Bible Survey. The Bible: God's special progressive revelation.
Vern Peterman · Jan 5, 2014
Bible Survey, No. 01
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4926411167022

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

Okay. Good morning. Right. Make sure you get a handout. You'll need to do that. And I don't mean the kind over at the freeway off-ramp. This is the paper handout here. So we're starting this series called Bible Survey. And sometimes those kinds of classes and electives can be just sort of going through the motions or academic that will certainly have content but we also want to look at this as this is the book that God has revealed that he intends to use powerfully in our lives this is the book that reveals things we could not know if God had not revealed it and why did he reveal these things to us because He loves us. Because He loves us. And so this is not just academic, it's not just dry, it is in fact we're looking at an overview in general of the book that God has revealed to us deliberately over time because He loves us and cares for us and desires amazingly to have fellowship with us eternally. and relationship.

So one of the things we're going to do before we start stepping through the various books is we're going to spend this month just looking at the character of the Bible and why it is that God revealed it and how he revealed it and what difference that makes. So we're going to spend the month looking at different aspects of God's Word and then proceed into the various books. Even as we proceed into the various books, there are particular themes that we're going to trace through all the books, things like salvation, things like grace and law. We're going to trace those through all these books here.

Now, the first thing we want to take a look at, you have an inset God's revelations to mankind looks kind of like this on the front page there. And let's kind of step our way through it. There are five different kinds of revelation that God has made to mankind. And so those five are, as you see on the front page of the handout and also on the slide, the first one is nature. Now, it says God reveals His existence in some aspects of His character. When you think of God revealing Himself through nature, what do you think of?

That's right, and so here's Psalm 19, the heavens declare the glory of God, alright? Do they declare everything you would possibly need to know? No, and that's one thing that's about these general revelations, see that Those vertical words there, general and special, these general revelations reveal things about God, but it doesn't reveal everything you would need to know. So, the heavens declare the glory of God.

People will go out on a clear, starry night, especially if they go out away from the city, lights and the dust and everything, and they'll look up and say, wow, this is phenomenal, this is glorious. And people will be amazed at what they see in nature. People will go up to spectacular places in nature and be amazed at the beauty that's there. And they'll have quite an experience looking at nature.

But does nature tell you that Christ died for your sins? Does nature tell you necessarily that there is a sin problem? So nature tells us something about God. We have the heavens declare the glory of God. Romans 1, it talks about nature reveals his eternal power and deity. But there are lots of other aspects of God's nature that are not touched on. The next one is providence and I would put that in, it goes in two directions. One is provision and the other is guidance. in a general kind of way. So it provides for and sets limits to cause humans to seek Him.

The Apostle Paul goes to the Gentile world and the longest discourse in his first missionary journey is Acts 14. And what does he do? He brings up things out of the first 11 chapters of Genesis and talks about how God puts constraints on people, makes provision, but puts constraints on people that people might seek him. He speaks similarly in Acts 17 when he goes and speaks to the philosophers at Athens. There's a worldview issue here. And so that providence and guidance, that guidance is not God guiding every little step of the way of some unbeliever per se, but it is rather God places limits so that people might seek Him.

Next, conscience reveals innate moral law. Should you let your conscience be your guide? Yeah, here's this conscience is there it's there for a reason But what are some of the hazards of just letting your conscience be your guide? What are the hazards that are there? Yeah part of his emotions and what's wrong with the most our emotions all bad not necessarily Yeah, they can fluctuate all over the place and it can depend on what I had for breakfast or didn't right. I Emotions by themselves do not give us sufficient guidance.

What's another problem with conscience? The conscience can be defective, right? So people who ought to be thinking, you know, this is wrong, and don't. Or, here's the other thing, yeah, I know it's wrong, but I'm going to do it anyway, right? So conscience by itself is not an adequate guide. People can violate conscience. People can override it. People can have their consciences distorted, dulled, and in the worst case, you'll have people who have no conscience at all. And by the way, if you've ever been with somebody who has no conscience at all, that's rather scary.

