The big picture of Bible history & geography
Vern Peterman · Jul 11, 2004
Bible Backgrounds, No. 02
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4826239363828

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Okay, this is for next week and so I just want to kind of get prepared because next week I'm going to have even more stuff to give to you. It's for the appendix. This is to be put, now you don't have a binder yet, do you? Okay, this is for this class and it's the things that are in it. Let's get you started here. And this goes in front of the colored sheet that you got inserted there and behind the sheets that you have right now. You got one.

OK. Now, I did we did find post. post-printing that there's a typo, and what this says on the bottom of the sheet is this is Bible backgrounds. Okay? And it should be just Bible backgrounds, not Bible backgrounds. So if you can handle that, I think the rest of it should be just fine. Okay.

What we said last week we'd do is we'd head into this looking at The big picture of Bible history and geography. We're going to make a sweep through a few thousand years. You ready? So we're going to go into hyperspace. Fasten your pew belts and let's head off here. This is the historical timeline that we'll be referring to throughout as we go through this here.

The Old Testament and New Testament refer back to historical events since the beginning. We have the Old Testament written starting about 1400 B.C. to 400 B.C., so about a thousand year period of time, right? The Old Testament, however, especially the book of Genesis, refers back to things prior to that time, right? Abraham, for example, prior to that time. Noah, prior to that time. So, it's looking back. The New Testament also refers back to things that are centuries earlier. Okay, there's a 400 year gap between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New.

So I think your handout makes note of that. We could go and just consume a lifetime of study in biblical chronology, you know, this happened. And really, they're putting together not only archaeological records, but they also look at astronomy, because there was a lot of there's a lot of astronomical clock things that we could take a look at. The truth is, though, it's helpful just to have some kind of round round number figures in our mind that serve as a framework. And that's what we're going to do here this morning. Give you about a half dozen different places you can, if you fix those in your mind, everything else fits in between them. Okay. So that's the idea.

Abraham about 2000 BC. That's the first one we're going to look at and we'll go over it again. So don't, don't worry about having to nail it just with this slide. Exodus led by Moses after about 1500 BC. Okay. and David about 1000 BC, and the New Testament in the first century AD. So those are the main points.

We've got a couple more to add to that. We'll go to a timeline, I think that'll help. One thing, as you notice, I put creation here at the beginning but didn't put a date on it. I said, if we assume that the ages and time frames given in the Bible are taken at face value and are given without gaps, and if we take the days of Genesis as literal solar days, they'll arrive at creation about 4000 BC. That is, with those assumptions. We're not going to have time to even begin to dig into that. That's beyond the scope of what we can do. So that's why I just put creation there and didn't say some date, just so you're aware of that. It's probably the second assumption that's got the most room for bringing in some other possibilities.

Now, Abraham, jumping ahead here to 2000 BC. Abraham started off in the city of Ur. Ur is in that same section of Kuwait and Iraq, very southern portion of Iraq. The truth is when our troops went in and started establishing ground control, during the Iraq invasion last year, Ur is one of the first places they went.

Because they wanted to get some control there and also protection of the archaeological site. Because this ziggurat that you see right there, they had generals and colonels and guys like that walking up and down this ziggurat that you see there on the left. Here's a cosmetic box with a lid. Look at the sophistication of that. That wasn't just for jewelry, this was for cosmetics. So they've got a high level of sophistication in Abraham's time.

Hi, let's get you up to speed with us here. My name is Vern. Randy. Randy. Thank you. Good. Linda? Randy and Linda? Yeah, no problem. Glad to have you here. I think you'll be able to track with us. We're in the second week, and you'll see the first or second week on the bottom of the page there, so we're in kind of the second section. You'll see at the bottom right corner, number up front here that tells you what page we're on in the second week so you can track with us, okay?

So anyway, here's the ziggurat at Ur on the left and the cosmetic box with the lid. There was a number of other things from Ur that are of this level of sophistication, and I just picked this one. But it's amazing how highly developed the civilization was at Ur.

Now, next one along the line there is Moses. We jump ahead to, this is the one, you know, after 1500 BC. And here's Moses, next one, he is the one credited with writing the first five books of the Old Testament, okay? So there's Moses. If you got Abraham at 2000 and Moses, you know, say about 1400 BC, you start getting some points where you can begin to establish, you know, Old Testament history Anything that happened in between, of course, is something you can fit between those dates.

