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Redeemer exists to celebrate and declare the gospel of God as we grow in knowing and following Jesus Christ.
So this morning, as Lauren said, we are going to, do something a little different than we normally do. Actually, a lot different than we normally do, which is why we have the marker boards up here and everything. But I'm gonna take 1 hour and just walk through the Bible. If you are new to Redeemer, this is your 1st Sunday. No, we don't typically do this.
Joel Brooks:You don't have to worry about hour long sermons every single week. So please come back next week. Next week, we begin a new series on the gospel through the life of David, And I thought this would be a good week for us to just, look at the overarching story of all of scripture, so we know even where that life of David, is placed within that. So buckle up, because we're going to be going through a lot this morning. I wanna begin just by asking a question, and it's not a rhetorical question.
Joel Brooks:How many of you have ever tried reading your Bible, and given up because you have just really gotten frustrated or confused? Me too. How many of you then try to, you know, say this time for real, you get a Bible reading plan, and it's gonna force you to go through it. And then you're in Leviticus. Maybe you make it all the way to 2nd Kings, and then you give up.
Joel Brooks:Anyone else? Yes. A lot of liars out there with your hands down. Yes. I I have given up at times in Bible reading plans.
Joel Brooks:It's understandable that you can get frustrated or confused as you're working through the Bible. It is a hard book to get through. For starters, it's really really long. It is over 1300 pages in my Bible. It's also, it's difficult to understand because of the enormous barriers that we have, like cultural barriers.
Joel Brooks:A lot of the Bible was written 35 100 years ago in a culture that, it'd be like us being dropped on an alien planet. We are that far removed from one another. And then there's language barriers. It's written in Hebrew, and in Greek, and in some places Aramaic. We typically read it like a little 5 minute or maybe 10 minutes in the morning, and then trying to to to get the big picture.
Joel Brooks:It's it's understandable why we get frustrated and give up. And so what I wanna do this morning is hopefully lift some of the fog for us, so we walk away with a better understanding of the content and the story of the Bible. I can't go through everything, but hopefully, it will bring a little clarity. So I want to start by us just looking at pretty much the genre of the bible. What type of book is it?
Joel Brooks:And to do that, you need to look at the very beginning and the very ends of the Bible. The the Bible begins with the words, in the beginning. Then you go all the way to the end of the Bible, where you get to Revelation 22. You'll read these words, and they shall reign forever and ever. So in the beginning, and then they shall reign forever and ever.
Joel Brooks:What type of books might you pick up that typically go along those lines? Books that tell a story. The bible is a narrative. A matter of fact, we would actually call it define it an epic narrative. An epic narrative is a narrative that spans an enormous amount of time.
Joel Brooks:Often, there are many different characters. There's a lot of subplots going on. Sometimes, they're even long songs or poetry or genealogies in an epic narrative. But what you find is throughout all of the different characters, all the different subplots, there's actually one overarching story that you're really supposed to follow. And if you just get too much into the weeds of the subplots, sometimes you get confused and you forget about the overarching story.
Joel Brooks:Since it's been at least 3 or 4 months, I feel comfortable in me being able to say this. But, Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, which never leaves my bedside table, Lord of the Rings is an epic narrative. It's really, really long. It's almost as long as the Bible. There are many different characters.
Joel Brooks:There are so many different subplots that are going on. There's also prophecies. There's poetry. There's songs throughout it. There's genealogies.
Joel Brooks:There's all these nations, there's all these wars. But through it all, what you find is one story that's being woven all throughout all of those others. It's an epic narrative. And, of course, Tolkien was writing fiction. The Bible is writing about actual events.
Joel Brooks:The Bible is history. But here's the question. If the Bible is an epic narrative, what then is the overarching theme of the Bible that pulls it all together? Well, if I had to summarize the theme of the Bible into just one sentence, it would be this. The Bible tells the story about Jesus and His kingdom.
Joel Brooks:The Bible tells the story about Jesus and His kingdom. This is ultimately what the Bible is about. Yes. There's a whole lot of other characters, a whole lot of other subplots, but that is the grand overarching theme. Jesus himself tells us this.
Joel Brooks:And the on the road to Emmaus in Luke chapter 24, he tells those 2 disciples there. He says that the law of Moses, the prophets, and the Psalms, which is all of the Old Testament, he says, speak about him. He tells the religious leaders in John chapter 5 that all the scriptures exist to testify to who he is. The point of it all is that people would come to him. Once again, the Bible is about Jesus and his kingdom.
