How to Study the Bible III - Between the Old & New Testaments

Today we are talking history. So remember, when we're trying to interpret scripture, it's important to know that scripture is written at a point in time, within a culture, in a given language. And so we study all aspects here. We understand history, culture, and language so that we can better understand what scripture is saying. Today's focus will be mostly on history, and we're focusing on the time period in between the Old Testament and the New Testament. So it makes tons of sense if we would understand what's going on historically while a book of the Bible is being written. Why in the world would we study history when no books of the Bible are being written whatsoever?

Bingo. Because history has impacts in the future, and the future of what we're talking about this week is going to be when Christ is walking around on this earth. So, yes, super relevant. There's about a 400-year period between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament.

And so just as a bit of a reminder, Israel ends up getting conquered by Assyria. That's about that. Judah, however, continues on Babylon. The Babylonians conquered Judah, and then we enter into this Persian Empire shortly thereafter. The Persian Empire lasts from all the way up to about 336 BC.

So that's what the blue number is about. You'll see some variation in that number. It'll range from maybe 336 up to 331. And that's because it turns out that the Persian Empire was quite large. And so which of the many, many, many battles do you decide, aha, now! Now the Persian Empire is dead. So another common one that you'll see is 331, and I'll point out why when we get there. So let's talk first about the Persian Empire.

The thrust of this particular map is, oh my gosh, ain't it big. So the Persian Empire was most of the known world at that point. It did stay out of northern Europe. Those Germanic tribes were vicious and unpredictable. They did not fight in an orderly manner. And so that land wasn't super exciting, so let's just not go up there. So walk through a progression of some of the Persian kings leading up until the Greeks took over.

Cyrus conquered Babylon during his reign. And it was important to the Persians. It was fundamental to their religious beliefs that you should not keep a people group away from where their cultural identity is. And so having conquered Babylon, they decided, you know what, anybody who wants to take off, go ahead and do that. And so the Jews did, some portion of them, and then the temple started being reconstructed.

The passage from Ezra 1-1 is super interesting with respect to Cyrus, and so I'm going to Go ahead and read it, and my speaker notes are like this. So now I'm going to squint and stick my face right in my computer. Now in the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, the Lord stirred up a spirit of Cyrus, king of Persia, so that he sent a proclamation through all his kingdom, and also put it in writing, saying, Thus says Cyrus, king of Persia, The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has appointed me to build him a house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah.

Whoever there is among you of all his people, may as God be with him. Let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and rebuild the house of the Lord, the God of Israel. He is the God who is in Jerusalem. Every survivor, at whatever place he may live, let the men of that place support him with silver and gold, with goods and cattle, together with a freewill offering for the house of God, which is in Jerusalem." So pretty cool. Persian king inspired by God to wave his magic wand and make a temple appear in Jerusalem. Jews can go. Everybody donate money. Let's go build this thing.

So his predecessor, boy that's a tough one, Cambyses, we're going to pretend that that's the pronunciation, came along and said, that's nonsense, that costs a lot of money and it's not producing anything for us, so let's stop that. So he didn't stay around too terribly long. Along came Darius I, and he said, let's go ahead and finish the temple. And the temple was, in fact, finished during his reign in about 515 BC.

Xerxes came along. The thing that I find most interesting about Xerxes is I am confident that during his time he was, like, super great. And he felt like he was super great. I am Xerxes, right? I know him because of Esther. And so it's just super interesting how God raises people up, and it's he who glorifies. Xerxes is distinguished by having been the king who was in reign when Esther was his queen. As Xerxes came along, he said, yes, let's go ahead and rebuild Jerusalem, let's rebuild its wall. That is what is there today.

A whole mess of kings later, enter King Darius III. King Darius III was not a strong and gifted leader. How would you like that? To be remembered 2400 years after you're walking around on this earth, and what you were remembered for is not a super effective leader, but that was what he was.

