The Bible In An Hour

Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures. Pray with me. God, I pray you would do the same with us, that you would open up our minds, that we might see you clearly in the scriptures, so that we would walk away with a much deeper appreciation of you, God, and our salvation. Write these things on our hearts. Now, I pray that my words would fall to the ground and blow away, and not be remembered anymore.

But, Lord, may your words remain, and may they change us. In the strong name of Jesus, we pray. Amen. Well, if this is your first time, coming to Redeemer, it is not normally like this. I don't normally preach for an hour, but we thought it would be a good transition week for us, as we had most of our stuff moved out, most of our sound already moved out, band stuff moved out.

And I've been wanting to do this for a while. So we thought we would just go through the Bible in an hour, at least see how far we get in an hour because the Bible is a pretty big confusing book. My Bible is over 13 100 pages. There's over a 1000, people. There's over a 1000 places.

And you could get pretty intimidated by it all. And so my goal is, hopefully, we can learn about the structure of the Bible, the story of the Bible, so the Bible is less intimidating to you. And hopefully, it will encourage you to read even more. And I wanna start with a table of contents. So, if you would open your bibles to the table of contents, and we're gonna look at the structure.

And I have a marker board that I may or may not use. I'm I'm very tempted. I've I've never actually had one of these when I've been teaching, so I might put some things up there. Alright. If you look at your table of contents and if you want a Bible, there's some in the back.

The first major division you'll see is there's an old testament and there's a new testament. Testament's a fancy word for covenant. It's the old covenant and the new covenant. And so your old testament has 39 books and your new testament has 27 books. The Old Testament is written by 28 authors.

It spans about 2000 years of history. Your new testament is written by just 9 different authors, and its history is less than a 100 years. So total, you have 211 100 years of history that's being covered in the bible. Now let's look at the old testament. Within here, it's broken up a number of different ways as well.

You have 3 major divisions. Your first 17 books are what we would call historical. So if you look at Genesis and you go all the way to Esther, those 17 books right there are the history of Israel. That's that's all the historical books we have right there, this first 17. The first five, we've we've called the Pentateuch or the law written by Moses, but the first 17 are historical.

The next 5 are poetical. So Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon is your poetry or your wisdom literature. And then your next 17, ending it out, are your prophetical. And you have 17 prophetical books. Your first five are major prophets, then your next 12 are minor prophets. Now, anybody know the difference between a major and minor? It's not like baseball. Major simply means length. They're the really long prophets. Ezekiel is really long.

Jeremiah is really long. Lamentations is short, but it's tied to Jeremiah. And so, your first five are your long prophecies, and then your other 12 are minor. Important, but just smaller in scope there. So that's your divisions right there.

17 historical, 5 poetical, 17 prophetical. The bible can be intimidating if you think, I'm just gonna read straight through it, and you're gonna get story that just unbroken story that goes through it. It doesn't work that way. If you wanna read the story, you gotta read the first 17 books. If you wanna read the preaching or the prophecies that go with some of those stories, then you have to go to the prophetical that mix in a lot with it.

Alright. Let's look at the New Testament. Also, three divisions. Your first five books are what we would call historical. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts.

Your next 13 books are what we would call epistles, fancy word for letter. And so these are our letters, and these are the Pauline letters. And so when you look at them, the the order that they're in, beginning with first Corinthians and ending with Hebrews, which we no longer really think is written by Paul, but they did when they were canonizing it. We we still recognize it as scripture, but, so it's it's linked with Paul's letters even though we usually think it's by a different author now. But from 1st Corinthians to Hebrews, they're in the order they're in because of length.

Once again, confusing, because you would think, why couldn't they have written it in order or put it in the order that it was written? And then it would have started with 1st Thessalonians, because that was Paul's first letter that he wrote. But instead, they just started with the biggest, and they whittled their way down. Within those 13 Pauline epistles, the first nine are to churches. The next 4 are to individuals.

And so it breaks down that way. After this, you have 9 more letters, and those are just what we would call general epistles, in which they're written by different authors. James, Peter, John, Jude. So there's your breakdown of the New Testament. Five historical, and then you have all your letters.

13 Paul letters, 9 general letters right there. None of them are in order according to date. They're in order according to length. And so once you kind of understand even that, the bible begins to make a little bit of sense when you know you wanna find something. If you wanna find a letter that's to a church, well, I mean, you've got just a few to choose from, and you know right where to go.