Joel Brooks:But before we begin, looking at that grand story, it'd probably be helpful if we first look at the structure of the bible itself. Because it's kinda hard to pick up on that story because of the way the Bible is structured. It's a pretty confusing structure. So, right now if you would turn to your table of contents, this time you don't have to do it secretly. So you know the person next to you doesn't know your you don't know where Zephaniah is.
Joel Brooks:Just go ahead. I'm giving you permission. Look at the table of contents, and we're just gonna walk through how the Bible structured first. The first thing you're gonna notice is the Bible isn't a book. It's a collection of books.
Joel Brooks:66 books. Altogether is what we call the Bible. First thing you'll notice after the 66 books is that there's 2 major divisions. There is a Old Testament, and there's a New Testament. Testament is just the Latin word for covenant.
Joel Brooks:There's an Old Covenant, and there is a New Covenant. The Old Testament has 39 different books written by 28 authors, And its history spans 2000 years. The new testament has 27 books, 9 different authors, and its history spans 100 years. The structure of each of those, of the old testament is this. Your first 17 books from Genesis to Esther, they are historical.
Joel Brooks:So those are gonna be recording the events. The next 5 books are what we call poetry. We have 5 poetical books there. These are Psalms, and Proverbs, or Job, Ecclesiastes. And then the next 17 books are prophetical.
Joel Brooks:And you can actually break up those if you want to. We have 5 major prophetical, and we have 12 minor prophets. Don't think of those as like baseball terms. You know, like, you know, poor Hosea. He's not he's not in the majors.
Joel Brooks:It's it's purely length. The the major prophets, you know, the Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the Isaiah, the Daniel, they're just longer in length. Lamentations is thrown in because it's attached to Jeremiah. The minor prophets are just shorter in length. But so now you know when you're reading the Old Testament.
Joel Brooks:You wanna read a story? First 17 books. You wanna read a song or a prayer or some poetry? It'll be the next 5. You wanna read about a prophecy?
Joel Brooks:It'll be one of those next 17. Now we go to the New Testament. The New Testament also begins with history. The first five books, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Acts, are all historical books. Your next 13 books are letters written by Paul.
Joel Brooks:The first nine of those letters were written to churches. The next four of those letters were written to individuals. And just because of whoever compiled the Bible and its current structure wanted to confuse you, They did not put those letters in order of date written or the events. They put them in order of length. They're not at all in the order of Paul's life or the order of events there.
Joel Brooks:So Romans, it's the longest. So it's first. And then, you have Philemon which is the shortest there. Then after the Pauline letters, you do have Hebrews. It's an anomaly.
Joel Brooks:It was added a little bit later and so it just kind of stands alone. It's really large. We don't really know who wrote that. And then, you move to the non Pauline books. Your John's, your Peter, your James.
Joel Brooks:You have 9 of them. And they are also ordered not chronologically, but they are ordered by length, in which they start with your longest and then you move down to your shortest, except for Revelation, which has to be at the end. And we will look at the reason for that later. So there's your structure for the Bible. You wanna read about the history, first five books.
Joel Brooks:You want to read about some teaching, well, you then go to the letters there. Now, let's look at the actual content of the bible, the story. What I've done is behind me, I've put 5 headings up that will help you, see where we are going. We'll be going from creation to fall, to Israel, which takes up an enormous part of your Bible, then to Jesus, and then to new creation. So you know where we are going.
Joel Brooks:We're gonna go from creation all the way to new creation. And underneath this, we're gonna be doing a number of different other subheadings. But at least now you know where we are going. And so, I want us to start over here at creation by looking at the beginnings. So creation is about beginnings.
Joel Brooks:This is Genesis 1 through 3. What we find in this first few chapters of Genesis are the answers to life's biggest questions. Who are we? How did we get here? And why exactly are we here?
Joel Brooks:What is our purpose? Those are the questions that Genesis 1 through 3 are interested in answering. And what we find is in the very first verse of scripture is, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. He creates everything that we know to be. And it's a beautiful and it's a perfect world.
Joel Brooks:And it is created out of an act of love on his part. And mankind was created as the pinnacle of his creation. Mankind was created to not just enjoy the creation, but to rule over it and to have dominion. We find this clearly in Genesis chapter 1 verse 26, if you put that up there. Then God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness.
Joel Brooks:And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. And God blessed them and said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion.
Joel Brooks:We'll stop right there. We talk a lot about being created in God's image and that can have a number of different nuances to it. But in the context of Genesis 1, its meaning is clear. God created us in his image in order to exercise dominion over the world. He wanted us to rule and reign over this world in a way that reflected who he was.