Yeah, here's another aspect of it. You think about it, especially for someone who is an unbeliever. Yeah, Satan, you know, you look at your enemies. You've got the world, the flesh, and the devil, right? And those are all in concert. So, yeah, conscience can be influenced by Satan. It can be influenced by the world. It can be influenced by the sin nature. It might be a little bit far out, but think of Adam and Eve in the garden, tempted by people.

They said, did God say it? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, and so so here's Satan all he begins by asking a question You know casting some doubt over what God said right and yeah Gary Yes, it can be sincerely wrong can't you right sincerely wrong so you look at these these are the three areas of general revelation and And yet, none of those is complete. Why? Why is there three areas of revelation? You think three? That sounds like a fair number.

What's the problem with it? Yeah, there are specific things that we need to know that, as good as these things are about revealing God, they are not complete and they do not reveal things that we do need to know. And the reality is that human beings, just looking at things from the human viewpoint, are not going to be able to figure out what they need, including even how to get saved. There are various things that don't connect there, right?

Yes. It isn't personal. Yeah, it isn't personal and direct. Yeah. multidimensional sphere and condense it into a space matter. That's really difficult. You look at all those, all those things are in time, right? And plus, it's all based on your current experience. How do you know what's historical? You don't. What's the future of all this? Well, that's a guess, right?

From a human standpoint, what we find in scripture is you know things go all the way back to the beginning and then even before the beginning and we have specific revelation about those things that we could not have figured out if it was just up to us to look at the world around us and how we think and how we feel we wouldn't know that and would we know that as soon as one thousand seven years from now this world will end and a new world will be created and only those who believe are going to be in that new world, in that new heavens and earth.

So you have the general revelations, then you have the specific revelations, and those are scripture, God reveals specific truth intentionally. Specific truth intentionally. What are some of the things that are specifically revealed in the Bible that you would never get anywhere else? God is love. We learn about his eternal power and deity by looking at nature.

We might have some idea of right and wrong from the standpoint of a conscience, but we wouldn't know that. What else? We have salvation and that's not revealed in any of these general You know, kinds of revelations. Gary? It would be tough to understand grace. Yeah, here is grace that has significance, huge significance, not only now but on into eternity. And I would never know that apart from God having revealed it.

Yeah. All the promises of God, you would not know any? Yes! Yeah! Here's all the promises and others. What else? Any spirit. He's a spiritual entity, a spiritual and eternal entity. The Greeks of both philosophical schools that Paul was talking to in Acts 17 in Athens, both of those philosophical schools believed that the physical world was eternal and that gods came and went. Isn't that interesting?

So that's what they had concluded. So we see scripture as a specific revelation. Jesus Christ is a specific revelation. How do we know about Jesus Christ since his last visit was well before our time? So how do we know about Jesus Christ? Through scripture. So we have one specific special revelation, scripture, that also for us reveals Jesus Christ. So scripture is the window through which we see Jesus Christ.

Both historically, that is the time of His visitation on earth, as well as what's happening right now. What's our relationship with Him now? How can we have fellowship with Him now? So God reveals Himself in the form of man and His salvation. Now here's something interesting. How far back was Jesus the Son of God? Forever, right? And why is it a trick question? Was He Jesus forever? And was He Christ forever? In eternity past? Not implemented in history, right?

That came when he was conceived in Mary and born of Mary. That introduction into him being Jesus, the Savior, and Christ, the Anointed One, began an earthly implementation then. So we have these five kinds of revelation, three of them, nature, providence, and conscience, being general, not disclosing things, Then we have Scripture and Christ being special revelations.

Do we know everything that we could possibly want to know from Scripture? No. It is sufficient. not exhaustive is the term. It doesn't cover everything we might want to know. So it's everything we need to know. It's everything that God has determined that we should know, but there are specific places.

Deuteronomy, here's Moses talking to the Israelites before they go into the land and he tells them there are things that God has revealed here and there's some things that he hasn't. Isaiah, God My ways are higher than your ways. My thoughts higher than your thoughts.

