Bible Backgrounds/Church History 2012

We're at what happened between the Old and New Testaments. There is about, as you see on the first slide there, there's about a 400 year gap between the final events of the Old Testament and the beginning events of the New Testament. And so four centuries, and we're going to step our way through it.

Basically, you have during that time the end of the Persian Empire. The Persian Empire is part of the last part of the Old Testament, but then the Persian Empire extended beyond that time. Then the Greek Empire, and we have in there parentheses S, empires, because it started off as one empire under Alexander the Great and very quickly broke up into four basic empires. Then the Hasmonean rulers, we'll talk about what that is, and then the Roman Empire. So those four empires impacted Israel during that time gap. So now you have the close of the Old Testament, about 430 BC, the end of the independent nation of Judah. So here's the Persian Empire, the last part of it, after the time of the Old Testament.

Let's take a look. Here's the Persian Empire at its greatest extent. Now, when you see maps of empires, were they just all of a sudden there and stable? No, they went back and forth and they would lose a little bit and gain a little bit. So, at its greatest extent, this is what the map looks like. Here are the Persian kings during the end of the Old Testament period.

You'll recognize some of the biblical connections. Cyrus is the one who conquered Babylon and allowed the Jews to return. a key point of doctrine in the religion of the Persians that you don't take people out of their homeland. Isn't that interesting?

And so the first thing they did was give them an opportunity to go back. Cambyses was the next one. Stopped work on the temple. Darius I authorized completion. So it got reversed. Then Xerxes, and the Bible name is Ahasuerus, so this is where you get different pronunciations based on what people can say.

If you think about it, you ever hear somebody speak the language of, say, some of the Kalahari desert people? A lot of pops and clicks. I don't know about you, I don't do those so well. Yeah, there's a whole lot of popping and clicking in their language, and we just don't do that.

So the Hebrews ended up pronouncing Xerxes as Ahasuerus. That was the king for the reign of Esther, who was queen of the Jewish queen, so the Book of Esther written after that. As a matter of fact, next month, starting sundown March 7th, the Jews will celebrate Piram, which is the defeat of Haman, the Agagite, who sought to wipe them out. So, at any rate, and then the last one there, Artaxerxes I authorized Nehemiah to rebuild Jerusalem on its wall. Sent Nehemiah back, and that's towards the end of the Old Testament period.

The Persian kings after the end of the Old Testament period, we have Xerxes II, Darius II, Artaxerxes II and III, Arsus, and Darius III, who was defeated by Alexander the Great. Darius III was a weak leader. He had a tough time keeping everybody in line. Alexander the Great was a phenomenally strong leader, so the Greek army defeated them at Arbella near Nineveh, that's where Jonah went, and the modern city of Mosul, Matt Kirby went there when he was stationed in Iraq.

So then the Greek empires, and one thing to note is you'll see this 336 number, sometimes you'll see it at a slightly different date, and the reason is this. When Alexander the Great went and essentially took over the Persian empire, he didn't do it all at once, did he? So what he did is he made a sweep south in the Mediterranean, then he kind of zigzagged his way through. So it took time, so that's one reason you'll see slightly different dates. And then that continued until 166, so we'll talk about that change.

Alexander the Great was the son of Philip II, had conquered Greece but was rather mysteriously assassinated. Details on it not known, all sorts of historical suspicions. And then Alexander the Great had been tutored by Aristotle. for a time. So he had this great philosopher and thinker.

In 334 Alexander began his attack upon the Persian Empire, and actually you could again move that date a little bit earlier, depends on where you want to start it. But he moved rapidly, though his forces were often outnumbered in battles. Here's a man, he's 20 years old. From there, for the next decade and a little bit more, he's fighting. You can imagine, you know, let's start at age 20 and then just start fighting for a decade or so. So now, here's the sequence and you'll have this on your handout. I think it's that color handout, the front, yeah, page one. So this is the sequence and basically you see him going from Macedonia, Greece, weaving his way through what is now Turkey, Asia Minor it was called, going down here and he took out Tyre.

Tyre was a city of seagoing people and they had the mainland city of Tyre and then they had a significant island. out in the ocean there, just away from the land. And so whenever they would get attacked, everybody would just go out to the island. And they would have their ships. And if anybody tried to come out to the island, they just got on their ships and took off.

