Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / March 6, 2016 | Route 66 - The Silent Years

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March 6, 2016 | Route 66 - The Silent Years · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: How are you today?
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: If you're visiting, we've been doing something called Route 66 for our messages, 66 books of the Bible, 66 Sundays, sort of a road trip through the Bible.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: We're off the beaten path right now.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: We finished the Old Testament with the book of Malachi two weeks ago.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: And last week we did sort of a summary in 10 words of the Old Testament.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: And this week I'm doing something.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to try to do something that's all your fault.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: During my message two weeks ago, I said, wow, I've got five Sundays, so I don't want to hit Matthew till after Easter.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I said I could do summer of the Old Testament, or I could, I and then I was in Malachi.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: I said, I could teach the blank page between the testaments, those 400 years.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: So because we have a lot of squirrely people in this church, well, loads of texts and emails going, oh, we want you to do the blank page.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Do the intertestamental period.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: At which, you know, my heart fell.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, my dad taught a course for decades called the intertestamental period in college.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I have the notes, but I mean, it's my goodness, to teach a whole course in 30 minutes.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: So um, but I'm a sucker, and so I've been studying it.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so this morning, uh I'm gonna teach the blank page.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Stephanie prayed, you know, bless Jim as he opens the word.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Is it does it really qualify as opening the word if you're teaching the stuff that has no black print?
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now, it's not that the blank pages don't actually have a message.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, after all, I was reading the Huffington Post this week pointed out that that Amazon.com has run out of a book entitled Everything Obama Knows About the Economy.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: You buy it, it opens up to 140 blank pages.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: So blank pages can mean something.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now that's just a takeoff from some previous.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: So now, no.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: Then you got a clap for this one.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Previous blank books include the presidential accomplishments of George W.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Bush, The Case for Global Warming, and How Duke Grads Have Changed the World.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's my personal favorite.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: All of which you buy, you pay$9.99 approximately, and you get a book with all blank pages.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: Kind of an expensive journal, but uh kind of a cool cover.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, so uh each of these books has a message, that is to say, there is no case for global warming.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: George Bush has no presidential accomplishments, stuke grads have done nothing to change the world.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: Obama knows nothing about the economy.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now, that's probably not going to be the conclusion I come to uh in the blank page of the 400 years between the testaments.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, as I studied this the last uh couple of weeks and wept and beat my head against the wall and uh asked the Lord to return, I I've decided that maybe there are some lessons, so I want to suggest four lessons from the blank page this morning.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: We're taking a detour, in other words, off of the Bible.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: This is not inspired stuff.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: This is 400 years of history I'm gonna try to teach you.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: They're oftentimes called the silent years, the 400 silent years.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: And they uh the 400 silent years is because Malachi was completed about 400 or 430, 435, whoever, you know, sometime around then, uh 430 years, let's say, before Christ was born.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: Christ was born five years before Christ was born.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if Christ was born about 5 BC, that's because the we figured the dates wrong way back then.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Not we.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's not our fault, it's their fault.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: So he was born about 5 BC.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: You have about 400 years in there of silence.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Now, by silence, we don't mean nothing happened, and everybody held their breath, and and you know.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we just mean that it was silent in one direction, that is, from heaven to earth.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: God apparently did not speak, he didn't use any prophets to give a fresh word from him.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: He inspired no Bible, absolutely, you know, no biblical books.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: It was just God just shut his mouth for about 400 years.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: But it certainly does not mean that it was silent in any other way.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because after all, uh, when you look at uh the what happened during those 400 years between the Old Testament and the New Testament, you realize there was a there were more changes, more things that happened than in any 400-year period up till that point.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: There was a change from Persian rule, which was going on in 400 BC, to Greek rule and then to Roman rule.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: The Old Testament 39 books were compiled into a canon, uh, the canon of scripture that we have today.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: New religious groups were founded: Pharisees, Sadducees, scribes, Essenes.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: A Greek translation of the scripture, that is, the Bible that Jesus and Paul used and quoted from in the New Testament, was the Greek translation, not generally, not generally the whole the Hebrew Old Testament, but a Greek translation of it done about 250 BC down in Egypt that was called the Septuagint, Sept means seven, because there were 70 Jewish scholars, actually 72, that did the translating.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: That was huge.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: Universal Greek language, Roman roads, so a lot of stuff happened.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, if you were to end the Old Testament, not knowing the Bible the way you know it, and then just keep reading into Matthew 1, it would be like culture shock.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: Because at the end of Malachi, the leaders you're reading about are people like Malachi, Ezra, and Nehemiah.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then you turn the next page and you're suddenly the characters are John the Baptist and Jesus.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: The ruling power has suddenly switched from Persia, way in the east, to Rome, way in the west.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's certainly a change.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Religious groups, there are no religious groups in Malachi's day.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody pretty much believes the same thing and uh hangs around the temple.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: But in the New Testament, suddenly you find out there's all these squabbling denominations.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: There's Methodists and Lutherans and Presbyterians, I'm sorry, there's scribes and there's Pharisees and there's Sadducees and there's Herodians and there's the Sanhedrin.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: And you also get shocked because you've stopped reading Hebrew and all of a sudden you've switched to the language of Greek.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's not heaven's language.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: What's going on here?