Alright. Now let's look at the actual Bible itself, the itself, the story of the Bible, and and if there is a theme to the whole Bible. And there is a theme. I I started off by reading from Luke, in which Jesus said that he began with Moses, and the prophets, and the Psalms, and he went through pretty much all the Old Testament, saying how they spoke about him. In John chapter 5, Jesus, he told the religious leaders of his day, said, you search the scriptures because you think in them, you have eternal life, but they speak about me.

They speak about me and you refuse to come to me that you might have life. And so, according to Jesus, all of the old testament, all of the scriptures are about him. And and if I were to put a theme on it, I would say that the Bible is about the kingdom of God and how Jesus is that king. The kingdom of God and how Jesus is the king. And so let's start with Genesis, and let's work through it so we could see how this all plays out.

And I'm gonna give you a number of headings. They're they're not original to me. You could break down the Bible, and I've seen it in 10 headings, 15 headings, 12. I think we're gonna we're gonna shoot for 12. And so, I'm gonna use this. That's all right. Hopefully, you can read my writing. 1st heading, creation. This is Genesis 1 through 11. Genesis 1 through 11 is creation.

First two chapters of Genesis tell how God made everything that has ever existed. And he spoke these things into existence. He said light, and there was light. He said land, and there was land. He he said, livestock or or or crawling animals, and there's crawling animals.

He just spoke, and it happened. But then when he created man, which we see in Genesis chapter 2, man was created differently. God didn't speak man into existence. God got his his hands dirty. And it's, it's using poetic language here, but it's like, God, He digs into the ground, and He fashions man.

But what it's saying is, He took His time with us. And he declared us very good. And and the fact that God would would would get his hands dirty and create us and declare all of creation good is different than all the other philosophies and all the other religions out there, which which usually only teach that the spirit side is good. God says, physical is good. The spiritual is good.

Everything ever created is good. Nothing is to be rejected. It is good. We read this in Genesis 1. God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness.

And let's him have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. And God blessed them and said to them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

So, man was special. The pinnacle of creation, it was only man that was created in the image of God. And that that can mean a number of different things. It likely means quite a few, but in the context of Genesis 1, being created in the image of God means that man has been given dominion. Because right before this, he says, you know, you were to have dominion over all these things, God creates them in the image of God.

Then once again, he blesses them and he says, have dominion over all these things. It's called an inclusio. Have dominion created in the image of God. Have dominion. So we're created like god, just as he is a ruler.

God created us to be a ruler, to have dominion. And that's why when you get to Romans, later, when it talks about, the earth is groaning and is waiting for us to be, the sons of God to be revealed, basically for the Christians to be revealed. It's groaning. Why? Because man, who is supposed to have dominion over the earth, needs to come and reign in righteousness, like we were supposed to.

And so, we're the pinnacle of creation. The goal of creation is what I would call Sabbath rest. God, he he created everything, and, it always says, and there was morning, and there was evening, the first day. There was morning, and there was evening, the second day. And then when he finally gets to day 7, it says, and God rested.

He rested on 7th from all his work, and he blessed it, and he made it holy. And what he's saying is, it's perfect. I've created all this and it's perfect. There's there's nothing more that needs to be added. I I I can I can sit and I can rest and work that is well done?

Now when sin enters the world, it shatters that rest and then we toil, we sweat. And Jesus has to come, and he's gonna restore that rest. And that's why it says, come to me all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. That's why Hebrews 11 says that through Christ, we enter into this new Sabbath rest. Jesus comes to restore the rest that we initially had enjoyed in that first creation.

Let's look at what blew it all. Genesis 3, if if you wanna look there, it's what we call the fall. We all know about the fall. It's when Adam and Eve, they ate of the tree of life. And it wasn't so much that they broke God's command, which really, God gave them one one rule there, and it was, like, hey, it's easy to love me because I've given you everything, and you're in this perfect environment.

Here's here's a unique way you could show that you love me, just keep this this one little rule. And Adam and Eve rejected that. And really, it wasn't so much that they broke the rules, that they wanted to be the one who set the rules. They wanted to be the rule makers, the law makers, and not god. Like, you don't tell me what to do, I tell myself what to do.

