Text I'm gonna open with tonight is John chapter or Luke chapter 24, a very familiar text on the road to Emmaus. This is Jesus talking to a couple of disciples on that road. Then Jesus said to them, these are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures. Pray with me.
Joel Brooks:Lord Jesus, that's what we ask right now, that you would open our minds to understand the scriptures. That how all of scripture from Moses and the prophets and the Psalms points to you. I pray you would show me what I should land on and what I should let go of, that you would give us ears to hear, hearts to hear, minds that will understand this. And I pray, Lord, that my words would fall to the ground and blow away and not be remembered anymore. But Lord, may your words remain, and may they change us.
Joel Brooks:Pray this in the strong name of Jesus. Amen. If y'all would, open your Bibles to your table of contents. Now tonight is going to be a much different, much, much different service than we normally have at Redeemer. And this is based on a number of conversations I've been having that I know a number of you here are new believers.
Joel Brooks:Some of you are still open to the Christian faith, but have not committed. And a lot of you have questions about the Bible, just the overall flow of the Bible. What is it? You know, the whole structure of it. I've talked to some of you who've tried to read through it, and you just get hopelessly lost.
Joel Brooks:And so tonight, I'm gonna just kind of do a sweep through the entire Bible, kind of show you the structure of it, where things are pointing, where things land. So hopefully after this, you have a key to understanding scripture. And so we're going to look at, first of all, your table of contents. And I've seen some of you sneak peeks, you know, whenever I mentioned a text before, you sneak peeks at your table of contents and then you try to flip there real quickly. You don't have to be embarrassed because probably most of us here do not know the Bible and order all the books.
Joel Brooks:You have 2 major divisions. You have the Old Testament and you have the New Testament. Testament's a fancy word for covenant. So you have an old covenant and you have a new covenant and that's the major break. But you have, in the Old Testament, 39 books there.
Joel Brooks:These 39 books span about 2000 years and they are written by 29 different authors. And so it could be just a little confusing when you do start going through this. The the content is enormous. And if you just try to pick up your Old Testament and read through it, you're gonna get lost if you're expecting this unbroken story. Like it's all in chronological order and it all tells a story because it doesn't.
Joel Brooks:And so look at your Old Testament here, and from Genesis to Nehemiah, these 17 books there are historical. That's the order of it. So you have Genesis to Nehemiah is the history of Israel, and that will be in chronological order there. Your nextor sorry through Esther. You have Genesis through Esther.
Joel Brooks:Your next five books Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon are your poetical books. So you have your first 17 are class historical. Your next 5 are poetical. And then you have your next 17 books are prophetical. So go 17,517.
Joel Brooks:And so from Isaiah all the way to Malachi are the prophets. Now the first five prophets are the major prophets. The next 12 prophets are the minor prophets. And the reason is broken up this way isn't because, you know, Isaiah is somehow better than Zephaniah, and, you know, he's major, Zephaniah is minor. It simply is length.
Joel Brooks:Isaiah, Jeremiah, and prophets. And while the rest are much shorter and though so they are the minor prophets. And so that's the the breakdown of the Old Testament. So if you want to go to a story in the Old Testament, you're gonna have to go to the first 17 books. That's the history.
Joel Brooks:If you want to go to wisdom literature or a poem or the the Psalms, you're gonna go to the next 5. If you want to go to prophecy, you're gonna go to the next 17 right there and that is your division. Then you go to the New Testament, and it's broken up somewhat similarly in that your first five books are historical. And you have Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts. And that is the the entire history of Jesus and the church that we have in the Bible right there.
Joel Brooks:After this, you have 13 Pauline epistles or letters. 13 letters all grouped by Paul there. You could break those up even more if you want to. The first nine of Paul's letters that are there from Romans to 2nd Thessalonians are all letters to churches. The next four letters, 1st Timothy to Philemon, are all to people.
Joel Brooks:So it's a very natural 1st Thessalonians would have been the first if it's an order that he wrote them. These are all by order of length. Romans is your longest letter. 1st Corinthians is your second longest letter, and it goes all the way down into where you get to, you know, little Thessalonians. And it's the same with the, the letters to people in which Philemon is just a little teeny teeny book.
Joel Brooks:And so in the New Testament, your first five books are what? Historical. Your next 13 books are? Paul's letters. Paul's letters.
Joel Brooks:And the first nine are letters to? And the next 4 are letters to? Very good. And then you have your final 9 beginning in Hebrews to Revelation. These are what you would call general letters.