And here's John who's told to write in Revelation, you know, write what was, what is, and what is to come. And he's told to, you know, write about this, write about that, write about that. But then one place, the seven thunders, they tell him, don't write about that. Isn't that interesting? Don't write about that. Yes?

It's things that we need to know, but in addition to that, it's things that we need to know so that we can understand inspiration when it comes. And you get those aha moments when you read the scriptures. So, it's a beginning. Here is a book that is not limitless in what it reveals, but the God who inspired it is infinite. So very interestingly, I think you were, Al, you were talking about earlier, you know, you studied this book for 60 years, you know. I've been a Christian for, you know, like 56 years now or something like that. So, and yet what I find is even though it's not limitless in what it reveals, the God who revealed it is limitless, is infinite, therefore I am never going to fully fathom everything that's in this book, even though it's not exhaustive in what it reveals. There is always, until I go home to see the Lord, there is always room to grow in what God's revealed.

I was just thinking, we're limited right now by time. And so we think the opposite of what's on this one. But God's timing is not ours. And each time I go back to a passage, There are little nuggets there to dig out that I wasn't ready for, or aware of, or hadn't had the training for, whatever. And God's timing, He's showing me things, especially since I've joined this fellowship, that I had never thought about, at least not deeply, not integrated into my life. So God works that way in our time. but to accomplish His purpose in His time.

Let's turn to page 2. We have principles of progressive revelation that we want to take a look at here. And the first thing, and we'll talk about this more in a little bit, but just to surface it, 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17, all scripture is inspired, that is, God breathed is what that means. by God, and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work. And then similarly in 2 Peter 1, 20 and 21, But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved And that actually means carried along, men moved by the Holy Spirit, spoke from God. Now there are several principles of progressive revelation we want to talk about here. And the first principle is what do we know now?

And what we mean by that is as we proceed through the pages of the Bible, which span about 1,500 Here's Moses writing the first five books of the Bible, the last book of the Bible being written about 1,500 years later, about 95 AD. Here's the book of Revelation. So over that span of 1,500 years, was everything revealed all at once? No. Things were revealed over time during that time. And so one of the questions we can ask at each stage is what was revealed and what wasn't.

So here is Noah. Does Noah have some revelation from God? Yes, Noah has revelation from God. And of course, a lot of what he talked about particularly was, you know, I've got to build the ark this way and, you know, the flood's coming and, you know, Noah walked with God. Noah had revelation from God. We have revelation from God about Noah, okay? But did Noah know that there was going to be someone chosen, Abraham, and that God was going to make promises to Abraham.

So far as we know, he didn't know that. Did Noah know that the Savior was going to be born of Mary in a little town called Nazareth? He didn't know that. So we could go through, what's that? Born in Bethlehem and grow up in the town of Nazareth. Thank you. Thinking about that, that there is a whole lot that Noah didn't know. Was Noah one who walked with God? Yeah, the Bible says so. He walked with God.

There's still a whole lot that he didn't know. Things that we now can look back on and say, well, we know now. Noah didn't know that. Things weren't revealed. So progressive revelation means things are revealed progressively through time. And at each stage we can ask the question, what's been revealed and what hasn't? What's been revealed and what hasn't?

Noah had enough faith for his time. Yes, Noah knew what he needed to know. He had faith in what God had revealed. Although much of it had yet to be revealed, right? He had faith in what God had revealed to him to that date. And he could walk with God based on what had been revealed to him. So, that's the first principle. What do we know now? We can look at each point. There are a couple of supplements. One looks like this.

Hebrew Old Testament chronology, and the advantage is that this shows you when the various books were written, and in some cases, like Psalms, they were collected over a period of about a thousand years. So the Psalms, we see it as a complete book. In fact, it went for a thousand years being completed.

There is a note at the end of Psalm 72, and it says this is the summation of all the Psalms and that little note was written during David's life. So at 72 they had had a collection and at that point that was where it was at, 72 Psalms. David went on to write several more Psalms that are also included and then they continued over centuries to collect the Psalms over a thousand years the Psalms were being collected. It started with one of the Psalms, and we make note of it there, Psalm 90, written by Moses. So Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible and Psalm 90.

