An Overview of the Whole Bible

00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)

00:00:02.580 | Happy Friday everyone.

00:00:06.640 | This is a special episode of the Ask Pastor John podcast

00:00:09.640 | and it comes to you in partnership

00:00:10.880 | with the Gospel Coalition.

00:00:13.260 | Today our guest, Dr. Don Carson joins us.

00:00:16.240 | He is the co-founder and president of the Gospel Coalition.

00:00:19.520 | He is also the editor of the new NIV Zondervan Study Bible

00:00:23.520 | which focuses on biblical theology themes

00:00:26.560 | as they develop in the Bible from Genesis

00:00:28.860 | to Revelation and nobody does this any better than Carson.

00:00:33.060 | So we're launching a little occasional series

00:00:35.200 | of longer episodes.

00:00:36.480 | We're all called Dr. Carson and he will riff

00:00:39.080 | on a certain theme in biblical theology.

00:00:42.340 | In the future we'll cover topics like

00:00:44.200 | the doctrine of creation or the doctrine of kingship

00:00:47.560 | or atonement or kingdom and so on and so on.

00:00:51.120 | Episodes will release on Fridays every three weeks or so

00:00:54.680 | on the podcast and should be wonderful.

00:00:57.360 | Let's see if he's home first.

00:01:00.000 | (phone ringing)

00:01:02.200 | Don Carson.

00:01:03.040 | Dr. Carson, Tony Reinke at Desiring God Hello

00:01:05.280 | and thank you for joining us to record a little series

00:01:08.160 | of episodes on various prominent themes in the Bible.

00:01:10.600 | Today we jump in and start with a historical overview

00:01:13.820 | of the Bible, the whole Bible.

00:01:16.180 | Tell us the story of the Bible in one shot.

00:01:18.800 | Are you ready?

00:01:19.640 | Yes.

00:01:20.460 | Of course you are.

00:01:21.300 | All right, take it away.

00:01:22.340 | Okay, here we go.

00:01:23.920 | To talk about the overview of the Bible

00:01:27.120 | is to conjure up two rather distinct things.

00:01:30.960 | On the one hand there's the Bible as we have it

00:01:37.040 | with Old Testament and New Testament

00:01:40.120 | and its division into various categories.

00:01:43.880 | And those categories are themselves sometimes

00:01:47.840 | a bit different in English than in the study

00:01:52.840 | of the Hebrew Old Testament, for example.

00:01:55.500 | We speak of the major and minor prophets,

00:01:58.720 | but those are not the categories in which

00:02:01.160 | the students of the Hebrew Bible think.

00:02:05.040 | But nevertheless we can break things down usefully

00:02:08.160 | into the Pentateuch, the first five books

00:02:10.680 | of the Old Testament, and historical books,

00:02:14.320 | and wisdom literature, books like Proverbs

00:02:18.080 | and Ecclesiastes and so forth,

00:02:20.560 | and prophets, major and minor,

00:02:23.520 | even though those are not standard categories.

00:02:26.500 | And in the New Testament one can think of Gospels,

00:02:29.460 | the Book of Acts, all the letters, the Apocalypse,

00:02:33.300 | and even the letters can be broken down

00:02:34.940 | into letters to churches versus letters to individuals

00:02:37.880 | like the first and second Timothy, Titus, Philemon.

00:02:41.440 | All of these are useful categories.

00:02:44.740 | What they don't get across is the sequence

00:02:48.380 | in which things are written,

00:02:50.180 | and they don't get across the chronology

00:02:54.320 | of the Bible storyline.

00:02:56.380 | And that's what we're interested in in this brief podcast.

00:03:01.380 | That is to say, what's the Bible storyline

00:03:05.720 | that links these various books

00:03:09.100 | with their different literary forms

00:03:11.520 | and different structures and different languages

00:03:14.360 | and so on together?

00:03:16.080 | The next thing to observe is that you can lay out

00:03:19.400 | that storyline in very brief sentences,

00:03:24.360 | or you could tease it out

00:03:26.120 | to make it a mini Howard presentation.

00:03:29.280 | In briefest form, you have creation,

00:03:33.280 | fall, redemption, consummation.

00:03:36.780 | That is the beginning and the end,

00:03:39.280 | and in between the two, you have the fall,

00:03:43.880 | the problem that is addressed,

00:03:46.120 | and then redemption, the solution that God provides.

00:03:49.520 | So that's laying out the Bible storyline

00:03:52.240 | in very, very brief compass.

00:03:54.480 | Then one can fill it out just a wee bit

00:03:56.520 | so that one could summarize it in two minutes

00:03:59.960 | or three minutes, or one could lay out the details

00:04:04.120 | in many, many hours of discussion with charts

00:04:07.040 | and tie-ins to all the biblical books

00:04:11.500 | so that you see exactly where they fit in

00:04:13.160 | in the storyline and so on.

00:04:15.200 | Moreover, some books are reflective

00:04:18.880 | of a particular incident or a particular time

00:04:21.560 | or a particular kingly reign, a particular period.