Joel Brooks:And that means that Paul didn't write these. You have Peter wrote some. You have John wrote some. We're not sure who wrote the book of Hebrews. And, and so you have your Pauline first, then you have your non Pauline or your general letters.
Joel Brooks:And, those once again are in order of length. Hebrews is your longest going all the way down except for Revelation. Revelation is really long, but you had to put Revelation at the end. You you you couldn't put it in the middle of the New Testament. Revelation deserved to be at the end.
Joel Brooks:So that's the the order of all the contents in the Bible. So real quick, I'm gonna run through it again. You have, the first 17 books of the Old Testament are? 12. Your next 5 books are?
Joel Brooks:12. Your next 17 books are? 12. In which the first first five are the? The next 12 are the?
Joel Brooks:Alright. Then we go to the New Testament. I am taking notes on each one who is not saying anything. I'm gonna come talk to you afterwards. You you get to the New Testament and you have your first five books are?
Joel Brooks:The story. Very good. Then you have your next 13 letters are? Pauline epistles or letters in which the first 9 are 2. The next 4 are 2.
Joel Brooks:Very good. And then you have 9 final that are? General. General letters. There you go.
Joel Brooks:So that's the structure of the entire Bible. Now let's begin looking at the content, and I'm gonna try to work through as much as I can. I'm going to go somewhat slow through the first chapters of Genesis. And we're just going to keep picking up steam to where we're going to start flying at the end. Okay.
Joel Brooks:But you really got to understand the first few chapters of Genesis if you want to understand the rest of the Bible. And so in Genesis chapter 1, you see Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2, you see that God created everything. There's nothing that He did not create, and He He created it through His spoken word. And so God said light, boom. There was light.
Joel Brooks:He said cattle, boom. There's cattle. You know, he just spoke and it came into being. And, except for when it came to man in which he actually got his hands dirty, and he said he fashioned man with the dust from the ground. Now the God that we see here in scripture is different than most major religions and philosophies concerning how God deals with matter or the world.
Joel Brooks:Most major religions and philosophies have God very distant from the physical. God is only concerned with the spiritual. He's only concerned with your spirit or your soul. But we see in Genesis 1 and 2 that God cares about your spirit. He cares about your body.
Joel Brooks:He's not scared to touch the matter, He says it's good, and He's concerned with the world itself. And this is huge in scripture because a lot of other religions say that everything's to be done away with and only your spirit matters. But the Bible, we believe our God says, know your spirit and your body and this world matter. They're good. They're all good.
Joel Brooks:Well, man of all of creation, creation was was made in 7 days. Man is the pinnacle of this. Man alone was, called, that he was created in God's image. And so we see man is the pinnacle of all creation, but not the goal. And a lot of people miss this.
Joel Brooks:The goal of creation is actually rest. Rest is what happens on the 7th day. And you see this turn turn to Genesis chapter 2 which is different than the other days of creation. And all the other days of creation, you have, and there was morning and or there was evening and there was morning the first day. There was evening and there was morning, you know, the second day.
Joel Brooks:You you have this, but you don't have this when it comes to creation of on the Sabbath. Verse 1 of chapter 2. Thus, the heavens and the earth were finished and all the host of them. And on the 7th day, god finished his work that he had done and he rested on the 7th day from all his work that he had done. So god blessed the 7th day and made it holy because on it, god rested from all his work that he had done in creation.
Joel Brooks:And you don't hear after that, and there was evening and there was morning the next day. Because the author is trying to say that this rest is ongoing. And that doesn't mean that God's not working, that God isn't sustaining everything by the word of his power. If God wasn't sustaining everything, the whole world would fall apart. By rest it means He's finished.
Joel Brooks:There's nothing He has to add to it. He looks at Adam and Eve in the garden and you know, he's walking with them in the cool of the evening and he says, perfect. This this is this is how it should be. I don't need to add anything. I I can rest.
Joel Brooks:This is shalom here. This is peace. And then we're gonna see that this rest gets shattered. If we go to the first, slide, I'm gonna break down the the Old Testament into, you go ahead and go to the next one, into 9 different categories. And the first is gonna be creation, what we're looking at right now.
Joel Brooks:I hate PowerPoint, by the way. Hate it. But it's either that or use a marker board, and I'm just gonna use 9 slides. That's it. So we have creation, which is Genesis 1 through 11.
Joel Brooks:When you go to Genesis 3, and you're going to see this rest broken. It's broken because the woman falls and she brings Adam with him, with her. They both fall. It's Adam's fault, primarily. But you know, they're in the garden.