I learned an acronym in school that I thought was very useful for remembering the thing about progressive revelation and salvation. And the object of our salvation is always God. The means of our salvation is always faith. And the basis is always Christ's work on the cross. But the content is what changed. The content of what was revealed and what you believed at that point in time was limited to what the progressive revelation taught to you.

Alright. So, Keith, let me know if there's something I can get you to write up. Yeah, be good. So first principle, what do we know now? And we can ask that at each stage in terms of what's revealed. And even, see the Psalms was not an instant data dump. It was a collection accumulating over a thousand year period of time. Other books were written in a very brief period of time. And what's great about this chart is it shows you the different lengths of time over which different things, different books were revealed.

The next principle, what do we know about the future? That is, prophecy starts in the very early chapters of Genesis. Prophecy starts in the early chapters of Genesis. By the time you get to the end of the Bible, there are point by point about 10,000 prophecies.

About 5,000 of them have been fulfilled, which tells you the other half of all those little prophetic points yet to be fulfilled. One of the reasons why God has not cut everything off, one of the reasons why God has not said, OK, now is the time to end the world, is that He made a promise to Abraham in Genesis chapter 12, and He's still keeping that promise. That promise is in a sense prophetic, because as time goes on, the fulfillment of His promise to Abraham is still going on and is still ahead of us. The complete fulfillment of the promises to Abraham is still ahead of us.

So, what do we know about the future is something that as we proceed through the Bible, there is more and more prophecy. Prophecy starts in the early chapters of the Bible and yet it isn't until you get to David that you start to get a sense, oh a descendant of David is going to reign on the throne over the house of Israel and reign on David's throne over Israel and over the entire earth.

Yes. It's kind of interesting because when you think about it, his revelation and his inspiration is almost dualistic because he does it with the world, those who are unsaved, and then he also does it with the saints, those who are saved. And so you have this almost, it's not a dichotomy because it's the same thing but it's just seen differently and in more depth. He does both. So here's what God does.

He reveals things about the future as he goes through what's revealed in the Bible. So it's not only what do I know now, but what do I know about the future now. See? So that's part of what we want to look at here. It's not just what do I know now, but what do I know about the future now.

And what we've just said is that right now, even with scripture having been completed, we still have 5,000 prophecies, about half, yet to be fulfilled. Future to our time now, even though the Bible's been complete for about 19 centuries. Principle number three, what do we know about the past? As you proceed through scripture, scripture not only points out the future but provides insights about the past. Let me go over some examples of that.

We're told, for example, about Adam and death in the early chapters of Genesis, but we're not told that all mankind is in Adam and therefore all die until 1 Corinthians 15-22. So we get not only increasing prophecies as we go through scripture about the future, but we also get further insights about the past as we go through scripture. We're told about Moses leading the Israelites under the cloud and through the sea in Exodus chapters 14-15, second book of the Bible, but we're not told that the Israelites were baptized into Moses until 1 Corinthians 10-2. The directions about the Passover lamb are given in Exodus 12, but 1 Corinthians 5-7 says explicitly that Christ is our Passover who has been sacrificed. a perspective about the past that is revealed in scripture, and increasingly so as we proceed through scripture. So there's the where are we now question, there's the what do we know about the future question, and then there's the what do we understand about the past question. See that? Those are all aspects of progressive revelation. So what is the point? What is the question about?

What is God doing? I think what he's doing is bringing, for instance today, is bringing more Jewish people to salvation through his timetable. God is a God of history, not that he's immersed in it and subject to it, except as he volunteers to be. But he has a purpose in time. He has a purpose that he's revealed in time. He is accomplishing things in time. All of which is a construct that he has made. He's the one that created time. Yeah. People have sometimes taken history and separated it and said it's his story. Yes, his story. Very good way to put it.

You see, if you study history from a secular standpoint, it's just a bunch of random events, and you can, to some degree, see cause and effect of various kinds. Just like Bible study courses that are done in college in comparative religions. They study the Bible, but they're just looking at it as words. They're not looking at it as inspired or leading towards something. There's nothing particularly spiritual about it. As a matter of fact, the assumptions are specifically non-spiritual. Here's Exodus 17, tells about how God, through Moses, gave the Israelites water from the rock.