Joel Brooks:And if we did this well, the entire world was going to flourish, because He packed the world with potential. It wasn't just a good and beautiful world, it also had potential in it. And if we were to reflect his rule and his reign, we could unpack that potential and make the world an even better place. And on top of of not just creating the world and and giving us rulership over it, God in his generosity also gave himself to mankind. He didn't just create the world and then walk away.
Joel Brooks:Instead, we actually read in Genesis that he walked in the garden in the cool of the evening. He was present among His creation. And that brings us to the next section of scripture. You've heard of the fall. I'll call this the fallout or you could call it the rebellion that happens.
Joel Brooks:God created Adam and Eve, and he put them in the Garden of Eden. And he gave them one instruction. So you can eat freely from any of the trees here. You can eat from the tree of life. But there is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that you cannot eat from.
Joel Brooks:And basically, what God was presenting to Adam and Eve was, you can either trust me to define what is right and what is wrong for you, or you can grab hold of that and you could define right and wrong or good and evil yourself. And that was the decision being presented before them. And he warned them, you define good and evil for yourself, you're going to die. And we all know what happened. Some mysterious serpent comes, tempts Eve and real quickly, she just takes, she eats, and she gives it to her husband.
Joel Brooks:And so they break the law of God. But once again, it's not so much about breaking the law. It's not about law breaking. It was more about law making. They decided they wanted to make the rules for themselves.
Joel Brooks:They wanted to define good and evil for themselves. And the result of them doing this was disastrous. You have a massive fallout from this. They become broken people and then the world breaks. It becomes a very hostile place to live.
Joel Brooks:Thorns and thistles are coming up from the ground. You can only cultivate the earth by the sweat of your brow. And we looked at this when we went through Romans 8. But all of this makes perfect sense that all of creation would fall when man fell. Because creation needs humans to rule over it in such a way to bring out its potential.
Joel Brooks:But when man falls, creation doesn't have that, and creation begins to fall apart. And we, of course, have seen this played out over and over throughout history. So the question now is, what is God gonna do after, Adam and Eve sinned against him? Is he gonna just give up on this world? Just let it fall to pieces?
Joel Brooks:Or is he gonna do something about it? What we find early on is God says, I'm going to fix this world that you just broke. And so he begins to put into play a plan to rescue all of creation. We see the first hint of this plan in Genesis 3 15 in what is the first gospel and strict scripture. If you wanna get fancy, the Latin words for it is the protoevangel, the first gospel.
Joel Brooks:And, if you'll put up the slide, God is speaking this to that mysterious serpent that had tempted Adam and Eve. He says these words, I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. It's the first hint of the gospel. The point is this, there's gonna be a descendant of Eve who's gonna come and is going to crush you, serpent.
Joel Brooks:Put an end to it all. Yes. You're gonna bite him in the heel, but then he's gonna turn and he's gonna crush your head and get rid of evil for good. It's the first little hint that we have of the gospel. And so what we're gonna find is right after that that prophecy or that those words spoken in Genesis 3:15, we now begin looking for the serpent crusher.
Joel Brooks:Who's gonna be the man who does this? Well, Adam and Eve, they have a child and immediately, they think this has got to be the one. I mean, if you're just reading through the Bible, you're wondering it too. Because right after that prophecy, it says Eve has a child. And she literally is like, I have made a man child.
Joel Brooks:She is hopeful. And then they named the child Cain. And have any of you ever met anyone else named Cain? I mean, certain names you just can't have. You know, Cain, Judas, Jezebel.
Joel Brooks:Like, there's certain certain names are just off limits to ever naming another person. No. Cain was not the serpent crusher. Saying or Cain would instead crush his brother Abel. He became a killer, not of the serpent, but a killer of men.
Joel Brooks:And actually, what you begin to see is the trajectory of of mankind. They become very selfish. If they want something, they violently take it. And this violence is seen as just spreading all across the globe. God wipes it out temporarily through the flood, But then it survives.
Joel Brooks:And that this evil culminates in the tower of Babel in Genesis chapter 11. This is when all of the families unite together in rebellion against God. Now as we are looking at that section there and we are seeing that first little hint of the gospel, you might be thinking, it's not really that much of a gospel. It's pretty vague. And I would say you're you are right.
Joel Brooks:What I would consider it to be is is this right here. I'm gonna do that. Here we go. You all know what that is? Strawberry.
Joel Brooks:The whole thing was dotted maybe. It's an acorn. Yes. Thank you, somebody. Strawberry.
Joel Brooks:It's the seed of the gospel. It it it's it's an acorn. Now what you're gonna see is this growing and growing and growing throughout scripture. So finally, you're gonna get right here. Yes.