This is Moses' domain, because here's Egypt on the left, and then the Sinai Peninsula, and then Israel, and you see the Dead Sea up in the upper corner. In fact, let me point to that. Here's the Nile Delta and the Sinai Peninsula. Mount Sinai is probably about down here. They went up here, there's the Dead Sea, and then they entered Canaan from the east. This is the traditional Mount Sinai site, where Moses would have gone up on the Mount.

Next, we have David, 1000 BC. Easy enough to just kind of keep that in your mind. Here's David, 1000 BC, and fairly even, easy date. He's a pivotal guy in the Old Testament, New Testament mentions him numerous times, even into the Book of Revelation. So, real critical guy. Here's the Citadel of David and the excavation in Jerusalem. And this is 2 Samuel 5, 8 actually mentions the shaft that you see right there.

And so now there's David in 1000 BC. David is important in the genealogy is why? Pardon? That's the line through whom Jesus came, right? So real critical. The next one we see there, here's the New Testament in the first century AD. So we put that in there. Now we've got some points of outline to work with. Now, we're going to get a little more detail here on David. You had Saul, David, and Solomon. Those are the three kings of the United Israel. Saul, David, and Solomon. You want some easy numbers to remember? Can you remember 40?

Each reigned about 40 years and then the kingdom divided 40 40 40 So if you can remember David about 1,000 BC and here's Saul David Solomon each of them reigned about 40 years Then you've got you know something else you can use as kind of a hinge point after that the the nation separated Israel to the north and Judea or Judah to the south Okay the next here is is the Jews were exiled to Babylon.

586 BC was the major exile. There was actually an earlier one, 605, but 586 was the major time of exile to Babylon. If you've got these dates here in mind, you can fix other things around them, okay? You can say, okay, I know when that was. That was just before, or that was between, okay? begin to get a kind of a mental outline using these these dates and these numbers The the exile the Babylon was big it had a huge impact it still has an impact on the Jews today Still has an impact on the Jews today many of the things that they started came as a result of their exile and the time afterwards now Coming back from the exile is the time since they came back from the exile that they came up with the Pharisees, Sadducees. You find them in the New Testament, won't find them in the Old Testament, right? It's because it's after the exile. They came back from Babylon and a lot of them had, you know, they used some different words, different language. Our word paradise is a word borrowed from their time in exile, okay? It means pleasure garden.

It's used three times in the New Testament. there are lots of impacts from that time of exile so those those dates that Abraham 2000 Moses about after 1500 David about a thousand BC okay and then the Jews going into exile 586 and then the New Testament in the first century those are some dates that you if you can get those fixed in your mind you can fit other things in between them and and get a relative chronology and in your mind okay now questions so far So far, so good.

Okay. Either baffled or really covered it well. Okay. Now, a word about historical dates. One of the things, have you ever looked at some chronology and said, well, this doesn't quite match up with some other date? Ever seen that? Saying, what's going on here? All right, let's walk through that one step at a time. We use the Gregorian calendar. Here's how it got started. Pope Gregory XIII, said in 1582, we're going with this new calendar. And just made a declaration that's the way it's going to happen.

Well, only the Catholic countries, because remember, this is after the Reformation had started, okay? Only the Catholic countries adopted it. The Protestant countries crossed their arms and said, you know, we don't listen to you. So they stayed on the Julian calendar so that the Catholic countries and the non-Catholic countries were out of sync by about 11 days.

Imagine that trying to communicate with each other. Okay. Eventually the Protestant countries came around so that by 1752 England and remember we hadn't declared independence and therefore the United States as it was in the colonies in those days took on the Gregorian calendar.

There were widespread riots. People said give me back my 11 days and they stormed the gates of you know all sorts of government offices, all of Europe went nuts over this thing. Finally the dust settled, but Eastern Europe, where the Orthodox churches were, of course they didn't listen to the Catholics either, they still were not going to follow it. It wasn't until after World War I that the Eastern Bloc countries actually adopted it. Isn't that amazing? The Russian Orthodox Church today still does not accept it, because it came out of Rome.

