the hand of the king of Israel who rise up against me. This is what he should have said to Jehovah, I am your servant, I am your son.

And so Tiglath-Pileser came and conquered Damascus, carried its people captive to Kyr, and killed the king Rezin. Then he invaded the land of Samaria, destroyed seven cities in the land of Naphtali, including Gilead and Galilee, and carried the people captive into Assyria. That would be like Mexico sending an army into Texas and capturing thousands of families and carrying them as prisoners back to Mexico or some other country. And so what does Ahaz do? Well, he goes up to Damascus to congratulate Tiglath-Pailisar, this king that he asked for help for, and to pay homage to him.

And while he's up there, he sees an altar that captures his fancy. And so he sends the drawings and the plans for it back to Uriah, the priest in Jerusalem. And Uriah builds him a copy, a replica, and has it done even before Ahaz returns from Damascus. And he starts worshiping it, had it. And so God sends Syria against him, and they carried some captives away to Damascus.

And then God sent Pekah against him. And we read in 2 Chronicles that Pekah killed 120, 000 in Judah in one day. All valiant men, because they had forsaken the Lord God of their fathers, and Zikri killed Maasea, the king's own son, and Ezraqam, the officer of the house in Alcana who was second to the king so he's come in and he's killing people in the king's administration. And the children of Israel carried away captive of their brethren 200, 000 women, sons and daughters and they took away much spoil and they brought it to Samaria but there was a prophet of the Lord there whose name was Odette and he went out to this army as it came back and he said look just because the Lord God of your fathers is angry with Judah and has delivered he's delivered them into your hand but you have killed them in a rage that reaches to heaven and now you propose to take these your own brothers and sisters and make them your male and female slaves. But he said, you're also guilty before God, aren't you?

He says, listen to me. You return these captives that you have taken from your brethrens, for the fierce wrath of God is on you too." And so some of the rulers back in Samaria listened to this prophet wisely and they stood up to the army and they said, no you can't bring these people back to our land. We fear the Lord and we don't want to bring more wrath upon us. You're going to add to our sins. Our guilt is already great.

So the armed men left the captives and the spoil before the leaders of the assembly. And the men who were designated by name rose up and took the captives, and from the spoil they clothed all who were naked among them, and dressed them, and gave them sandals and food to drink, and anointed them, and they let them ride on donkeys, and they brought them to their brethren at Jericho, the city of palm trees, and they returned to Samaria. And so what does Ahaz do in this distress? He goes back to the king who helped them the last time. He sent to the king of Assyria to help him.

For the Edomites had come into the land and attacked Judah and carried away captives and the Philistines had invaded the cities and taken their villages, villages that Judah had captured previously under Aziah. And the Lord brought Judah very low because of Ahaz. For he encouraged this moral decline in the land of Judah. And he had been continually unfaithful to the Lord. So he called for Tiglath-Pileser again to come.

But he didn't. Tiglath-Pileser came and distressed him and did not assist him. And so Ahaz took part of the treasures of the house of the Lord from the house of the king and from the leaders And as he taxed everybody and he gave it to the king of Assyria, but he did not help him He was he was sold into or he was attacked by the same people that he had hired to rescue him, which which is a rather foolish thing to have done. Isaiah had tried to dissuade Ahaz from seeking aid for Assyria. He encouraged Ahaz to depend on the Lord instead of foreign powers.

But depending on foreign powers to defeat an enemy that's too strong for you is really suicidal. If the foreign power is strong enough to beat the enemies that are too powerful you into submission, then they're strong enough to beat you into submission as well. And force him and that's what happened. See Isaiah's message to trust in the Lord and not as Syria was contrary to the official position of the king. And so Isaiah, just like Jeremiah after him, was called a traitor for conspiring against the land.

See, the people of Judah, led by their king, were wholly unable to comprehend what Isaiah understood. They thought that when he was speaking about what would happen, that he was conspiring against them. He was telling them the truth. It's a lot like the pejorative label that of racist or conspiracy theorists that racists and conspirators like to pin on historians who point out inconvenient truths. See, they projected their rebellion onto Isaiah and they irrationally concluded that he was helping the enemy and conspiring to overthrow the land.

But the actual fact is that Ahaz was the one who was conspiring to destroy the land while while Isaiah was merely faithfully obeying the Lord, and he was giving good counsel to the country and to the king. And so Jehovah says to Isaiah in verse 12, don't say a conspiracy just because all the people are calling you a conspirator. And the Lord gives to Isaiah the same message that Isaiah gave to Judah. Don't be afraid of their threats. Don't be anxious and be troubled by what they're saying.