Joel Brooks:Tree, not broccoli. Somebody yell broccoli before. Tree. Thank you. It's gonna grow to where we see Jesus on a cross.
Joel Brooks:That's the oak tree. The only way we actually understand what this really is is because we know the end. We know what it grows to. Now here, you're not told there's gonna be a, you know, man named Jesus, born of a virgin. You know, he's gonna come.
Joel Brooks:He's gonna suffer, he's gonna die for our sin. You don't get any of that here. You just get this hint. But you do see that begin to grow throughout scripture, and and you start getting prophecies. Oh, the virgin shall be with child.
Joel Brooks:Oh, the government shall, rest on his shoulders. It will be, there will be David will have a son and it will reign forever. You get all these things filled out to where you finally come to the oak tree. You know where it's been growing all along. But now that we know this, we can look back and we can make sense of it all.
Joel Brooks:But if you don't know what's being grown here, you're not gonna be able to make sense of the sacrificial system. The priests, the temple, the tabernacle, all the things that are actually growing into this moment right here. So that's where we're going. Okay. So back to babble.
Joel Brooks:That's how it ends with man's rebellion against God. How is God gonna respond to that? Well, what he does is we move to the next section here. Oh, god. I'll do black.
Joel Brooks:Keep that. Of Abraham, He chooses a remnant of humanity and he says, I'm gonna use you Abraham and your family now to rescue the world. Now to rescue the world. And so we read these words in Genesis 12. Now, the Lord said to Abram, go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you.
Joel Brooks:And I will make of you a great nation. And I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. And I will bless those who bless you. And of him who dishonors you, I will curse. And in you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
Joel Brooks:Now it doesn't take a a rocket scientist to understand the theme of this or maybe an English teacher to understand the theme of this. What word is repeated over and over? Bless. This is all about blessing. God says, now in this moment, I'm I'm choosing you, Abraham.
Joel Brooks:I'm choosing you. Just like I blessed Adam and Eve, I'm now going to bless you. But the reason that I'm blessing you is so now that through you, I can bless the entire world. Actually, the language that we read there is, all the families of the earth shall be blessed. And that's remarkable.
Joel Brooks:Because the last we saw the families of the earth, they were all united in the rebellion against God. And then the very next section, we have God looking back at those same families, and he is saying, I am now going to bless those who are rebelling against me. I'm going to love my enemies. See where we're going? See where we're going?
Joel Brooks:And so Abraham's family grows. He has Isaac. He has Jacob. Jacob has 12 sons, which become the 12 tribes of Israel, which is going to dominate the rest of the Old Testament there. So how does it work out?
Joel Brooks:Does Abraham's family become a blessing? Bless the whole world. It's a disaster. It is it's it works out terribly. A matter of fact, the last words that we have in Genesis are the words, a coffin in Egypt.
Joel Brooks:You could kinda hear the creepy organ music playing. There's a sense of foreboding. It's not gonna go well, and it doesn't. And so that leads us to the next section here, Exodus. Over 400 year period, God did grow Abraham's family to where it was very large in number.
Joel Brooks:But they did not become a great nation. Instead, they became an enslaved people. The Egyptians enslaved them. So now it looks like God's promise to Abraham is just dead in the water, but God does not give up on his people. He doesn't give up on his plan to rescue the world through Israel now.
Joel Brooks:And so he confronts this evil of of slavery in Egypt. He raises up Moses, sends the 10 plagues, parts the Red Sea, and He takes out the descendants of Abraham. He sets them free, and He takes them straight to Sinai. And then he tells him, remember, you're now all part of my rescue plan for this world. We read about this in Exodus 19.
Joel Brooks:You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians and how I bore you on eagles wings and brought you to myself. Now, therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine. And you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. So God rescues all the descendants of Abraham in order to now make them a kingdom of priest. Now what is a priest?
Joel Brooks:Priest is someone who like access a go between between mankind and God. A priest is someone who demonstrates his humanity who God is. And so now, what we're finding is that collectively, these people are supposed to be the image of God. They're supposed to reflect who God is and to represent His rule and His reign in this world and to do what Adam and Eve had originally been called to do. And you find something very similar here.
Joel Brooks:Just as Adam and Eve were given one command, now this nation of priests is given 10 commandments. But it's the same situation. Obey these 10 Commandments. You let me define good and evil for you. Obey these 10 Commandments and the entire world flourishes, not just you.