So he met Alexander the Great in battle on more than one occasion. On each such occasion, he had a great idea. Run away. Because, it turns out, Alexander the Great was a great strategist, and despite being overmatched in every battle by sheer numbers, He tended to do pretty well in the battles. And so Darius, when he would see Alexander, would say, ha ha, flee.

He only reigned for about four years. Most of that time was spent running away from Alexander. And eventually, so historians are somewhat in disagreement by this. He either fled the last battle, at which Alexander the Great finally conquered the last major city within the Persian Empire. He ran away and was later assassinated by his cousin, or Alexander took him on the battlefield.

In any case, when that happened, the army just went completely it just turned into a chaotic sea of people, and so Alexander was able to take it, even though he was outnumbered by 10 to 1 in that battle. So, Greek Empire. Let us talk about some Alexander the Great. So, Alexander the Great.

A few fun facts about him. So number one, he was son of Philip II of Macedon. Philip was assassinated. The circumstances surrounding that assassination are a little bit unclear. There are those who suppose that Alexander himself had a hand in the assassination of his father. Regardless, Alexander ended up taking over. He'd been tutored by Aristotle for a while, so there's an interesting connection. He was super smart.

He ended up starting his conquest of the Persian Empire when he was about 20 years old, and carried that through until he was about 30 years old. So, made it to 20, then spent the next decade roughly equal to half of his life up to that point just conquering. Fun fact about that, and you can sort of get a sense of his opinion of himself from this.

I'm going to just name off a few of the cities that he conquered as he went through, because he renamed them as he conquered them. So some of the names are Alexandria, Alexandria, Alexandria, Alexandria, Alexandria, 16 of those. So 16 cities he created named Alexandria. He named a city after his horse. He named a city after his dog. He named a city after his mama, because who doesn't love their mama? He named a city After his death, that's Philippi.

So that's where we got that one. So in 334, he started his attack on the Persian Empire. He was grossly outnumbered in many, many, many of those battles. He was just an astounding strategist and tactician. And he trained his soldiers and drilled them and drilled them and drilled them and drilled them so that they could execute his plans exactly the way that he wanted his plans executed. And so it was on that basis that he was able to take on forces of much, much greater number. We already talked about Darius. You should have a handout that shows this, a special handout perhaps on the back. It would be delightful if you did. Yes? It's on the second page, I think. This one? Yeah, it's on the second page.

OK, awesome. So this shows the progression of Alexander the Great as he went through. And you can see that he pretty much hugged the coastline as he came down. around over into Egypt. So a couple of interesting stories along the way. You see the big battle at Tyre.

So the folks who lived there weren't too terribly concerned about warring factions coming through, because they were seamen. They had pretty swift boats, and there was an island that was just offshore. And so what they would do when somebody came in is just everybody jump on the boats, go to the island, wait for the bad guys to go, and then sail back to shore. And then life was really good.

Alexander, to give you an idea of his approach, when they did that, he saw them. OK, well, what we really need is a giant sandbar so we can just walk out there and slaughter them all. And so he ordered the complete destruction of the city and used all the building materials in the city through those into the sea. And there's still a sandbar to this day. That island no longer exists. It's been connected to the mainland. That approach did not work out super well for those guys at that time.

Alexander the Great keeps coming down, and he gets to Jerusalem. And at this point, he's just been conquering and conquering and conquering. He gets into Jerusalem, and rather than running into another army that he's got to fight, the Jewish leaders come out, and they say, we were expecting you.

I'm sorry, what? Let us read to you from Daniel 8. And actually, that would be a really cool thing to do. So the exciting thing was they told him, hey, guess what? Our scriptures predict that you're going to come here. So you're here. That's wonderful. So this is Daniel chapter 8. I'm going to read for a little while.

The first ram with multiple horns we'll get is the Persian Empire, and then the next one, the goat with the singular horn, this is our Alexander the Great. I'm going to start in verse 3. Then I lifted my eyes and looked, and behold, a ram, which had two horns, was standing in front of the canal. Now, the two horns were long, but one was longer than the other, and the longer one coming up last.