But 1 Corinthians 10.4 tells us the rock was Christ.

You don't get that until later. So keeping these three principles, where are we now? And right now, as we go through the Bible, what are we told about the future? And then as we go through the Bible, what insights do we gain about the past as we proceed? So there's those three principles, but we're not done. Page three.

These principles of progressive revelation are essential insights to properly understand scripture, and this leads us to the next principle of progressive revelation. The fourth one, revelation is progressive until it is complete. See, there are those who will say, hey, we've got to continue in the revelation. So we've got the Book of Mormon, and the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price, and I've got Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Key of the Scriptures. So there are those who do that. You've got some charismatic groups who actually say they've got apostles. So you have those who try to bring on progressive revelation.

What we would say is scripture itself indicates that the Old Testament drew to a close with Malachi. about 450 in the following years, B.C. We have a quote there from Josephus that gives us an indication. Josephus wrote it during the end of the New Testament era. Josephus said, with the end of the prophets, and he actually gave here the different books, the end of the prophets, the line ended and nobody dared add to it. Then we have in the New Testament, it is progressive until the last book is written by the Apostle John, the book of Revelation. Any attempt to add to these 27 books, and there have been many, is false. Rough number, rough figure, is that about 800 fake New Testament books were written by the year 800.

And that's an approximate figure. People came up like, Paul wrote in his letter to the Colossians about a letter to the Laodiceans that we don't have. So about a hundred years later, somebody wrote a fake letter to the Laodiceans. And it sounds like a bunch of Paul-like writing, but Paul didn't write it.

It's kind of like I was saying earlier, you have the revelation to the world and you have the revelation to the saints. So you've got the scripture, that's actually for the saints, and you've got all these other things, the Mary Baker Eddy, the Mormonism, the Jehovah Witnesses, etc., etc., etc., which is basically for the world.

So you have to exercise a certain amount of discernment so that you are constantly, as he was saying earlier, in relationship with God or in His will. So that comes through discernment, not necessarily through conscience, but being able to discern what comes from God. Right. And that's where one of the important works of the Holy Spirit that doesn't get talked about much, is we submit ourselves to God. He gives us the gift of the Holy Spirit, and one of the things that the Holy Spirit helps is to divide. Right, to the proper understanding of God's Word.

The other thing that we see here is all of the books of the New Testament, so you've got 39 in the Old, 27 in the New, all the books in the New Testament were either written by an apostle or sponsored by an apostle. And what do I mean by that? You had, initially, Apostles Matthew, John, Paul, writing a number of books. But you also had other books. And let me give an example. Mark, written by John, Mark, sponsored by both Peter and Paul. Peter and Paul each had contact with them. Luke was sponsored by the Apostle Paul.

He's the one apostle that we have association with. And when you go through the books of the New Testament that way, they're all either written by an apostle or sponsored by an apostle. There are five biblical qualifications of an apostle. One, they had success in evangelism. And notice that almost every one of these qualifications of an apostle are written by Paul.

They had success in evangelism, several passages there, 1st and 2nd Corinthians and Galatians. Next, had the capacity to suffer patiently, to persevere in trial. Thirdly, they received the gift and office by a sovereign decision of God. And it wasn't some, hey, pick me, or I'll do it. But no, they were particularly selected and appointed by God for what they were doing. Here's the Apostle Paul, he's saying, I'm going to Damascus to kill as many Christians as I can. And what did the Lord do? The Lord confronted him there on the road to Damascus, and he had an assignment for him.

And by the way, part of that, right in chapter 9, is he's going to suffer greatly for me. Part of the qualifications. The next one had to have been an eyewitness of the resurrected Jesus Christ. And of course you had those while Christ was here on earth during his time in ministry. The Apostle Paul met directly and personally with the Lord, and it seems in iterations over time after Christ was resurrected. And then the fifth one, endowed with power to perform signs, wonders, and miracles.