Okay. So, the Bible authors, of course, didn't know anything about our calendar. Who's Gregory? What's a Pope? They had no idea about any of that stuff, so the way they typically would write things down, they would say, in the first year of the second month of reign of the king, da-da-da-da-da-da, such and such day.

And so that's the way you'll see a lot of the chronologies, and especially the Old Testament. Here's where we get to history and culture. Some cultures said that the first year was from 0 to 1. Other cultures said that the first year was from 1 to 2, by our measure. So you have to find out not just how did they record it, but what was the cultural standard for how you record the first year. And just like now, if you ever talk to anybody who's out of an oriental background, a baby is one year old when it's born.

So the same thing applies when they look at the chronologies. You've got to figure that out. So that's a big challenge. In some cases, we don't have exact numbers as to when somebody came in by our own calendar. So the uncertainties here, the farther you go back in time, the more it stretches out, and you get more and more uncertainty the farther you go back. Because what we're doing is we're building from our own calendar, right? And we go back, and we go back, and we go back, and any time there's an uncertainty, it accumulates the farther you go back in time.

So that's why you'll see dates that will vary for the same event, for the same person, you know, death and birth dates, things of that sort. Historians like to establish a chronology, and they look at those kinds of things, and that's nice to put that together. A lot of times these things aren't clear, and you will find variations. What we're going to find, though, is a couple of things.

One thing is that these uncertainties and dates don't have any big impact on the doctrines in the Bible. What is almost always, without question, is the sequence. And that's what ends up mattering. Real important to get that fixed in our mind. The sequence is really what counts the most. The exact dates are not that critical. Now, having said that, there are some key points at issue here. If you're reading some author, About when when did this happen? Okay.

One thing is is the Bible taken at face value? Do they assume that what the Bible says it means? Or as some authors maybe you've seen TV shows that have been similar Will assume at the outset that is just full of mythology Their presupposition is going to feed into how they state this. Okay, so you want it you want to ask the question of Are they taking the Bible at face value, or are they assuming that this thing is just a bunch of myth?

Second thing, does the author accept that there are true prophecies? One of the things we'll find as we get into this is the book of Daniel, if you read it, looks like it was written at the end of the Babylonian Empire into the beginning of the Persian Empire. And it appears to make prophecies that extend into our own day. But you will find authors who will say that the book of Daniel was written about 163 to 168 BC.

Why? Because they don't accept that there's such a thing as prophecy. And so therefore they are forced to interpret it and to date it way late because they can't tolerate the idea that it might actually be a prophecy. So it's presupposition, not fact, that dictates it, but you want to keep an eye out for that.

You have some timeline resources. I have an A here instead of the number of the page, and that's because it's in your appendix. I don't mean that we go into it now. There's a couple reasons for doing both. I really like these kind of horizontal timelines. That helps me a lot. But I also realize this other table that you should have in the back of your appendix lists specific verses for the dates of when people were born, things of that sort. And that can be helpful. So I put in both of them in your appendix, and you'll have those as study tools.

The geography we talked about last time, and we'll be going into that more, basically around the Mediterranean and a little farther to the east is the area that the Bible talks about, and is a modern map. And we've made mention of the fact that there down in the Persian Gulf is where you see things starting in Bible history.

OK, one of the things we're going to show, we're going to show some empires next and their boundaries. But before we do that, there's something we've got to make clear. And that is we're going to see these slides. We're going to see the promised land. We're going to see slides of empires, things of that sort. The reality is that the boundaries shifted. How come the boundaries would shift on an empire? Yeah, fighting back and forth, disputes.

One of the things we mentioned is that the Parthian Empire came in and took Jerusalem from the Romans in 40 BC. And then the Romans pushed them back. So you try to draw a map of the Roman Empire, well, the lines shifted. Later on, Hadrian went in and pushed back the Parthians and got land all the way down into the Persian Gulf and then later lost it.

So boundaries are constantly shifting because of battles and disputes. So when we show these boundaries remember that we're showing approximations probably to a particular time and not necessarily something that's fixed and concrete. Here for example is the Egyptian Empire about the time when Moses led the Jews out of Egypt. And what you see mostly is they've got this area around what is even modern Egypt a little bit farther to the south And then this area, including the area that the Jews went into and claimed as their own land. Notice that the Egyptians didn't go way over into here, didn't go up north, didn't go far anywhere else. Why do you think that the Egyptians would have this chunk of land in here? Why would that be valuable to them?