And so they rejected God's authority. And when they did, it led to disastrous consequences for the whole earth. Remember, they they were set up to have dominion over the earth. And when they fell, the whole world fell under a curse with them. And God punishes them. He he kicks them out of the Garden of Eden, and he places everything under a curse. And then, we come to Genesis 315. Let me highlight that here. Genesis 315, in which we call this the protoevangel. I just spelled it wrong.

There we go. The protoevangel, fancy word for the first gospel. Genesis 315. This is after Adam and Eve had been kicked out of the garden. God confronts the serpent, and he says this, I will put enmity between between you and the woman, between your offspring and her offspring.

He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. And if you're kind of scratching your head like, It's because it's just the first hint of the gospel. God's like, I'm gonna I'm gonna have to punish you, I'm gonna have to remove you, but there's gonna be hope, a little bit of hope. And that woman, you're gonna have a seed. You're you're gonna have a descendant, a mighty descendant, and the serpent, Satan is going to bite him in the heel.

But he's gonna turn around, and he's gonna give a death blow to him. And it's just the first hit of the gospel of Jesus on the cross. And what I like to do, let's see if anybody can actually guess this. I'll draw this as here we go. Anybody wanna guess? That's an acorn. Very good. I'm not that bad. That's the acorn. Anybody? It's broccoli. Yes. Right. No. It's this is the tree.

This is the cross. Genesis 315 is the acorn. And what we're gonna see is as scripture begins to unfold, in each page, this acorn grows and it grows and it grows. And then you have moments like Isaiah saying, the virgin shall be with child, and you get even more clarity and it grows. And so finally, when we come to Jesus, we're like, that's the tree.

That's what this has been growing to the whole time. And the thing is, you don't know what this is unless you know what this is. That's why Jesus was saying that he was the key that was needed to be able to look back in the old testament, to look back at Genesis, and help them make sense of this. They're looking at this, like, what is this? But if you know what it's gonna grow to, then you could begin to read the old testament in a whole different way.

Like, now I understand Genesis 315. Now I understand where this is all going. So this is the first glimpse of the gospel. And so that's Genesis chapters 1 through 3. If you go to the end of the bible and you look at Revelation 20, 21, and 22, you find the exact same themes. There's the serpent. There's the tree of life. There's another river. There's God's presence with man again. It's the bookends to the whole Bible.

And so you have Genesis 1 through 3, God's created world, his kingdom being established, and then broken. Then the rest of scripture is rebuilding it, and rebuilding it, and rebuilding it, till we see it again at the end. After man sinned against God and broke this vertical relationship, the very first thing that happens is it's going to break the horizontal relationship. Genesis 4 is Cain and Abel, the first murder. It's what happens when you no longer have that vertical relationship anymore.

You begin to damage one another. The rest of Genesis is what I would call this, the patriarchs. I know we're jumping over ground, we didn't cover the flood, Tower of Babel, any of that. I do want us to talk through the patriarchs. In Genesis chapter 12, and I'll write this up there, Genesis 12 through 50 is the patriarchs.

It's a key chapter in the bible, and this is when God calls Abraham. God looks over all the world, and as he picks Abraham not because Abraham is more righteous, he's not. He just says, you, I'm making a covenant with you. And if you wanna turn to Genesis 12, verses 1 through 3, the rest of the old testament is going to unpack Genesis 12 1 through 3. The Lord said to Abraham, go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you.

Blessed. All the families on earth will be blessed through you. That's an astonishing claim there. But what it's doing, it's pointing to Abraham, it's it's through you, and it's gonna be through your seed. That somebody's going to come and bless the entire earth. And so you have the patriots, you have Abraham, the covenant God makes with them in Genesis 12. Abraham has Isaac. Isaac has Jacob. Jacob has Joseph. And so, Genesis ends with a story of Joseph and Joseph being carried off into Egypt.

If you remember the story, god uses Joseph to rescue all of Egypt. And when he is there, he is able to preserve the life, not of just the Egyptians, but really really the whole world. But then Genesis ends with the words coffin. It ends with the words coffin. Joseph's coffin in Egypt, which is kind of this ominous foreshadowing.

Because now that the Abraham's descendants are in Egypt, they're gonna multiply there. 400 years are going to go by, and they're gonna get bigger and bigger and bigger, but because they grow to such a multitude, pharaoh will be threatened by them. Pharaoh is going to enslave them. And so they're gonna be under severe persecution, even to the point where pharaoh is killing the babies of the Israelites. So 400 years of this happens.