Joel Brooks:God gives them one instruction, you're not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. So one instruction that they have in paradise. But they take it, and it ruins everything. The rest of the Bible is going to try to fix, or will fix what, what's broken here. And so they they broke God's law, but that's not the primary sin here, is that they they disobeyed God's law.
Joel Brooks:The primary sin is that they decided to make their own law. That they are now deciding what's right or wrong by eating the the from the tree of knowledge of good or evil. They heard what God said, this is right and wrong. They said, No, we make the laws. And so we say this is okay.
Joel Brooks:And so they take this, and the result is a curse. They are thrown out of the garden and all of creation is cursed. All of creation falls, in a sense, with Adam and Eve. And so things look pretty hopeless at this point. Rest is destroyed.
Joel Brooks:Shalom is destroyed. And then you get to Genesis 3:15. If you will look there and you get your first hint of hope. And this is god talking to the serpent. Says, I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring.
Joel Brooks:He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. The fancy word for this is the protoevangel, meaning the first gospel. Theologians like saying things in Latin because it makes them feel really important. But it's the protoevangel, the first gospel, And it's the first hint of it. It's not full fledged here.
Joel Brooks:It's it's not really fleshed out, and I am gonna use this, and you're gonna laugh at me. But what you have here is, this is gonna be so bad. Anybody know what that is? Acorn. Acorn.
Joel Brooks:It wasn't that bad. Alright. What you see here is an acorn And which is, it's not, it's not the full gospel. It's a hint at it. And and the hint is, okay, Eve, you've fallen, but you know what?
Joel Brooks:Your seed, your seed is going to, it's gonna battle the serpent's seed and, and someday the Serpent's gonna bite one of your descendants on the heel, but he's going to turn around and crush its head. Give it a death blow. And so it's just a hit of the gospel. And what you're gonna see throughout scripture is this growing, growing, growing, and growing. And so finally you get, that's a tree.
Joel Brooks:I'm not gonna ask you. And so you get a tree, which is the cross. This gospel is going to grow throughout all of the old Testament until finally, when you, when you get to the cross, you can look back at this and you can understand it. And you're going to see this throughout the whole old testament. A lot of it doesn't make any sense unless you understand what is growing to be, Unless you understand it's the tree.
Joel Brooks:And there's a fancy word for this. I'm just gonna abbreviate it. O P r, which is organic progressive revelation. Organic, just throw that out. Next dinner discussion, organic progressive revelation And all that means is God doesn't reveal everything at the very beginning.
Joel Brooks:He doesn't. He lets it grow through each page of scripture throughout the old testament. This revelation, he keeps revealing himself more and more and more and more until you have people like Moses who gets to see some of God. So you get Isaiah who's saying the Virgin shall be with child and and the government's gonna rest on his shoulders until finally you get to the cross and it all clicks. The final revelation in Jesus.
Joel Brooks:You could think of the Old Testament as a love story. This, I mean, you, you can accept Jesus as your Lord and savior without knowing any of the Old Testament. You can. But you won't really, really, really know him like you could. The old testaments, the marriage proposal.
Joel Brooks:It's the, it's the bringing flowers. It's the, it's the, the cording, the gradually getting to know one another there until finally, when the proposal comes, you're like, yes, I see it. I see it. And and Jesus here. So that's your first hint of the gospel.
Joel Brooks:And then when God kicks Adam and Eve out of the garden, you get to see kind of a little aspect of this as well when God clothes them. He, he clothes them with animal skins, takes away their fig leaves, and he's like, No, no. Fig leaves will not cover shame. There needs to be death. And so God kills an animal and dresses them.
Joel Brooks:Said, It's gonna take blood to cover your shame. And so you, you, you see even a hint there of, of a sacrificial system to come. Well, the moment this vertical relationship with God is damaged, the horizontal's damaged. You have in Genesis 4. You have, Cain killing Abel.
Joel Brooks:You have mankind getting so bad that in Genesis 6 through 9, God just wipes out the earth with a flood, and it just looks like things cannot get any worse. The pinnacles, the tower of Babel in Genesis 11, in which they disobey God's first command, which is to go and to fill the earth. And they say, no, we will not fill the earth. Instead, we're going to get together and we're gonna make a name for ourselves instead of a name for God. And so, God, he disperses that, puts an end to that project, And then, he decides to start with 1 man, Abraham, Genesis 12.
