Good morning. Let's open our Bibles to the book of Obadiah, Obadiah. Let's ask the Lord's blessings, our Heavenly Father. What great hope and comfort you have given us by your spirit, enabling us, as we just sang, to call you Abba Father. What a great joy and comfort and hope it is to be able to come before thy throne, knowing that in Christ it is a throne of grace. Lord, as sinners, how comforted we are in knowing that the Lord Jesus has put away our sin by the sacrifice of himself. And Lord, you have told us to come in confidence, to come boldly before thee, to find help and grace in our time of need. Lord, we are a needy people. and know how we need your grace. We pray, Lord, that you would send your spirit in power. We pray that you would speak peace and life to our hearts. Pray that you would reveal the glory of thy son. For it's in his name we ask it. Amen.

You have your Bibles open to Obadiah. We've been in this wonderful little prophet for a few weeks now, but I want to concentrate our attention this morning to one verse. I've titled this message, Three Glorious Shalls. three glorious shalls and here it is in verse 17 but upon Mount Zion shall be deliverance and there shall be holiness and the house of Jacob shall possess their possessions.

We don't use the word shall much in modern English and I've noticed in all of the paraphrases, the modern paraphrases of the Bible that the men who wrote those books changed this word shall to the word will. And the concern that I have for that is in the Old Testament, King James, when you look up the word will, It's most often in the imperfect tense, which means that it's a continual action. And when you look up the word shall, it's in the perfect tense, which means a completed action.

How glorious are the shalls of God's word. Over 6,000 times in the King James, we find the word shall. When God says it shall be, we can be certain that it already is. The perfect tense means a completed action. And so we might read these prophecies thinking that it's a future tense, but because it's in the perfect tense, what the Lord is saying is that that which will happen in the future or shall happen in the future It shall happen because it's already happened. It's already been determined in God's purpose to be.

The best example I've heard for this, Tom shared with me years ago when I first made this point in preaching. Tom used to be an air traffic controller and they have a manual that they have to follow in order to keep the planes safe. He said at the back of the manual, there was a glossary of terms. In the glossary of terms, these auxiliary verbs were given definition. And it said that if the word should, then this was the definition. If the word can, then this is the definition. If the word will, then this is the definition. And each one of those definitions provided some leeway to the air traffic controller as to how to proceed. But in the manual, and in the glossary of terms, It had a definition for the word shall. And the air traffic controllers were instructed, if you see the word shall, there can be no deviation. If you don't follow it by the letter of the law, planes will crash and people will die.

Now, that's what the word shall means in the Bible. When God says it shall be, it shall be. And we rest in that. One of the greatest shalls in the Bible is I will be their God. I will. By my own sovereign will, I will be their God and they shall be my people. The false gospel says, I shall be his people, and he will be my, or I will be his people, and he shall be my God. I will make a determined decision to submit to God, and by doing so, I will obligate him to be my God. I will be his people, and he shall be my God. No, that's not what the scripture says. I will be their God and they shall be my people. Now that's what this word shall means.

But upon Mount Zion shall be deliverance and there shall be holiness. and the house of Jacob shall possess their possessions." What comfort, what hope we have when God says, this shall be, this shall be. Now this promise is not made to everyone. It says, notice in the very first part, it says, upon Mount Zion. Mount Zion, the city of David, the church, the new Jerusalem, the place where God has set his king upon his holy hill in Psalm 2. The church is called the Daughters of Zion. When David prayed in Psalm 51, he concluded that prayer by saying, do good in thy good pleasure unto Zion. Build the walls of Jerusalem. This promise is to God's people, Mount Zion, which he loved.

Peter refers to the church as a spiritual house built upon Christ as the chief cornerstone. And then he references that Old Testament passage when he said, I lay in Zion, a chief cornerstone, elect and precious. And they that believe on him shall not be confounded. They shall not be confounded." I'm so thankful for the shalls of the Bible. What is the first shall that we see in verse 17? That shall be upon Mount Zion. Deliverance. Deliverance. It's a word that describes a refugee who is fleeing from an intolerable place and being delivered from the despotism of a tyrant. And the Lord is speaking to his people. and telling us that he's going to deliver us from the tyranny and the bondage of sin. He's going to deliver us from the wrath that is to come. And this shall be. I'm going to lead them out of darkness into the marvelous light of grace and forgiveness. I'm going to, I'm going to do that, shall be.

