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Now for the first two talks on this video we're going to tackle things in a rather different
way. Instead of taking a book of the Bible, I want first of all to give you an overview
of the whole Old Testament. Here we have a collection of books covering about 1000 years
written by many different authors and many different types of books. There are history
books, law books, song books. How do they all relate together, all 39 of them? I think
it's so important to have an overall picture of how these books fit together. God has not
given us a topical Bible. Wouldn't it be nice if he had? You know, if the book of Genesis
was all about God, and the book of Exodus all about Jesus, and the book of Leviticus
all about the Holy Spirit, and if he'd put all the text together under one topic it would
save us buying concordances and looking things up from all over. He deliberately didn't give
us a Bible like that. He didn't want us to have a Bible like that and so the teaching
on any one topic is scattered over the whole Bible. And he didn't want to give us a box
full of texts though since chapter and verse numbers have been added to the Bible that's
how we treat it, and we pick a text out from here and a text out from there, and just ignore
the context so often. Well now, God has given us actually a library
of books. The word Bible is a plural word; it comes from the Latin biblia and it means
books, not book, so the Bible is not a book it's a library of books and each book is a
separate entity. And God wants you to learn his word book by book because that's how he
chose to give it to us. If he just wanted to give us a lot of texts, he'd have done
that; if he wanted to give us a lot of topics, he'd have done that, but what he did do was
give us these books and every text - as we call each verse - is in a context of that
book and that book is in a context of history. God gave us his Word in time and space and
it's very important to get both dimensions, so that we understand at what time he said
this, and in what place he said this, and the time and place give it its meaning because
his word was given in life situations. He was always saying something to a particular
situation in time and space and those are the two contexts we need. So I thought in
this talk I'd give you something of that context. Let's begin with space, and to do that of
course we need maps. There is a geography of the Bible as well as a history of the Bible
that we need to hold in our minds when we're reading it. And there are really only two
maps that we need, a map of the whole Middle East and a map of the Promised Land in the
Middle East, and we need to hold these if we can as a picture in our minds. Now the
familiar name that is given to the overall map of the Middle East is The Fertile Crescent
and that's a phrase you'll read in many books on Bible background. If you can see I've drawn
the Crescent, a sort of new moon shape - I've drawn it on this map and what it does is it
links two very large rivers at each end - the River Nile and the two rivers Tigris and Euphrates,
and those two major river basins produce fertility. So these are very fertile valleys, the Nile
Delta and the Nile Valley and then the Tigris and the Euphrates, what used to be called
Mesopotamia which means the middle of the rivers: 'Meso' - middle and 'Potamia'
- rivers, so between the two rivers - a very fertile plain, very flat. Now then these two
fertile areas were the centres of power in the ancient world; these were the east and
west world powers. So the whole Old Testament is a struggle between these two world powers
- between Egypt and the different empires that arose here notably Assyria and Babylon.
That's where Saddam Hussein is now, that's where Iraq and Iran are now. Iran is here,
Iraq is over here but they are divided by this river.
So we have two world powers in the ancient Middle East and in between, the Promised Land.
Now you notice that the Arabian Desert covers all of this and the Sahara there, so when
these two big powers attacked each other or tried to overcome each other they had to travel
through this narrow bit of land here. I don't know if you can see a rather purply patch
here, that is actually black basalt rock which is very sharp and very hard, even camels can't
cross it. Which means that all the traffic was directed down this narrow coastal strip.
If you didn't want to cross the desert which most didn't, but if you wanted to keep feeding
your troops you had to go through the Fertile Crescent, you had to go round that Crescent
to the other end to attack your enemy. Which means that this was the crossroads of the
world actually. And somebody has said about Israel if you will live in the middle of a
crossroads you're bound to get run over - which is exactly what happened. They were constantly
being run over. In Jesus' day they were run over by the Romans but before that they'd
been run over by the Greeks and the Syrians and the Egyptians and so it goes on. And so
here we have two world powers at either end of this Crescent with a narrow corridor down
the coast in between and that is the narrow corridor. And God gave them a land at the
crossroads of the world. Actually, the road from Europe to Arabia comes down through that
corridor and the road from Africa to Asia goes through that corridor. On this map the
road from Europe comes down the coast, it crosses the Plain of Esdraelon, goes down
into the Jordan Valley and up on to the other side and down to Arabia. The road from Africa
comes up the coastal plain and it crosses over the same Vale of Esdraelon or the Valley
of Jezreel and goes up through Capernaum and up through Damascus and on to India and China.
So that the actual crossroads of the world is precisely there at a little hill called
Megiddo and the Hill of Megiddo in Hebrew is Hamageddon; and that's why most of the
big battles in history took place there at the crossroads of the world. Overlooking that
crossroads is a little village called Nazareth and a boy of Nazareth could watch the world
go by. Literally he could lie on the hill as a boy could Jesus and it was like being
in an airport lounge where you see all the nationalities coming and going. That's why
they call this northern part Galilee of the Nations because it was an international crossroads.
Whereas further south up in the hills it was very isolated and very Jewish, and Jerusalem
is right up in 'them there hills' just about here. So you had two parts of the Promised
Land, the international part where all the nations came and went, and this very Jewish
isolated part up in the hills with Jerusalem. So you can see the importance of this land.