So it's like you can't do anything with them. Well, Alexander the Great didn't have ships. So he ordered his men to scrape the city down to the dirt and dump it out in the ocean and make the end of the island. And to this day, it is no longer an island. There's a large sandbar that goes out there and it's a peninsula. It's no longer an island. And it's because of what Alexander the Great did.

Then he went down into Israel And rather than a battle, he was met by a very interesting, how do I say, introduction? Encounter? According to Josephus, Jotawa the high priest said to Alexander the Great, we were expecting you. Because of... Huh? Yes, we were expecting you, and he said, whoa. Because of the book of Daniel.

And so Alexander was positively taken aback. The Jews didn't battle him. The high priest goes out and says, yeah, we were expecting you. And so Alexander had a good relationship with the Jews. And they said, well, just allow us to do our religious duties and don't interfere with that. And we'll be happy.

And then he asked a number of Jews to move down to what was a newly created city in Egypt, surprise name, Alexandria, Egypt. And so a number of Jews established on the east part of Alexandria, they established a Jewish border, which is not certainly but quite possibly where Mary and Joseph went. Because that would have been the major Jewish population in Egypt when they went there when Jesus was an infant. So he goes down, you can see on the map, you can see the movement down here in Egypt and in Alexandria.

By the way, he established nine Alexandrias. Most of those names went back to something else, but this one stuck. So then he went back up through Israel and then took over the rest of the empire and going into Afghanistan, where we have troops now. Okay. Now, here's where I talk about Josephus. I'm going to skip past that. You don't have it on your handout because I didn't have room for it. Alexander the Great survived battle after battle.

He just went out there, he drove his men really hard. He equipped them well, he trained them well, he drove them hard. Even at some points, like when they got into what we now call Afghanistan, some of the men were just dropping. He just rode them so hard.

They were dropping just from exhaustion and lack of water and things of that sort. He finally succumbed to alcoholism and disease, possibly malaria, based on the description of what the symptoms are, dying in his early 30s. So here's a guy at 20 years old, he starts taking over the world, he fights for, you know, a decade and more and then finally gets to the end and is kind of the end of the then known world. And so the bottle and a mosquito took him out.

So, four of Alexander's generals each took portions of the empire. What's interesting, here he is on his deathbed and The question was put to him, well, who does the empire go to? He says, to the strongest. So it initiated a civil war between these generals, and they broke up, you can see the color coding, and that's on your color map there, the color coding and the way that those Greek empires broke up. So anyway, those are the main empires and names. Here's the larger map. Though the map shows this Egyptian empire holding Israel, the reality is it went back and forth between the Egyptian empire here and the old Persian empire area there, twelve times. And the Jews just got tired of it. And, to make matters worse, at the last, the fellow who was running this empire, Antiochus, was forcing the Jews to participate in pagan rituals.

Before we go into that, though, the impact of Alexander the Great on the Greek language. One of the things he did was distribute the Greek language over the eastern Mediterranean. In other words, when he went someplace, he said, guess what? You're going to learn Greek. And he enforced it. So he distributed it over the eastern Mediterranean.

He unified the language, minimizing the influence of dialects. Prior to Alexander's actually making deliberate adjustments in the language, there were different dialects and the language was fairly complex and the different dialects had a hard time communicating with each other. He went and just changed the language structure deliberately and made that unification a part of it so you no longer had all these little dialects. The next thing, he simplified the language. In other words, where the grammar was complicated, he simplified it and made it much less complex, leading to shorter, more easily understood sentences.

And he enforced the changes so that they remained for 600 years. Here's something very interesting historically, and that is that it is a common pattern that after the political and military power wanes, the language continues. So for Greece, right, here's Alexander the Great, the guy died in, you know, he started off at 20, died in his early 30s, and here goes and establishes this language that sticks around for about six centuries. Long, long after the guy's dead, yes.

Yes, that would be one. And I think another one is because he was a very strong leader and he insisted on, you know, you will learn Greek and you will learn it this way. And so by his enforcement of it, not only did it work, I mean, the reality is he made some improvements, if you will, in the language, but he said, absolutely, you're going to learn Greek. Yeah.

Koine Greek, common Greek. How did he do that? He had essentially been tutored by Aristotle and he thought, you know, he got all these little different Greek dialects and a lot of it seemed real awkward and he says, how are we ever going to get an empire with all this broken up language? So he said, you know, it really ought to be this way.