Joel Brooks:Disobey them, disastrous consequences. And just as Adam and Eve had to be exiled out of the garden, you will have to be exiled out of the promised land. So it's the same situation again. To help them out with this, God actually gives them a mini version of Eden, the Garden of Eden at this point, something we know as the tabernacle, which is just a big tent, but it was a tent that represented the Garden of Eden. I mean, if you ever study the tabernacle, you're gonna find all this garden imagery is woven all through the fabrics.
Joel Brooks:You're gonna find that the temple or the, tabernacle furniture all has this garden of Eden imagery. And God himself says, I will actually uniquely come down just like I did in the Garden of Eden. I will come down there and dwell once again with my people. And you can really see the the high priest is almost being like a new Adam because once a year, the high priest would actually get to meet personally with God. And so God gives them this little mini version of Eden to even help them out in the way.
Joel Brooks:How did they do? Terribly. Once again, it seems like God's rescue plan is just falling apart. I mean, they didn't even last one day before they were bowing down to a golden calf. So now what happens?
Joel Brooks:God sends them out into the desert for 40 years to punish them before they enter into the promised land, and we enter into this period now of the judges. Boy, children's bibles love judges. I did as a child reading those. They're very selective in what they pull out of judges. I mean, we love the stories of Gideon, love the stories of Samson, love the stories of Samson.
Joel Brooks:Love the stories of Samson. Children's Bibles don't like the stories about temple pegs being driven through people's heads while they sleep, or, how Judges ends with a woman being chopped into 12 different pieces and then mailed out to the 12 tribes of Israel. Once you get in that territory, it's actually why the bible was nearly banned in public school. It's because of the stories and judges. As they're in the land of Canaan, the promised land, God will raise up from time to time judges.
Joel Brooks:We have 7 of them to, to help the people out, to deliver them whenever some neighboring tribe came in, to lead them to repentance. But really, what you have is these 7 leaders that keep coming. They keep spiraling down. Things get worse and worse and worse. And so finally, you get a woman being hacked up and mailed out to the 12 tribes of Israel.
Joel Brooks:The only redeeming quality about this time of the judges is that Ruth lived during this time. And she's, like, kinda set off to the side to say, see, not everyone was terrible. After the period of the judges, we moved to the period of the kingdom. The people of Israel, they agreed, yes. This judge situation is terrible.
Joel Brooks:Can we do something different? And their idea was, we need a king. We need to set up a kingdom. And so God gives them Saul, then He gives them David, then He gives them Solomon, and then the kingdom splits. You've got 40 total kings.
Joel Brooks:We're gonna look at this next week when we look at the life of David. But of all the kings, of all the people in this period, David is by far the most central figure in this period. He is the largest biography we have of any ancient figure in history. To put it in perspective, I have 153 pages about King David in my bible. There are only 120 pages of the gospels.
Joel Brooks:We have more about the life of David than we have written about the life of Jesus in the gospels. We know everything about like, his his childhood. We know how he became king. We know about his successes. We know his terrible flaws.
Joel Brooks:How he commits adultery, murder. We know about all of these things. Which God makes a promise to him. David's just recently become king. He's just made Jerusalem his capital city.
Joel Brooks:Now he says, now that I'm established, God, I'm gonna make you a house. Now I'm going to build you a temple. This is God's response to him. God essentially says, no. You don't make me a house.
Joel Brooks:The Lord will make you a house. And your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me. Your throne shall be established forever. God was going to raise up a descendant of David to become king. This king wasn't just gonna reign 10 years or 40 years.
Joel Brooks:This king was going to reign forever and ever. That is one heck of a promise to have someone on the throne in which the reign will never end. It also means that this person is not a mere human, because no mere human could reign forever and ever. This is gonna have to be a king that will have dominion not just over the world, but will have to have dominion over death itself. Death won't be able to touch this king.
Joel Brooks:So this isn't an ordinary king that's just been promised. And now we're gonna spend the rest of scripture looking for this King, the son of David, who obviously is the serpent crusher. Now the serpent crusher, we know is gonna sit on a throne. We know that he is going to be a descendant of David. And just like after Eve was given these pro those promises and she immediately she's wondering, is my child gonna be the next one?
Joel Brooks:Is he the serpent crusher? David has a child, Solomon. And we're wondering, is he the one? And things actually start off really well for Solomon, don't they? And then you get the whole, like, he marries 700 women, 300 concubines, starts hoarding up wealth.
Joel Brooks:And on top of all that, he begins enslaving people to build an empire. He actually takes Israel back and they become Egypt. Solomon is not only the the He's not only not the serpent crusher, he moves Israel backwards and into even greater rebellion. They become Egypt, and we see this played all over again. Well, after Solomon dies, there's a civil war.