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: The place of worship is partly the same.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's a temple in Jerusalem, but all of a sudden you're reading that a lot of the people aren't, you know, on the Shabbat.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: They're going to synagogues.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: What are those?
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: You know, those are like not really places of worship so much as places of study, and there seems to be one in every town.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: And we could add some other things.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: You know, as the Old Testament closes, there are no really strong towns.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's a fragile community in Israel.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody's pretty poor.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: The people are, and they're living hand to mouth, they're poor farmers, and the cities lie in ruins.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: You get to the New Testament, wow, the Jews are into commerce big time.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: They're out in the Mediterranean taking their crops north and taking them south.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: The cities are beautiful.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, everything's, you know, seems just shockingly different.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: So those 400 silent years, you know, are not silent in some important ways.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: It happens to remind me of an album that I own, but of course, everybody who lived in the 60s owned that album by Simon and Garfunkel.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds of silence.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to suggest to you that there are some clear sounds or lessons from the silent period, four of them.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: And the first one I'll just lay out at the very beginning because it comes from the New Testament itself.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: From a verse in Galatians where Paul writes in Galatians 4:4, when the fullness, the pleroma, when the fullness of time came, God sent out his son born of a woman.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: What's he saying?
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: The picture is that time was maybe sort of like a woman getting fuller and fuller and pregnant and all of a sudden, you know, has the baby, or that it's that somehow time is climbing a mountain.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: And when, and I like this why I like the Holman Christian standard in this verse, when the time came to completion or was fulfilled or fruition, so it's as though the mountain was climbed.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: You know the picture is here that God in, in a sense, invented all of history for this moment.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, as I stand back, I would say there are two mountain peaks in all of world history.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: And those two mountain peaks are the first coming of Christ and the second coming of Christ.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: And all of history moved up to that first mountain peak in 5 BC or 4 BC when Jesus was born.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: And now all of history is again moving through a kind of a silent period up to the second coming of Jesus Christ.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: And the lesson from Galatians 4, 4, and maybe the overarching message lesson of the whole message is that God controls history, that it's his story, it's his doing, that he's managing the whole thing.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I know that's kind of a cliche, you've heard that many times, but I'm suggesting to you that you might want to remind yourself of that as you sit here anxiously worried about the presidential election.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: And when rarely CNN stops talking about Donald Trump and moves over to overseas, then you're reading about ISIS and you're reading about whether it's France or in Africa or somewhere else or Syria, where all kinds of you know, people are getting killed because of Islamic fanaticism.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: And you find yourself thinking, God, do you know about this?
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Are you noticing the kind of candidates we have?
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: Are you noticing the kind of events that are happening in world history?