And you think about it, English has gone through some changes over the centuries. And if you were to read, you know, English from over a thousand years ago, you could hardly recognize it. But most of those changes have come about by an evolution. Alexander made deliberate changes that he enforced.

And so, yeah, he basically said, you know, look, we got this dialect, that one, let's do it this way. Yeah, well, he was a very strong leader, and he drove his people hard, and even those people that stayed to establish the Greek language had to learn that and then convey that, but he did it phenomenally, yeah. He was a master of delegation. Yes, he was a very good delegator, but he also, he drove it, and he continued to insist on what he wanted as the outcome. and military outcomes, and social outcomes, and language outcomes. Yes?

Little sidebar. One of the examples of his battle strategy was if he found a town and said, no, we're not going to surrender, he'd say, okay, then watch this. I need to have a company of soldiers go over the cliff and kill themselves. He said, okay, now who's going to, who, you are next. Yeah. He's just a very intent person.

And that's why when he kind of came to the end of his empire, he didn't know what to do with himself. Yes? Is there any connection between Tower of Babel and the languages that were divided up? Yes, it's interesting, the Tower of Babel is the dispersion of peoples and languages, and what he's trying to do is to pull it back together and make it opposite of the tendency of language under the Tower of Babel judgment.

That's a good observation. Stan? Since I'm a little color blind, could you kind of outline with your pointer there what those four kingdoms are? Okay, this one is the Ptolemaic Kingdom, which is centered in Egypt, okay? So this is one of them. You've got another one here, which is the one that extends all the way from most of, not all of, what is now Turkey, all the way over into the old Persian Empire. Is that Antiochus? And that's where Antiochus came from. And then you've also got additional pieces here and here in Greece and parts of what is now northern Turkey. So you have those four main areas.

So guess what? Alexander had a great relationship with the Jews, but he did tell them, especially the ones that were moving outside of Israel, you will learn Greek. And guess what? He did it so intensely and so thoroughly, they forgot how to read Hebrew. within a generation nobody knew how to read Hebrew anymore.

And so they said we need a Greek translation of the Old Testament. The term is called Septuagint and that comes from the idea that there were 70 scholars, that's the meaning of the term, 70 scholars who did the translation from Hebrew into Greek. So you have this Septuagint, it was done in Alexandria, Egypt, about 250 BC. Because basically, you have a generation after moving down there and nobody knows Hebrew anymore, so we need something, so that's how they started the Greek Old Testament known as the Septuagint.

I refer to it quite a bit because it's very insightful. In some places, the text reveals a bias towards Greek culture and translation that includes interpretation. So some of the Jews who actually did know Hebrew and then looked at the Greek and, you know, familiar with both, looked at it and said, that ain't right.

Because Daniel, for example, was not just translated, there was a lot of interpretation put into it. So the first time they looked at Daniel, they said, uh-uh, we're not doing that. So they ended up developing other versions. For this reason, some books were replaced by others, Daniel being one of them.

Now, migration of Jews, about 220 BC, The leader of this old Persian empire, this area of the Chonan Green, very long east-west length here, the leader said, guess what? I will give you Jews 10 years tax-free if you will move to the area around what is now Ephesus. So 2,000 families made the move. Ten years, no taxes, that sounds great. So they made the move. And so what you ended up having is a move from here, they're mostly around Babylon, because remember that's where the Babylonians had moved the Jews, right, when they went into exile. And they move it up to this area. And another thing that happened during this time period, was from the time of Ezra a group of Jews known as the Hasidim that held to the Old Testament scriptures. These were the roots of several groups which began in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC.

The New Testament reveals several of these groups. The Pharisees, so that's one group. It is the major group And it is the group that believed in the entire Old Testament, not just like Sadducee's first five books. The Pharisees were also missionary. That is, they would go out to places and teach people, and not just hang around Jerusalem, but go out and teach people things out of the Bible. at least the Old Testament, right? So that was the Pharisees. The Sadducees hung around Jerusalem. They didn't go much anywhere else. They hung around Jerusalem. Many of the high priests were Sadducees.

The Zealots, those were ones who were zealous for Israel and were at times known for even doing violent and subversive things against some dominating authority. And then the Essenes, those are the ones thought to have moved out to Qumran and they're kind of reclusive. And then the Sicarii, basically Jewish terrorists.