Joel Brooks:In which we come to the next section of scripture, which is the patriarchs. And when we finish Luke, you know, we're on week 40 something in Luke. When we finish Luke, our next series is gonna be the Patriarchs for about 15 or 20 weeks and then we'll go to Acts. But the patriarchs in which you have, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph fill up the rest of Genesis, But Genesis 12 is probably the biggest verses in the Old Testament. Genesis 12, the first three verses.
Joel Brooks:And let me read those. In which god picks Abraham not because he's righteous. He just picks Abraham because he wants to. And he says this, now the Lord said to Abraham, go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation.
Joel Brooks:And I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you. In him who dishonors you, I will curse. And in you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed. Now pretty much you could say the rest of the Old Testament is nothing but a commentary or an exposition of these three verses being fleshed out.
Joel Brooks:And what you got after Adam, you know, was kicked out of the garden, there was curse. Curse. And then God, he picks Abraham and the language is bless, bless, bless. I'm going to bless you and I'm going to make you a blessing. And so we have that, that godly seed now is going to go through the line of Abraham.
Joel Brooks:That God is going to somehow bring rest and blessing back to the world, restore it through Abraham. And they've got a number of promises there. One, he's gonna have to have a lot of land if he's gonna be a nation. He's gonna have to have a lot of descendants if he's gonna be a nation. He's going to be famous, and he's going to bless all the families of the world, his seed is.
Joel Brooks:Gonna bless everyone. And so, you see this starting to grow throughout the rest of Genesis. Abraham falls repeatedly. A lot of people, they put the patriarchs on a pedestal and they're like, Wow, these are the heroes of the faith. Well, yeah, I mean they they did have a lot of faith at times.
Joel Brooks:But you see things like Abraham lying to a king saying, Oh, Sarah, she's not my wife, she's my sister. And right after he does that, God responds by blessing him, not judging him. He sends and God blesses him. Isaac, his son, does the same thing. Actually, he lies to the exact same king, and he says, Oh no, Rebekah is not my wife, she's my sister.
Joel Brooks:And God responds by blessing Isaac. And then Isaac has Jacob. Jacob lies pretty much from the moment he is born. He is a liar and he is a deceiver and God just blesses him and blesses him. And and what you're seeing is God revealing himself, this organic progressive revelation.
Joel Brooks:He's going overboard to show I am a gracious God. I am a good god. I am for you. And over and over, you see these people blow it, and god actually keeps blessing them and blessing them, saying, I am for you. Well, the big thing you need to know about the rest of the patriarchs is Jacob has 12 sons.
Joel Brooks:You know, Abraham has Isaac. Isaac has Jacob. Jacob has 12 sons who become the 12 tribes of Israel. All 12 of these sons, eventually, they make their way to Egypt because there is a famine. And Genesis 50, the last verse, the last words are a coffin in Egypt.
Joel Brooks:These are the last words. It's pretty, pretty dark words, foreshadowing of what is to come in Egypt. And so we come to Egypt and God partially fulfills this promise to Abraham. They start growing. His seed starts growing.
Joel Brooks:They become very numerous in number over about 400 years and to where there's probably close to 2,000,000 of them at this point. So they're huge, but they're in Egypt. Pharaoh doesn't like this. And so, you know, we looked at this all last year, the story of Moses. So he puts the Israelites, these Hebrews, he makes them, he makes them, do heavy labor.
Joel Brooks:They're slaves. And then, he kills the firstborn or the, all the male children, doing anything to try to squash them down. And so, it looks like this promise to Abraham isn't going to work. How can they bless the nations when they are a slave to a nation? So God sends one of the dominant figures of the Old Testament, Moses.
Joel Brooks:Moses comes on the scene, God appears to him in Exodus chapter 3, raises him up to be a deliverer of all of Israel. And that's where you get your famous stories like, the burning bush where God reveals himself to Moses as Yahweh or I am. That's where you get, the parting of the Red Sea in Exodus 14. You had all the 10 plagues leading up to that parting of the Red Sea. The final plague probably being the most significant in which Moses went to pharaoh and he said, pharaoh, if you do not let, my people go, God's going to kill the firstborn of all of Egypt.
Joel Brooks:And God does. And the only reason that he spares the Hebrews is because they put the blood of a lamb on their doorpost. The blood of a lamb. Obviously, you know, we see that from the tree perspective back to this acorn and we see Christ. Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
Joel Brooks:We see that clearly. He is our Passover lamb. Well, the people of God are delivered. They that's the exodus. The 2 million people leave and they're going off to the promised land, and that takes up Exodus, oh, sorry we go.