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: And God says, relax.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: Same kind of stuff I was hearing in 400, 300, 200, and 100 BC, and now I'm hearing it from you in 2000 AD.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: But I control history and I'm moving it all toward a climax.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now, as for an overview, I don't know how I'm gonna vacuum pack a whole course in intertestamental period.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I have my dad's notes, but how to vacuum pack that in the next 20 minutes, 25 minutes.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not gonna do a great job of it, but I'm gonna whip through it as best I can.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: You remember that in Daniel chapter 2, Daniel predicted that there would be four kingdoms, one after another: gold, silver, bronze, then iron.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: The gold was Babylon.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: Date, 606 to 539.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Remember, they captured Judah.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: And then in 539, Cyrus the Great of Persia, silver, conquered Babylon.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: We're still in Old Testament times right now.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: We haven't hit the intertestamental period, which starts at 400 BC.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then we have the intertestamental period starting, and then we have Greece, Alexander the Great, 331 BC down to 63 BC is the date when Pompey of Rome defeated Jerusalem, 63 BC, and then the Roman Empire, 63 BC to 397 A.D.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: So let's start with the Persian Empire, then the Grecian Empire, then the Roman Empire, and draw some inner tell some interesting stories and draw some lessons.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting to me, okay?
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the Babylonian, yeah, I'd leave too.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the Babylonian Empire, Babylonian Empire was, I used to fall asleep when my dad sit around at the dinner table and he started talking about John Hyrcanus and the Maccabees and so forth, and they go, oh my goodness, just bring dessert.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: So Babylonian Empire seemed to be really huge, but listen, the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great absolutely swallowed up, dwarfed it, and was gigantic.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to suggest to you, you're gonna watch a video for just a minute or two here about the Persian Empire and its greatness, but I share with you this, it's like a one-minute excerpt of an over-hour-long video, a historical video from YouTube.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: But um, I want to show you this so that I can tell you why I think God employed or used the Persian Empire in the lives of his people.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_06: Ancient Persia, fearless, formidable, unrelenting, for ages shrouded in mystery, an empire unparalleled in conquest and riches.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_05: To create an empire of the size of the Persian Empire, the largest empire the world knows, obviously takes military skills.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_06: From North Africa to Asia, it was a civilization driven by a dynasty of extraordinary rulers, ambitious and all-powerful.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_06: The Persian Empire created some of the most astonishing feats of engineering the world has ever seen.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_06: Magnificent palaces that rose up from barren deserts, roadways, bridges, and canals.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_07: Everyone has heard of the Suez Canal, but how many have heard of Darius's canal?
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_06: But dark clouds were on the horizon.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_06: An ancient rivalry with Greece would erupt into an epic clash that changed the course of history and shaped the Western world for thousands of years to come.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_06: As Passagad was being built, Cyrus added to his dominion one enemy kingdom after another.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_06: But Cyrus was a very different kind of king.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_06: He refused to enslave his new subjects, a revolutionary concept in the ancient world.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_04: He recognized the local validity, if you will, of different religions and beliefs, and uh allowed those things to persist.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: In 539, Cyrus conquered Babylon, but he did not present himself as a conqueror.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: He presented himself as a liberator, rescuing these people from their despotic ruler.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: And then he did a totally unprecedented thing.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: He freed the Jews.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: The Jews had been living in Babylon in captivity ever since Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem and their temple.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: And Cyrus freed them.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: Now, it could be said in hindsight or political history that Cyrus was looking for a buffer state between a hostile Egypt and his own empire.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: But so what?