Trust in the Lord. The Lord of hosts, him you shall hallow. Let him be your fear. Let him be your dread. And so I think this is a very helpful teaching on how we ought to respond to conspiracies and accusations of conspiracies.

Now, we've been using the word, but we should probably give it a definition because it can be somewhat confusing, like the word for lying. Conspiracies are the plans of multiple people to carry out some evil act, some crime. That's a conspiracy by definition. There are small conspiracies to rob a bank, and there are large generational conspiracies to overthrow nations and kingdoms. But by definition, conspiracies are the plans of people to do evil.

They are not the plans of people to do good. A conspiracy is by definition a plan to do evil. But when good is called evil and evil good, then the plans of good people to do good are called conspiracies by those who define good as evil. So you see how that gets inverted. And people can look at Christianity and its progress over the course of centuries, and they can speak about the vast right-wing conspiracy or something like that.

So the first thing though we need to see here is that conspiracies do exist. We know that they exist. The Bible says that they exist. Psalm two says that conspiracies exist. The kings of the earth conspire against the Messiah to overthrow his reign.

So we shouldn't be surprised when we see the kings of the earth conspiring together against Messiah to overthrow his reign. And how does the Messiah reign? Well, he reigns through three governments as we saw in our confession of faith this morning. He reigns through the governments of the family, the church, and the state. And so we would expect those conspiracies to come against these three authorities.

Against the family, to overthrow the authority of the family, to subvert the ability of fathers and mothers to pass on to their children the faith and to lead them. So we would expect a tax on the authority of parents. We expect these conspiracies to come against the church, to subvert the church in various ways, to subvert the Bible, to subvert the authority of the church, to corrupt the church in all the different ways that Satan attacks the church. And we expect it to come against the authority of the civil magistrate. And we do.

When we look in history, we can see conspiracies in all each of these areas. Evil men conspired to get Jesus crucified. Samaria and Syria conspired to replace the king of Judah here in this passage. And evil people accused Isaiah and Jeremiah of conspiring to commit treason against Judah because they spoke truthfully about the judgment that was coming on the land. And because of that they said, well, you're trying to discourage the people and take their morale away, and so you must be working for the enemy.

You must be conspiring with them. Absalom conspired to overthrow his father David. But secondly, not everything is a conspiracy, not every coincidence is a conspiracy. And too many people become fearful of conspiracies and start seeing them everywhere. And God says to them, don't be afraid of everything.

Don't find Conspiracies in everything. Don't say a conspiracy concerning all that this people call a conspiracy in the words of God to Isaiah. Don't live in fear of them and don't be consumed by trying to find conspiracies everywhere. Thirdly, we see projection. Wicked people project their wickedness onto others and accuse others of doing the very thing that they are doing.

Ahaz was conspiring against the land to be in cahoots with with the king of Assyria. Throughout the history of the church, Those who have sought to call the church back to her God-given mission and away from her man-made programs have been treated as troublemakers. And these people here are accusing Isaiah of a conspiracy. And God says to Isaiah, don't be afraid of their threats. Don't be anxious or troubled by what they're calling you.

Let them call you a racist, a conspiracy theorist. Trust in the Lord. Him you shall hallow, Let him be your fear, let him be your dread. And when we see these large conspiracies to destroy Christianity in America, we should not be surprised, we shouldn't be afraid of them. It is real, it's provable from primary source documentation and from the trail of breadcrumbs that have been left over the last 100 years.

But we shouldn't be afraid of these conspiracies. They will ultimately fail. We shouldn't live in fear of them or of those who call us a conspiracy theorist for speaking the truth about these matters. We should fear the Lord. But there's another more fundamental point in this and that is the temptation in the face of these conspiracies is to blame them for what they have done to us.

You hear that a lot, them. Look what they have done to us. Whether it's the feds or the government or the establishment or today the popular term is the deep state. The tendency is to always blame them for the unpleasant situation in which we find ourselves. But I think we first need to look inward.

We need to look at our own heart. Judgment begins with the house of God. The problem lies first in our own heart. We have exactly what Our grandparents and our parents and our great grandparents asked for and often what we continue to ask for. So often the lust of the flesh, the pride of life, lust of the eyes, clouds our understanding.

We can take any one of the large conspiracies. There's been a conspiracy to undermine schools and to take them over, to convert them from public schools that taught the truth about the Word of God, that taught children that God created the earth, that taught them to read them the scriptures, and taught them to pray into government schools that teach them a lie about history, that teach them a lie about creation. And we could look at them and say, well, look at the poison that they have done. But what should we say? Well, look what we have done.