Joel Brooks:That takes up Exodus through Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy is a little bit interesting in which you have the Ten Commandments there as well. The Ten Commandments are found in Exodus 20 and in Deuteronomy. And the reason is Deuteronomy is to that next generation of Hebrews. The 1st generation died off, and so Deuteronomy is to that next generation reminding them of their faith.
Joel Brooks:Reminding them of why do they have this tabernacle. What what is this tabernacle all about? Which is one of the dominant themes of Exodus. When when Moses delivers the people and they're moving towards the promised land, they land at Mount Sinai in Exodus 19. Exodus 20, he gives them the 10 commandments.
Joel Brooks:And then you have these detailed instructions about how to build this tabernacle. It's, it's just, I mean, the minutia of just, it fills up the rest of Exodus. But it's a fulfillment of the promise to Abraham. It's the restoring of rest at this point. Because God's saying, Hey, you know what?
Joel Brooks:Now that I've delivered you, I'm gonna come and be present with you again. Kind of like, you know, when we're in the garden, I'm gonna come in my presence. I'm gonna restore some of that rest. And so you're gonna build a special tabernacle, You're going to build a special seat called the Ark of the Covenant and you're going to surround it with thick curtains, but My glory, My presence will come in there, Which is great news. You have you have kind of the Garden of Eden and a little bit being restored.
Joel Brooks:But the problem now is that these are very sinful people, and now you have a very holy God coming in their midst. And so this is where the sacrificial system comes into play. You're like, well, I mean, if a holy God's gonna come, he's just gonna destroy us unless we make sacrifices atoning for our sin. And so this is when the sacrificial system is fleshed out in the Exodus. All of this pointing to Jesus.
Joel Brooks:You know, John chapter 1 goes into a lot of Exodus and a lot of Genesis. But John chapter 1 starts with, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things that were, it came into being, nothing has come into being apart from Him. And what John is saying is that spoken word that we looked at in Genesis was Jesus. That spoken word was Jesus creating.
Joel Brooks:And then we have in the word became flesh and dwelt among us. That word for dwelt is tabernacled. It just says God's presence came and tabernacled among the Israelites. Now Jesus comes and tabernacles with us. And then later, you know, the very first thing that Jesus has called is, Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
Joel Brooks:Jesus, now He's, He's the presence of God in our midst and He's also the lamb of God who's going to take away our sin. All the scripture starts pointing towards Jesus. You start seeing the cross growing. Let's go to the next heading here, which is going to be conquest. God takes his people to the edge of this promised land that was promised to Abraham and, and says, Go and take it.
Joel Brooks:And after being disobedient and having to wander for 40 years, then they go and they take it. Joshua's the main figure here. This is where you get the, the song Joshua in the Battle of Jericho. Next heading. Then you come to a period of Judges, which is in the book of Judges and Ruth.
Joel Brooks:And so, now, you have this 2,000,000 people. They've just gone into the promised land. They're not a kingdom. They're not like the United States at this point. What they are is a loose confederation.
Joel Brooks:Think of them as that. There are 12 loose tribes kind of interconnected. So they don't have a king. What they have is a judge who comes. You have judges like Gideon, judges like Deborah, judges like Samson.
Joel Brooks:And so this is the book that they are all in. And what you have is a cycle that happens over and over in Judges. They're in the promised land. You would think, Okay, Abraham's blessing is being fulfilled. Now we've got land.
Joel Brooks:Now we can really be a light into the world. We've got the law, you know, which tells us to be generous to the sojourner, which tells us to be extremely generous with our money. We can, we can be a light into the world, but they don't. They commit idolatry. And so what God does is he sends in a foreign nation, kind of destroys them a little bit.
Joel Brooks:And so they cry out to God for help. We're so sorry. God sends a judge like, we'll say Deborah or Gideon. Gideon delivers them, they repent, and everything's fine for the life of that judge. The judge dies.
Joel Brooks:The people fall into sin. God sends in a neighboring nation to come in and fight them and destroy them. They cry out to God, Help us. Help us. We're sorry.
Joel Brooks:We repent. God raises up a judge, delivers them. Everything's great and fine. The judge dies. Then the people fall into sin again.
Joel Brooks:This cycle happens 7 times in judges, 7 times, And you can actually say it's a spiral because every cycle gets worse and worse and worse. And so, when you finally get to the end of Judges, and it is, the most graphic, horrific chapters in the Bible. It is, sexually explicit. It's, the, the murders that are there, the, just the evil coming out and the depravity of man's hearts. You look at it and it's the reason that, a lot of schools tried to ban the Bible from their libraries.