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: The point is that no one had ever done anything like this, and hardly anyone has ever done anything like it since.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: And subsequently, he is the only Gentile in the Bible to be referred to as Mashiach or Messiah.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_04: As uh one distinguished Oxford scholar once said to me, Cyrus always had a very good press.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_04: It's uh it's a very true uh statement.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_06: Before he could launch the campaign that would make Persia the lone superpower of the ancient world, Cyrus the Great died in battle in 530 BC.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: So picture, imagine that you're God in heaven for just a moment.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's a little dangerous, but you have caused your people to be taken captive into Babylon by people who enslave the countries they conquered.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: Nebuchadnezzar, Babylon, and so they have taken all of the people of Israel, the best people at least, into Babylon, and they are enslaved.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: But you as God, you need to fulfill your promises.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: You need to bring your people back to Jerusalem.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, you need someone in charge in Babylon who's kind, who's gracious, who's an absolutely unique world ruler.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so you cause Babylon to be overthrown by Persia.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: Persia under Cyrus the Great, a man so benevolent that even the countries he defeated called him a just judge and a kind ruler, a man who was called father by his own people.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, in the Bible, you you uh uh inspired the greatest prophet, Isaiah, 200 years before, to mention Cyrus' name and say, I have anointed this man, anoint in Hebrew, Mashiach, just like Messiah.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: I've anointed this man to deliver my people.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: So you put Cyrus the Great and Persia in charge so that he will release the Jews and send them back to the land.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: That in any in any event is my opinion about why, I'll ask God when I get there, why God put Persia in charge and such a kind man in 539 BC to overthrow Babylon.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: Daniel predicted it.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: Remember many, many Tekleuparson, the handwriting on the wall, and that night Cyrus the Great, the troops come in and overthrow Babylon.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: All predicted by God in the book of Daniel.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: So that's Cyrus the Great, and that's Persia, and that kingdom lasts, the greatest kingdom in size, perhaps that the world has ever seen.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: That lasted down through 400 BC as the silent, the years of silence begin, and it lasted all the way down to 331 BC.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: When there came on the scene a 25-year-old guy who's one of the greatest people in all of history named Alexander the Great.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: Alexander the Great is one of these characters that, well, Cyrus the Great deserved the title the Great because he was not only military but kind.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: I would say Alexander deserves it as well because he was not only military but intellectual.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'll explain that in a minute.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: Alexander the Great grew up in northern Greece, over in the west, in an area called Macedon, which was its own country back then.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: And unlike the Greece, uh the democratic Greece down below, the Athens and Corinth, Macedon had a king.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: The king happened to be Alexander's father.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: His name was Philip.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: King Philip of Macedon.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: King Philip of Macedon was this remarkable military genius who thought constantly about new ways to fight.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm guessing he talked around the dinner table about this because his son, even as a teenager, showed remarkable gift in military planning.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: And at age 16, his father made him a head of a whole cavalry regiment.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: But dad died when he was 20 years old, and Alexander assumed the post not only of ruler, but of commander of all of the armies, and he immediately set out to conquer the entire known world.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: There are some actual, some pretty good pictures of Alexander the Great.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: The most famous one is the mosaic.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: Sort of looks like a chariot has run over his face, but but I prefer the coin.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: I have a, in Jesus' day, you've heard of the shekel.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: The shekels were minted up in Tyre, up in Lebanon.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: I have one.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: They're solid silver, they're pretty heavy, and they all have Alexander the Great's face on it.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I think he looks better on the coin than he looks on the mosaic.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: But either way, he's got a big nose.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the the war, the the style of warfare that they invented, which was which is just just you would conquer everyone, was called the Macedonian phalanx, and it turned the Macedonian army into the second most powerful army in the world, behind the Persian army.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: The phalanx was uh was an invention whereby you had 256 soldiers in a square, 16 on each side, and they all carried this 20-foot, 18 to 20-foot javelin.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, uh, this javelin was the forerunner of our track and field javelin today.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: Most spears of that day were only half that size.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: And these things were aerodynamic, they were sharpened to razor edge, and so as they would march, they were unstoppable as they would march through foreign forces with these things out, no horses would get near them, and they would just conquer everybody.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: And with the phalanx and with his, had the best horsemen in the world, 7,000 of them, plus his 40,000 uh uh foot soldiers, Alexander marched through the known world, conquering everyone, even though he was outnumbered by many of his foes.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what's interesting is the Bible predicted all this.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: Daniel chapter 8 calls Greece a he-goat.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: And Greece is pictured as a he-goat with one sharp horn that attacks a ram with two horns.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: The ram stands for Medio Persia.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: The text goes like this Daniel chapter 8.