You will call his name Jesus for he shall save his people from their sins. Now, faith is believing God. That's what it is. And when God says, this is what shall be, we hang all the hopes of our salvation on what he has said he shall do.

Turn back with me to Genesis chapter 45. Joseph is such a glorious picture of the Lord Jesus. And you remember the story. He'd been sold by his brothers into slavery. We sold our elder brother to sin. on Calvary's Cross. And now his brothers have come to Egypt to find bread. There's a famine in the land. They're starving. And Joseph, being the one who holds the keys to the storehouse, is the only one that can distribute the bread. And so they come to their brother Joseph, not knowing that it was Joseph. And in chapter 45 of Genesis, then Joseph could not refrain himself before all of them that stood by him. And he cried, cause every man to go out from me. And there stood no man with him while Joseph made himself known unto his brethren.

What a beautiful picture. of what the Lord Jesus does. He makes himself known onto his brethren. He causes everyone else to go out, and he wept aloud, and the Egyptians of the house and Pharaoh heard what compassion, even in spite of what his brothers had done to him, He has great compassion for them. And Joseph said unto his brethren, I am Joseph, doth my father yet live? And his brethren could not answer him, for they were, and that word troubled is terrified at his presence. They were terrified. They thought, oh no, what's he gonna do? And Joseph said unto his brethren, come near to me.

All you that are heavy laden, burdened, come unto me. Come unto me. Learn of me. Take my yoke upon you, for my burden is light, my yoke is easy. I pray you." And they came near, and he said, I am Joseph, your brother, whom you sold into Egypt.

Now, therefore, be not grieved nor angry with yourselves that you sold me hither, for God did send me before you to preserve life. For these two years hath the famine been in the land, and yet there are five years in the which shall neither be earing nor harvest. And God sent me before you to preserve you a posterity in the earth, and to save your lives by a great deliverance, by a great deliverance.

God sent Joseph. Oh, it was by the wicked hands of his brothers, just as we read in Peter's sermon in Acts chapter two is by their wicked hands that they offered up, but it was the ordained will and purpose of God, to do what? To deliver my people, to bring about a great deliverance.

The Lord knows how to deliver the godly out of temptation. And he hath, he hath and he shall deliver us from our sins. Even when, like Lot, we linger in Sodom, we're reluctant to go out on our own. Like Lot, he takes us by the hand and he leads us out. He shall bring in Zion a great deliverance. And this deliverance is a continual work. It's a continual work.

Turn with me to 2 Corinthians 1. 2 Corinthians 1. Verse 10. Speaking of Christ, who delivered us from so great a death and doth deliver in whom we trust that he will yet deliver. He never stops delivering his people. He causes them to escape by himself, by himself.

Scripture tells us that there is no temptation taking you, which is not common to all men. But God is faithful. God is faithful. And he will not suffer you to be tempted above that which you are able. A lot of people stop right there and say, well, God won't put more on you than you can bear. Read the rest of that verse. He will not suffer you to be tempted above that which you are able.

If he doesn't put more on us than we can bear, we'll never need him. And if he puts the weight of our sin on us, we'll know that we need deliverance. We need a deliverer. There hath no temptation taken you, but such is common to all men. But our God is faithful. He will not suffer you to be tempted above that which you are able, but will. but will provide the way of escape.

That's what the word deliver means, to escape. And the Lord Jesus we know is the way. He's not a way. He didn't show us the way. How does the Lord deliver his people? When he says there shall be a great deliverance in Zion, He gives us faith in Christ. He causes us to flee to Christ. He causes us to look to him. He causes us to rest in him and to rely upon him and to believe on him. He is the way of escape. He is the deliverer of his people.

Go back with me to our text. But upon Mount Zion shall be deliverance, and there shall be holiness. There shall be holiness. The Lord Jesus is called the Holy One of Israel, the High and Lofty One who inhabits eternity. When Isaiah saw the Lord, in Isaiah chapter six, and he heard those seraphim who hovered over the throne of God, crying, holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God of hosts. Heaven and earth is filled with his glory.