Pardon? It's access, but it's actually access the other way. It's saying, I want some kind of a factor of safety, a buffer, because that's where all my enemies come from. All my enemies come through that chunk of land, so if I go and establish forts and defensive areas in there, that'll keep the Babylonians and the Assyrians and all the other people that bother us from coming in.

So they would have this little area up in here, not because they're all that interested in holding land, but because they just didn't want people coming in and invading them, not having any buffer zone. He said, no surprises. Okay. No surprises. That's what they were looking for. This, however, this is the land that God had promised Abraham. Okay.

Now here's the Assyrian empire. Jonah was sent to Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire. During the invasion of Iraq, do you recall hearing the name of the city Mosul? M-O-S-U-L? Nineveh. Nineveh. That's Mosul. And so you find that in the northern part. When the troops went in, they started of course in Kuwait and the south there and moved up. And then there was a smaller northern group in one of the places that they went to. Quickly was Mosul because that was a northern city and that was Nineveh, you know well over 2,000 years ago Here's the Assyrian Empire and look it includes a lot of what is modern Iraq a few areas that aren't and then going into modern Syria and the northern part of Israel Okay, that was the Assyrian Empire Jonah was sent to go to Nineveh telling the Ninevites imagine you're supposed to come from here Go over here to Nineveh and tell those people that they better repent And with what army?

None. Jonah was not real happy with the idea, as you can tell from the account of Jonah. One of the reasons why, the Assyrians would take somebody who was particularly irritating to them and peel their skin off and pour salt water on it. Not the skin peeled off, on the body that's left. That kind of a treatment, Jonah had probably had relatives and friends that had had that treatment. The last thing he wants is mercy for these people.

So if you look at this, it wasn't just some dry, dusty, unreal place, some fantasy. This is a real world place, and Jonah had real world reasons why he was not too caught on the idea of the Lord warning these people and showing them mercy, and especially being the instrument of it. Can you imagine that? There was some real heart working that had to be done in Jonah. Whale work too, or fish work.

Now, here's Babylon. This is where the Jews were exiled. Notice it's a lot of the same area as Assyria, but it also included some other area to the south and farther into this area of Israel and into the Sinai Peninsula. So they're encroaching on the area that was Egypt's. So Egypt is starting to lose footing here, isn't it? Egypt is starting to lose footing. It's lost its string of fortresses that are along the eastern Mediterranean. Now here's Babylon. Something else that was interesting, it impacted history.

The Assyrians' philosophy on when I capture another nation, their philosophy was scramble them. Move them around to different places. The Babylonians' philosophy was let's take the leadership and bring them to our place and train them under our system.

There's Daniel. Brought into Babylonian leadership, and his friends Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego as well. And those were their Babylonian names. Give them Babylonian names, train them according to the Babylonian culture, and therefore their leadership will become of thinking like us.

That was their philosophy. Next we go to the Persian Empire. The Persians had a different philosophy. Send the people back to their land, be kind to them, but just make them pay. So that's how the Jews got sent back. See that? Each of them had a different philosophy and each of those different empires impacted Israel differently and had an impact on what Israel became. By the way, you'll notice some of these maps are of different kinds. This particular one is part of the Australian Defense Department History of Military Action manual. So that's where this came from.

This is the Persian Empire, 500 BC. Next, we go to the empire of Alexander the Great. And they're overlaid enough, look at this. Here's the Persian Empire, Alexander the Great, a lot of similarity, isn't there? There's a lot of similar area that's covered.

Philip of Macedon, Philippi was named after him, was the father of Alexander the Great. Philip of Macedon had Alexander the Great trained under Aristotle. Alexander the Great had a unique idea in military strategy. He said, let's not just mass up a bunch of people. Let's train them really, really well and develop strategy. And he would go into situations where he was outnumbered 10 to 1 and still win handily because of that difference in his strategy. So he came in a lot of these areas.

Now notice, here he came into Israel, right? When he came into Israel, Jodwa, the high priest, showed Alexander the Great a copy of the book of Daniel. By the way, that's one of the evidences that Daniel was not written in the second century BC. Jodwa, the high priest, showed Alexander the Great a copy of the book of Daniel and said, see, Daniel said you were going to be here. Welcome. And so Alexander the Great gave, he still had them as a captive nation, but gave them privileges that none of the other nations got because of the welcome that he was given by Jodoah the High Priest.