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: As I was observing, writes Daniel, a male goat appeared coming from the west across the surface of the entire earth without touching the ground.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: The goat had a Conspicuous horn between his eyes.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: He came toward the two-horned ram I had seen and rushed at him with savage fury, shattering his two horns, media in Persia, and the ram was not strong enough to stand against him.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: The goat threw him to the ground and trampled him.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that's precisely what happened.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: Alexander was 25 years old.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: He marched all the way east and he matched up against the huge force, about 200,000, 250,000 troops of Persia, five times his size.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: And you can read about military manuals, YouTube, you can read about how he conquered him, flanking him, and just really creative.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: But he defeated this mighty Persian armory under Darius, it was Darius III, and then he was the ruler of the known world.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: And a story, however, which is interesting for us, because this is a Bible church, is that Alexander came to defeat Jerusalem.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: He came on his way toward Egypt, and he'd heard about Jerusalem, and he came to lay siege to and destroy Jerusalem.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: But what happened is he drew near, and the high priest in Jerusalem, whose name was Jeduah, that name is found, by the way, as a priest's name in Nehemiah.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: Jadouah had a brilliant idea.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: He grabbed the book of Daniel and he told all of his assistant priests and as many townspeople as wished to dress in white robes and to start marching north, as he knew Alexander was marching south, having just destroyed the city of the so-called impregnable city of Tyre.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: And some miles out of Jerusalem, Alexander with his army marching south, saw this parade of white robed people coming toward him.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: And he would later tell the high priest that he'd had a dream early in his military campaign where one night God showed him a man, an old man in white, and God said, This old man, there will be an old man in white who comes to you to show you, to tell you something significant.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: So with this dream in mind, Alexander tells his troops to stay still and he goes up to meet the high priest.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: And the high priest opens up the book of Daniel and shows him where he is predicted as the conqueror in Daniel chapter 8, that passage that I read to you.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, Josephus tells about this in his book of Antiquities.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: Josephus was a first-century Jew who converted to Rome and wrote books called The Wars of the Jews, the Antiquities, and so forth.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: And we read in Antiquities 11, verse 8, and when the book of Daniel was showed him, wherein Daniel declared that one of the Greeks should destroy the empire of the Persians, he, Alexander, supposed that himself was the person intended, and he was then glad.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: He was not only glad, but he showered the priest and all of these other people with gifts, and he marched his army around, and he didn't bother the city of Jerusalem.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: And he would never say anything bad about the Jews or the Hebrew religion.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: God caring for his people.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: Lesson number two: not only does God control history, but God keeps his promises, and God keeps his prophecies.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: Cyrus the Great, Alexander the Great, Daniel chapter 8 and 11 are detailed prophecies fulfilled in the intertestamental period.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: Why would God use Alexander the Great and Greece to help prepare the way for his son?
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: Here's my opinion.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: There were three great philosophers in Greece at this time.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: It was known for its philosophy, and you've heard their names.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: There's Socrates, who we only know about, because of his main pupil, Plato, and Plato.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: Plato started a school in Athens.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: Plato's main pupil was Aristotle, who also started a school.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: Aristotle's main pupil, get this, was none other than the young Alexander the Great.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: King Philip of Macedon, his father, wanted his son to be an intellectual, not just a warrior.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so he offered Aristotle just bucos of money, he rebuilt his home city, he did a lot of things.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so Alexander was tutored by none other than Aristotle.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: Aristotle had this view, that strong view, Plato also had it, that it's not enough to be athletic, strong, a warrior, that you need to balance that.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: Aristotle was big into balance and unity, that you need to balance that with intellect, with musical skill, with these, with knowledge, with philosophy.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: And had a strong belief that everything should be unified.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: And for this reason, Alexander the Great was not a normal ruler.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: Not a normal, I mean, not a normal general.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: When he started marching east, he took a huge throng of scientists and philosophers with him.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, it was said, it's been said in one book, that until the space program in America, no government has ever incurred the cost that Alexander the Great did for all of his scientists.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: And he ordered them to get flora and fauna and information and take it back to his mentor Aristotle and to the educational system of Greece.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_00: Because he had this vision of uniting the entire world, not just militarily, but economically and linguistically and culturally.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's called Hellenization.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: The name Greece in Greek is hellas.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so this process, there was a process whereby Alexander the Great decided that he wanted to unify the entire world so that everyone spoke Greek.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, he planted no less than a hundred cities as he marched through the world, cities which would only speak Greek, so that after a while the whole world started speaking Greek.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: Can you see why it was that Paul was able to travel through the entire world, known world of that day, speaking Greek and be able to share the gospel with everyone?
