We will spend the next two weeks preparing for and setting the stage for our study of the New Testament. My wife continually warns me about these two weeks. <That’s right. Don’t panic. Don’t be overwhelmed. He’s going to cover a lot of information and a lot of new words that you will hear again. Don’t worry about it.> These first two Sundays give you all the background to prepare you for the New Testament. It is a lot of secular history—the World Empires going on at this time. If you’re like me in school, as soon as they said, "World Empires," you were yawning and falling asleep. But I will try to make it interesting.

I will also cover an overview of the Old Testament so that you understand more about the time between the Old and New Testaments. Then we’ll talk about the time between the Testaments. I do this because many of the things mentioned in the New Testament occur or develop during the time between the Testaments. So by knowing the source of the "Pharisees" and "Saducees," you’ll understand where these groups came from when you read about them in the New Testament. Also, when presenting this dry, boring, factual history stuff (which I don’t think is dry or boring now) a lot of questions are answered about the New Testament.

Here’s an example. For those of you who’ve been through the Old Testament, weren’t you amazed at how many times we found Christ in the Old Testament? It is just absolutely amazing how much Christ was in the Old Testament. It begs the question when you get to the New Testament, "How did the Jews miss Him? How could they not recognize Jesus as the Messiah? How could they reject Him?" That’s a question that will occur all throughout the New Testament. You’ll say, "If it’s this clear, how could they miss Jesus Christ?" We’ll talk more about that.

By knowing what went on between the Old and New Testaments, called the "intertestamental period," you’ll understand and gain an appreciation for the New Testament. That’s what I’m going to try to do this week.

The first thing I want to do is give you a timeline. This is the way I’m going to approach it this morning. It’s going to be fast and furious, but I want to give you the 120,000-foot view. We’re going to go through this diagram very quickly but it’s really a summary of the whole Bible in one page. This timeline helps me to understand the whole Bible. That’s what you’re looking at—God’s plan from eternity past to eternity future. On the top and through the middle are "open-ended" arrows (arrows pointing in both directions). That represents "eternity," meaning there is no beginning and no end.

On the left, you’ll see "Adam and Eve sinned; Sin and death Entered the World," and a reference. Does everybody see that? This occurs back in the Old Testament, in Genesis. God created the heavens and the earth, plants and animals, and Adam and Eve. As soon as Adam and Eve sinned, you’ll see above the line, it says, "Time Begins." For those of you who’ve been through the Old Testament, how long were Adam and Eve going to live before they sinned? Forever. There wasn’t any death. God said, "When you disobey me, death will enter the world." That’s how man today really measures time: how long we live. Years are really important to us because we are born, we live, and then we die.

Right above that, it says, "God deals with the entire world through major events: Flood, Tower of Babel." This is a summary of Genesis 1-9. You can go back and read it. Remember that this is very high-level. God said, "Man has become disobedient. They have a disobedient nature now. I need to get them right with me. We need to have a correct relationship but they can’t do it. They keep failing and failing. I have to do it." So God dealt with the whole world, saying, "I want the whole world to have a relationship with me." At the Tower of Babel, God said, "I’m going to disperse all the people so that they cannot communicate with each other."

At the bottom of the timeline, it says, "Nation of Israel; Chosen by God; God’s promises to Israel." Does everybody see that? What chapter is that from? Genesis 12. It is the key chapter in the whole Bible because it says that God changed the way He was talking to people. To this point, God has been dealing with the whole world but now He’s going to focus on one Nation. He gave Abraham many promises but the key promise is, "Through your descendants, all nations (the whole world) will be blessed." In other words, God said, "I tried the whole world. They are not responding. I am going to prepare for all nations to be blessed through Abraham’s seed." Guess who comes from Abraham’s seed? Jesus Christ. The Nation of Israel is chosen.

Now look back above the eternal line. It says, "Time of Israel." That’s the Old Testament: God is preparing Israel to deliver Jesus Christ. That will be when Christ comes, dies on the cross, rises up, ascends to heaven, and sends the Holy Spirit for the "Time of the Church" to begin. God works through the Nation. During this time, Christ is born. I just went very quickly through the Old Testament. I’m going to go through it slower in just a moment.

So Christ is born (Luke 2). That’s the start of the New Testament. The next thing that happens is, "Christ is crucified, buried, resurrected, and ascended." Take a look above the line at this point. This is significant. Many people ask, "Well, what happened to all the Old Testament saints?" If Christ was the Savior, the Old Testament saints died before Christ was crucified so that we might have forgiveness of sins. How do they get to heaven? There are some references there and we’ll talk more about it. It says, "Ephesians 4:8-10; Christ in heaven, Brings Old Testament saints from Paradise to Heaven." He led the captives free. For three days (from the time He died until He rose again), I believe the Bible says that Jesus went to Paradise. He took all the Old Testament saints, believers, those of faith, to Heaven. When someone dies today, where do they go? They go into the presence of God and Jesus. We’ll paint this picture by the time we get to Revelation. We’ll know where everybody is, categorically.

