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The 400 Years of Silence_What Happened Between Malachi and Matthew · truthunedited

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  Speaker 1: Between the last word of the Old Testament and the
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  Speaker 1: first chapter of Matthew, there are 400 years. The last
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  Speaker 1: recorded prophet was Malachi, writing around 430 B.C. The next
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  Speaker 1: time God speaks directly to a human being is in
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  Speaker 1: Luke chapter 1, when the angel Gabriel appears to an
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  Speaker 1: elderly priest in the temple. 400 years. No prophet. No scripture.
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  Speaker 1: No direct word from God to Israel. And what happened
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  Speaker 1: inside those 400 years determined the world Jesus was born into,
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  Speaker 1: the language the New Testament was written in, the roads
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  Speaker 1: Paul traveled to spread the gospel, and the religious factions
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  Speaker 1: that put Jesus on trial. Everything that makes the New
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  Speaker 1: Testament possible was built during the silence. Today, we are
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  Speaker 1: going to walk through those 400 years, the five powers
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  Speaker 1: that ruled over Israel. the man who nearly destroyed the
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  Speaker 1: Jewish people and the revolt that stopped him, the translation
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  Speaker 1: that put the Bible in the language of the world,
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  Speaker 1: and the exact moment the silence finally broke. By the end,
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  Speaker 1: you will understand. This was never abandonment. It was God
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  Speaker 1: building the stage. But first, you need to hear the
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  Speaker 1: last words God spoke before the silence fell. Because inside
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  Speaker 1: those words was a promise. And that promise is the
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  Speaker 1: reason that everything that happened over the next 400 years
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  Speaker 1: was not chaos. It was construction. The final book of
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  Speaker 1: the Old Testament is Malachi, and it ends with a
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  Speaker 1: warning and a promise in the same breath. Malachi chapter 4,
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  Speaker 1: verses 5 and 6. Behold, I will send you Elijah
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  Speaker 1: the prophet before the great and awesome day of the
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  Speaker 1: Lord comes. and he will turn the hearts of fathers
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  Speaker 1: to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers.
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  Speaker 1: Or else I will come and strike the land with
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  Speaker 1: a decree of utter destruction. Then the page turns, and
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  Speaker 1: God says nothing for 400 years. The name Malachi in
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  Speaker 1: Hebrew means my messenger. The last messenger's final message was
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  Speaker 1: a prediction. Another messenger was coming. and then silence. But
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  Speaker 1: this silence was not a surprise. Centuries before Malachi, the
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  Speaker 1: prophet Amos had recorded God's own warning. Amos chapter 8
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  Speaker 1: verse 11. Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord God,
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  Speaker 1: when I will send a famine on the land, not
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  Speaker 1: a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but
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  Speaker 1: of hearing the words of the Lord. The silence was announced.
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  Speaker 1: It was not abandonment, It was a decree. To understand
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  Speaker 1: the weight of what this silence meant, you have to
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  Speaker 1: understand what the Jewish people were living with when it fell.
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  Speaker 1: They had returned from Babylonian exile. The temple had been rebuilt,
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  Speaker 1: completed in 516 B.C. But the glory that had filled
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  Speaker 1: the first temple, the Shekinah, the visible presence of God
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  Speaker 1: descending on the Holy of Holies, had not returned. The
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  Speaker 1: Ark of the Covenant was gone. The throne of David
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  Speaker 1: was empty. No king from the line of David sat
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  Speaker 1: in Jerusalem. And now, one by one, the prophets had
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  Speaker 1: fallen silent. Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi. And then there was no one.
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  Speaker 1: A people with a covenant, a temple, and a promise,
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  Speaker 1: and no voice to confirm any of it. That is
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  Speaker 1: what the silence felt like from the inside. That is
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  Speaker 1: what 400 years of waiting means in human terms. But
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  Speaker 1: God had not left. He had simply stopped speaking. And
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  Speaker 1: while he was silent, he was working. In 332 B.C.,
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  Speaker 1: a 24-year-old Macedonian general marched through the land of Israel
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  Speaker 1: on his way from Persia to Egypt. His name was Alexander.