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: Not only that, but but he decided to unite the world economically.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: Across the world, everybody was in a barter system in that day.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: I'll trade my oranges for your flowers, kind of a thing.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: But in 600 BC, you know, the Greeks had sort of invented coinage.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so Alexander, coins with his face on them, of course, brought coins everywhere.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: And all of a sudden you have coins, and people no longer have to barter, and they can start traveling and they can start doing commerce.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: Linguistically, economically, politically, Alexander the Great united the world politically, culturally.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: He brought Greek mythology everywhere, he brought their clothing, he brought their customs everywhere.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: He, in a sense, civilized the entire world.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: And things were looking pretty good at this moment, but something happened that was predicted by Daniel.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: Verse 8, chapter 8.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_00: Then the male goat became very great, that is Greece.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: But when he became powerful, the large horn, that is Alexander the Great, was shattered.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: After 11 years, just 11 years of conquering the world, at age 32, he reached Babylon, and the story goes that he drank himself to death because he was depressed.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: He'd conquered the whole known world.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: Not sure about that because he hadn't finished conquering India yet, but for whatever reason he died young at age 32.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_00: And the kingdom fell into chaos.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: He'd had a son who'd gotten murdered, but now all he had left was four generals, or six, but it ended up being four that started fighting over his kingdom, and they divided his kingdom.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: Four conspicuous horns came up in its place, Daniel 8.8, pointing toward the four winds of heaven.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: North, south, east, and west.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: Two of those horns became highly significant.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: The Seleucid Empire in the east, Syria, and the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt in the south.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: Let me show you just a minute-long video to give you a little picture of what we're about to enter now as we're still in sort of the Greek empire, but it's now going to fracture into the Seleucids and the Ptolemies, Syria and Egypt.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_02: But the sudden death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE brought chaos to his empire.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_02: Six of his generals began to war among themselves to gain succession to rulership.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_02: One of them, Seleucus, wrested control of a huge territory from his adversaries and established what became known as the Seleucid Empire.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_02: Later, Judea fell within this region.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_03: Then Alexander's officers began to rule, each in his own place.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_03: They all put on crowns after his death, and so did their descendants after them.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_03: And they caused many evils on the earth.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_03: From them came forth a sinful root.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_03: Antiochus Epiphanes.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_02: A century and a half after Alexander's death, Antiochus Epiphanes gained the throne of the Seleucid Empire.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_02: He would become the embodiment of evil to the Jews.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_02: As emperor, it became his mission to civilize what to him were his barbarous subjects.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_02: Under his tyrannical rule, the benign Hellenization of his predecessors became a mania of oppression.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_02: In his zeal for all things Greek, Antiochus renamed Jerusalem, calling it Antioch after his own name.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_02: The indigenous Jews lost their rights of citizenship, and their holy city was transformed into a Greek municipality.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: Certainly not to his face.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: But Antiochus Epiphanes wanted to turn the Jews into Greeks.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: Alexander the Great was fine with them worshiping the gods of Abraham, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, just speaking Greek, please, using Greek coinage.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: Antiochus Epiphanes went down and he slaughtered 40,000 Jews that dared oppose him.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: He walked into the temple, stole all the gold and everything else, desecrated the altar by offering a pig on the altar and then sprinkling all of the stuff all over the temple complex, absolutely defiling it.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_00: He made it illegal to get circumcised.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: He made it illegal to worship on Shabbat.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: He made it illegal to pray to Yahweh or to use a Torah scroll.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: He killed anyone who would disobey his direct order to offer a pig on an altar.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: This is what Daniel called the abomination of desolation that Daniel predicted.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: Antiochus Epiphanes was the Antichrist, it's often said, of the Old Testament.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_00: And Jesus in Matthew chapter 25 says there'll be another Antiochus Epiphanes on the final day, and he too will bring an abomination of desolation into the rebuilt temple.