Joel Brooks:They would point to the end of judges and say, How in the world can you have that? How can children be reading this? Now, in contrast to the judges, you have one good person. Ruth. She lived an amazing, godly life.
Joel Brooks:And the point of Ruth is to show not everybody was like the judges here, but there was Ruth. And, she's the great grandmother of David. And the last word of Ruth is David, which is the point of it all, Pointing to the next, next category we have, which is the kingdom. So after 400 years of being a loose Confederacy and having these judges, they finally get a king, finally get a king. And they have 3 kings that hold the United Kingdom.
Joel Brooks:They have Saul, David, and Solomon that reigned for a 120 years. Now, David is probably the most central figure in the Old Testament. Just to put it in perspective, in my Bible, there's a 153 pages dedicated to King David. There's only a 120 pages in the Gospels, all 4 of them. And so the biography that we have of King David is greater than the biography we have of Jesus.
Joel Brooks:A matter of fact, it is the largest biography in existence of any ancient historical figure, secular or religious. One of the things that's kind of amazing about that is, I mean, you know, King David just dominates all of this, and yet until 1993, there was not a single evidence outside of scripture that King David existed. And, a lot of people wrote that he was just a myth, that he really didn't exist. Until finally they found some extra biblical writings in 1993 that said, no, there is a King David. And then in this millennium, right in 2000, they found his palace.
Joel Brooks:And so, finally, there the archaeological evidence of King David is starting to come up. But David absolutely dominates the scene, And, he's gonna fill up 1st and second Samuel here, and 1st Kings. And, one of the things, and also 1st Chronicles, one of the things I love about David is that you get to see him warts and all in scripture. You get to see his highs and you get to see his lows. But the most significant part of David's life actually comes in 2nd Samuel 7, if you wanna turn there.
Joel Brooks:2nd Samuel 7. God has established David as king. When he's king, he's established rest. We'll read in verse 11 of chapter 7. We'll start with the, and I will, And I will give you rest, once again, establishing that rest from all your enemies.
Joel Brooks:Moreover, the lord declares to you that the Lord will make you a house. Now, the reason that the Lord says this is because David had this great idea. He said, hey, God, you know, you're dwelling in this tent, this tabernacle. You know what? I'm gonna make you a house.
Joel Brooks:And God responds by saying, No, you're not going to make me a house. I'm going to make you a house. I don't need your help David, but I'm going to establish something for you. And go to verse 16, Says, and your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me. Your throne shall be established forever.
Joel Brooks:Forever. Now this acorn is just really, really starting to grow at this point. In which God looks at King David and says, You're not gonna do anything for me. I work by grace, and you're fallen, and you're sinful, and you're all those things, but I'm gonna establish rest. I'm going to establish Shalom and you know what?
Joel Brooks:I'm going to build you a house, a kingdom that will go on forever. Forever. Well, how can a kingdom go on forever? We see this in Jesus. The Kingdom of David doesn't seem like it lasts forever.
Joel Brooks:You know, you have King Saul, King David, King Solomon. That's the only time that you have a united Israel for a 120 years. 1st Kings is about the civil war that takes place and then the kingdoms split. And, and if you really want me to bore you to death, I could go through all of the kings, but there it's it's pretty boring. There's 40 of them.
Joel Brooks:In which you have the kingdom when it divides, you have this northern kingdom called Israel, and then you have this southern kingdom called Judah. And, the northern kingdom has 20 kings. All of them are wicked. There's not one good king that ever comes through the northern kingdom. And so, this is where all the prophets, the they're they're starting to come up here saying, if you don't repent, you'll be destroyed.
Joel Brooks:Well, they're destroyed in 722 BC by Assyria. Then you have the southern kingdom, and they also have 20 kings, and 8 of them are pretty decent. They're not great, but they're decent. And so God postpones judgment there, and He keeps sending prophet after prophet. Almost every one of your prophets comes during this time of 2nd Kings.
Joel Brooks:Almost every one of them. And, and, and the message is, is almost always the same. Hey, Hey, if you don't repent, you're gonna be destroyed. If you don't repent, you're gonna be destroyed. Well, finally, the southern kingdom was destroyed in 586 and the temple was destroyed as well.