Yes? Did these groups actually come from just individual tribes, or were they across tribes? In general, you would say across tribes. There was, I would say, one exception to that, and that is the Sadducees, many of them were out of the tribe of Levi, the priests. Not entirely, but many of them were. So there was more of a tendency for that to be tribal, not exclusively, but a tendency. So now, we have the Hasmonean rulers. Now, you may wonder, that's a funny name. Asmoneus is the source of that name. He was the first of those rulers, so that's why the name Hasmonean came from that.

Following many decades of the land of Israel changing hands between the successors of Alexander's kingdom, the Jews rebelled against Antiochus, who had forced pagan rituals to honor the pagan god Spacchus, the god of wine. And the Jews said, nothing doing, we'll fight to the death before we do that.

So the Maccabees, and here's something in order to clarify terms, the Maccabees, which is a Jewish military group and comes from the Hebrew Maccabim, fought for Jewish self-rule and they established then the line of rulers known as the Hasmonean Dynasty. Yeah, Tom? So what does the Maccabee have in common with Martel? Oh. Charles Martel frames. Right, the hammer.

Okay, now it's from this period of time that you get Hanukkah. It's the Feast of Dedication or the Feast of Lights. And the only place that's mentioned in the Bible is John 10, 22, and 23. Not by Hanukkah, but it's called the Feast of Dedication. So what you end up having is from this in-between the Testaments time, you have all these things that come out in the New Testament, that if you didn't know what happened between the Testaments, you'd wonder, why that? Why is the New Testament all in Greek? And with a few exceptions, none of the Old Testament has Greek source words. The main source of the Greek words in the Old Testament is in Daniel where, remember, Nebuchadnezzar had this big statue that everybody was to bow down to? And what was the signal for them to bow down? They played a bunch of instruments. And the instruments had Greek names because they were made in Greece. Okay. So now, the other thing that happened is the establishment of the Jewish two-court system. Now this to us seems very odd. Imagine deciding which court system you wanted to go to.

You could go to the court of Hillel or the court of Shammai. In general, the court of Hillel was more liberal, and in general, the court of Shammai was more strict or conservative. And there are some exceptions, but that's a good generalization. Oh, by the way, Hillel, Rabbi Hillel, grandfather of Gamaliel who taught Paul. A Jew could choose to conduct their legal matters under one system or the other and could even switch.

So, with Hillel, for example, if one wanted to get a divorce, he could get a divorce for any reason. They basically didn't ask. If you went to Shammai, you had to go and pronounce in court, here is why I'm getting a divorce. And it had to be an allowable reason. So Joseph, when he found out Mary was pregnant, decided to put her away quietly. Which court did he go to? Hillel court, that's right. He was determining, I'll go to the Hillel court. because then I don't have to shame Mary and make a big noise.

I just go there and say I want a divorce because even though he was engaged under the legal and custom practices of the Jews, if you were engaged, you had to get a legal divorce to end the engagement, unlike our system, you know, here where engagement is not official, not legal.

So the Rabbi Hillel said that a woman could divorce for any reason, whereas the Rabbi Shammai said that divorce was permitted only for unfaithfulness, abandonment and lack of physical support, and denial of affection. This is interesting. Denial of affection was one of the things that the Jews enforced in their synagogues. This is interesting because if a wife went to the synagogue leaders and said, he is not you know, providing for me, or even he's not being affectionate with me.

They had a series of fines. The first time this was your fine, the next time the man had to pay a higher fine, and when you got to the end of the fines, the whipping started. So it's interesting, a woman had quite a bit of enforcement capacity in the court system. Yes? So were both these courts based on the Mosaic Law and the laws, Yes, both were based on the laws, but there was different sets of interpretations of the laws. And so, real interesting, both of them would say, yeah, we follow the law, but how you interpret it is quite different.

And we'll see in the main service in Matthew, just like next week or two here, this issue comes up. They ask Jesus, Why did Moses allow divorce, you know, for any reason? And basically, Jesus agrees with the court of Shammai. It's kind of like the denominations today, right? Yeah, similar to denominations.

And here's something else more complicated. If you say Presbyterian, is there just one group of Presbyterians? There's a whole bunch of different ones, right? There were seven different groups of Pharisees. So, you know, again, it's complicated just like our denominations are complicated. That's a good comparison, Stan.

Okay, so then you get into the time of the Roman Empire and beginning in 63. Now, beginning in 63 in Israel, the Roman Empire had actually begun earlier than that. The city of Rome began to be founded around 700 BC. but then developed into a more substantial city. And as Alexander was moving to the east, Rome began moving towards Alexander's empire.