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: But this is why Israel felt as though it was in danger of immediate extermination.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_00: And the interesting thing is not everyone, of course, in Jerusalem thought that Antiochus Epiphanes was bad.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: The Jews themselves split, this always happened, split into a group that liked the Greek, the Greeking of culture.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: They were called the Hellenists.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: They loved the fact that they had a new language and they loved the new Greek gods and they loved Hector and they loved Hercules and they loved Zeus and they loved Aphrodite.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_00: And they liked the fact that they just loved it when Antiochus Epiphanes went into the Holy of Holies and hung up a picture of Zeus and then slaughtered a pig on the altar.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_00: They thought that was okay.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: They liked it when Antiochus Epiphanes says, listen, I'm going to sell the high priesthood to the highest bidder.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_00: No longer do you need to be a descendant of Aaron.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: A guy named Jason raised his hand, and so temporarily he got it until he got outbid.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: And Jason built a Greek gymnasium, one of these athletic, a school with an athletic gymnasium where everyone exercises in the nude.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then he got so embarrassed that in the nude, of course, the Jews were circumcised, and so they started having this painful surgery, these Hellenistic Jews, to try to reverse circumcision.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: And yet on the other side, you know, you have this division where you had the Puritans, you had the Hasidim.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_00: You still hear of Hasidic Jews today.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever heard of that?
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: Those are the sort of the Puritans, the conservatives, the pious ones.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: And in those days, they were, some of them called themselves separatists.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_00: The word is Pharisee, separatists, like the Puritans.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: And back in those days, they were so good.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: They worshiped the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: They loved the Ten Commandments of Moses, and they were good, honest people.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is that by Jesus' day, they had uh they'd become externalistic and legalistic and self-centered and money grubbing, and Jesus didn't have a good word to say about them.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_00: And they opposed, of course, even in Jesus' day, the Sadducees.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_00: The Sadducees, of course, were the liberals, and in Jesus' Day, they used to ask them hard questions.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they'd say, we don't believe in the resurrection, and uh, whose husband is a wife going to be if she's married seven men?
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: Remember that?
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_00: They would ask Jesus questions like this.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: So you have these divisions within Judaism, and everything is a complete and horrible mess until wonderfully God sends along a remarkable deliverer, almost like a Gideon or a Joshua in the Old Testament.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_00: And his name is Judah Maccabeas.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: The story goes like this: Judah's dad, Matthias, an old man, was up in a town, in his town of Modin, 17 miles north of Jerusalem.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: And Antiochus had sent a detachment of troops who called all the townspeople into the square and said, Build an altar.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_00: And they built an altar and said, Now, Matthias, you're the leader in this town.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_00: Old man, come forward and offer a pig on the altar.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: Matthias said, You can kill me if you want.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: I refuse.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: And uh a seleucid collaborator said, I'll do it.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_00: And he came forward, he took the pig, and he was about to sacrifice it.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_00: And the book of 1 Maccabees, chapter 3, says that old Matthias's heart burned within him, and he was burned with a righteous zeal.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_00: And he pulled out a he pulled out a sword and he went up and he slew the collaborator, and then he turned and he slew the sergeant, the sergeant of uh of the military, the Seleucid military, and then they fell, he and his family, his sons, five sons, they fell on the other soldiers and they killed them.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then they ran into the woods, and the revolution had begun, and almost like the American Revolution, it was composed of former farmers who didn't seem to stand a chance against the redcoats, the organized troops of the Seleucids.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_00: And the Seleucids sent 3,000 men against them, but these colonists, like at Concord and Lexington, they picked them off.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_00: They did guerrilla warfare, and then 6,000 troops.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_00: And Judah, who was appointed by his father as the leader, had the heart of a lion and somehow military genius and a righteous soul.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_00: And brilliantly he organized, he he executed a defeat of 6,000 soldiers.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: Antiochus Epiphanes up in Syria, the emperor heard about it, like King George III in England said, Wow, this is getting serious.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: And he sent nearly 50,000 troops down to take care of it.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: And Judah, by miracles, somehow defeated them.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then he sent the rest of his army, along with elephants, which were supposed to terrify everyone.