God was going to plant his people at the crossroads of the world where everybody could see them,
where they could be a model of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. So the whole world could
see what blessing comes to people living under God's rule, but they would also see what curse
comes of disobeying God's rule. So you can see why God chose this land. Now
it's a very fertile strip. Here's that black basalt. If you've ever been to Capernaum you've
seen the black basalt rock, they used it to build the houses of Capernaum, terribly hard,
sharp stuff. And so it was impassable so there was this barrier of sand and basalt rock on
the east and the barrier of the sea on the west. All the traffic went down the coast
here and through this little break in the hills which we call the Vale of Esdraelon
or Hamageddon. Then we have this huge crack right down the earth's surface, right through
to Africa, and here is its deepest point. The white bit is below sea level and the Dead
Sea is way below. You have the Jordan coming in to this valley and going nowhere, just
evaporating from the intense heat. So in this little area the size of Wales you
have the entire world in miniature. You've got every kind of climate and every kind of
scenery. You will find somewhere in Israel a place like home. In fact the place most
like England is just south of Tel Aviv down here, it's just like England. But they call
Carmel Little Switzerland and you can always go skiing at any time of year on the snow-capped
Mount Hermon up here, and yet 10 minutes later you can be down among palm trees here. All
the fauna and flora of Europe is to be found here, all the fauna and flora of Africa is
to be found here, all the fauna and flora of Asia is to be found here. So you can have
Scottish pine trees growing next to palm trees from the Sahara and in the Bible days all
the wild animals were here - lions, bears, crocodiles, camels - you've got the whole
world squeezed in to this little point where they all join. Fascinating! I could go on
for hours but I must stop. Once you've got a feel of the geography
and especially a feel for the shape of the land… Now, this is a relief map of the Promised
Land. Can you see that deep valley running north-south with a little bit of green on
that side and a little bit of green on that side and then the desert? If you master that
map and hold it in your mind, you will be able to read every Bible story that takes
place in the Promised Land very easily, and you'll know why things happened as they
did. And why Samaria was in the middle and why Jesus' main ministry was up in Galilee.
Why he was put to death by the Jews - that doesn't mean by all Israelis, it means the
people of Judah. And when you read in the Gospel of John that the Jews killed Jesus
that doesn't mean all Israel it means the Southerners up in the hills. The Galileans
were all for Jesus. It was the Jews, the Judeans, who were against him in the south. So that's
the geographical background for the Bible. In the Old Testament we're moving around that
Fertile Crescent from one end to the other. Sometimes the people of God are slaves in
Egypt, other times they're taken away into Assyria or Babylon at this end, but there
they were right in the middle of it all, at the crossroads of the world.
Now the other dimension that you need to master is the dimension of time and I've tried to
reduce this dimension of time to a very simple pattern that's easily held in your mind. And
at first sight that chart must look horrific to you, but as we go through it I think you'll
find it's actually very simple. Basically, the Old Testament covers 2000 years of history
- BC Before Christ, but there is in Genesis 1 to 11 what we might call the pre-historic
part, that means pre-historic to Israel and so in Genesis 1 to 11 we have the creation
of the universe, the fall of man in the Garden of Eden, the flood and the tower of Babel.
It's all about man generally. It's not about God's chosen people yet; it's about man - the
human race - and that's the pre-historic history of Israel - before their history really began.
But their history begins around the year 2000 BC, so just as far as we are after Christ,
the history of Israel starts before Christ - 2000 years either side, alright?
That's our opening date for the history of Israel and I divide it into four equal parts
of 500 years each, and we take those four quarters as distinct periods. We mark each
of the four dates - 2000, 1500, 1000 and 500 BC with events and people, and I like to give
names of people and events to these dates so I fix them in my mind. And so the first
four words I've written down are events - Election, Exodus, Empire, Exile - and you've got the
four events that mark the four quarters of their history. That's when God chose Abraham
and Elected Abraham and his descendants to be his people; that's when Moses led them
out of Egypt; that's when they had all the land God promised to them and had a time of
unparalleled prosperity and peace, and I've called it the Empire because they not only
had their own land but many other nations were now under their control. And then the
lowest point of their history – Exile. And roughly speaking those four events fit those
four dates. Then I attach a prominent person to each of those dates. Abraham is the man
to attach to 2000, Moses to 1500 or thereabouts, David to 1000 - he was reigning in the year
1000 BC - and Isaiah is the most prominent man associated with the exile. So, you've
got four events and four people. But also, the leadership of Israel changed and the leadership
in each of these four periods was different. In the first period they were led by Patriarchs,
that's a word for forefathers really - patriarchs from Abraham to Joseph. In the second period
they were led by Prophets from Moses to Samuel; in the third 500 years they were led by Princes
from Saul to Zedekiah, and in the fourth period they were led by Priests from Joshua who came
with Zerubbabel back from the exile right through to Caiaphas in our Lord's day.
So you can see that the leadership changed from Patriarchs to Prophets to Princes and
then to Priests. Now it doesn't mean there weren't prophets at other times or priests
at other times, but the leadership of the nation passed from one group to the other
- until Jesus came who was prophet, priest and king all rolled into one. So they tried
three different kinds of leadership in their history but they were really looking for someone
who could combine all these things in one, and all the leadership failed in the Old Testament.
So have you got those four basic periods in your mind? Now once you've got that, the next
thing is to put in