Back around 1980, a man out in Nevada named Dennis Hope looked at an old treaty, decided nobody had properly claimed the moon, filed a declaration of ownership, and started selling it.
An acre at a time. Deed, certificate, the whole business. He has reportedly sold millions of acres to millions of people, and there are folks sitting in living rooms across America right now with a framed deed on the wall to a piece of lunar property they will never once stand on.
I have no idea whether Mr. Hope believes his own paperwork. But I know this much - - - a deed is only worth the authority standing behind it.
You can print anything. You can frame anything. You can hang it over the fireplace and show it to company. What you cannot do is create authority you were never given.
Which brings me to a city.
The Deed Was Read Into the Record a Long Time Ago
Matthew 5:34-35 - "But I say unto you, Swear not at all; neither by heaven; for it is God's throne: Nor by the earth; for it is his footstool: neither by Jerusalem; for it is the city of the great King."
Understand what is happening there. Jesus is preaching on oath-taking, correcting a religious crowd that had figured out how to swear by things near God so they could weasel out of the promise later. It was a shell game with holy words.
And right in the middle of cleaning that up, He slips in a property record.
Heaven is God's throne. Earth is His footstool. Jerusalem is the city of the great King.
Now notice when He said it. Rome ran that city. Roman boots patrolled those streets. Caiaphas ran the temple and the temple was for sale. Every man in that crowd knew exactly who was in charge, and it was not the fellow standing in front of them in a carpenter's clothes.
The rightful King of Jerusalem stood on a hillside, unrecognized and largely unwanted, and called the city His anyway. He was not describing what Jerusalem had been. He was reading off the deed.
Eighty Years of Paperwork
The historian Eric Cline went through four thousand years of the record on that city and came up with numbers that ought to stop you cold. At least 118 separate conflicts in and for Jerusalem. Completely destroyed twice. Besieged twenty-three times. Attacked another fifty-two times. Captured and recaptured forty-four times.
In four thousand years, control of that city has changed hands peacefully exactly twice.
Twice.
Then in 1947 the United Nations took its first swing at the problem. The partition plan did not hand Jerusalem to anybody living there. It designated the city a corpus separatum - - - Latin for a separated body - - - an international city to be administered by the United Nations itself.
The very first thing the United Nations ever decided about Jerusalem was that Jerusalem ought to belong to the United Nations.
It never took effect. What followed instead was a war, a divided city, another war, and then eight decades of stationery. Resolutions. Condemnations. Frameworks. Road maps. Corridors. Shared capitals. Final status talks about the final status talks.
Eighty years of paper. Eighty years of committees. Eighty years of serious men in good suits assuring us they were very close this time.
And not one hour of peace in the city whose own name carries the word for it.
God Told Us Plainly How This Would Go
Zechariah 12:2-3 - "Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling unto all the people round about... And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces."
Read that again, because it is not poetry. A cup of trembling is a cup that makes the man drinking it stagger. A burdensome stone is a rock too heavy to lift that ruptures the fellow who tries.
Babylon picked it up. Rome picked it up. The Crusaders picked it up. The Ottomans picked it up. The British picked it up and could not put it down fast enough. Every one of them came away limping, and every one of them was certain they would be the exception.
The United Nations is simply the current occupant of a very long line.
But we're not done - - - because I want to be fair to the men at that table.
The plans do not fail because the diplomats are stupid. Some of them are brilliant. Some of them genuinely want the killing to stop, and I cannot fault a man for that. They fail because the negotiators are dividing up property that was never theirs to divide, and no amount of goodwill fixes a title defect.
You cannot broker a settlement on land you do not hold the deed to.
Genesis 12:3 - "And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee." That is not a Middle East policy position. That is a signature on a covenant, and God has never once torn one up.
And We Do Not Get to Sit This One Out Clean
I need to say something to us before I close.
We can draw the prophecy chart from memory. We can name the seals, number the trumpets, and argue the timeline in Sunday school for an hour and a half. And then we walk out to the parking lot and never mention that city again until the next conference.
We have made Jerusalem a hobby when God made it a covenant.
Some pulpits have gone further than neglect. They have handed the promise off to somebody else entirely and called it theology - - - the tidy notion that God eventually got tired of His own word and reassigned it. Paul answered that one in four syllables. "Hath God cast away his people? God forbid." (Romans 11:1)
If God can quietly retire a promise He swore to Abraham, then you and I have no business resting on a single promise He made to us either.
He Is Coming Back to Settle It
Zechariah 14:4 - "And his feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east."
His feet. Not His influence. Not His principles. Not His memory living on in the hearts of good people. Feet - - - on a hill with a location, east of a city with a street address.
Zechariah 14:9 - "And the LORD shall be king over all the earth: in that day shall there be one LORD, and his name one."
Men have spent forty centuries arguing over who owns that city. One day the Lord is going to settle it in an afternoon.
But here is where this quits being geopolitics and lands in your lap.
Before Christ becomes the King the world welcomes, He has to become the King you welcome. I have met people who could sketch you a prophecy chart from memory and had never once bowed a knee to the Man standing in the middle of it.
So the question is not whether you believe in a coming Kingdom. The question is whether you belong to its King.
The first time He came to that city, they crowned Him with thorns and He let them.
When He comes back, He wears many crowns - - - and nobody at any table anywhere will be asked to ratify it.
Signed,
Common Sense
(and the rightful King of Jerusalem)