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  Speaker 1: He had already conquered most of the known world. He
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  Speaker 1: would be dead in eight years. And his brief, violent
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  Speaker 1: passage through history would do more to prepare the world
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  Speaker 1: for the gospel than almost any event before or after him.
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  Speaker 1: Alexander the Great's mission was not merely conquest. It was Hellenization,
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  Speaker 1: the systematic spread of Greek culture, Greek architecture, Greek philosophy, and,
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  Speaker 1: above all, the Greek language across every territory he touched.
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  Speaker 1: Within one generation of his campaigns, Koine Greek had become
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  Speaker 1: the universal language of the Mediterranean world, from Rome to Alexandria,
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  Speaker 1: from Athens to Jerusalem. One language, spoken everywhere. The historian
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  Speaker 1: Josephus records that when Alexander reached Jerusalem, the high priest
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  Speaker 1: Jadua went out to meet him, wearing his full priestly robes.
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  Speaker 1: According to the account in Josephus' antiquities, Alexander bowed before
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  Speaker 1: the high priest, telling his astonished generals, that he had
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  Speaker 1: seen this figure in a dream before his campaigns, and
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  Speaker 1: that the dream had promised him victory. Whether the account
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  Speaker 1: is literal history or theological legend, the practical result is documented.
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  Speaker 1: The Jews were given favor. They were permitted to keep
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  Speaker 1: their own laws. They were exempted from tribute in the
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  Speaker 1: sabbatical year. Alexander died in 323 B.C. at the age
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  Speaker 1: of 32. He left no clear air. But the Greek
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  Speaker 1: language did not die with him. It spread. It settled.
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  Speaker 1: It became the tongue of commerce, of government, of philosophy,
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  Speaker 1: and of literature across the entire ancient world. And in
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  Speaker 1: approximately 280 BC, something happened in Alexandria, Egypt, that would
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  Speaker 1: change the history of Scripture permanently. Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the
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  Speaker 1: Greek ruler of Egypt, commissioned a group of Jewish scholars
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  Speaker 1: to translate the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek. Approximately 70
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  Speaker 1: scholars were gathered. The translation took generations to complete. It
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  Speaker 1: became known as the Septuagint, named for those 70 translators,
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  Speaker 1: abbreviated in Roman numerals as LXX. The result was this,
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  Speaker 1: the complete Hebrew scriptures, the Torah, the prophets, the writings,
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  Speaker 1: were now available in the common language of the entire
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  Speaker 1: Mediterranean world. The scroll of Isaiah, which described a servant
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  Speaker 1: who would be pierced for the transgressions of his people,
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  Speaker 1: who would be led like a lamb to the slaughter,
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  Speaker 1: was now readable by every educated person in the Roman world.
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  Speaker 1: In Greek, 300 years before Jesus was born. When Matthew, Luke,
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  Speaker 1: and Paul quote the Old Testament in the New Testament,
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  Speaker 1: they frequently quote the Septuagint, not the original Hebrew. The
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  Speaker 1: Bible was in the world's language before the word became flesh.
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  Speaker 1: As the Jewish people scattered across the Mediterranean under Ptolemaic
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  Speaker 1: rule into Egypt, North Africa, Syria, and Asia Minor, they
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  Speaker 1: built something in every city they settled. Not a temple.
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  Speaker 1: They had only one temple, and it was in Jerusalem.
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  Speaker 1: They built synagogues, gathering places for prayer, Torah reading and
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  Speaker 1: community within reach of every Jewish family, no matter how
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  Speaker 1: far they were from the land. By the time of Jesus,
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  Speaker 1: synagogues existed in every major city of the Roman world.
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  Speaker 1: That network would become the first distribution system of the gospel.
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  Speaker 1: Every city Paul entered on his missionary journeys, he went
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  Speaker 1: to the synagogue first. The infrastructure was already there. It
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  Speaker 1: had been built during the silence. Alexander's successors divided his
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  Speaker 1: empire among themselves. Judea passed through several sets of hands.