Joel Brooks:Kingdom is split in 2. This is when your Bible becomes impossible to understand. I I am serious. There are 40 kings that reign during this time. I had to when I was going through seminary, I had to remember all these kings, learn them all.
Joel Brooks:And I knew the names of every one of these kings for the 5 minutes before my exam. I did not know them during the exam. But I promise you for the 5 minutes before it it all came together. So that is the only time in my life I have ever known all 40 of those kings. I mean, it just becomes really exhausting.
Joel Brooks:Here's here's a list of them if you want, you know, and you wanna get out your phone, take a picture of that, memorize them at home. You're welcome to. I'm not gonna walk through this period of Israel's history. I'll give you a 10,000 foot view. Kingdom splits, 10 tribes to the North, they become the Northern Kingdom also known as Israel or Ephraim in your Bible.
Joel Brooks:These 2 Southern kingdoms, they split off. They become the Southern Kingdom, also known as Judah throughout your Bible. That's like the best grade you could get, a B minus. But really, the period of the kingdom is not any better than the judges. And so, once again, we were left wondering kind of where is God in all of this?
Joel Brooks:Well, thankfully, during this time, he sends prophets. To to speak truth into the kings here, the the prophets will come. They pretty much would say the same thing over and over, Repent or perish. They would say it poetically. I mean, they were poets.
Joel Brooks:And so they're saying it in a beautiful poetic way, but it's essentially turn or burn. That was it, over and over. Turn or burn. But also along with that, they would say, you know, God's you're you're not gonna repent. God is gonna be punishing you, but he will also send a messiah.
Joel Brooks:And this is where we start getting language about the Messiah. So the serpent crusher who's gonna sit on the throne of David, and he's gonna be this anointed one, this Messiah. And he is gonna come and he's gonna set everything right. And so from that point on, we're looking forward to the messiah. And we have these prophecies about this messiah is gonna actually be called Emmanuel, God with us.
Joel Brooks:The government is gonna be on his shoulders. This Messiah is also gonna have to suffer and take on the sins of the world. We have all of those prophecies happening at that time. But first, they need to get destroyed. And so, they get destroyed.
Joel Brooks:We have this The Northern Kingdom is destroyed in 7 22 AD. The Southern Kingdom, Judah is destroyed in 586. Sorry. I said 80. BC.
Joel Brooks:And the, the Southern Kingdom is destroyed in 586 BC by Babylon. You have that tower of Babel. That imagery is coming right through. And then they are sent to the next period here of exile. So just like Adam and Eve, they didn't obey god, they were exiled out.
Joel Brooks:Here we have, they didn't obey god, and now they're exiled out. And so for 70 years, we have these exiles living in the land of Babylon. These are your stories of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, your stories of Daniel. They were all exiles living in Babylon. And if you're an Israelite at this point, you're wondering, my gosh.
Joel Brooks:That promise to Abraham seems so so long ago. And it was. It was about 1400 years earlier. Is God really gonna keep his promise? Well, God sends prophets during this time of the exile, prophets like Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and they make promises of, you know what?
Joel Brooks:God is gonna do something. And this time, he's gonna get to the heart of the matter, which is your hearts. The reason we keep having everything fall apart and fall apart is because, actually, it's you're the problem. And so he's gonna give you a new heart. And so we have Jeremiah 31 prophesying about this.
Joel Brooks: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 that I made with their fathers on the day when 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. But this is a covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days declares the Lord. I will put my law within them. And I will write it on their hearts.
Joel Brooks:And I will be their god and they shall be my people. It's actually where we get the New Testament from. The new covenant is being spoken of right here in which God will change our hearts. Ezekiel says something similar. In Ezekiel 11, he says, and I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put in them.
Joel Brooks:I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh, and I will give them a heart of flesh. So now God's not just promising a messiah, he's now promising that maybe through this messiah, something's gonna happen to our hearts to deal with the actual sin issue that's happening there. This leads us to the next section of scripture, the return. After the exile, a lot of Israel returns back to the land of Israel but not everyone, but a lot do. This is where you get your stories of Nehemiah who rebuilds the walls, Ezra, the stories of Esther.
Joel Brooks:You do have a few prophets like Zephaniah, Zechariah, Malachi. And then you get silence for 400 years. For 400 years, we don't really know what happened. God is silent. That doesn't mean he wasn't working.
Joel Brooks:We just don't have anything that's recorded in this period in the bible. The book of Esther, which happens right here, sets us up for that. Because what is the, you know, the one, like, fun fact about the book of Esther? It's the only book in the Bible where God's not mentioned. It's almost like in Esther, God's going silent.