And this brings us to 3rd major heading, Exodus. Anybody wanna guess what book Exodus covers? Exodus. Here we go. You can actually put Exodus through Deuteronomy.

So here, God raises a man named Moses. He raises a man named Moses saying, hey, Now that, the Egyptians, they are enslaved all of Abraham's descendants, I'm gonna use you to rescue them. You get to one of the most famous chapters in the bible, Exodus chapter 3, where which is when God is calling Moses, and Moses says, well, God, I don't I don't even know your name. What am I supposed to do? At least tell me your name.

And God says, alright. I will tell you my name. And so it's in Exodus chapter 3, God reveals his name to Moses and to us. It is the name Yahweh, which simply means, I am. It's a really interesting name. God doesn't say, I am holy. He doesn't say, I'm great, or I am powerful. Because the moment he would have said that, you would have said, okay. You would have put God in a category that you've already made. Okay.

So you're like the most powerful thing I could think of, or you're like the most holy person I could think of. And God says, no, I don't fit into any of your categories. You can't put me in a category. I simply am. I'm my own category.

I am. So he reveals himself as Yahweh in Exodus 3. Moses goes on to go to pharaoh, and we can all picture Charlton Heston saying, let my people go. They never add the rest, which is, let my people go that they may worship me in the wilderness. It's always just, let my people go.

And he says that to pharaoh and, pharaoh, of course, rejects. And so we get these 10 plagues that God sends. And each one of these plagues is an attack on an Egyptian god. And and god, 1 by 1, he just starts attacking what what the Egyptians thought were god's. And so finally, he gets to the pinnacle plague, which is death of the firstborn.

In which God said, I'm gonna send my destroyer. Destroyer over the land of Egypt. And the only way you could be spared of this is if you were to put blood of a lamb over the doorpost. You do that, and I will pass over you, and I will not destroy your firstborn. That's where we get, you know, the Passover celebration.

And so on that night, God did just that, and his destroyer killed the firstborn of every Egyptian. But he delivered, the Israelites, And he brings them to this is in chapter 20. Let's see if anybody? Little visual there. 10 Commandments. Chapter 20 is when god gives his people the law. Delivers them out of Egypt, and he takes them to Mount Sinai. And you gotta understand what the law is. It's, it's not god say, hey. I've got a lot of rules.

I kinda wanna make life really complicated for you right now. Okay? And I'm just gonna give you a whole lot of rules you have to follow. You don't follow them, you go to hell. Alright? That's that's how it's gonna be. This isn't for salvation. Alright? God saved the Israelites. He just did 10 plagues. He just took them through the Red Sea. The Israelites are saved by grace. God has saved them. What he's doing is saying, I want you to know what I'm like. Alright?

I I want you to know what I'm like. These are the things I love. These are the things that I treasure. This is my heart. And so think of the think of the law, the 10 commandments as a giant flashlight, in which God could point to himself, and you could see him.

This this is what I look like. When Jesus comes, you can see Jesus. He's the one who keeps all the law. And so you, you could see God fully in him. And then the bad part is when you shine the law on you, it just exposes all of your sin and how you look nothing like God.

But that's what the law is. It's just this giant flash light. We could we could shine it at God, and we could appreciate his beauty. We could shine it at Jesus and see how he fulfills it all, and then we could shine it at us, and we're like, ah, there's there's all this sin. There's all this yuckiness there.

But the law was given to expose our sin and to show us what God is like and to point us to Jesus. It's really what kind of the the whole old testament is. You could think of the old testament as, it's a marriage proposal. It's what it is. You you get your wedding in the New Testament, but the Old Testament is the, it's the dates.

It's the flowers. It's it's the dinner. It's the the letting the people kinda get to know God, him wooing them, to where finally when the proposal comes, they're like, yes. That's what the Old Testament is when we read it. It's it's it's the beginnings of this courtship.

So when Jesus comes and when that flashlight hits him, we say, yes. Alright. So we have the law. We have the people being delivered from the Egyptians. But there's one thing they're like, God, we really wanna we really kinda wanna be like Adam and Eve again. We wanna we wanna be back in the garden. We wanna be in your presence again. God says, well, that can't happen. I mean, I'm a holy God and you're a sinful people. But how about I do what I did right after the garden?