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_00: 70,000 troops descended to try to root out this ragtag bunch of frontiersmen under Judah Maccabees, and Judah defeated them as well.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_00: Astounding.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then Judah marched into Jerusalem and he freed the city.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_00: And when he walked into the temple precinct and saw that it had become a whorehouse and saw that there were pig's blood everywhere and the whole thing had been defiled, they just wept.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_00: And then they purified it and announced that they were going to dedicate it in an eight-day ceremony, and this dedication service should be celebrated by Jews in perpetuity, which they still do.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's called Hanukkah, which means dedication.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_00: It happened on December the 25th.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where you get the story of Hanukkah.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where you get the lesson, the wonderful lesson that God not only controls history and keeps his promises, but he protects and preserves his people, even at the last when it looks like they will be exterminated.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: So then you have the uh, after the Hellenistic kings and after the whole kingdom, after Judah Maccabees overthrows the Seleucids, you have a hundred years of Jewish freedom.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_00: They still look back on this time today, from 164 B.C.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: to 63 B.C.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_00: as such a wonderful time, but then Rome under Pompey the Great, the general, came, laid siege to Jerusalem in 63 B.C., conquered Jerusalem.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: You've heard the names.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_00: Octavian, Augustus Caesar, Tiberius, Julius Caesar.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_00: You've heard these names.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_00: Pompey defeats Jerusalem.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_00: They appoint Herod the Great, a descendant of Esau, not Jacob, to rule over Jerusalem and Judea.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: Herod is an amazing builder.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_00: He rebuilds the temple.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of the seven wonders of the world.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_00: He builds a lot of wonderful things, but he is an evil man.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_00: And as you know, he dies in 4 BC, but before he dies, he orders the killing of the innocent babies in Bethlehem, because the wise men had come to him, and he knows that a baby has been born that he wants to kill.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_00: So the lesson I think from these years as we get to Rome is that God was setting the stage.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_00: He's almost like a stage, organizing a stage crew.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_00: He's preparing for the coming of his son.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_00: Preparing for the coming of his son in three ways: unification, communication, and desperation.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_00: Unification.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_00: Under Alexander the Great, the kingdom has been unified, and now it's at peace with Pax Romana.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_00: And as a result, the gospel is able to spread.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: Communication.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone speaks the same language, the Greek language now, and Roman roads are built all over the kingdom so that Paul and the apostles can travel everywhere and take the gospel.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_00: Desperation.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_00: The entire known world at that time, we know had a messianic expectation, saying we're tired of all of the conquering and all of the blood.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_00: We're desperate for a leader, for a benevolent king, for a messiah.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the wise men out east see a star, and they come and they knock on Herod, the king's door, and they say, Where is he who's been born king of the Jews?
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_00: We've seen his star back in the east.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_00: We've come to worship him.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_00: All of that, God preparing hearts so that they will accept his son.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_00: And it seems to me that today we live in a kind of silent period, just waiting for something to happen.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: People, in a sense, desperate.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_00: The gospel's being communicated all over the world.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_00: We live in a land of relative peace in America.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: God has been so gracious to us that you and I are desperate for that last mountain peak to come, the second coming of Christ.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the picture of the 400 intertestamental years, the silent years, is that God controls history.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's his story.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_00: Keeps his promises and prophecies.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: So be patient.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_00: Wait for it.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_00: God is setting the stage for the coming of his son.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, we thank you for this race through these years of history, and we thank you for the way you set the stage for the coming of your beloved Son Jesus Christ.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we're looking forward to his return.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_00: And we're trusting you that everything that happens, though sometimes it seems awful and endangering, everything that happens is still under your control as you set the stage for his second coming.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: We trust in you this morning.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.