Joel Brooks:And for 400 years, there's just silence. It's the deep breath waiting for the arrival of Jesus. So we go to the New Testament. And here, I wanna make things really easy on you and how I label this. Alright.
Joel Brooks:Jesus. It works. I mean, I I've really thought of other things. I could say serpent crusher, you know, something like that. But Jesus.
Joel Brooks:We come to Jesus. We now see God's rescue plan coming into full fruition. He sends his son Jesus to the world in order to be the perfect human. He's fully God, but he is also fully human. So he's not only the son of God, he is also the son of Abraham and he's the son of David.
Joel Brooks:He's a direct descendant of the line of David. He is an heir to the throne. He's going to be the king that will reign forever and ever. And you see clearly that Jesus saw himself as this, as the king establishing his kingdom that will reign forever and ever. When Mark introduces Jesus, when he comes on the scene, these are the words we read in Mark chapter 1 verse 14.
Joel Brooks:Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God and saying, the time is fulfilled. Or like, that means, everything has been building up to this one moment, people. The time is fulfilled. The kingdom of God is at hand or the kingdom of God is before you. Repent and believe the gospel.
Joel Brooks:And the gospel's the good news. Would you accept that all of time, all of history has been building to this moment standing before you in which the kingdom of God has now just presented itself? Can you repent and believe this good news? That's the message of Jesus. And then Jesus, he does the same thing that that God did when he was making the the kingdom of priest here in Exodus.
Joel Brooks:He gathers some of Abraham's descendants together. He gathers 12 different leaders representing the 12 tribes of Israel, and he takes them straight to a mountain, and he gives them a new law. We know it there as the sermon on the mount. And what he's doing there is he's showing us this is how humans are supposed to live. This is what they've always how they've always been supposed to live.
Joel Brooks:How they're supposed to be a priest. How they're supposed to rule over this world. And it's not by taking what you want. It's not by using violence to get your way. It's by serving.
Joel Brooks:It's by doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. It's about loving even those you disagreed loving your enemies. That's what the Sermon on the Mount is about. It's the new laws of the new kingdom. Now, the gospels in the New Testament, they are the books that tell us of the story of Jesus and the life and ministry of Jesus.
Joel Brooks:And we have Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and John all to slightly tell us different aspects of his life. They're the biographies of Jesus. But they are more than just biographies. I like to call them biographical sermons because they're not just presenting their the the life of Jesus. They're presenting the life of Jesus in such a way to convince you of something.
Joel Brooks:They want to take you somewhere. They want to force you to have to make a decision when you see the life of Jesus. So they are biographical sermons. And what they're trying to show you is Jesus is king. He's establishing his kingdom.
Joel Brooks:Will you submit to his lordship? Jesus is the long awaited savior of the world. Jesus came to show humanity how we were supposed to live. He was the new Adam. But unlike Adam, he didn't sin.
Joel Brooks:He obeyed his father perfectly. And you know how humanity responded when they saw the perfect human? They killed him. That's how humanity responded to the Son of God coming. We killed him.
Joel Brooks:However, this was always part of God's rescue plan. You see, because God is a just God. He's a righteous and He's a just God. And He can't just look at all He can't do that. He's got to do something with the sin.
Joel Brooks:It needs to be punished. And what he does is Jesus comes and he offers payment for our sins. He is punished for our sins by going to the cross and dying there. 3 days later, Jesus rose from the dead. No one saw that coming.
Joel Brooks:No one. I mean, the disciples were with them, you know, for 3 years. Didn't see it coming. Completely unexpected, but Jesus rose from the dead and this vindicated him, that he was who he said he was. He did what he said he would do.
Joel Brooks:That he no longer needed to stay in the grave because he had fully paid for all of his sins. And that he was indeed the rightful heir of the throne of David that could reign forever and ever because he would have dominion over death itself. He rose from the dead. This is a very important fact for us to understand about Jesus. He's still human.
Joel Brooks:He will forever be human. Fully God, fully man. But this is why it's so important. When we look at Jesus, what we now see is our future when we unite ourselves to him in faith that we will go through the grave and we will come out the other side and be given a new resurrected body just like Jesus. You could sum it up this way, and this is is not original to me.
Joel Brooks:But the gospels, what they tell us is that Jesus became what we are so that we might become like he is. Jesus became what we are so that we might become like He is, but only if we believe. Throughout the New Testament, and especially in the Book of Acts, the cross is referred to as a tree. And acts is almost exclusively referred to as Jesus' side on a tree, not the cross. Very intentional language.