Without holiness, no man can see the Lord. No man will see God. God's eyes are too pure to look upon iniquity. We must be holy even as he is holy. This word is also translated sanctified or set apart. And the scripture says, he that sanctifyeth and they that are sanctified are all as one so that he's not ashamed to call them his brethren. John said, this is our boldness in the day of judgment. What is our boldness in the day of judgment? That as he is, so are we.

There shall be holiness in Mount Zion. There shall be holiness in Mount Zion because the Lord Jesus is at Mount Zion. He said, where two or three are gathered together, there I am in the midst of them. And by virtue of our union with him, God has declared us to be holy. The Lord Jesus prayed in John chapter 17, and he said, I sanctify myself that they also may be sanctified through the truth. through the truth. When God gives his people faith to believe what he has revealed about himself, that faith sets them apart. That faith causes them to find all the hope of their salvation in the Lord Jesus Christ, and they are by God's grace sanctified.

when the angel was telling Mary about her conceiving of the Holy Spirit, he says, and that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. Now, holiness is more than than moral purity. It's more than that. It's more than just having satisfied the demands of God's law. Holiness means that God is completely other than we are. He's different from us in every way. When we see him, what is the evidence that that we have hope in Christ, that when we see him, a glimpse of him, we cry with Isaiah chapter six, woe is me, I'm undone, there's nothing in me like him. I'm a man of unclean lips, I live among a people of unclean lips. I look to my right, I look to my left, who's going to save me? We say with our brother Job, When the Lord is pleased to reveal himself, behold, I am vile. There's nothing in me. There's nothing in me that's like that. I must have him to impute to me his nature and his holiness. If I have any hope of standing in the presence of a holy God, I must be found in him.

Psalm 96 verse 9 says that we worship the Lord in the beauty of His holiness. We bow before Him and we acknowledge that He is holy and that the only hope that we have of ever being able to be accepted of Him is for Him to impute to us the righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ, that we might also be holy.

Isaiah chapter 41, the Lord tells us, turn with me there, if you will, Isaiah chapter 41. Look at verse 13. For I, the Lord thy God, will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, Fear not, fear not, I will help thee. Fear not, thou worm, Jacob, and ye men of Israel. I will help thee, saith the Lord, and thy Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel."

Here's our hope. As we sang in that opening hymn. We have an advocate in heaven before God Almighty. We have one who is saying to our Heavenly Father, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. We have one who presents himself to God as our substitute. and we find the hope of our acceptance before God in him who has redeemed us.

Some, some might say, if our holiness before God is is only what we have by virtue of our union with Christ. And he is our substitute, and he is all of our righteousness before God. Some might interpret that to mean, well, that doesn't it doesn't matter than what I do. It doesn't matter how I live. Maybe you've had someone say that to you. Maybe you've had someone say, if those who are trying to satisfy God's justice by their law keeping would interpret the grace of God that way. They would say, if I believed what you believed, I'd live like I want. That's what they would say. And the child of God responds to the truth of the gospel by saying, I wish I could live like I want.

The truth is that this sin nature that we have in our old man is the same in every one of us. It's the same. There's no difference. It's everything about it's sinful. Everything about it falls short of the glory of God. Every believer's desire and every believer's hope is to have the manifested evidence of that sin nature restrained. That's our desire. We have a terminal disease. And in our old man, it's incurable. It's going to kill us one day. But as with terminal disease, often there are medications that can be taken to mitigate the symptoms of that disease. The Lord Jesus himself is called the balm of Gilead. Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, looking to Christ, not looking to the law, not looking to our determination. The believer's heart's desire is to have the symptoms of that sin nature restrained. And only by God's grace will that happen.

The fact that we have all of our holiness in Christ does not give the child of God an excuse for sin. It's the only thing, it's the only thing that helps them to resist the devil and to to have a life that would honor God.

Turn with me to Titus. Let me show you a verse of Titus. Titus chapter two. Titus chapter two. This restraining of the manifested evidence of our sin nature does not mean that we become more holy. It's not a progressive sanctification. The more we see of Christ, the more we understand how deep and dark this in nature really goes. And the more we grow in grace and in the knowledge of Christ, the more we see our need for more grace. These things work together.

Look at Titus chapter two, verse 11. For the grace of God, for the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men. It's of grace. It's not of works. It is all of grace. It's all God's work and he gets all the glory. And what does this grace of God that has brought salvation do? It teaches us. It teaches us that denying ungodliness and worldly lust, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world, looking for that blessed hope and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify unto himself a peculiar people who are zealous of good works.

