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Newington Three Angels Church

Eric Walsh

Race and Prophecy

We're going to get right into the message.

There's a lot to cover as a Black History Month message.

And you've got to ride this 1 all the way through to see where God leads with it.

Our scripture reading is taken from the book of Proverbs, chapter 68.

Proverbs, chapter 68, and verse 31 says, Princes shall come out of Egypt.

Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands unto God.

Our message is entitled, Race and Prophecy.

Father God, we thank you for this opportunity to study your word.

We thank you, Lord, for being better to us than we are to ourselves.

And I thank you, Lord, for just your goodness.

And Lord, as we celebrate the accomplishments of African Americans and we look at how even the black church has impacted America and the world.

Lord, we recognize that we are a part of a bigger family.

So Lord, as we dive into your word now, I pray that all of us, Lord, would look for nuggets of truth as your Holy Spirit opens hearts and minds, that we would all understand your word better.

Make me a nail on the wall, Lord, and hang a portrait of Jesus Christ there.

All right, so we're gonna go to the book of Acts, chapter 8, start with verse 26.

The Bible says, and the angel of the Lord spake unto Philip, saying, arise and go toward the south unto the way that goeth down from Jerusalem, unto Gaza, which is desert.

And he arose and went, and behold, a man of Ethiopia, a eunuch of great authority under Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who had the charge of all her treasure, and had come to Jerusalem for to worship." What a powerful passage of Scripture.

In fact, before Paul begins to go to those who are not of the line of Judah and of the house of Israel, Philip is the 1 who begins to reject prejudice and boundaries.

Goes to the Samarians And here he is found with an Ethiopian dignitary.

The Bible says that an angel told him to go.

And he reaches to this man who is of great authority.

And the term Candace, many argue, is like Caesar or like other titles of authority, which means that there may have been more than 1 era where they had queens.

And we know we're going all the way back, there was the queen of Sheba of the same region.

But he had charge of all the treasure, and he had gone to Jerusalem to worship.

Interesting is the trajectory of Philip's ministry.

The angel told him to come down here to Gaza.

He gets to Gaza, and in Gaza he meets up with the Ethiopian eunuch.

The scripture says afterwards he's taken away, and he is taken just north along the coast to his next assignment.

There's a lot to be said about Ethiopia in the scripture.

So because it's February, we can talk a little bit about this.

From a geographical standpoint, most of the time in the Bible, Ethiopia refers to a specific or not so specific, depending on the context, land that was south of Egypt.

And you can see here on this map, they had a lower Ethiopia and upper Ethiopia deep into central Africa.

And then over here in another map, they show you that the connections between Judah into Ghana and Songhai and all over North Africa.

And of course, from Egypt down further south into Ethiopia.

And Ethiopia, of course, would come all of the area down in this region.

Jeremiah gives you another perspective of what the Bible, when the Bible refers to Ethiopians, is what it says.

Jeremiah 13 says, Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?

Then may ye also do good that are accustomed to do evil.

And the point Jeremiah is making there is that some folks' characters won't change, but as a reference point, he speaks about the skin of a leopard or of an Ethiopian.

And again, in the Greek, the word Ethiopian, it means a very dark-skinned person, burnt-skinned person.

So, Jeremiah is speaking of very dark-skinned people, which Jeremiah in his book actually gets some connection to and knowledge of, as we'll see.

So the idea of dark-skinned people and a land of Ethiopia, in other words, Africa in the Bible, is very rich and alive.

1 of the great stories of this goes all the way back to 1 Kings 10, 1 Kings 10, verse 4, and it says, And when the queen of Sheba had seen all Solomon's wisdom, the house that he had built, and the meat of his table, and the sitting of his servants, and the attendance of his ministers, and their apparel, and his cupbearers, and his assent by which he went up into the house of the Lord, there was no more spirit in her.

The queen of Sheba had come to Judah and Jerusalem to check on Solomon, to see if his wisdom was as brilliant as it had been explained to her, his riches, the nature of his court.

The scripture says that when this queen saw him, there was no more spirit in her.

She was so overwhelmed by the grandeur of the people of God and the way that their king conducted himself.

The scripture says in verse 6 of 1 Kings 10, and she said to the king, "'It was a true report that I heard in mine own land "'of thy acts and of thy wisdom.

"'Howbeit I believed not the words until I came "'and mine eyes had seen it, "'and behold, the half was not told to me.

"'Thy wisdom and prosperity exceedeth the fame which I heard.

Happy are these thy servants which stand continually before thee and adhere thy wisdom.

Blessed be the Lord thy God which delighteth in thee to set thee on the throne of Israel.

Because the Lord loved Israel forever, therefore made he the king, to do judgment and justice.

She says, listen, God loves Israel, that's why he gave them a king like you.

Now, what we believe is that she took from Israel the truths she learned.

In fact, monotheism very well may have reached deep into Africa if it wasn't already there through this visit.

Solomon, no 1 would have been able to explain the scriptures and the truths of the Bible that they had at the time better than Solomon.

And so she would have taken this back home with her.

And Of course, according to Ethiopian tradition, she also took back a baby, Menelik I.

And Menelik II would have been Haile Selassie's father, the Ethiopian emperor from last century.

So there are many who argue that the people of Ethiopia, and especially their royalty, their royal line actually goes all the way back to David, which is in and of itself very powerful.

Of course, there are other Ethiopians in the Bible.

On the left is a picture of Ebed-Melech, who was an Ethiopian servant to the king Zedekiah.

He's the 1 that made sure Jeremiah was alive and pulled him up out of the well.

And He was such a godly person that Jeremiah, the prophecy on him was that even when Judah was invaded and taken by Babylon, the sword would not touch him.

And many say that he was as righteous a man as any in the scripture.

Of course, this is an artist's rendition of the Queen of Sheba on the next slide, just to give you some context.

So out of deep in Africa, these things happen.

It says, talking of the Ethiopian eunuch, Going back to the book of Acts, verse 28 says that this Ethiopian was returning and sitting in his chariot.

He was reading the book of Isaiah, the prophet.

Scripture says in verse 29, Then the Spirit said unto Philip, Go nearer, and join thyself to this chariot.

And Philip ran thither to him, and heard him read the prophet Isaiah, and said, understandest thou what thou readest.

Spirit of prophecy tells us that Philip is an example for us, because when he hears what God says we are to do, he doesn't question it.

The Ethiopian eunuch would have been reading out loud the Book of Isaiah, which says a lot.

1, he had gone to Jerusalem to worship, and he was reading the Book of Isaiah, which tells you he was a believer in every sense, just like the people in Israel were.

In fact, when I was in Israel, I was there for 2 months as a student in high school, they were bringing Ethiopian Jews to Israel to make aliyah and to be able to settle in Israel because they recognized that there were Jews still left in Ethiopia and they would have come from this time.

If Philip says to him, look, do you understand what you're reading?

He's a man of great power and privilege, yet he's humble.

He says in Acts 8 and verse 31, and he said, how can I except some man should guide me?

And desired Philip that he would come up and sit with him.

The place of the scripture which he read was this, this is what he was reading about, He was led as a sheep to the slaughter.

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Race and Prophecy

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