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  Speaker 1: The Ptolemies ruled it with relative tolerance for more than
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  Speaker 1: a century. And then, in 198 BC, a new power
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  Speaker 1: took control, and what they did to Israel very nearly
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  Speaker 1: ended it. In 198 B.C., the Seleucid king Antiochus III
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  Speaker 1: defeated the Ptolemies at the Battle of Panium and took
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  Speaker 1: control of Judea. He continued the general policy of tolerance.
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  Speaker 1: His son reversed every word of it. Antiochus IV came
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  Speaker 1: to power in 175 B.C. He gave himself the title Epiphanes,
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  Speaker 1: meaning God Manifest. The Jews who lived under his rule
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  Speaker 1: called him by a different name, Epimenes, the Madman. Both
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  Speaker 1: names were accurate. He began by draining the temple. In
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  Speaker 1: 169 B.C., Antiochus IV entered Jerusalem and removed the temple treasury.
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  Speaker 1: Approximately 1,800 talents of gold, the sacred vessels, the lampstand,
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  Speaker 1: the altar of incense, the golden table for the showbread,
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  Speaker 1: loaded onto carts and taken to Antioch. The holiest objects
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  Speaker 1: in Israel's history, gone. Then came the decrees. In 167 BC,
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  Speaker 1: Antiochus IV issued a series of edicts across Judea. No
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  Speaker 1: Sabbath observance, no circumcision, no reading or owning a copy
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  Speaker 1: of the Torah. Every practice that distinguished the Jewish people
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  Speaker 1: from the surrounding Gentile world was made illegal. Violation was
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  Speaker 1: punishable by death. To understand what came next, you must
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  Speaker 1: first understand what the temple was to the Jewish people.
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  Speaker 1: The altar of burnt offerings stood in the temple courtyard.
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  Speaker 1: the central point of contact between Israel and God. Every
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  Speaker 1: morning and every evening, a sacrifice was offered there. It
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  Speaker 1: was not ritual for its own sake. It was the
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  Speaker 1: ordained meeting point between a holy God and a people
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  Speaker 1: he had claimed as his own. It had stood for centuries.
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  Speaker 1: It was, for every Jewish person alive, the most sacred
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  Speaker 1: ground on earth. Antiochus IV converted the temple into a
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  Speaker 1: shrine to Zeus Olympios. He erected a pagan altar directly
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  Speaker 1: on top of the altar of burnt offering. And then,
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  Speaker 1: on the twenty-fifth day of the month of Kislev, in
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  Speaker 1: the year 167 B.C., he sacrificed a pig on the
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  Speaker 1: altar of God. The prophet Daniel had named this event
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  Speaker 1: before it happened. Daniel chapter 11 verse 31 forces from
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  Speaker 1: him shall appear and profane the temple and fortress, and
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  Speaker 1: shall take away the regular burnt offering, and they shall
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  Speaker 1: set up the abomination that makes desolate. The abomination of desolation.
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  Speaker 1: And then in Matthew chapter 24 verse 15, Jesus looked
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  Speaker 1: at his disciples and said, When you see the abomination
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  Speaker 1: of desolation spoken of by Daniel the prophet standing in
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  Speaker 1: the holy place, Let the reader understand. He was not
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  Speaker 1: describing the past. He was describing what was still coming.
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  Speaker 1: Antiochus IV was not just a historical villain. He was
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  Speaker 1: a prophetic type, a preview of something Jesus warned would
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  Speaker 1: happen again before the end of the age. The persecution
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  Speaker 1: was not limited to the temple. It reached into every
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  Speaker 1: Jewish home. The books of 1 and 2 Maccabees Historical documents,
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  Speaker 1: whose reliability is widely accepted by scholars, regardless of their
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  Speaker 1: canonical status, record what followed with careful, devastating detail. A
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  Speaker 1: mother was brought before the Seleucid authorities with her seven sons.
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  Speaker 1: They were ordered to eat pork in public violation of
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  Speaker 1: the Torah. The first son refused. They killed him in
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  Speaker 1: front of his brothers and his mother. They killed him
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  Speaker 1: in front of his brothers and his mother. The second
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  Speaker 1: son refused. Before he died, he said this, recorded in
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  Speaker 1: 2 Maccabees 7, verse 9,' You dismiss us from this
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  Speaker 1: present life, but the King of the universe will raise
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  Speaker 1: us up to an everlasting renewal of life, because we
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  Speaker 1: have died for his laws.' Then they killed the second son.