I saw the ram butting westward, northward, and southward, and no other beast could stand before him, nor was there anyone to rescue from his power. But he did as he pleased, and he magnified himself. So now we've got this giant Persian empire. While I was observing, behold, a male goat was coming from the west over the surface of the whole earth without touching the ground. And the goat had a conspicuous horn between his eyes.

He came up to the ram that had the two horns, which I had seen standing in front of the canal, and rushed at him with this mighty breath. I saw him come beside the ram. And he was enraged at him. And he struck the ram and shattered his two horns. And the ram had no strength to withstand him. So he hurled him to the ground and trampled on him. And there was none to rescue the ram from his power. Then the male goat magnified himself exceedingly."

I'm going to finish just this section and ask you guys to remember the next couple of verses. We'll come back to them. But as soon as he was mighty, the large horn was broken, and in its place there came up four conspicuous horns toward the four winds of heaven." So the Jews greet Alexander the Great like, wonderful, you're here. Our scriptures predict your coming. You can imagine Alexander the Great, this conquering hero, hearing Our religious texts tell us that you are going to come.

I was thinking, I like these people. These are really good people. He says, OK, what do you want? And they said, we want what we've always wanted. You know what? You can go ahead and rule us. We don't need complete autonomy. What we do need is to be able to continue doing what we've been doing, which is worshipping the Lord our God. We want to continue our temple practices, follow our law. And by the way, it would be great if every seventh year you just gave us a break on our taxes. And Alexander the Great says, yeah, that's a pretty good arrangement. And so he lets them do exactly that. There are folks who disagree with this historical account. These are exactly the same folks who don't believe that prophecy exists, and so they're highly motivated to discount the account.

Alexander continues on through Jerusalem, makes it down into Egypt, and conquers there, creates a city. It's called Alexandria, of course. From this point on, whenever I talk about Alexandria, I'll be talking about that, not one of the other 15 Alexandrias.

He got down there and decided, you know what? This is a great place for trade. It's right on the coast, so we can get ships in and out. Highly strategic. I don't want to lose this, so I want to plant some people here to make sure that it stays the way that it's supposed to stay.

And so he scratches his head for a little bit, and he says, you know what? Those people up in Jerusalem were pretty awesome, and they liked me a lot. So he went back up to Jerusalem, grabbed some of the folks from up there, brought them down to Alexandria, and started a Jewish calling down there.

Yes, ma'am? Is this the Alexandria that was the hub of knowledge and had the library and that sort of thing? Yes. OK. Exactly. And so when we get to the Septuagint, It was written in Alexandria for a very specific reason. So now we've got a large Jewish population in Alexandria. And we've got a strong push toward enculturation into the Greek culture. Sure, you can continue your laws and your traditions, but you're going to learn our language.

That ends up being pretty important. So the Babylonians, what they were about was they would go and conquer a people group pick them up from where they were, and move them somewhere else, and plop them down so that they lose any sort of sense of identity. And pick them up and move them again, and pick them up and move them again. They like to do that.

Alexander took a different approach. So this was unusual that he grabbed Fulks and brought him down to Alexandria. So for Star Trek Fulks, he was more closely affiliated with the Borg. So what he would do is just assimilate, assimilate, assimilate. So he would conquer a people group and then say, OK, we've had this.

It's just like boys fighting in junior high school. So many boys end up growing up. best friends. And you ask, OK, how did you meet one another? And it was, well, we really didn't like each other. And so we had some fist fights. And then we decided we were all right in their type. This is the exact approach Alexander took.

So he would conquer a people group and say, OK, no. No harm. Sure would like to have you on my side, so let's teach you some language. Let's teach you some military strategy. You can join my army. You'll get some rewards. And off they would go. So his kingdom grew and grew and grew, not with people who were highly resistant to what he was doing, because they would get rewards for then joining his military forces.