And I think in many ways Christians have rightly responded to that more of late. We need to pray that more do. But in the last two or three generations, Christians have recognized we need to separate from this institution. It's a wicked institution. We should have nothing to do with it.

But we could say the same about many other areas, about money, the whole area of money and the control of our economy. We have to look at the lust of our own heart, the desire to live beyond our own means, the desire to have money immediately so we can live in a house immediately as soon as we get married. That's only possible because of the Federal Reserve and their ability to create money out of nothing. Otherwise, if you want money and you want to borrow it, You have to take it from somebody. The Federal Reserve has come up with a way to create it out of nothing, or at least to give the appearance that they do.

But of course it has brought great destruction on our economy. We're impoverished compared to the generations before us. Yes, we have the appearance of money, but we're also in debt. So we're really not. It's just an appearance.

So instead of saying, look what they've done to us, we need to ask our own heart, what have we lusted after? Say the same about a conspiracy in medicine. The conspiracy in science to replace science, the God of science with the God of the Bible. So therefore, the God is no longer needed to account for this world. Because these are all conspiracies to overthrow Christianity.

And lately, there's been a lot of talk about the Jews and how the Jews have done everything. And again, this is somewhat of a false conspiracy. And it's a matter that we need the wisdom of this chapter to recognize what is truth and what is not. What is a conspiracy and what is not. And this isn't, we don't have time to get into all the intricacies of this latest rage about the conspiracy of the Jews to to account for everything that's gone wrong in our country.

What we can say is that Jesus said to the Pharisees and the Sadducees that you are of your father the devil. And when they, and when he said, you have heard it said, but I say to you he is correcting the oral tradition, the oral tradition that had subverted the word of God. That oral tradition was written down and became the Talmud, what we call the Talmud today. It's a satanic document. It has horrific things I won't even say in public, let alone here.

But, and yes, there are today those among that group of people, these Talmudic followers, who do have conspiracies to overthrow the church, to overthrow Messiah's reign. But that's not the same as the Jews. We have to distinguish between these people that follow the Talmud and Jews in general. And so the exhortation of Isaiah 8 is to trust in the Lord, let him be our fear. There's a tendency to want to find knowledge through all signs of means.

And one of those means is through the occult. And so Isaiah deals with that here. He says, When they say to you, seek those who are mediums and wizards who whisper and mutter, should not a people seek their God? The Lord in his word has given us everything we need to know. We do not need this the new age, the occult, the wizardry, and all the hidden knowledge that is portrayed as hidden from us.

The Word of God is the revealed Word of God. It contains everything that we need to know about every area of our life. Everything that we need to know whether it's in medicine, economics, in civil government, in our families, in our marriages, everything that is necessary is in the Word of God. Should they seek the dead on behalf of the living? So some would say well, we are the Catholics say that we should pray We should ask the Saints who are dead to pray for us because we're part of the communion of saints.

But the scripture is clear. We are not to seek the dead on behalf of the living. And that's what that's doing. Even if even though they try to say we're not actually praying to them, we're just asking them to pray for us. That is seeking the dead on behalf of the living, something that we are not to do, to the law and to the testimony.

If they do not speak according to this word, it is because there is no light in them. The scriptures are all that we need. We need a right understanding of the scriptures. It's the scriptures that we need to meditate on. It's the scriptures that we need to study, to memorize, to learn.

And we need the Holy Spirit to teach us His word, And he will. We do not need the hidden wisdom. Of the New Age of the occult and all the other things that are supposedly hidden been hidden from us that we need to uncover The word of God is given to us. It's been given. It's ours.

And we have it. And God will preserve it to us. And that is what we need. May he give us understanding of it. Almighty Heavenly Father, we thank you for the sufficiency of your scriptures for every area of our life.

We thank you that You have given us this truth in Jesus Christ. And we thank you that this life that we now live in the flesh, we live by faith in the Son of God, you who have loved us and given yourself for us. Grant us contentment with what you have revealed to us. Grant us wisdom to apply it, to apprehend its principles, to love it, to lay it up in our heart, to practice it in our lives, to be doers of your word. May our treasure be in heaven, may our hearts be there as well.

May we be filled with the Spirit and not with wine or not the Spirit of this age, but with your Holy Spirit. We may speak those things that are true, pure, lovely and of good report. That we may feed upon what is true and think on these things. Father, may you fortify us against the fears and the conspiracies and the plots that swirl around us. Father, may we look to your word, to your testimony.

May you be true, even if that makes every man on earth a liar. In Jesus' name we ask. Amen.