Yeah? When you see the movement of these different empires, Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, and then finally the Romans, none of them got up to England, or basically middle or northern Europe. We're going to see that. The Romans did. And we'll see that in just a minute.

Who were those people? Who lived there? Were they tribes? Yes, they had Germanic tribes of different kinds. So there were tribal groups. And even in England, when the English fought the Romans, and that's an interesting story, that was happening during the period of the Book of Acts. tribal unit for them not to go in there and just take them, right? Yeah, yeah. In some areas they had more trouble than others, but the Romans had some huge losses at times to these Germanic tribes, the barbarians as we often call them.

So here's the city of Rome, this is a satellite map there, had begun military exploits to the west of the Greek empires in the 3rd century BC. So here's Alexander's empires being established to the east and now the Romans are coming in shortly thereafter and starting to press against that empire. By the second century BC, the Roman military began encroaching upon the western portions of the Greek empires. Not just exploits, they were taking them out, they were taking over. So here you look at the empires, they're coming up into these areas here. So they were going around Italy and now they're coming down the east side. Pardon? Yes, right.

Then, by 63 BC, the Roman army had overtaken Israel, which had been under a century, more or less, of Hasmonean rule. So the Jews had varying degrees of self-rule and independence from the Greek empires. And now the Romans came in. The Romans allowed limited self-rule and exemptions.

What do I mean by that? Generally, yeah, you got your temple, go ahead and do your temple, and you can have your Sanhedrin, but don't let us catch you doing the capital punishment thing. That's ours to call. Sometimes they did it anyway, like the case of Stephen. But in general, the Romans didn't want them doing that. They wanted the Romans to be the ones to carry that out. Any exemptions? The Jews were exempt from Roman military service, and can you guess why? Why would the Jews be exempt from Roman military service? They would have to be in a pagan heist to eat Roman.

Yeah, think about it. Okay, tomorrow evening we're going to be setting up over here, and we're going to be traveling all up until that time. the Jews can only travel so far on the Sabbath, right? So you've got a problem. Here you've got the whole Roman army moving here and there's this other Jewish group over here that's not going with them. That doesn't work. Another problem. Mealtime. Right? Big problem.

You know, we have a special provision for the Jews. And it can't even be cooked on the same stuff that you use for the, you know, so that just isn't going to work. And then, you know, even something like clothing can't mix fabrics and things. So, you know, you've got all sorts of things in the Jewish law that just makes it impossible. So they just said, look, you guys are exempt. We just won't even try. Okay.

Herod the Great was put in place to hold the line against the Parthians. The Parthians was the empire to the east that took over much of that eastern Greek empire. So the Parthians you see on this map in this sort of orangish and then brownish area here. So here was the Roman Empire, the eastern part of it here, and then here's the Parthian Empire. What happened is in 40 BC, the Parthians punched down into Jerusalem and actually liberated Jerusalem after 23 years of Roman rule, liberated Jerusalem from the Romans.

And the Romans said, nothing doing, and they pushed them back out. So the Romans didn't want that to happen again. You know, that's a big pain and real uncomfortable and disruptive and everything. So they said, we want to put somebody in power who will make absolutely certain that the Parthians never do that again.

And so they put in Herod the Great, who wasn't that great, but boy was he nasty. Right? So, here he comes in. Herod the Great was tyrannical and cruelly paranoid. Augustus Caesar made a joke, a play on Greek words. He said it is better to be Herod's pig than his son. He would kill a son and did. So that's what Caesar said. Now, he was also paranoid that anything that looked like it would encroach on his kingdom was bad. So guess what?

Here's the Magi, right? The Magi come and guess what empire the Magi are from? They're from over here, right? So you have people from the Parthian Empire asking about where he was born King of the Jews. This sounds doubly bad to the cruel and paranoid Herod, right? So he really wants to talk to these guys, make sure that they're not like military scouts or anything like that, and find out about this, who's this other king. So here's here's Herod.

He also established great building programs, and he had no problem taxing people to death, so to speak. He started a military port city of Caesarea, on the coast, which ends up being several times an axe that crops up. It was one of the places, well, that's where Peter went in order to have Cornelius become the first Gentile believer in his household. It is where Paul was sent from Jerusalem and spent a couple years there in prison.