Right after I kicked you out of the garden, I I killed the animal, I made a sacrifice, and I put animal skins on you. As a way of covering your shame. Let's create a sacrificial system as a way of kind of covering your shame, and I will come and be with you. So, god sets up the tabernacle as a a a tent in which they could set up and he would come and he would dwell in the most holy place and they would be able to come in there after a series of sacrifices. They could experience God's presence to some degree once again.

It was an imperfect system because he had to make sacrifice after sacrifice after sacrifice, and he went in with fear and trepidation. But it was pointing to something greater. When Jesus comes, John says in John chapter 1, that God came and he became flesh and he tabernacled or he tented among us. That this this skin that Jesus wore was the tabernacle. People could come to him and now meet god.

Alright. Let's move on to, the next heading, in which we're gonna go conquest. Exodus through Deuteronomy is an expansion of the law of god. And all through this time, god has promised them this, promised land, what he promised Abraham. This inheritance, this land flowing with milk and honey.

And finally, we we come to it after 40 years of wandering in the desert, we come to it. And Joshua is the one who leads him in. Moses doesn't come in, Joshua comes in, and we all know the song, Joshua, in the battle of Jericho. The walls come crumbling down. Joshua is the general.

He's he's the leader of Israel during this time to go through and settle the people in the promised land. And this leads us to the most awkward time in Israel's history. The judges. These judges last about 400 years. The book of Judges is why the bible almost got banned in, in the school systems.

It's also the source of, like, all the children bible stuff, like love judges, because you have Gideon, you've got Samson, you've got all these great stories about the judges, but you also have, you also have rape. You have, people hacking up their own concubines into 12 pieces, and mailing them out to the 12 tribes of Israel. You you have depravity like you have never seen in the book of Judges. And so it kind of shocks you. A judge was a leader.

Not quite a king, not quite a prophet, just a special leader. Because what you had during this time of judges was, the Israelites are now in the land of Canaan, they're they're not a nation think of them as a loose confederacy at this point. They've got 12 tribes that are up there, that are kind of this loose relationship with one another. And when they would forsake God, which they would always do, God would send in a neighboring tribe or a neighboring nation to defeat them, to persecute them. So they cry out for help.

God, we're sorry. We sinned against you. We repent. So God would send in a judge, a rescuer, a Gideon to come in. You drive out this foreign power. People would be like, great. They would do well for the entire life of the judge. They would be worshiping God and the judge would die. People would forsake God. God would bring in a neighboring country to persecute them. They'd cry out for help. God sends in another judge, rescues them. Now, yay. They're great. They follow the Lord.

For usually about 40 years or so, the judge dies. The cycle goes over and over and over. Seven times you have that cycle in the book of Judges. And I guess a better way of of saying it than a cycle, think of it as a spiral. It's kinda spiraling down.

Because each cycle, the Israelites get worse and worse and worse. I mean, it's hard to read the end of judges because the people are so depraved at that point. There's only one really good person you're going to find there, and that's Ruth. Ruth lived during the time of the judges, and, she was a righteous woman. And really the the point of her is the the book of Ruth ends with the word David.

And pointing to someday, basically, there's going to be a king, David, who's gonna come and make some things right. Let's look at kingdom. After 400 years of judges, the Israelites have had enough. They're like, no more judges. It's it's time we become a full fledged kingdom. And so they asked God for a king. God says, okay. And he gives them Saul, then they have David, and then they have Solomon. Each of those reign for 40 years. You wanna put a year on this, this is about 1,000 BC.

And then that's it for the kingdom. Alright? Yeah. I mean, that's that's it. After this, the the kingdom splits, it has civil war, it just goes into total chaos.

You've got 3, 3 kings in the United Kingdom, Saul, David, Solomon. And David is by far the most dominant figure, of of the old testament. It's the largest We just studied the life of David, so I won't go over all the details, but it's the largest biography we have of any historical figure. Up until 20 years ago, though, did you know that there wasn't any archaeological evidence that King David even existed? It wasn't till 1993 that they actually found the first archaeological evidence, and, I remember there was a book, it was in the New York Times bestseller called The Bible Unearthed, that said David didn't even exist.

And they said, and if he did exist, he was nothing more than some chieftain in a small, little village, which is what they said Jerusalem probably was. And then they find David's palace, and then they found all these things since then about King David. But, I mean, it's astonishing. Just 20 years ago, no archaeological evidence whatsoever that King David even existed, yet he dominates scripture. In my Bible, I have a 153 pages dedicated to King David.