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  Speaker 1: The mother watched all seven of her sons die. She
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  Speaker 1: outlived them all. She was executed last. These accounts did
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  Speaker 1: something to Jewish theology that no period of peace could
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  Speaker 1: have accomplished. The martyrs died affirming that God would raise
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  Speaker 1: their bodies, that the grave was not the end, that
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  Speaker 1: a king who could put you in the ground could
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  Speaker 1: not keep you there if the king of the universe
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  Speaker 1: had decreed otherwise. This theology, bodily resurrection, as a certainty,
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  Speaker 1: as a promise, as the ground on which you could
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  Speaker 1: die without despair, became a defining doctrine of the Pharisees.
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  Speaker 1: It is the exact doctrine the Sadducees denied and Jesus affirmed.
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  Speaker 1: It is the doctrine Paul placed at the center of
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  Speaker 1: his entire theology in 1 Corinthians chapter 15. It is
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  Speaker 1: the doctrine that made the resurrection of Jesus not a
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  Speaker 1: Greek myth but a Jewish expectation. Antiochus IV tried to
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  Speaker 1: extinguish Jewish faith. He accidentally produced the clearest articulation of
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  Speaker 1: resurrection theology in Israel's history. The worst moment in 400
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  Speaker 1: years produced its most important doctrine. The revolt began with
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  Speaker 1: an elderly priest in a small village. His name was Mattathias.
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  Speaker 1: He lived in the village of Modine, northwest of Jerusalem.
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  Speaker 1: when a Seleucid official arrived and ordered the community to
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  Speaker 1: perform a public pagan sacrifice, Mattathias refused. Another Jewish man
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  Speaker 1: stepped forward to comply. Mattathias killed them both, the Seleucid
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  Speaker 1: official and the man who would have offered the sacrifice.
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  Speaker 1: Then he and his five sons fled to the hills
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  Speaker 1: of Judea and began a guerrilla war against one of
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  Speaker 1: the great military powers of the ancient world. After Mattathias died,
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  Speaker 1: his son Judah took command. Judah's nickname was Maccabee, almost
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  Speaker 1: certainly from the Hebrew makavet, meaning hammer. He was appropriately named.
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  Speaker 1: The military odds were, by any reasonable calculation, impossible. The
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  Speaker 1: Maccabees had no cavalry, no siege equipment, no professional military structure,
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  Speaker 1: no standing army. They were farmers, priests, and craftsmen, who
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  Speaker 1: had chosen death over compromise. Against them stood the full
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  Speaker 1: force of the Seleucid imperial army, trained soldiers, war elephants,
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  Speaker 1: and the resources of a regional empire. The Maccabees won.
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  Speaker 1: Within three years, Judah Maccabee had driven the Seleucid forces
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  Speaker 1: from Jerusalem and retaken the temple. The pagan altar was
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  Speaker 1: torn down. The stones that had been defiled were removed
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  Speaker 1: and replaced. the lampstand was relit. On the 25th day
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  Speaker 1: of Kislev, in the year 164 BC, exactly three years
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  Speaker 1: after the desecration, the temple was rededicated to God. That
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  Speaker 1: date is still observed. It is called Hanukkah, the festival
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  Speaker 1: of dedication. In John chapter 10, verse 22, the text
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  Speaker 1: records this. At that time, the feast of dedication took
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  Speaker 1: place at Jerusalem. It was winter. And Jesus was walking
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  Speaker 1: in the temple, in the colonnade of Solomon. Jesus was
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  Speaker 1: present at Hanukkah. He stood on ground that had been
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  Speaker 1: recovered by an impossible military victory, and lit by a
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  Speaker 1: priesthood that had refused to surrender. And he said nothing
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  Speaker 1: to distance himself from it. The victory, however, created a
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  Speaker 1: new problem. The Maccabees' descendants, the Hasmonean dynasty, began ruling
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  Speaker 1: Judea as both priests and kings. Kingship in Israel belonged
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  Speaker 1: to the tribe of Judah and the line of David.