So he did that. He started in 20 B.C. an upgrade to the temple in Jerusalem. Now this was an upgrade to an active temple. So it was carried out in stages and wasn't completed until about 63 A.D. Oh, just several years before it was completely wrecked by the Romans. So, but that's another one of those accomplishments of heritage. Here is the temple upgrade, just to kind of give you a view.

It's a model of it. Phenomenal structure. Some of the stones, especially the ones in the wall, 50 tons. Huge, huge stones. And this is why we'll see later on in our study of Matthew, the disciples are marveling at the stonework in this place. Oh, here's one other thing. You see this part here? That's an active temple, right? Can you allow anybody to go and work on the Holy of Holies and all that? No, you can't.

So you know what they did? They trained the Levites to do the work. So you had Levites who had been trained up to do all the sacrifices and do all the health inspections and everything else. And so now these Levites were trained as tradesmen I think some numbers like up to 10,000 Levites were involved in some aspect of the reconstruction. So that was one thing that he did.

Herodium was a place right, you can see it from Bethlehem. And Herodium was basically just this conical mountain and he cut the top off and then cut down into it a military fort. So it was a good place to watch for Parthians, right? So that's Herodium. It may have been the place where the soldiers came from. It might also have been Jerusalem, where the soldiers came from to kill all the babies in Bethlehem.

Yes, Dan? So it was basically vacant as far as God's presence was concerned. Spiritually vacant. Yeah, a good way to put it. Maybe there's a long inception about the presence of the Lord because when Caiaphas was saying it is necessary for this man to die or the whole nation will perish. He wasn't saying it of his own will. The Holy Spirit was actually saying it. And we made the remark previously that this temple would be of greater honor than the previous one, which we would attribute to Jesus' presence there.

Yep. So anyway, and these are a couple examples. 12 BC, Herod volunteered for the Jews to pay for the Olympics. Olympics, real interesting history. What we're doing now for the Olympics isn't anything like it. First of all, no married women are allowed. It's supposedly capital punishment. Only ten events, and the men are all naked.

Okay, you have a Herod family chart, and I went through and made this because I looked at a lot of charts and some of them had mistakes in them. What I wanted to do is to narrow it down because he had nine or ten wives, the scholars debated, nine or ten wives, but not all of them ended up having a biblical impact. These are the ones where they are named in the New Testament.

So that's what that chart is, and you end up even having, here's Bernice, here in Herod Agrippa, who you can see are brother and sister, and they're also brother and sister and husband and wife. So, at any rate, and you end up having lots of marriage of uncles and half-brothers and all sorts of things. a lot of what we would call incest within the Herod family. He married his sister and his cousin, and some debate whether or not that's the same. He also married a lady named Cleopatra, and some question is whether that was the Cleopatra of fame, but anyway.

So there are some debates about him, but these are not in question, where we have the biblical references there. What I find in going through the Book of Acts, and through the Gospels, you can just keep referring to this again and again and again as you go through it, because they keep showing up.

Augustus was a pivotal emperor. Now here's the emperor of the whole Roman Empire. in that his efforts turned from expanding the empire, notice everybody up until that point is, you know, let's get the empire bigger, he turned from expanding it to establishing it in a way that's sustainable. In 18 BC, Augustus had a bunch of social and marriage laws put in place.

For instance, if you got a divorce, If you were still a childbearing age and hadn't had three kids, you had to get married again in two years. Right? So things like that. And so he established a whole bunch of things that were the idea of let's get the population going and stable and producing children and things of that sort.

Further, he ruled for a long period of time. There was a tendency for the emperors to go and reverse some of the decisions of prior emperors, but he was in there for decades, basically. And so there was some stability as opposed to just, you know, here's the emperor for this year, that kind of thing. And that allowed for a continued implementation of his policies and to get everything established and not have reversals and not have instability. because it is essentially decades of rule. Here, and this is not a map that you have, but here is the empire in some stages.

What's interesting is, you know how here the Parthians stepped down into Jerusalem. After the New Testament era, the Romans decided, you know, we're going to come back and get you guys. And then they punched into the Parthian empire and went all the way down to the Persian Gulf. for a while, and then the Parthians pushed them back out.

But that was sort of a got-your-back military effort. They did go up to southern Britain. When they went to take on the British, the British did all these weird colored paints, body paints and stuff like that. It freaked out the soldiers. And initially many of the soldiers were going to rebel. And the general gave the order to burn the ships. You will fight. And so the British thought it was going to be such a romp that they invited all the women and kids to watch. That was not a good idea. Ah, okay.