The gospels only take a 120 pages in my Bible. So there's more written about David than all 4 gospels combined. And we know a lot about David because we have so much written. We know about his childhood, how he came to be king. We know about his terrible flaws, his adultery, his murder.

We know about his repentance, but by far, the most important thing to happen to David comes in 2nd Samuel chapter 7. If you wanna turn there, 2nd Samuel 11. David is very thankful to God that God has made him king. So he says, All right, God, you live in a tent long enough. How about I build you a house?

Let me build you something. Verse 11, this is God speaking. He says, from the time that I appointed judges over my people Israel, or sorry, and I will give you rest from all your enemies. Moreover, the Lord declares to you that the Lord will make you a house. When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom.

He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. Verse 16, and your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me. Your throne shall be established forever. And this is so remarkable. This is David says, God, I'm gonna build you a house. And he goes, nobody gives me a thing. No. I always give. You don't give me a house. As a matter of fact, I'm gonna give you a house.

I'm gonna establish your kingdom forever. I'm fulfilling the promise I made with Abraham through you. The seed is coming through you. So this is the kingdom of God being established here through David. Of course, David is not the king, so we end up waiting for a son of David.

A son of David to come and to sit on the throne. Alright. So, you have 1st and second Samuel, talk about the kingdom, the United Kingdom. You have 1st Kings, it starts talking about the civil wars, and then it's just impossible to follow. Alright?

I'm I'm as a pastor, I'm telling you, once that's just impossible to follow after this, to keep things straight. Because you've got this northern kingdom, there is splits into a northern kingdom, which has 10 tribes, and then as a southern kingdom that has 2 tribes named Judah, and that's where Jerusalem is. And the northern kingdom has 20 a total of 20 kings that I've in one time, you know, seminary, I remember I had to make the little line charting them and remembering all 20 kings. I memorized that for a test. I do not know those kings at all anymore.

Okay? 20 kings in the northern kingdom. None of them righteous. Not one. All of them did evil in the sight of the lord. Southern kingdom, you have 20 kings also. 8, yeah, they were alright. That was about it. So out of 40 kings, 32 were horrible. 8 were okay. And so this is when all the prophets come. The prophets come during this time. And prophets would come to a king, and they would be like, Israel needs to repent. If you don't repent, I'm gonna destroy you. And he does.

He destroys the northern kingdom in 722. He destroys the southern kingdom in 586. And so all the prophecies are about that. Repent or burn. Repent or burn. And you get these. And finally, those things come to fruition. The most famous prophet was Isaiah, who was writing during the time of the, Southern Kingdom fall, which is about 586. Let me just say a little word about prophecy. If you wanna turn to Isaiah 7, I guess you can.

Turn to Isaiah 7. Prophecy is really confusing, And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, is in Isaiah 7 verse 14. Isaiah is saying this to king Ahaz, one of the most unrighteous kings there was. Says, therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel.

Alright. This is how prophecy works. That is a mountain. Alright? That's that's Isaiah. Alright? Prophecy is like God lifting up a prophet to, to, to see way into the future. Like He lifts them up to give them this grand vision. So He's doing this with Isaiah. And so, Isaiah is looking forward and he's seeing some other peaks. He he sees the virgin shall be with child. Alright? I don't know how to do a baby. All right? That's a baby in a crib.

All right? Or somebody laying down in a canoe or I I don't know what it is. Alright. That's a baby in a crib. And so so Isaiah sees this. He's like, okay. The virgin shall be with child, or the virgin in Hebrew is just a young woman. A young woman shall be with child. Well, let's read the rest of Isaiah 7 verse 15. He shall eat curds and honey when he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good.

For before the boy knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land whose 2 kings you dread will be deserted. Now, how many of you have heard that during the Christmas story? Alright. Like, what the heck? What's happening during this time is king Ahaz has these 2, 2 kingdoms that are persecuting him, these 2 kings.

And he's scared to death and to be destroyed. And God says, you're not going to be destroyed. Here's a sign to you. A woman, she's going to have a child, a very special child. And before that a that child is the age of 2 or 3, the 2 kings whom you're dreading are gonna be dead. What does that have to do with Jesus? Verse or chapter 8 says that this child's name was Maher Shaloh Hash Baz. It's the longest name in the Bible. Maher Shallow Hash Baz. Come on.