So different approach, different strategy. I'll give you a moment to read the quote from Josephus. The gist is the story I just told you, pretty much spot on. So Josephus was a historian, maybe around about 100 to 200 AD. So there we go. The end of Alexander the Great. So Alexander conquered for a decade. He was outnumbered ten to one, sometimes even more in battle, had no problem conquering through, got to the ends of the known earth, and then alcoholism, and possibly a mosquito took him down. So, looking at the historical records, we don't have 100% confirmation.

The symptoms that he was experiencing right before he kicked the bucket resemble malaria. So, God enabled him to conquer all of that land, and then very possibly sent a little bug like that to take him out. because his work was done. Something revealing in what he said on his deathbed. And they asked him, OK, so you're in the process of dying.

Who is going to take over for you? Who's going to rule the kingdom? And his response was, the strongest. had either given no thought whatsoever to who would rule after him, or he just didn't care. It was all about Alexander. Maybe Alexander the Great could be Alexander the Self-Important.

So what happened, he had four generals. Those four generals ended up creating a civil war. They fought amongst themselves and ended up dividing that kingdom up into four pieces. Interesting that that ram's horn broke them in half and four smaller horns grew in its place.

So the two that we care about the most are the orange and the green on this particular chart. which is our Ptolemaic and our Seleucid kingdoms. I do want to point out right here, this area, which is Israel, it actually ended up shifting hands quite a lot. You see a well-defined border between these two kingdoms. But that was pretty desirable land, pretty difficult land to keep a hold of as well. And so that property changed between the two kingdoms 12 times. So the Jews, I'm sure, by that point were pretty tired of, OK, we're under this guy, now we're under this guy, and just back and forth and back and forth. Hard to keep track of what rules they need to follow. But also, interestingly, throughout all of those changes of hands, Somehow they were able to continue following their laws and their traditions. They still had the temple. They were still conducting their sacrifices. All of that continued.

So looking at what came out of this, number one, Alexander distributed the Greek language over this whole region. He also unified the language. So there were multiple dialects at that time. The most common one was Attic Greek. If you wanted to go and read Socrates and Plato and Aristotle in the original language, the original language would be Attic Greek. Now, New Testament Greek is Koine Greek. It's common Greek. It's different than Attic. So think of Attic Greek as the language of the intellectuals.

And so it was a much headier language, large vocabulary, complicated construction. Some of you were in here when we were going over Greek at the beginning of this class, and you got to see how, as verbs change tense and change usage, those endings change on those Greek verbs. And you know that there may have been 50, 60 different endings that had to be memorized so that you could go through all of the tenses and voices and so on. There was fully a third more of those in Attic Greek. So even more memorization. And the reason was, in Koine Greek, like in English, we have singular and we have plural.

So there's either one of you or there's a lot of you. In Attic Greek, there's one of you, two of you, or a lot of you. And so you just had another set of endings for that dual. So you had singular, dual, and plural. There were also some complicated constructions in the way the prepositions were used.

Be grateful you did not have to learn Attic Greek. He comes through, he conquers people. Greek is not their first language. When we learn English as a second language, we learn a simpler dialect. Vocabulary, we don't worry about picking up all of the different words, just enough to be able to communicate. And so some of the more esoteric words drop out of the language.

And so just from a military's strategic reasoning, he needed to simplify the language so that everybody could learn the language, so that they could follow his instructions, so that they could conquer. And so reduced the dialects, made things simpler, distributed the Greek language because he wants everybody speaking Greek so that he can command them effectively. And he enforced the changes. You had to learn Greek full stop. And interestingly, he was so emphatic about learning Greek, and so forceful that everybody should learn Greek, that the Jews that he pulled down from Jerusalem to Alexandria in Egypt Within one generation, they'd already lost their language. And so there were some who knew Hebrew, but most everybody was speaking Greek at that point. It's like, ah, how do we read our scriptures?