Right below that is, "God works through the Church" and "Time of the Church." You are in the age or time of the Church. In other words, God says, "Here’s my ministry to the world. I went through world events. I went through the Nation of Israel. Now I’m working through the Church." Do you know who "the Church" is? The "Church" is you, the body of Christ. God says, "I am working through you (not First Baptist Church) as the body of Christ." We attend First Baptist Church, it is the body of Christ, but it’s the people who make up the body of Christ. "I am working through you to tell others about who I am. I am a loving and faithful God. I sent my Son as a sacrifice for you forever." We are the Church.

Our timeline says, "Temple Destroyed (70 AD)." That’s a key moment. I’ll tell you why as we get into the New Testament. Then you see "TODAY." Does everybody see that? That is today, June 15^th, 2003. Right after that are some dashes in the eternal line. We don’t know the time that the next event will happen. We are up to today. I just went from Creation to today in about 10 minutes. We don’t know the future but there is an event that’s going to happen: right below today, it says, "No one knows the time (Mark 13:32)." We don’t know when this is going to happen.

Everything past that is what’s going to happen in Revelation. I told you that we would spend three months in Revelation to discuss all this. You can read all this but what is said there is that basically I approach the "End Times" as a premillenial dispensation. We’ll explain this and all the other approaches when we get to Revelation. You have to make up your own mind about the future. No one knows the future until it happens but you prayerfully read the Bible and decide for yourself. One of these days, God is going to look over at Christ, who is seated at the right hand, and say, "Son, it’s time." As soon as He says that, Christ is going to call all of the saints home. That’s called the rapture (like you read about in the Left Behind books). Everybody disappears. Some of you may come to Church the next Sunday and some of us won’t be here. That means that you got left behind and we went on. That’s the rapture. No one knows when that moment in time will occur.

When that happens, the Final Judgment is coming. We’ll look at the Judgment of God throughout the New Testament. We saw it in the Old Testament. It happened with a Great Flood. It happened with different nations. We’re going to see it happen with the Israelite Nation. He’s going to judge the whole world. This is what we read in the Bible and believe as Christians. There is a Final Judgment coming. God says, "I have dealt with man (human beings). I have been patient with man, but it’s over. Now it’s going to be cleaned up. It will be like the time when Adam and Eve were in the Garden, before they sinned. I am going to have people, the human beings I’ve created, in a new, resurrected body. They will live with me forever." That’s the hope we have as Christians. That’s why we should get more excited about what’s going to happen in the future than what’s happening to us today or yesterday (in terms of worry, stress, etc.). We have a hope. God says, "This is yours. I’m going to give it to you."

At the bottom of this sheet, it says, "God created the plan of salvation before the foundation of the world. All who have been given life and come of age (i.e., reached the ‘age of accountability’ where they say, "You know, I have done wrong. I can’t stand before God because of my wrong. I can’t clean myself up—it’s only through the blood of Jesus Christ.") have sinned. God actually seeks all who have sinned. He has sacrificed His only Son so that all who respond through faith will live with Him through all eternity."

I hope this helps. This is a real good "cheat sheet" for where you are in the scheme of eternity. We are in the time of the Church. When we get to Revelation, we’ll discuss the future.

We’ve already introduced the world events. Genesis 1 to Genesis 11 covers about 2,000 years. The rest of Genesis (chapters 12-50) covers about 350 years. The period from Genesis 12 (the key chapter in the whole Bible) to Matthew 1 covers about 2,000 years. So there are 2,000 years in the first 11 chapters and 2,000 years in the rest of the Old Testament. That includes the 400-year intertestamental period that we don’t have in the Bible. Let’s summarize the second 2,000 years from Genesis 12 to the New Testament.

Here’s an example. Solomon built a Temple, patterned after the Tabernacle (which we’ll talk about in Hebrews). When Babylon came over to Jerusalem, they destroyed it. So there was a period when there was no Temple. This is when "synagogues" came into being (around 600-585 BC). While in Babylon, they said, "We don’t have a Temple. We can’t burn offerings to God." In the Jewish culture (according to the Bible), atonement (or cover) for sin was to be made once a year at the Temple. If you don’t have a Temple, what happens? You can’t go there so there’s no atonement. So they said, "We have to maintain our Jewish history, culture, and religion," so they created synagogues. They started in Babylon and continued through the New Testament. That’s why every village has a synagogue by the time we get to the New Testament. When Paul traveled around, he always visited the synagogues first. But this is how the synagogues came about—they had no Temple but had to worship God. The synagogues were a place for people to congregate and learn about the Jewish history—kind of like a home Bible study to us.

So the people have lost their Temple. They’ve lost some of their Jewish identity. They’ve created synagogues. They come back over to the Land after 70 years and rebuild the Temple. It was a much smaller and less grand Temple. They are poor. They’ve been wiped out, held in captivity, and enslaved for years. You can read about this in Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther. They are trying to get money to rebuild the Temple and walls of Jerusalem.

It is this rebuilt Temple that we take into the New Testament for Jesus. We’ll be talking about it. Herod the Great makes a lot of improvements to the Temple. He added porches, enlarged the Temple, and made it much grander. Then this Temple is wiped out in 70 AD.