So when these apostles, when their life ended, that was the end of the apostles, the end of any apostolic authoring, and the end of any apostolic sponsoring. So it's not just, hey, we think it ended, but you have the apostles as the authors or the sponsors of the entire New Testament. With them out of the picture, you're done, right? You're done with the New Testament.

God is completely revealing through His Son and those He elected to serve as contemporary witnesses. This is Hebrews 1, 2. And Jude 3 and Revelation 12, 18 and 19, 1 Corinthians 4, Hebrews 2, 1 through 4, Ephesians 2, 20, and 3, 4, and 5, all speak of the finality of apostolic era revelation.

One example out of Ephesians there is the apostles and prophets are the foundation, right? So when do you quit building the foundation? when you're ready to build on the superstructure, correct? So, for example, when they're building this church, they just didn't keep building foundation, foundation, foundation, all the way from the bottom. It was a stopping point, and then you put the superstructure on top. So there are no more apostles, and no others qualify biblically according to those five points that we have here above.

So the Bible is God's love letter to us that took 1,500 years to complete. So if it's not prophets and it's not apostles, what are the people going to be called that lead the people through the tribulation in the millennial age? Alright, let's think about that. Through the tribulation and the millennial age, how is this going to happen? Let's talk about the tribulation period briefly, since we could spend way too much time on it. But let's talk about that. What are the ways God is going to have a voice in the world during the tribulation period?

Okay, first is 144,000. This is chapter 7 of Revelation. Chapter 7 and chapter 14. There are 144,000 single Jewish males, 12,000 by each tribe, listed by tribe. And they will be sealed so as not to be impacted by all these crazy things going on in the world. And they will go out and evangelize and speak the truth from the early time of the tribulation period.

We've got another one. What else do we have? The Gospel Angel. There's a Gospel Angel. It says it flies in three levels of heaven, atmospheric, stellar, and celestial heaven, the place where God dwells. This Gospel Angel goes about proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, at least, there in the atmospheric heavens. It would be like if you had, here's this plane flying by and it's got this banner with a message on the back, only it's an angel, not an airplane. So here are the 144,000 on the earth and you've got a gospel angel, what else? What else have you got?

You've got two prophets who from the beginning to the middle of the tribulation period proclaim And if anybody tries to oppose them, these guys are like Moses and Elijah, they just, boom, you're dead. So after a while people get the idea, I guess I better not oppose this guy or I'm not going to be around. So they're called prophets because they are Those two are called two witnesses. Two witnesses. Specifically. So there are two witnesses that God has basically untouchable until the middle of the tribulation period. So there's your third, and we're not done. Yes?

Well, the word prophet, sometimes we get hung up on words. And basic meaning is just someone who proclaims God's truth. So he may not have a title with a capital P, Prophet. But we are prophets in a word study manner when we proclaim God's truth. A prophet speaks for God is the general category.

We don't say prophet vermin. But doesn't the book of Hebrews specifically say that Jesus was the last prophet? That kind of prophet, right? Jesus was the last... The problem is you have New Testament category prophets that continue even after Jesus left. Jesus was the prophet, the one that Moses spoke of as coming and speaking like Moses to the people. Because he is the Word. Pardon? Because he is the Word. And he is the Word, yes.

What's the Bible verse for Gospel Angel? I have to take a look at that, but that's in the book of Revelation in the middle. That's in the book of Revelation, the middle. You'll have to look that up. It's very close to the middle. But there's one more. You've got one more voice.

How about tribulation saints? So, aside from the 144,000, aside from the two witnesses, aside from the gospel angel, you also have tribulation saints. Towards the end, many of them will lose their lives. But nonetheless, you'll have tribulation saints.

So you've got those four voices giving specific revelation to the world and speaking the truth out to a world, many of whom don't want to hear it. Now, we get into the Millennial Kingdom, we've got a whole lot more voices. First of all, you've got the Messiah right there. You've got us with the Messiah. You have Old Testament and Tribulation Saints resurrected.