Paul tells Titus, these things speak and exhort and rebuke with all authority and let no man despise thee. It is the grace of God that teaches us to follow after Christ. And even as we have our sin nature restrained by the grace of God, we see more of our need for grace because we understand how wicked that sin nature really is.

This word holy means to be separate. How desirous we are to be separate from this world, to be separate from our sin, to be separate from all the wiles of the devil that we've experienced far too often.

Go back with me to our text. In Mount Zion, there shall be. holiness. The Lord Jesus Christ is the holiness of God that is in Mount Zion and who is in the hearts of his people. And whatever restraint there is in the believer's life from the manifested evil of the sin nature that is within them, It is to his glory and it is all by his grace. So the believer can never, the believer could never boast in anything they do or in anything they don't do.

There shall be holiness. And the third shall, look, There shall be deliverance. They shall escape the wrath and judgment of God. There shall be holiness. Remember what that word shall means. God says it shall be done. It's a perfect tense. It's done. It's done.

And Jacob. Jacob. And when the Lord uses the name Jacob, to remind us of our old sinful nature. We have two names. The believer is called Jacob sometimes, and sometimes he's called Israel. Jacob, the supplanter. Jacob, the deceiver. Israel, the prince of God. And here he reminds us that though we are Jacob, we shall possess our possession. We shall take possession of our inheritance.

David said in Psalm 16, the Lord is the portion of my inheritance. I am thy shield, what the Lord told Abraham, and I am thine exceeding great reward." Jacob shall possess his possession, his inheritance. Isaiah 54, this is the inheritance of the servants of the Lord, their righteousness. We have Christ as our inheritance. We have his righteousness before God. Our inheritance.

Two things about the inheritance of the Old Testament that I learned that is unique from our experience. We might have someone say, I'm going to cut you out of my will if you don't do this or that or if you don't act right. From what I understand in the Old Testament, the father was obligated by the law to give to each of his children Whether they be natural born children or whether they be adopted children, the father was obligated by law to give to each of his children their inheritance. He could not withhold from them because of anything on their part or because of any change that he made in his own mind and heart.

What a beautiful picture. of the inheritance that the Lord has given to his, they shall possess their possession. He will not withhold from any of his children the inheritance that he has purposed to give them. The second thing about the Old Testament inheritance laws is that provisions were made for any child to receive a portion of their inheritance or all of their inheritance before the death of the father, which explains the prodigal son who came to the father and said, I want my inheritance now. And the father gave him his inheritance.

We come before our heavenly father like that prodigal. Lord, I need my inheritance now. I need it now. I need it, yes, for eternity, but I need it now. And sadly, like the prodigal, we often waste our inheritance in this world. But it does not change. The father is always there. He's always there. The father knew when that son was coming back and he ran to him and he, Bible says he put his face in the neck of his son and he lavished him with kisses and he said to the servants, come, come and bring the robe and and the ring on his finger and shoes on his feet and kill the fatted lamb, my son which was lost is now found.

What a beautiful picture of the inheritance. The son said, father, I'm not worthy to be thy servant. And that's what his children always say. Lord, I've got no claim on thee. Lord, I've taken my inheritance and wasted so much of it. Lord, I need mercy. And the father, while the son was a great way off, the father saw him and ran to him. Lord, we need a portion of our inheritance now. We know that the fullness of that inheritance won't come until we until we are made like thee and we see thee for who thou art." Lord, if you could give me a taste right now.

And here's his promise. Look back at our text. Jacob, old, deceitful, sinful Jacob, shall take possession of their inheritance. God said it's going to be. Turn with me to 1 Peter 1. We'll close here.

1 Peter 1. Three glorious shalls. They shall escape, they shall be delivered. There shall be holiness in Zion and they shall take possession of their inheritance.

First Peter chapter one, look at verse three. Blessed be the God who made such precious promises who said to us, I will be their God and they shall be my people. It's perfect tense. It's a completed action. It's going to happen.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. which according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled that fadeth not away reserved in heaven for you.

And right now, right now, the portion of your inheritance is given in that you are kept. You are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation to be revealed in the last time. No, it's not a can, it's not a might, it's not even a will. It is God saying to his people, It shall be. It shall be.