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  Speaker 1: Priesthood belonged to the tribe of Levi. The Hasmoneans were
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  Speaker 1: priests who became kings. Their illegitimacy and eventual corruption fractured
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  Speaker 1: the Jewish community into four competing movements. Those movements were
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  Speaker 1: the world Jesus walked into. By the time of Jesus,
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  Speaker 1: Judaism was not a monolith. It was a contested landscape
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  Speaker 1: of competing theologies and competing answers to the same ancient question.
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  Speaker 1: What does it mean to be the people of God
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  Speaker 1: under foreign power? Four movements defined that landscape. Every major
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  Speaker 1: conflict in the Gospels is rooted in one of them.
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  Speaker 1: The Pharisees were the most numerous. Approximately 6,000 of them
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  Speaker 1: lived in Judea at the time of Jesus, a figure
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  Speaker 1: from Josephus. They believed in both the written Torah and
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  Speaker 1: the oral law, the accumulated interpretive tradition passed down through
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  Speaker 1: generations of rabbis. They believed in bodily resurrection, in angels,
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  Speaker 1: in the afterlife. Among ordinary Jewish people, they were widely respected.
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  Speaker 1: They were the scholars, the teachers, the men who had
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  Speaker 1: preserved Jewish identity through centuries of foreign pressure. Their problem
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  Speaker 1: was not that they were wrong about the law. It
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  Speaker 1: was that they had built a performance system around it.
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  Speaker 1: Obedience had become a public display rather than a private relationship.
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  Speaker 1: Jesus' words in Matthew chapter 23 were directed at this precisely,
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  Speaker 1: not at their knowledge of Scripture, which he affirmed, but
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  Speaker 1: at the gap between what they taught and how they lived.
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  Speaker 1: The Sadducees were the priestly aristocracy, wealthy, politically connected, and
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  Speaker 1: deeply invested in the Roman system that kept them in power.
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  Speaker 1: They accepted only the written Torah, rejecting the oral law entirely.
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  Speaker 1: They denied the resurrection of the dead, the existence of angels,
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  Speaker 1: and the reality of an afterlife. The high priest Caiaphas,
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  Speaker 1: who presided over Jesus' trial, was a Sadducee. When Jesus
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  Speaker 1: cleansed the temple and overturned the tables of the money changers,
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  Speaker 1: he was directly attacking the Sadducees' commercial system and their
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  Speaker 1: political arrangement with Rome. The Essenes had withdrawn from Jerusalem altogether.
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  Speaker 1: They considered the temple establishment so thoroughly corrupt that continued
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  Speaker 1: participation in it was impossible. They established communal settlements in
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  Speaker 1: the wilderness, the most famous at Qumran, on the northwest
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  Speaker 1: shore of the Dead Sea. It is the Essene community
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  Speaker 1: at Qumran that produced and preserved the Dead Sea Scrolls.
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  Speaker 1: Nearly 900 manuscripts, including the oldest known copies of almost
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  Speaker 1: every book of the Old Testament. John the Baptist presents
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  Speaker 1: a striking profile, Wilderness Setting, Ascetic Lifestyles, Ritual Immersion for Repentance,
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  Speaker 1: a sharp critique of the Jerusalem establishment. Scholars have noted
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  Speaker 1: the close parallels between John's practice and the Essene community
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  Speaker 1: at Qumran. No ancient text, however, directly places John inside
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  Speaker 1: the Essene movement. The parallel is real. The connection is
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  Speaker 1: not established. The Zealots operated from a conviction inherited directly
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  Speaker 1: from the Maccabees. God had given military victory once against
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  Speaker 1: impossible odds, and he would do it again. Violent armed
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  Speaker 1: resistance to Rome was not merely permitted. It was required.
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  Speaker 1: Among the twelve men Jesus chose as his disciples was Simon,
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  Speaker 1: called the Zealot. The Zealots eventually launched the revolt of
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  Speaker 1: 66 A.D. Rome destroyed the temple in 70 A.D. the
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  Speaker 1: event Jesus had predicted in Matthew 24.2. When the disciples
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  Speaker 1: asked the risen Jesus in Acts 1.6, Lord, will you
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  Speaker 1: at this time restore the kingdom to Israel? They were
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  Speaker 1: asking a zealot question. They expected a military Messiah. Jesus
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  Speaker 1: had spent three years telling them otherwise. Understanding the four
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  Speaker 1: factions does not simply explain the conflicts in the Gospels.