Joel Brooks:Because what the authors of scripture are doing is they're pointing back to this tree here in the beginning. They're saying just as humanity was given a tree in which they could choose life or they could choose death, We have been given another tree right here that we have to make a decision about. You can either choose life or you could choose death. Will you believe that Jesus is the son of God and that he paid for your sins on the cross and that he is resurrected and that is your glorious future? That's the decision that's being presented to us.
Joel Brooks:So the gospels tell about the life of Jesus. And then we move into the next section, which is gonna be his followers. I'm gonna I'm gonna do church, and I'm gonna put it right here. Next section is church. Jesus, he meets with his followers for 40 days after the resurrection, then he ascends to heaven.
Joel Brooks:He sends his spirit down, begins changing our hearts, in such a way that the only way it could be described is we're born again. We become new people. And for the first time, we could start to obey God. And so this Jesus movement now spreads across the world. And that's what Acts is about, seeing the church go forward, energized by the spirit of God.
Joel Brooks:But notice I put church here. I didn't put it here. We're in this now and not yet period. And and we know this. We all feel this.
Joel Brooks:Like, the Spirit of God comes in. He has changed things for the first time in our life. Like, we're we're alive. We can obey God. New life.
Joel Brooks:New creation. But we still make some of the same boneheaded decisions that Adam and Eve made. There's still some of that old sin in us. So we're living this kinda now and not fully realized yet new creation. That's why Paul writes us these letters that basically, they they go like, hey, I love you.
Joel Brooks:I pray for you often. Would you quit making stupid decisions and, and say hello for Timothy to Timothy for me? You know, that's basically, you know, how how's letters go, like but but they're teaching us how we still are working out our salvation and how we are becoming a new creation. Then we end here in Revelation. And I get our elders to someday teach through it.
Joel Brooks:I'm not touching it. No. It's apocalyptic literature. It's a little hard to understand at times. It's mostly, I believe, historical, but you do have some prophetical elements in it, especially the last three chapters, which is why it's at the end of the Bible.
Joel Brooks:It tells us where we're going. The last three chapters of Revelation mirror the first three chapters of the Bible. You should think of them as the bookends of the Bible. This tells our beginnings and everything that went wrong. This tells us how everything is gonna be restored and go right.
Joel Brooks:The exact same things are there though. Once again, you find the serpent, but this time he's judged and dealt with. You find another tree of life. There's God once again living with man. The Bible ends with all of humanity and all of creation being fully healed, not destroyed, fully healed.
Joel Brooks:And then we reign with Jesus here on a renewed world. The Bible does not end with us floating around in heaven in some disembodied spirit. The Bible, like, I don't know where that really came in. It's more Plato than it is scripture. But the point of salvation, the point of the Bible is not for your spirit to go off to heaven.
Joel Brooks:It has always been about creation will be restored and we will physically be in a new world and new resurrected bodies. That's where we're going. I want to end our time by reading some of the last words in Revelation, last chapter of the Bible. Revelation 22. Then, the angel showed me the river of the water of life, brightest crystal flowing from the throne of God and of the lamb through the middle of the street of the city.
Joel Brooks:Also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with this 12 kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. Stop right there. There are still nations in the new creation. That's where we get the every tongue, tribe, and nation.
Joel Brooks:We'll be worshiping Jesus forever. I mean, it's a real creation, a real world. Nations exist. No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the lamb will be in it. And his servants will worship him.
Joel Brooks:Those servants, that's us. We're now going all the way back to Genesis 1 and a recreation. God is just speaking and light exists for all of eternity. And then it ends with, and they will reign forever and ever. Notice, we have Jesus already reigning forever and ever, But this doesn't say, and he will reign forever and ever.
Joel Brooks:I mean, Handel's messiah is right. He will reign forever and ever. Yes. But it says, they, that day is us, will reign forever and ever, co ruling with Christ. The whole new testament unpacks this.
Joel Brooks:Once again, we now become what Adam and Eve were supposed to do, to have dominion over this world, to rule this world in a way that it brings out its potential. That's where it ends, with us being restored, given new resurrected bodies, co ruling with Christ, bringing out a new and beautiful glorious creation for all of eternity. Isn't that an amazing, glorious end? That's where we are heading if we trust Christ. Pray with me.
Joel Brooks:Father, we thank you for this story. I know there's a lot, but wow, what you have done throughout history. Thank you for being a God who has not given up on this world, who has not given up on us. But at great sacrifice to yourself, you have put things right. Jesus, we look forward to the day where you are reigning forever, and, Lord, we are co reigning with you.
Joel Brooks:Lord, I pray that you would make that the longing of our hearts. And we pray this in the strong name of Jesus. Amen.