Jew and Gentile, resurrected and present in the Millennial Kingdom, and you have at the start of it, everybody who enters the Millennial Kingdom will be a believer. Nobody who is an unbeliever will enter. There will be those who died during the Millennial Kingdom. There will be those who are born during the Millennial Kingdom. But at least starting, 100% believers entering the Millennial Kingdom. And so you'll have all those voices plus God's word will be there. God's word will be present.

Okay, now looking at, you've got these charts here. Here is Hebrew Old Testament chronology. Now let's take a look at one. We've got the book of Isaiah. It's kind of center and slightly to the right. Here's the book of Isaiah. centered around the year 700 approximately. So let's take Isaiah 53. Isaiah 53 is the one that says, you know, who has believed our message?

And then it goes on to talk in prophetic terms about Christ's death, his burial, and his resurrection. Did Isaiah understand everything about Jesus when he wrote that? No, he didn't. But he wrote prophetically as the Lord directed him to write. And we do as we look at it, we see from the very first verse, belief is the issue. It's belief.

And then we see death, burial, and resurrection in those verses. What are some things that Isaiah knew by that time, about the year 700 when he wrote that? What are some things that Isaiah knew? He knew Messiah was going to die. and be buried and resurrected.

Right? Okay. Good. And this was principle number two. It's prophetic about the future. In other words, what had been revealed by his time, prophetically, was that the Messiah would die, be buried, and rise again. Right? Even ask the question, who has believed our report? That's right. Who has believed it? Which says that belief is the issue. Okay? Belief is the issue. And there's the fundamentals of the gospel right there. Yes.

Well, he expanded upon Genesis 3.15, the fact that there was going to be a Messiah, and what he was going to be like, and where he was going to come from. Right. So here's Isaiah. You think about it. If you look at this chart here, had all the Psalms been written? No. So this book of Psalms is still being collected.

All the books that you see after his time had not been written yet. He didn't know about any of that. He didn't know about any of the New Testament. He knew about the pre-king history of the Jewish race. Right, so he was king up to the time of Hezekiah and the ones that followed. He served under quite a number of kings. Yes, he served under several different kings of Judah. So there are things that yet to be revealed. The whole New Testament and all these books in the Old Testament yet to be revealed. He didn't know about a guy named Daniel.

He knew that God had a message. He knew that God was mighty. Go back to chapter 6 where he says, I was in the temple. His vision of the Lord high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple with glory. Who am I? He realized he was a sinner. Here's Isaiah, it describes what he sees in the heavenly scene. But what's his response? Does he feel comfortable there? Does he feel like, hey, this is home?

Woe is me. Woe is me. He's freaked out. He's freaked out, and yet we, with later revelation, look and see, oh, I'm seated there in the heavenlies. I call the Father, Papa. What an entirely different perspective we have on that heavenly scene. Why? It's because we're of a different group, and we have more revelation. Right? Yes.

And it's also the fact that in the Old Testament, except for an occasional theophany, which was probably Jesus, their revelation was always God was always seeing them, not the Holy Spirit or not Jesus except through the Theophany, but it was God. God on his throne like in Isaiah. Ezekiel seeing the wheels and all this other sort of thing. Moses having a face-to-face dissertation with God on the mountain, etc. And that's how God revealed himself to specific ones. But it was God. And it showed an aspect of God that really puts more meaning to propitiation because of his anger and his wrath. God's holiness and his righteousness and an absolute demand for justice. Absolutely. Yes. I was reading a devotional a couple days ago that talked about the names of God. Why so many names for God? Yeah.

As he gets revealed in his different attributes and functions, you know him as a different name. One of the things we could do with this same chart is to look at it and say, what names get revealed when? We could do that, couldn't we? What names get revealed when? And we could go through that. What names for Christ get revealed when? So we could go through and see progressive revelation, and it reveals a number of things, including names of God which reveal attributes of God. It's not this chart, it's your other one on the New Testament books. But when you look at that and see where James is written, you understand better than the words in the book of James, how they fit into the revelation that was just being revealed.

Grace was still new. People thought they should have one foot on law and one foot in grace. And they hadn't really apprehended the full meaning. And when you take a look at Paul's epistles and look at James and try to make a conflict, it disappears when you really put it into its proper place. Yeah, let's take a look.