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  Speaker 1: It explains why Jesus said what he said, the way
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  Speaker 1: he said it, to the people he was saying it to.
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  Speaker 1: He was not preaching into a vacuum. He was speaking
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  Speaker 1: into a world these four movements had shaped. In 63 B.C.,
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  Speaker 1: the Roman general Pompey arrived in Judea in the middle
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  Speaker 1: of a Hasmonean civil war. He besieged Jerusalem, and when
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  Speaker 1: the city fell, he walked through the temple, past the
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  Speaker 1: outer courts, passed the inner court, passed the veil, and
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  Speaker 1: entered the Holy of Holies. Only the high priest was
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  Speaker 1: permitted to enter that room, only once a year, only
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  Speaker 1: on Yom Kippur, only after extensive ritual purification. Pompey walked
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  Speaker 1: in as a Roman general. Jewish independence ended that day.
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  Speaker 1: The land became a Roman province, and in 37 B.C.,
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  Speaker 1: the Roman Senate, appointed its own king. Herod, known to
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  Speaker 1: history as Herod the Great, was not Jewish by heritage.
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  Speaker 1: He was an Idumean, descended from the Edomites. He ruled
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  Speaker 1: through fear, paranoia, and the particular anxiety of a man
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  Speaker 1: whose throne rested on the approval of a foreign empire.
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  Speaker 1: He executed his own sons. He executed his wife. When
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  Speaker 1: the Magi arrived from the east asking about a newborn king,
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  Speaker 1: He ordered the slaughter of every male infant in the
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  Speaker 1: region of Bethlehem under two years old. Matthew chapter 2,
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  Speaker 1: verse 16. He was exactly the kind of man who
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  Speaker 1: would do exactly that. But Herod also built. To secure
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  Speaker 1: Jewish loyalty, he launched the most ambitious construction project in
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  Speaker 1: the history of the land, the expansion and reconstruction of
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  Speaker 1: the second temple. He doubled the size of the Temple Mount,
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  Speaker 1: engineering massive stone-retaining walls around the hill. One of those
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  Speaker 1: walls stands today. It is called the Western Wall. The
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  Speaker 1: structure took 46 years to complete. Jesus notes this in
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  Speaker 1: John 2, verse 20. It was finally finished in approximately
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: 64 A.D. Rome burned it in 70 A.D., six years later. Rome, however,
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: was not only conquest, it was infrastructure. The Pax Romana,
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: the Roman peace established from 27 BC onward, created conditions
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: of stability across the Mediterranean world that were unprecedented. Roman
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: roads connected every major city in the empire, approximately 80,000
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: kilometers of paved road. The sea was safe. A common
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: language was spoken everywhere. A common legal system governed trade
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: and travel. Paul's missionary journeys covered approximately 10,000 miles. Every
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: one of those miles was a Roman road. The letters
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: he wrote to churches in Corinth, Rome, Galatia, Ephesus, and
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: Philippi traveled by Roman postal routes. The infrastructure that spread
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: the gospel across three continents was built by the empire
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: that crucified the one the gospel proclaimed. The Apostle Paul
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: understood this precisely. In his letter to the Galatians, chapter 4,
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: verse 4, But when the fullness of time had come,
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: God sent forth his Son. The phrase in Greek is
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: pleroma tu chrono, the moment of perfect completion. Not early,
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: not late, the moment when nothing was missing. Think about
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: what had been assembled. Greek language, so the gospel could
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: be written and read across the world. The Septuagint, so
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: every Gentile city already had the prophecies in their language
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: before the Messiah arrived. Roman roads, so a tent maker
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: from Tarsus could carry the message across three continents. Synagogues
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: in every city, so he had a room full of
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: people waiting for him when he got there. Four centuries
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: of messianic expectation, compressing to a point of maximum pressure.