And he went and established Greek in this eastern part of the Mediterranean, so that after the Greek Empire began to fall apart and the Romans came in, what's still the dominant language of the eastern part of the Roman Empire? So here's the Roman Empire. What you see here in the green is the area that was the case around the birth of Christ, and then later on they added other territories. During the New Testament time was when the southern part of Britain was invaded and taken over by the Romans. The New Testament doesn't mention that, but that was going on during that time. Real interesting. That's a story in itself. I won't go into it. I get too carried away.

Then, some of the ancient resources, and this isn't exhaustive, but this is again one of the things from the Australian Defense Department manual. One of the things that would happen as military advances would take place, they'd say, where are the resources? We want to fight to get the resources. So they would look at some of the various resources.

There's iron, for example, here, and copper, gold here. The hill right above Philippi, where the Book of Philippians was written to, that hill is just a bunch of gold mines. So that would be an example, the gold from this area. So the military activities, a lot of those empires were with the intent of, we want to get the resources out of each of these places. That's where there's some money in this thing. You have this map in very small print, I won't say that it's adequate, but you also have it in your appendix, so in the large size, so that you have something to work with.

The mountains and seas and rivers all had an impact on Bible history. It was tough, for example, for there to be a lot of crossing between peoples up here and peoples over here. Occasionally happened, the Jews at one point in time fought the Scythians, who came from over here. Alexander the Great had to head into some of this stuff in here, but the mountains were a bore. Obviously the seas were tough to get across without a lot of naval capacity. So the geography of this area had a lot of impact on what happens in Bible lands.

Okay, inside scoop on resources. When I say resources this time, I mean things to study from. things for you as you're looking, because remember, we pointed out last week, there are three things you're wanting to put together to interpret the Bible correctly. And that is language, history, and culture. It's that simple, those three things. And you want to find out about those three things.

And so when we look at historical and cultural resources, we find that a number of the resources out there might have good factual information, but present it right alongside bias. and you want to be able to sniff that out. You want to be able to discern what's the bias and what's a good resource and discern between those two and only use what's good out of it. Okay, what we want to do is to glean the information that's out of the resource and leave behind what the author has put in as bias, recognizing the bias.

Alright, now, an author who doesn't regard scripture as inspired will make statements that will reveal his lack of respect to it. Have any of you run across things like that? Or even seen T-shows? You'll see that when they make references to those kinds of statements.

And so there will be some good information there, but you have to pick out what's fact and what's bias and discern between those, okay? An author who doesn't hold to a pre-millennial dispensational view may see different background as relevant. That's what we want to be careful of. Historical and cultural background information is very important and extremely helpful in understanding scripture. But if I have an author who's picked the wrong place and time, they are going to match that up with the wrong background information. See that? If, for example, I have someone who doesn't see the book of Daniel as written when it claims to have been written. He won't try to say, here's the Babylonian culture. Here's the Persian culture. He'll instead say, here's the Greek culture. See that? He'll match up the wrong culture to the text, because of his assumptions. All right, here's the key to discernment. OK, what am I going to use to figure these things out?

We're examining scripture, and by the way, this is real important, we're examining scripture not to come to the right interpretation. Yes, we want to do that, but that's not the final point. The final point is we're examining scripture to behold the Lord. That's why. And as we're doing so, we're going to view scripture as inspired and infallible.

Not all the people that you read will have that viewpoint. We're going to view scripture as to be interpreted according to its normal sense. The term that we use is grammatical, historical, cultural interpretation. If the normal sense makes sense, don't seek any other sense. That's kind of the dictum that we use there.

Our study of history and culture is intended to illuminate the meaning of Scripture, not eliminate the meaning. There's a big difference. Have you ever heard somebody talk about Scripture and they bring in some cultural background and then they basically end up making it irrelevant? You've seen that? They basically dismiss, oh, that's just because of this cultural thing, it doesn't mean anything. They dismiss the meaning of Scripture and what they have done is instead of using the cultural understanding and the historical understanding, to illuminate the meaning of the scripture, all they do is they use it to eliminate the meaning. Big difference. We want to make a big point of that one. Here's an example I'm going to give you here. This fellow here, Dr. Calvin Retzel, here's his book.