Say that. Maher. That's right. It means swift is the booty, speedy is the prey. It's it's it's a great Hebrew name. That's this child. That's this child because it says right after that that before that child was 2 or 3, those 2 kings were dead. Alright. But then you have he wasn't called Emmanuel. He wasn't called the prince of peace.

You have another child. You have enough yeah. Sorry. You you you have another child that Isaiah is looking and seeing as well. This child is pointing towards that child. And so, we also see Jesus. Jesus is the Emmanuel. Jesus is God with us. But then later in Isaiah 9, it says, and the government will be on his shoulders and it will have no, no end. Well, that didn't quite happen.

And so you have another mountain in which you do have Jesus reigning, that's a crown on his head, reigning as king. Prophecy works this way. Isaiah is lifted up on a mountain and he looks and he sees all of these things blend together. He sees them as one event, and he shares them as one event. Rarely is prophecy when you're getting to those 17 prophetical books in the bible.

Rarely, as you're going through that, is one event gonna fulfill a certain prophecy. Think of prophecy as, it's a cup that that that's being filled. And so you have the young woman, she shall be with child. So you have part of it being fulfilled with. But then it's really the virgin shall be with child, and his name shall be called Emmanuel, and then his government shall know no end.

It's being fulfilled. So, prophecy isn't just filled in a moment, it is it's being poured into. And so, you can see that in all 17 prophetical books as you're going through. And this will help you not be like, Tim LaHaye or or something like that, in which you see prophecy, and you're always trying to make some crazy scheme fit into one little prophecy. Usually works like this.

Usually, there's an immediate context, then there's a first advent, and then there's a second advent. Makes sense, or did I just confuse the daylights out of every one of you? Probably a little of both. We got 10 minutes. Let's go to the next exile. The kingdom lasts about 400 years also. It's destroyed. Once it is destroyed, the the final kingdom, southern kingdom in 586. By the Babylonians, they come in. And they don't just destroy everybody, they take away the chosen, the cream of the crop.

They take away the Daniels, the Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and they exile them. This is what we're looking at next week when we study Daniel. So I won't go through this in great detail. I'm really excited about us going through Daniel and saying, what does it look like to follow God in a pagan culture? Because that's what happened.

Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, Daniel, they were all exported. They were exiled away from their homeland. This lasts for 70 years. They're exiled. Now during this time, if you're an Israelite, you're just wondering whatever happened to Genesis 12.

Whatever happens, we're we're gonna be a blessing. The whole world's gonna be blessed through us. We've just been decimated. We're now living and serving a people who killed all of our our relatives, ripped us from our homeland, and we're supposed to be a blessing to the earth. What have we done wrong?

Guys, like, well, you've done a whole lot wrong. That's why this happened. But then his letters to the exiles, which is Jeremiah and is Ezekiel, they're full of all these woes, and then their cities are destroyed, and then they're full of hope. This is where we get, you know, Jeremiah 29, 30, and 31, the, I know the plans I have for you. And it's really good plans.

Plans for prosperity. They're in exile when they're hearing this. Jeremiah 30 or 29, 30, and 31, or Ezekiel 14 are all about, you know what? The problem was, you couldn't fulfill the law, so I'm gonna give you a new heart. Just so you know, and I make things really good, and I'm gonna put the law in your heart.

A time is coming when I'm gonna do that, and it's coming soon. So there were people, they returned from exile, and then you get the rebuilding. They're having a parade upstairs. I'm not sure what what they're doing. They come back to Jerusalem after an exile.

They rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. They rebuild a a really kind of pathetic temple. This is Nehemiah, rebuilds the walls, Ezra kinda rebuilds the people, during this time. And after they rebuild all of this, you have silence. For 400 years. And that doesn't mean that God was silent or God wasn't doing anything. It just means that for the next 400 years, we don't have anything recorded in the Bible. So that is the old testament. New testament in 3 minutes. It's kinda easy.

Jesus. Alright. Alright. We we get to that. The the the new testament is pretty easy. So we come to the New Testament, we're gonna see Jesus as a fulfillment of all of these things. We get something called the gospels. The best way to think of a gospel is it's not a straight history. A gospel is a biographical sermon. That's what it is. It's a biography, and it's a sermon. It's both. It's not just biography and it's not just sermon. It's a biographical sermon. We have 4 of them.