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: Every piece was in place. The Pleroma tu chrono. Nothing
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: was missing. The stage had been built. The curtain was
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: about to rise. The silence broke in a temple. Not
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: with thunder. Not with a vision given to a king
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: or a general. It broke in a room full of
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: incense smoke. where a priest had been chosen by Lot
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: to perform a routine duty. The priesthood in first century
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: Judea was divided into 24 divisions, each serving at the
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: temple in rotating terms. Within each division, individual duties were
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: assigned by Lot. The duty of entering the holy place
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: to burn incense fell to Zechariah on this particular day.
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: Luke chapter 1 verse 8 records it. He was chosen
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: by Lot according to the custom of the priesthood. He
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: entered the temple. He approached the altar of incense, and
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: the angel of the Lord appeared, standing on the right
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: side of the altar. After 400 years, God sent a messenger,
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: and the first words recorded after four centuries of silence
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: are these, Do not be afraid. Zechariah, for your prayer
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: has been heard. Your prayer has been heard. After 400
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: years without a prophetic voice, without a new word from God,
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: without a recorded angel, without a vision, the silence breaks
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: with a sentence about answered prayer, not a declaration, not
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: a decree, a personal word, to one frightened priest standing
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: alone in a room full of incense. The announcement that
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: followed contained language that no Jewish listener would have missed.
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: Luke 1.17 John would go before the Lord, in the
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: the fathers to the children. The exact language of Malachi 4.6
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: The final verse of the Old Testament says, the last
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: words before the silence began, is quoted by Gabriel in
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: the announcement that the silence is over. The silence begins
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: with that verse. It ends with that verse spoken again
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: by an angel of God. The 400 years are a parenthesis.
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: Malachi opens it. Gabriel closes it. John the Baptist was
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: the Elijah figure Malachi had promised, the messenger before the messenger.
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: the voice preparing a straight path for the one who
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: would come after. Six months after Gabriel appeared to Zechariah,
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: he appeared again, to a young woman in the town
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: of Nazareth. Luke chapter 1 verse 31. You will conceive
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: and give birth to a son, and you are to
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: call him Jesus. The stage that had taken four hundred
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: years to build— five powers, four factions, one translation— one road network,
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: one universal language, one synagogue in every city, was ready
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: for one person. The curtain rose. Looking back across those
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: four hundred years with both testaments in hand, what becomes
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: visible is not disorder. It is a method. Noah built
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: the ark for approximately 100 years before the flood came.
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: 100 years of construction with no rain in sight. Abraham
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: received the promise of a son at age 75. Isaac
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: was born when Abraham was 100. 25 years between the
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: promise and its fulfillment. Joseph was sold into slavery at 17.
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: he spent 13 years in an Egyptian household and an
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: Egyptian prison before Pharaoh called him from the cell and
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: placed him over the entire nation. Israel went into Egypt
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: as 70 people and stayed for 400 years, every one
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: of those years looking from inside it like a permanent condition.
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: Then Moses arrived at the burning bush, and then another
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: 400 years of silence. No prophet, no word, no visible movement.
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: And then Gabriel appears to Zechariah in the temple, and
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: the silence that God himself had announced through Amos is over.
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: The Bible does not present these waiting periods as exceptions
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: to God's normal way of working. It presents them as
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: the pattern, extended periods of preparation, invisible from inside them,
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: that end at the exact moment of completion. Paul's word
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: for it was, pleroma to chronu the fullness of time
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: not early not late the moment when nothing is missing
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: the 400 years of silence is the largest and most
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: thoroughly documented example of that pattern in all of scripture
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: five powers four factions one translation one road network one
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: universal language four centuries of expectation compressing to a single
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: point nothing was missing Nothing was rushed. Nothing was improvised.
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: The silence was never absence. It was construction. If this
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: video gave you something you did not have before, if
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: the 400 years between Malachi and Matthew now make sense
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: to you as preparation and not abandonment, then this channel
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: has much more for you. Every video on Bible Originals
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: Plus goes this deep into the history, the scripture, and
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: the stories most people have never been told. Subscribe now
• 31:59
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• 32:02
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• 32:06
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