Kind of a big deal. Enter the Septuagint. The Septuagint is a Greek translation of the Old Testament that was done in about 250 BC. So this is really 80 years after Alexander came through and conquered this region. Now we need a Greek New Testament because people don't speak Hebrew. Did I say New Testament? Because if I did, I meant old. Because people were not speaking Hebrew so much anymore.

The Septuagint is also referred to as the LXX, Roman numerals for 70, because ostensibly there were 70 translators involved in writing this. And it was done down in Alexandria, because that's where the greatest need for those Old Testament scriptures was. random fun thought. When Alexander grabbed the Jews out of Jerusalem and pulled them down into Alexandria, and then 80 years later when they got their Greek Old Testament to study, and you've got this strong community down there, I think God had some sort of plan about maybe Mary and Joseph needing a place to stay for a couple of years when Jerusalem wasn't so safe. It's kind of cool. So looking at the Septuagint, some of the books are translated very well. It's neither Attic nor Koine. It's something called translation Greek. But not all of the books of the Septuagint were translated cleanly. So some had some additional interpretation in them.

A great example of that would be Daniel. And why in the world wouldn't you want to mess with that one a little bit? Because we conquered these people. They told us that their scriptures predicted Alexander the Great's coming through. So let's just mark up. chapter 8 a little bit and throw in some stuff about Alexander the Great, because that's pretty good. The Jews were smart enough to suss that out, took those books. Daniel's the only one I knew of, but I believe that there were others.

Took those books, chalked them, rewrote those. And so that's where we ended up with the overall Septuagint. So Verne will refer to the Septuagint a ton because there is a lot of insight that we can get out of the construct of the Greek language. And so he will refer to that pretty heavily. The Septuagint, it would have been the scriptures that when Paul was going around that many of the Jews would have been familiar with. Yes. OK. That's right. So, yes ma'am. And are we talking from Genesis to Malachite? Okay, thank you.

Migration of Jews, about 220 B.C. There were 2,000 families that were located down in Babylon. If you'll remember when the king all the way back in 500 something B.C. said, okay, anybody who wants to go to Jerusalem, go to Jerusalem. A lot of people did. A lot of people didn't because they were established. They had families. They're now in Babylon. And so in 220, they get encouraged to move.

We do the same thing here in the US. So we'll actually give tax breaks and pay folks to go and live in Alaska because Alaska is not a fun place to live. But we need it habitated. We supplement that. And to some people, that sounds like a great idea. They're like, yes, I'm cashing in. I'm going to Alaska. Most of us, not so much. Well, same arrangement was made for these folks. They were told, you know what? We'll give you a tax break. No taxes for 10 years if you move. So 2,000 families said, that's a great deal. We're going to do that.

And they took off. And where they ended up landing was up by Ephesus. And so 250 years later, 280 years later, Paul's writing to the churches up there. And they're struggling with a very legalistic Jewish community that is coming in and trying to put law onto grace. They came from here. They came from Babylon. They moved for a tax break.

Pharisees and the Sadducees came out of the Hasidim in the Old Testament. They split out into a number of different factions. And some of the groups are kind of interesting. So we all know about the Pharisees and the Sadducees. So the Sadducees, who Bernal will point out, are not sad, you see. They came out of the priests. So out of all of these groups, they're the only ones who have some tribe affinity, the tribe affinity to Levi. So they came out of the priests.

Their fundamental belief was, all we can trust are the first five books of the Bible as they are written down, called the Torah. So that's what they buy, nothing else. The Pharisees came out of the scribes. This one is fascinating to me, because the Pharisees, they buy what the Sadducees buy, but then they also buy the complete oral tradition and all of the interpretation by the various rabbis of the Old Testament scriptures, which later got canonized in the Talmud. They buy all of the traditions, the traditions that are passed orally. But they came out of the scribes. So the gang that was responsible for carefully, methodically, precisely replicating scripture time and time again without a single word wrong decided, you know what? Oral tradition is A-OK with us as well. They were the predominant group by the time Jesus was walking on the earth. The zealots we see in scripture. Simon was a zealot.