By the way, he's printed out a new one that's been revised. But this is by John Knox Press. He wrote this book back in 1985, and just now, this last spring, retired, so he could write more. Write more books. Well, he's been teaching religious studies at Macalester College. He was trained at some secular universities, and that seems to come through. He does not regard scripture as inspired and infallible. Alright, so, he writes this book, and it seems like, whoa, this would really be good. The world that shaped the New Testament. I thought, oh man, that's right on. That's what I want to read.

No. But what happens is as you start to look at it, you start saying, hmm, something here isn't quite right. John Knox Press is generally a liberal and a covenant theology orientation. Just to make sure that that's not slipped past here. The covenant theology orientation means that they say that the believer is under law. They will say the law is your life. So there's a liberal and covenant theology orientation there. So we're not surprised then here when Dr. Retzel comes up on page 98, second paragraph, he begins, much of the New Testament shares fully in the mythology of evil of his Jewish parent. Ah. Okay? Problem. Okay? He's looking at the New Testament just as portraying the current mythology rather than being inspired revelation. Okay? Are there facts in here? Yes.

The problem is you have to be able to sniff out when is he throwing something at you that is his understanding of it based on presupposition and bias and when is he giving you fact. Dr. Retzel addresses a topic and the face of it would be really good, but we have to be careful when we read through it. What's fact? When is he stating fact and when is he throwing interpretation at us? We have to be able to sniff out the bias from the fact.

Here's another example. This is one that's fairly popular. It's the Bible Background Commentary at InterVarsity Press. 800 pages plus. So substantial writing. Most of it's text. There's a few little maps and things in the back. Substantial book available at most Christian bookstores. But when you read through it, something starts to come up. Dr. Keener's a sharp fellow.

But he views most of the book of Revelation as portraying things during the first century. And he puts off the content of the book of Revelation as being relevant to the future except for the last few chapters. So he sees it all describing things that happened during the first century. Now, in doing so, he loses value.

Here's an example out of Revelation 9-8. He says the hair-like woman would be a more obvious allusion to most of John's readers. Everyone in the Roman Empire knew that barbarians outside the Roman Empire had long hair. So he would just look at it as fulfillment right then. Since Dr. Keener looks for most every fulfillment in Revelation within the New Testament era, he generally eliminates the possibility that John is describing a future event.

Here's where he runs into trouble. In Revelation 119, John is instructed to write the things which you have seen, the things which are, and the things which will take place after these things. What he does is he takes the after these things and shoves that all the way to the end. He says this is all about what is, the things which are, okay?

The problem is the church stops being mentioned after chapter 3. And then he makes chapter 4, chapter 5, chapter 6, chapter 7, you know, on and on applicable to the church as well. And you look in the text, the church isn't even mentioned. So, what happens then is you end up interpreting from chapter 4 on, all in view of the wrong background, the wrong assumption about the text.

You've got to match up the time and the text. Okay. Principle. Match the right background to the text. You're going to get lots of historical fact, the historical and cultural background information. has to fit the text so that you illuminate the meaning, not eliminate the meaning. Principle one here. And then the next one, matching the right background to the text requires that we respect the inspiration and authority of scripture.

Take each text in its normal, literal sense. Now, does that set aside figures of speech? Does it? Can we have figures of speech? Yeah, sure. Normally we use figures of speech don't we that's not the same as forcing an allegory on every text that you see There was there was one person who was kind of brought up on the sort of an allegorical interpretation You know background in his seminary training.

He was a pastor. He was talking to somebody You know it was giving him questions about the book of revelation and he hadn't really studied it in great depth other than to be taught that this stuff is all allegorical and And so the person was asking him, well, what exactly does this mean?

He says, I don't know what it means, but it certainly doesn't mean what it says. And my point is, yes, it does mean what it says. If there's a figure of speech, it's intended to be a figure of speech, just like we use figures of speech, and that's what we mean. If I call somebody up and invite them over for dinner, You know, usually at the end of the conversation, we say goodbye and we hang up. The person isn't on the other end wondering, boy, I wonder what he was talking about.