Joel Brooks:And so that takes us to the next category, exile. What looks like the promise to Abraham has failed. I mean, when they finally got really numerous, well, then they were, you know, in slavery. When they finally got land, well, then a lot of it was taken away. When they finally got this kingdom, this great nation, well, it lasted for just such a short amount of time.
Joel Brooks:And in 586, when Jerusalem was destroyed by Babylon, the Babylonians didn't just kill all of the Israelites. They did something very clever. They actually took the cream of the crop of Israel, and they said, y'all are going with us back to Babylon, And what they want to do is to educate them all in the Babylonian ways and then send them back, and just completely transform Israel that way. And, and what you have is this deportation of the cream of the crop of Israel. Daniel is exported.
Joel Brooks:You have Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego. These are where all those stories come from, where where they live in exile in Babylon. And so now the people have got to really wondering, I mean, for 1, is their faith even going to hold on at all? Was this all just a sham? What about these promises to Abraham?
Joel Brooks:And so God sends a prophet Jeremiah and one of the best texts in all scripture, turn to Jeremiah 29. And he writes this letter to the exiles. And it's kinda become one of the key verses in the life of this church. Because you have these exiles, they're living in Babylon, they hate it there. It's in the midst of a pagan people and they're thinking the promises to Abraham, they're gone.
Joel Brooks:And and God says this, I'll read in verse 4. Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel to all the exiles, whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. Build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat their produce, take wives and have sons and daughters, Take wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters. Multiply there and do not decrease, but seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile. And pray to the Lord on its behalf for its welfare, and you will find your welfare.
Joel Brooks:And here, Jeremiah, he's saying, you know what? You can still be a blessing. You can still bless all the families of the earth. My promise to Abraham is not void. When it says seek the welfare, that word is shalom.
Joel Brooks:Seek the shalom of the city. Seek the rest of it. Don't don't just give up here. And so you have people like Daniel taking that to heart. You have Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego taking that to heart.
Joel Brooks:And then later in Jeremiah 29, he gives those very hopeful words when he says, for I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. God has not given up on them. And then you flip over just 2 chapters to Jeremiah 31, one of the key chapters in the Old Testament, beginning in verse 31, God makes an extraordinary promise to them. He says, okay, you know what? You've had land and you've lost it.
Joel Brooks:You have made you famous and you've blown it. You have never been a blessing. The the problem is your heart. Your heart. That's the issue.
Joel Brooks:So, I'm going to make a new covenant with you, different than the covenant of Abraham. I'm gonna make a new covenant with you and it's going to change your heart. It says, behold, the days are coming, declares the lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. Not like the covenant I made with their fathers on the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt. My covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord.
Joel Brooks:But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declared the Lord. I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And so God makes this extraordinary promise, this new covenant that, you know what? I'm going to deal with the sin issue.
Joel Brooks:And we see that with Jesus fulfilling this, you know, the, that last supper, last Passover meal, when he says, This cup is my blood of the new covenant. And what he is saying is Jeremiah 31 fulfilled. Jeremiah 31 is being launched right now. I'm changing hearts. He's changing hearts through the cross because he's dealing with the sin issue.
Joel Brooks:Well, this brings us to the next section, which is the return. After 70 years in exile, they're finally allowed to return, and a very, very, very small percentage of the Israelites return. And, here we get the books Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther. And Ezra is really about the rebuilding of the people in Jerusalem. Nehemiah is really about the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem.
Joel Brooks:And then you also have Ezekiel prophesying during this time as well. And they rebuild the temple, and the people who remember the former temple are weeping because they realize that though God has returned them back to their land, they're nothing compared to who they were. And so they're still thinking, is God's promise to Abraham really going to be fulfilled? And then you have the next section, 400 years of silence, in which nothing happens. We don't have any recorded history of it in the bible.
Joel Brooks:This is when the Pharisees and the Sadducees came to power. It was during this time. They started giving their new interpretations of the law and things like that, until finally we come to Jesus. So that's the old testament right there. The kind of unbroken story of the old testament.
Joel Brooks:Now, let's get to the New Testament. Now, I'm gonna try to end in enough time for y'all to ask a few questions because we're gonna fly through the New Testament. You have the first four books, I don't have any slides for this, your first four books are the gospels, which is a new genre. There's nothing like the Gospels before they came out. I would call them a biographical sermon.
Joel Brooks:It's not straight up history. It's not a straight up biography, and it's not just a sermon. It's a biographical sermon. And by that, I mean, each author wrote their gospel trying to make a certain theological point. So they took the true stories of Jesus and they presented just certain ones because you can't write about everything Jesus did.