So, here are Roman roads in 1480 at the death of Augustus. By the end of the time of the Roman Empire, the Romans had built, and it was the soldiers that did the construction, the Romans had built enough roads to go two times around the earth. That is a lot of roads hand-built. And the way they did it was this. They would dig down in this roadway, they would dig down and then lay down sand and then eventually coarser and coarser material and then they'd have big blocks of rock laid on the top. And so many of those roads are now still in use sometimes with something laying on top of it so that it's smoother, but many of those roads are still in use in Europe. And so you can still walk parts of it. When they put the road through the middle of Philippi, all they did is just run the paving machine over the top of the Roman road, because the Roman road was still good after a couple thousand years. So here's the Roman roads. They made a network of roads. So, let's see. Ah, details surrounding the birth of Christ.

Augustus was the emperor, and that's listed in Luke 2.1.

Herod was the king, Matthew 2.1-23, that's where it's recorded about the Magi, until his death in the middle of March of 4 BC, right after an eclipse. The Jews had a major population established in Egypt, especially Alexandria, to which Joseph and Mary might have gone outside of Herod's realm.

In Galatians 4.4, Paul writes, in the fullness of time, God sent his son.

Right? And look at this, the Roman Empire provided political stability and good roads on which to carry the gospel. You know, you want to get somebody to walk this letter from Paul, you know, to here, there. Good roads. Right? The Greek culture brought the Greek language, which was structured beautifully for conveying the essential New Testament truths. The Greek language, especially under Alexander the Great, built in a lot of meaning into the verb.

So here is Jesus on the cross, and what's translated, it is finished, was an accounting term. It means it's all paid. And it was in the perfect tense. It's all paid completely. as a past action with ongoing results on in the future, implying permanence. It is all completely, permanently chained with continuing effect. One word, and all that meaning comes out.

The spread of Jewish culture gave the Empire a background in the Old Testament so as to better convey the Gospel. Paul could write to the churches in other places, even though there were majority Gentiles, because the Pharisees, that's the sect of the Jews that was missionary, the Pharisees had gone into all these places and started telling them about Abraham, and telling them about Moses, and telling them about David. So they had that background, and Paul could write not what people are completely ignorant, what are you talking about? But people who had some understanding of what he was writing.

Fascinating. So, when Paul wrote in the fullness of time, and even elsewhere, at just the right time, he wasn't kidding, and he wasn't exaggerating. It was exactly the right time. The right language, the right background with the Jews, and the right roads, you could do it. There was political stability, you could go around the entire empire and spread the gospel.

Cool, huh? Yeah, really cool. And it's amazing when you look at it. Here's all these empires and people going everywhere, and here's Alexander the Great doing all this phenomenal stuff for a little over a decade and then dying. It all sounds kind of crazy, but then when you look at it, it's all set up. Christ came at the right time for the Gospel to be expressed, for the Gospel to be carried, and to be able to be written with the Old Testament background already understood by people. It really is phenomenal. It's amazing.

This is a God who rules over history. In all things, Ephesians 110, all things will be summed up in Christ. He is managing history towards that end. Suddenly, I have a different understanding of the Pharisees. God used them two very different ways to bring about His will. Yes. Yes. Yes, Dan? I was going to say, it's interesting that through all this course of time, they've been able to change the culture, they've been able to change who owns what, kings, rulers, all those different things.

But they have never been able to change the condition of man. Because even though they have the powers in Rome, one of the biggest problems was thievery, killing, and all the rest of it. Yes, you weren't safe, especially if you were by yourself. And the only thing they could do was fear the law, which was to be crucified. A serious problem. Yeah, a serious problem. So, let's pray. Lord, we do thank you. As we look at this, this is really amazing stuff.

With all of what appears in many ways to be random and appears to be almost senseless with Alexander the Great fighting so hard and then to have it all come apart. We look at this, the Jews gaining some kind of independence and then losing it, and yet in the end we can see that you had a plan in place for not just the accomplishment of Christ's death, burial, and resurrection, but for the spread of the gospel throughout the then known world. And we thank you for what you have done and accomplished and for what you yet plan to do in our lives and even in history. You are indeed the God of history, the master of it. And we give you thanks in Jesus' name. Amen.