Did he really mean dinner or was this some sort of allegorical thing? Or when he said come over to our house, does that mean he wants to join our family to his? You know, we don't read in allegory, okay? We don't read in allegory. An invitation to dinner isn't a matter of saying, you know, let's have our family get married or something, you know?

The point being, we say things in a normal sense. If we mean something by figure of speech, it is evident in the context. If I say that somebody is driving me up a wall, it has nothing to do with cars. And it has nothing to do with cars leaned up against the wall. We know when we're talking that there are figures of speech. The Bible does the same thing. Figures of speech are used. Dozens of different kinds. But examination of the context begins to make it apparent what the figure of speech is.

We don't force an allegory on it. In Revelation chapter 7 where it says that there are the 12 tribes and it even names the 12 tribes. That's not listing the different denominations of the Christian church. That's the allegorical interpretation. That's forcing an allegory on the context. By the context, You would not assume that that means that that's the Christian denominations, especially when it tells you 12,000 of each. Okay. It, that is a very rough way of trying to handle the text. What we do is we read it in the normal sense and understanding that there are symbols and figures of speech, but we don't read allegory into the text. Okay.

Next time we'll get into the old Testament history and we'll be spreading it out into three different sections. Creation to Jacob, Egyptian slavery to David, and Solomon to Malachi. So you'll have those three segments that we'll break it up into, and then cover the gap between the Old and the New Testaments.

A couple things I want to let you know. I showed a couple of books. What I'd like to do each time is also let you know of some good resources. I had some last time. This is one that I refer to often, and it's a four-volume set. So this is the first and the fourth books. What this does is it's the New Testament, in New Testament order, like Matthew to Revelation, chapter order, verse order, and what it does is you'll go through each verse and it will, with pictures and things of that sort, explain the historical and cultural background through the New Testament. It is a little bit steep if you buy the set, it runs a little short of a hundred bucks, but you've got four volumes And it's probably the best I've seen in terms of providing good background, excellent scholarship, and also some good pictures and things of that sort as you go through it.

So anyway, that's highly recommendable. You can come take a look at the volumes. The other thing I'd have to offer is I've got some just various short articles on subjects that we've We either have talked about or just about to talk about here. And feel free to look through those and take one if it looks interesting to you. Okay, now, any questions? Any comments? Exasperations? Nothing? Man! Okay. As we're going through this, I hope you're finding it interesting. I'm always fascinated with this stuff, and you'll probably figure that out.

But what's neat to me is that there's a richness in the Bible that comes out when you understand what it's talking about. In the cultural context, we're trying to put our minds into the minds of the writers and readers of the Old and New Testament. That's our goal. So that when we read it, we understand what's being said. I made the example last week, you know, when it says in Revelation where the church has promised, he overcomes, I'll give a white rock. And we say, what am I going to do with a white rock? And then we understand, ah, the white rock is your invitation to the victory banquet after an athletic competition. There, now it means something. Now it's got some depth to it. Now it's got significance.

As you read through the pages of the Old and New Testament, there is tremendous richness behind everything that's written. And as you begin to look at these things, it is immensely exciting to see what is written there. I am convinced as I study that quite often the people reading it had to just stop and put the pages down and collect their thoughts for a while because what they were being told was so shocking. so startling, so graphic and exciting, that they just had to pause. I'm convinced of it.

Some of this stuff is like, wait a minute, put that down, let me absorb that. Or, you are kidding me, this is amazing. As we'll see in our Ephesians-Colossians study, the people, when they read about the grace of God, compared to the gods they knew, the gods who always demanded something. You're not getting something without giving me something first, okay? to have a God that took the initiative when we were yet enemies and said, not only that, I'm going to take eternity to show you my marvelous grace.

That was just mind-boggling to them. I can't imagine that they could continue reading. They would have to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, stop. Let me absorb that. Because it was such a shocking and phenomenal change from what they had been brought up every day of their lives in the common culture.

Finally this is this is rich stuff. This is wonderful stuff Because it it it reveals things not they're just archaeological interesting. Yes, they are But it reveals things about the marvelous Lord that we have and that's well worth looking at let's pray Thank you Lord for what you've given us here, and thank you for the richness that's in your word We praise you for it, and thank you for it tonight ask that you would open the eyes of our heart that we would see. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.