Joel Brooks:So you just tell these certain ones to make a certain theological point. And so you have the gospel, Matthew wants to show that Jesus is the Messiah. He is the King. And so, he's going to tell all these stories that show that. And you have Mark that really wants to highlight how Jesus was, was the servant and he's the suffering servant spoken of in Isaiah.
Joel Brooks:Then he gets to Luke in which Luke really shows, you know, and hopefully you've seen that, that Jesus is the perfect man. He's not like any other man. He's this perfect man who seeks sinners. He's perfect, but he's drawn to the imperfect. And Luke really highlights that.
Joel Brooks:And then you get to John, which, he highlights that Jesus is the son of God. He says that in the most blatant terms possible. All of the gospels tell about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and that he is the son of God. All of them point to that. That's central in them.
Joel Brooks:But they each have their own little point of view to give us this different angle, to to to really reinforce a different theological truth. And Jesus, he sees himself as the fulfillment of the entire Old Testament, like we we just read on the road to Emmaus. He began with Moses and the prophets. And, I mean, you can almost just picture it, you know. He would have gone on for hours and hours, but saying, hey, you know that Passover lamb that that pointed to me.
Joel Brooks:That was that was me. You know, the tabernacle? Well, that was me. I'm I'm dwelled now in your in your midst. I'm the presence of God.
Joel Brooks:You would have gone through everything. You know the, the line of David? That's me. I'm the fulfillment of those promises to David. He could have just gone through the entire Bible and all of us as believers should be able from the old testament to preach Jesus.
Joel Brooks:It was the only scriptures that were available to Paul. I mean, when he would go and he preached Jesus, he'd explained through the scriptures, meaning the old Testament. And we're not just saying, oh, he directly fulfills this prophecy. No, the entire Old Testament declares or prepares for Jesus. So you have the gospels, which are the life of Jesus, and then you get to Acts.
Joel Brooks:And Acts chapter 1 through 12 is where we see really the birth of the New Testament church, in which the primary figure there is Peter, upon this rock I will build my kingdom. Then you have Acts 13 through 28, which is missional. And this is when we see missions explode through the conversion of Paul in Acts 9, but then he is commissioned to be a missionary and he changes the world. And what now we're seeing is the fulfillment of they're becoming a blessing to the nations. Finally, because they've changed our Jesus has dealt with the root issue, and now the nations are being blessed.
Joel Brooks:And I can't wait. We're gonna have in, what, 3, 4 weeks, the Ascension. We're gonna celebrate the Ascension here. The Ascension has everything to do with missions. It really does is when Jesus goes up to be with his father, and then he sends his spirit, Sends his spirit and it ignites people and it fulfills those promises.
Joel Brooks:And Joel too, it fulfills the promises to Abraham about being a blessing to the, to the nations. And, you just start seeing that spread, through the giving of the spirit. And then, finally, after missions, we have the letters in which the apostle Paul, he writes to all the people and to the churches. And I say this and I'm not exaggerating. For me, the the reason that, I'm gonna try to give my children the best education they can have, is because I want them to someday understand the book of Romans.
Joel Brooks:I think it's the pinnacle of what we as believers should strive for. It's a very complicated book. The logic is extremely difficult. The theology is hard to grasp, but what you're getting at Romans is the end of Paul's life. And it's the closest thing he has to a systematized theology of the Christian faith.
Joel Brooks:And it's my goal to to really pour into the education of my children so that someday they might be able to read that and understand it, in which the the scope of it is just vast. But I would say when it comes to the letters in the New Testament, that the Romans is testament that the Romans is pretty much the, the mountain that all of us need to climb. And I'll end with Revelation, and then I'll let you ask questions. The last three chapters of Revelation mirror the first three chapters of Genesis. They're bookends.
Joel Brooks:You see rest restored. You have the same themes. Once again, you have that serpent. It says that ancient serpent, but he's judged. Once again, you you see the, the tree of life there, but this time the people can take freely of it.
Joel Brooks:Once again, you have God's presence in the people's midst, but this time it's not a garden. It's what they were supposed to be all along, a city. Remember, they were supposed to fill the earth. They were supposed to multiply, and now you have this glorious city in which God is in the middle. And, and once again you find rest, shalom, peace restored.
Joel Brooks:You have the new heavens and the new earth, this new creation. And so you see all the themes of Genesis 3, again, in the last three chapters of Revelation, and all of scripture is pointing towards those last three chapters into which we see, Genesis 1 through 3 restored and fulfilled.