Here's James writing, to pick your example, here's James writing about 45 AD, it's a little more than a decade after Christ has come and gone, okay? So he's writing, does he know that he's seated with Christ in the heavenlies? No. He doesn't know yet that he's seated with Christ in the heavenlies. Does he even know that he's been identified with Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection?

Doesn't seem so. Yeah. Doesn't seem so. And even the Apostle Paul, he writes to the church at Rome before the end of the book of Acts. Does Paul convey that he understands that we're seated with Christ in the heavenlies? What's that? In Romans, because he wrote Romans. What's interesting is he specifically writes, we've been identified with Christ's death, burial, and resurrection. There's nothing in Romans that gets the believer off the ground. And that's all in Chapter 6, isn't it? Yeah, Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 are the identification passages, yeah. So, I've seen Bibles that are advertised about the Bible in chronological order. I'm assuming that they changed the order of the books.

Does that lead to a better understanding of when things were revealed or does it make it more confusing? The reality is that that sort of thing is somewhat helpful. In the end, you have to take a look at it and say when did things happen and ask those kinds of questions anyway. Because different things happen in different parts of the book. Right, and what we pointed out here is not all the books were written at some point in time.

So yeah, in other words, what you would have to do is say, OK, I'm going to have this book here, and all of a sudden I'm going to insert Psalm 90 that Moses wrote, and I'm going to put that there in the middle of Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus. Put that smack dab in the middle there. So I'd have to really cut and splice to really do that service. Because the truth is, you've got books like the Psalms that are spread out over time, and in some cases we have a very clear indication as to when it was written, like the one by Moses.

In other cases, we have very little indication as to when it was written. So in some cases like that, they'd have to be guessing if they were to do a real job of making everything chronological. So, and that's one of the things we'll be doing is going through these. In a few instances, I've rearranged the order just in order to get things a little bit more chronological or to put things together that should be together.

Her example is the Book of Judges, which covers a long period of time and a number of different judges and that kind of thing. And you have in the middle of that time frame Ruth, the Moabite woman, and her account. So here's Ruth, and you've got basically one life revealed there. Yes, Esther's another. Here's one life and one insert point in time, and yet you have other books of the Bible extending over many, many centuries. Yeah? I'm an owner of the Bible, and I've read through it. It's novel, but you'd be better to just take this chart. read your Bible, just have an awareness when you study a book. Right, yeah, where am I? And just look at the chart.

It doesn't gain you a lot of things, and they have gone through great efforts to put the Psalms into different places where they can tie it in, but there's a lot of slush. Yeah. There's things we don't know. Yeah, you have some Psalms that give clear indication of when they were written, and others not. There's nothing historical in the context of some of the Psalms. And in fact, some of the Psalms are prophetic.

Psalm 2 is about the tribulation period in the beginning of the millennium. Psalm 22 is about Christ's crucifixion. So here's another example of, okay, here's when it was written, when is it talking about? Psalm 22 was written about a thousand years ahead of when it was actually fulfilled with Christ's crucifixion. Psalm 2 has actually not happened yet. You've got a lot of scripture that is for an event that's occurring in that time frame, but it's pointing to something important that's farther.

It's like us going out and driving down I-25, you get close to Pike's Peak, you don't see Pike's Peak, you just see the foothills. You have to get back a ways and then you see the foothills and Pike's Peak in perspective. Okay, I've got to wrap it up here because I've got people pressing their noses up against the window. So let's pray.

I think this is, to me, it seems like an exciting start. Here's what God is doing, He's revealed these amazing things because He loves us and cares about us and He wants us to know these things, impacting our day-by-day growth and impacting what we're looking forward to in the future. That's great. Barbara, thank you for your word and thank you for the exciting things that have just begun to open here. Thank you that you've laid out these specific revelations and we can trust that you've in fact inspired them and you have even selected what's revealed because you love us and care for us and you know what we need and that's another thing we can take comfort in. You know what we need. in the way of information as well. And it's not just data, but it's something that we need personally and in fact eternally. We thank you for it. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.