These were folks who were very much opposed to the Roman government. They were rebels. They ended up spawning the revolution. 80, 70, plus or minus 3, that ended up getting Jerusalem just completely crushed. After Jerusalem was a complete wasteland, they were still holed up in a fort fighting. And they stayed fighting for a good five or six months.

After everybody else had been just pretty much wiped out, and the temple had been pushed off, They were excellent fighters, perhaps didn't have the long view on what their revolution might do. You get the Assyrians, and then also the Sakurai. Those guys are scary. So the only mention in scripture of the Sakurai is about the 4,000 assassins that are going out into the desert.

So the folks that we know in Israel today who are hardcore, who are fighters, who are military, same was true back then. Interestingly, during the Greek rule when, well, we'll get there when we get to the Romans. So the Hasmonean Empire. This was the Jews managed to cast off the Greeks.

Interesting what caused this to happen. So life was going pretty well under the Greeks until this guy Antiochus decided that he really wanted to put the Jews under his thumb. And he thought that the best way to go about this would be to erect an idol of Zeus on the temple mount and force the Jews to sacrifice, of all things, pigs on the altar. So it turns out the Maccabees didn't like that very much. There was a revolution. There was a lot of slaughter. And then all of a sudden, the Greeks were no longer in control of Jerusalem.

Also interesting, the pits that had been sacrificed within that temple, you can imagine that that made things a little unclean in there, and so there was a purification that had to take place. As the story goes, there was a candle lit during the purification. The oil was supposed to last for one day. It ended up lasting for eight days.

Because this is a people group that cannot glorify war and honor and celebrate war, we get Hanukkah from this time period, because Hanukkah celebrates the purification of the temple after the revolution that was successful. We're running low on time because I'm being long-winded today. So let's go ahead and skip over Hillel and Shemai. I think Vern has covered it about 40 times in the last year.

And we'll jump straight forward to the Roman Empire. So the city of Rome had been formed. I mean, Alexander the Great came across, and just right behind him, the city of Rome starts to grow and bloom. By the second century, the Roman military had started moving along that same path that Alexander the Great had taken. Yes. So the beginnings of the Roman Empire by 63 BC, the Roman Empire had actually come through and managed to conquer the Hasmonean Empire.

And so now we're no longer under Jewish rule. We're under Roman rule. The Romans did allow for some limited self-rule and some exceptions to their processes. to be able to have some sort of peace with the group that was there. For example, you can imagine how a group that cares about military dexterity would not want to include a people group that can't travel on the Sabbath. That would not go well. So the Jews were exempted from having to do military service. random thing. They were also exempted from the one wife law. Turns out not many of them took up the Roman folks on being able to have that liberty.

So the problem that the Romans ran into was you see the orange area that is up yonder. So these are the Parthians, and they kept coming down and trying to grab some land back. And they actually made it all the way down into Jerusalem and managed to conquer. And then a while later, they got pushed all the way back.

But because this was such a key location, the Roman government decided we need to put a stronghold there. We need to put something in place that is going to keep those Parthians from coming down. And they said, what we really need is somebody who is completely cruel and insane. And we will put him in charge. So inter Herod the Great, he was paranoid, he was crazy, and he was vicious.

There was a historian, I think it was Josephus again, but I'm not sure, who made a play on words in the Greek, saying it's better to be his hus than his quias. which is to say it's better to be Herod's pig than his son. So Herod started building all sorts of stuff. He liked construction programs. That kept him happy.

Interesting thing about Herod, he had the title of king. If you work in a small company today and you want to attract talent from the outside, but you can't actually pay them with lots of money, you get them a fancy title. They're like, I don't know, the king of software development. So they did the same thing with Herod. He was made king. They didn't actually mean anything. They just sort of threw titles out willy-nilly to make people happy. So it's King Herod.