We have Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And they're a biography. They tell about Jesus. But they tell they they structure the events and they highlight certain events and they highlight certain certain teachings of Jesus order to make a point. That's what a sermon is. Matthew's point is Jesus is the king. He's the king. Mark's point is Jesus is the servant. He's the suffering servant. And that's why half of the book of Mark is all about the cross.

The cross. Luke points out that Jesus is the perfect man who came to seek and to save the lost. And John's point is that Jesus was the son of god. All of them teach all of those things, but that's the emphasis of their biographical sermons. All four gospels teach are the 3 years of Jesus' ministry.

All of them teach the death, burial, If you were to break up these headings, I would say, you would have the gospels, and then I'm gonna say the life of church or mission, maybe? And then, we'll do mission. The life of the church. After Jesus ascends, his spirit comes down. The Jeremiah prophecies, the Ezekiel prophecies, they come true.

God's spirit writes the law of God on our hearts, energizes us to where we could go out, and we could start sharing about the King who's coming to restore everything that was broken. We can declare Jesus. And so you have the book of acts, which is all about the life of the church, all about the mission of the church. Then he got the epistles, which are really just an explanation of the gospel and what the church believed. You come to Revelation, which is the end.

Someday, I'll get Jeff to preach on Revelation. Revelation is, it's a it's a very difficult book. It's what's called an apocryphal book. Apocalyptic book, not apocryphal. Sorry.

Apocalyptic literature always is written during a time of intense persecution. There's literally thousands of apocalyptic books out there, apocalyptic letters. A lot of them read very similar to Revelation, in which there's beasts and there's horns and this symbolic language. You can't say, hey, the Roman Empire or the Roman Emperor stinks. I wish you'd go away because then that's your head.

So you have to use you have to use symbolic language. You have to kinda hide some things. All apop apocalyptic literature is history, not future forward looking. If you look at all other apocalyptic literature, it is historical. Now, Revelation has some futuristic elements to it.

It talks about the new heavens. It talks about the new earth. There is some forward prophetical elements to it, but I believe a large, large portion of Revelation is actually describing the events that were happening or it just happened in the life of the church. But Jeff's gonna explain that a lot further in detail. We're gonna work on this at some point.

I said, if I ever teach through Revelation, I do Revelation in a day. Or just revelation in 1 night. So you could get the main point, which is good triumphs over evil. It's a great hope to people who are being persecuted. And if you read through revelation in one setting, one sitting, that's what you really come away with is good triumphs over evil, and it leaves you very hopeful.

When you get caught up in counting all the the different horns, and whether if using Visa is the sign of the beast or or things like that, you're you're it's really gonna get confusing. It's the one book that John Calvin didn't do a commentary on. I think he was probably there scratching his head, like, I I I I don't know. Alright. So there is the, the bible.

Let me just tell you some things about Jesus that we see fulfilled. When John opens up scripture, he says, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. We see that Jesus was the creative word, that light, and there's light, land, and there's land. Who was that creative word? It was Jesus.

He was the one doing these things. He was the tabernacle. He was the word that was made flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus is who the Passover lamb points. John chapter 1, again, when John the Baptist sees Jesus, he says, Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

Jesus is faithful Israel. Israel failed over and over and over, 40 years of failure in the desert. Jesus went to the desert, was tempted by Satan, and prevailed. He was what Israel was supposed to be. Jesus is the prophet like Moses. He's the one who gives us the new law. He gives us he wants he went up on a mountain, the Sermon on the Mount. He gives us this new law. He's the He's the descendant of Jesse, or the descendant of King David. He would always go by the title, he's the son of David.

He is Isaiah's Emmanuel child, the one born of a virgin. He's the suffering servant. He's the initiator of the new covenant that we find in Ezekiel 14, Jeremiah 31, when God says he's gonna make a new covenant. He's gonna give us a new heart, and he's the true temple in which we get to have presence be in God's presence when we are in the presence of Jesus. So Jesus is the fulfillment of all of these things.

Pray with me. God, tonight was like trying to drink water from a fire hydrant. A lot. I pray that you would take some of these words and kind of make sense of your glorious scripture. We thank you. We thank you for Jesus and whom all this points. Jesus, we love you, we adore you, and we praise you. That's in your name. We pray. Amen.