Has it been rebuilt since? No. And here comes Revelation. We’re going to get excited about this. The Temple has to be rebuilt because the Jews… we’ll get to that. It’s exciting. It’s unbelievable. It’s all one story.

When Assyria came over and wiped out Israel, they transplanted its own people there. It wasn’t that they just killed all the people or carried them away into captivity. They moved some people from Assyria to Israel. After Assyria was defeated, some Jews returned to Israel. The Jews who returned to Jerusalem from Babylon to rebuild the wall and the Temple didn’t recognize the ones there as pure Jews because they had intermarried with the Assyrians. Now hear me. If you were a Jew, knew the Old Testament, knew your heritage, and knew that God had just judged you, what would you be thinking? From a religious point of view, you would be thinking, "Sacrifice. Become pure. Never compromise God again." You would say, "Man, that was a really bad time. I don’t want to go through that anymore." This was their desire. They had such a desire to remain pure before God. In other words, they asked, "What did the Law say in Exodus? Whatever it says, we’re going to do it. How can we interpret the Law to ensure that we don’t cross God or sin against God?" So they started doing that and adding more and more "laws." Does that sound a little like what you’ve read in the New Testament? That’s what was happening. By the time they got to the New Testament, they said, "To be a Jew, as a male, you have to be circumcised, you have to do this, you have to do that, you can’t work on the Sabbath, etc." They had all these rules to be a "pure Jew" in their eyes.

The others were not pure Jews. The Babylonian Jews would not allow the Assyrian Jews to come to their Temple so they built their own Temple. They said, "Well, that’s alright. We’ll build our own temple." These people were called "Samaritans." We’ll read about them in the New Testament. Jesus visited the woman at the well. Do you remember what she asked? "Where do you worship God? We worship on this mountain but you worship on that mountain." Jesus had to talk to her. He said, "It doesn’t matter where you worship God as long as you’re worshipping in Spirit and in Truth." That story will mean a lot more to you, now that you know the background and what was going on during the intertestamental time in these locations. These are "contaminated" people.

Another significant event happened during the "silent years." When Alexander the Great died, his kingdom was broken into four pieces. The Ptolemies and Seleucids were two of those four. They’re the ones who fought over Jerusalem. The Ptolemies were in Egypt. The Seleucids were in Syria. They fought over the Promised Land—it was very important land back then. Around 185 BC, the Seleucids defeated the Ptolemies and took over this land. The Seleucid kings or rulers were named "Antiochus." Antiochus IV was known as "Antiochus Epiphanes." About 175 BC, Antiochus Epiphanes said, "You know. Everyone has to be Greek. I don’t care who you are—Jew or not. You have to be Greek." He’s the one who said, "If anyone is caught with a scroll of Isaiah or anything will be killed and we’ll destroy the scroll." He put a statue of Zeus, the Greek god, in the Temple. Two weeks later, he took a pig into the Temple, slaughtered it, and poured the blood all over the altar.

If you were a Jew, how would you feel? You’re trying to maintain purity, aren’t you? You’re coming out of this period of captivity. It’s been a couple of hundred years but everybody has the synagogues and temples going. You’re trying to maintain purity and then this guy comes along and does this to you. It happens in 175 BC. About that time, Mattathias, a priest out in the villages, comes along. There was an episode where they were going to worship and sacrifice a pig on an altar in his village. He killed the Jew who was going to sacrifice the pig. That started a revolt—the Maccabbean Revolt. After this revolt, the Pharisees became very, very hot. They came in and said, "We’re going to be the ones to enforce purity." They’re called Hasidim Jews now (the pious ones).

Two years later, the Jews recaptured the Temple from the Seleucids and cleaned it up. They started to burn candles in the Temple (with pure oil, as required in the Pentateuch). They only had one day’s worth of oil. You know this story, don’t you? You know where I’m headed. The one day of oil lasted eight days. It was a miracle. That’s why Jews, today, celebrate Hanukkah. It happened around December, 165 BC. But that’s the source of the Jewish holiday, Hanukkah.

What I want you to see is that after this episode, how pure do you want to be now? How jealous, zealous, and on guard do you want to be for your relationship to God? Very. That’s what we’re going to see as we come into the New Testament. Christ comes along and starts to talk to them about their Law. If you want to know why they missed it and how they could have been so blind and deaf to Jesus, here are some of the reasons why. They had all this going on within their lives. By the time Jesus came, they were so iron-clad zealous for themselves, purity, and the Law. They became so legalistic that Jesus couldn’t get through to them. They were blind. We’ll see Jesus call them "blind and deaf." That’s absolutely what was going on here.

Does this help you understand what you’re getting into as we start the New Testament? Next week, we’ll finish the intertestamental period. We have a little more to cover. We’ll get into how we got the New Testament and an introduction to the New Testament books. That’s a little dry and boring too, but it’s the most exciting thing you’ll ever hear. How do we know we’re reading what God intended for us to read in the New Testament? Then we’ll start into Matthew.

I know this was a lot, but if you understand this background, it will really help you to understand the New Testament. We’ll also cover more about these "characters" in the New Testament.