OK, so one of the things he did, the Jerusalem Temple upgrade, this is a model of it here. He actually had to construct the walls first, then bring dirt in from outside to build up inside those walls so that he had enough surface area on which to build the temple. So it was a huge endeavor. And then the Herodium, which kind of looks like an ant hill up there. That was an existing mountain. He lopped the top off of that thing, scooped it out inside, and set up a military base in there. And there were actually a number of these along the border up there, because everything out there are mostly plains with these hills that are scooped out. And great watchtowers that you could see for miles and miles. And so keeping the Parthenons out, great idea. We won't have time to go into this today.

The Herod family chart, though, is a hoot, so this is a redacted version of his family tree. These are only the wives. He had nine or ten wives. These are the ones that are mentioned in scripture, so they're relevant for us. This is a case of I am my own grandpa, because some of these people had married one another, and then married sons, and then it was pretty. The ancestry goes more straight up than branched out.

OK. Emperor Augustus. There were a number of emperors that rose up, fell, rose up, fell, rose up, fell. Emperor Augustus was in power for about 45 years prior to, well, prior to and during Christ's early childhood. Having a rule for that long, 45 years, you get an entire generation and a half that are raised within that rule.

And so where previous Caesars would come into power and would throw out the laws that had been there prior that they didn't care about, that couldn't happen because he was in control for that whole time. So he brought a ton of stability. into the area of political stability. And then, even after his death, because you have a generation and a half that were raised within his law, they were pretty resistant to change. People do not like it when you move their chiefs, and they have to go and find it again. And so that stability lasted, even after his death.

Let's skip over that one. Roman roads. So one of the things that the Romans did that was pretty fantastic was build enough roads to go around the earth multiple times. And the way that they built these roads was pretty incredible. They would go dig super deep, and then layer sand, and then layer pea gravel, and then gravel, and then rocks, and then big boulders. So they were super, super stable because they had to move super heavy military equipment around quickly.

Those roads, many of them are still around today. This is a picture that I took in 2006 when I was in Jerusalem. This is a market that's there. Those stones that are there, they were placed there 2,000 years prior by Romans. So there you can see how smooth and polished they are from people walking over them for millennia. Much better looking roads than we have today.

So the Jews, again, were able to keep a tradition of their self-rule in place. Still able to sacrifice, still able to worship the Lord. Funny how you think that all worked out, though, through all these different groups. They still get to worship him. I can imagine somebody coming in and saying, you can't, and then get a certain reaction. And I'd say, you know what? Never mind. You guys just go ahead and do that. Skip ahead a little bit.

So by the time we get to Christ's birth, we've got Augustus is the emperor over the Roman Empire. So he's bringing stability. You've got Herod, who was king at that point in time, which forces Jesus to move out and down to somewhere where there might be another Jewish population where he could learn his script. Alexandria. And so good on God for figuring that one out. But what do we get the time that Christ is walking here?

And so we have the Roman Empire. providing political stability and solid roads to be able to go out and share whatever news might be coming. We had a Greek language which is exceptionally precise in its construction so that we can understand exactly what the word of God says. And that has spread very widely. And you've got the Jewish culture intact that has also been spread all the way from Babylon, all the way pushed up into Ephesus, shoved down into Alexandria.

So when Paul is writing, he can refer to Old Testament scriptures. And they've got them. And they know them. And they can put all the pieces together. Because you've got this crazy guy who wanted to conquer people. You've got this insane guy who's scooping out mountaintops. God orchestrated all of these seemingly random historical events to create the perfect environment for his word to spread.

And then I'm going to close with, 5.6, which says, for while you were still helpless, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. Right? That's right. Father, thank you so much for the way that you for his good, everything in control, everything for your glory. Thank you for your great wisdom. Thank you for serving your scriptures for us. So good night. It's in Jesus' name. Amen.