00:04:26.080 | One thinks of the book of Esther, for example.

00:04:28.680 | It's tied to the time of one queen

00:04:33.680 | and one emperor and only part of their lives,

00:04:39.660 | whereas books like 1 and 2 Samuel

00:04:42.600 | and then 1 and 2 Kings or 1 and 2 Chronicles and so on,

00:04:46.040 | they cover multi-reigns,

00:04:49.260 | which means they've been brought together

00:04:51.520 | at the end of that period of reigns,

00:04:54.640 | but it covers literally hundreds of years.

00:04:56.880 | When you go from 1 Samuel to the end of 2 Kings,

00:05:01.160 | you're covering the period from before King Saul.

00:05:06.160 | So you're back in the 11th century BC,

00:05:11.160 | all the way to the destruction of Jerusalem in 586, 587.

00:05:15.400 | It's almost half a millennium.

00:05:17.280 | And that means that documents have been put together

00:05:23.120 | and so forth, but the storyline is built out

00:05:27.120 | of the bits and pieces that you find there.

00:05:29.760 | And then part of trying to understand the storyline

00:05:33.000 | is the fact that the last bit of narrative material

00:05:36.180 | in the Old Testament, the book of Nehemiah,

00:05:39.520 | still presents what's taking place

00:05:42.040 | about 400 years before Christ comes.

00:05:46.480 | So to fill in the whole historical storyline

00:05:49.120 | brings you into filling out bits and pieces

00:05:52.160 | of what is often called the intertestamental period.

00:05:55.320 | That is the period between the testaments,

00:05:58.040 | hence intertestamental period,

00:06:00.400 | or it's sometimes called

00:06:02.560 | the period of Second Temple Judaism.

00:06:05.720 | That is the period during which the Second Temple,

00:06:09.880 | not the temple built by Solomon,

00:06:12.240 | but the rebuilt temple after the return from the exile,

00:06:15.740 | during the period that it was standing,

00:06:20.600 | all the way until the time it was destroyed in about AD 70,

00:06:24.000 | which then overlaps, of course,

00:06:25.560 | with the onset of the Christian era.

00:06:28.080 | So one could flush things out along those lines.

00:06:35.020 | What I propose to do for the next few minutes

00:06:37.320 | is to take an in-between step,

00:06:40.720 | to fill out the Bible storyline

00:06:42.760 | and indicate some of the ways

00:06:44.220 | the biblical books get locked in.

00:06:46.560 | Because the more of that storyline you know,

00:06:49.780 | that you've memorized, that you've understood,

00:06:53.780 | then the easier it is to tie in particular books

00:06:58.700 | to that storyline and see where they fit.

00:07:01.160 | So we begin with creation.

00:07:04.480 | God makes everything good.

00:07:07.040 | We'll have a separate session on just creation

00:07:10.320 | and how it functions in scripture.

00:07:12.520 | And then comes the fall, rebellion against the creator,

00:07:16.280 | and with it death and decay and destruction.

00:07:19.560 | Eventually that leads to judgment.

00:07:22.060 | The sin is so severe and God is so righteously angry

00:07:26.400 | that he sends the flood.

00:07:28.320 | That's Genesis 6-9, roughly.

00:07:32.560 | But God in his mercy allows Noah and his family

00:07:37.560 | to escape, eight people.

00:07:40.040 | And then sadly, evil is still no better.

00:07:45.040 | It breaks out again and results in the Tower of Babel

00:07:49.240 | as a sign of rebellion against God.

00:07:51.000 | That's Genesis 11.

00:07:52.440 | So Genesis 1-11 are sometimes referred

00:07:56.140 | to the prehistoric chapters,

00:07:58.120 | which is not meant that they take place before history,

00:08:01.600 | but before history writing.

00:08:03.360 | We have a kind of demonstration of materials

00:08:08.400 | being recorded from Abraham on about 2000 BC.

00:08:12.960 | And it's quite possible that some documents

00:08:17.040 | came down from earlier times,

00:08:18.900 | but we don't have access to them.

00:08:21.880 | So from Genesis 12-50,

00:08:26.840 | that is the rest of the book of Genesis,

00:08:29.200 | you have what's sometimes called the patriarchal cycles.

00:08:33.040 | You have Abraham and then Isaac,

00:08:36.840 | then Jacob, then his sons, especially Joseph.

00:08:40.720 | And what you have then is the rise

00:08:43.160 | of the Jewish people as a race.

00:08:46.560 | There's still no experience of nationhood at this point.

00:08:51.560 | There's still a large extended family.

00:08:54.340 | And here there's a huge emphasis on the promises of God,

00:08:57.520 | the covenant of God with Abraham.

00:09:00.320 | One can argue that God made a covenant

00:09:03.240 | with Adam in the garden,

00:09:04.740 | but we'll come to that briefly

00:09:09.260 | when we consider creation more closely.

00:09:12.080 | So here you have the Abrahamic covenant,

00:09:14.920 | which is picked up in the New Testament.

00:09:16.720 | We'll return to that.

00:09:18.120 | And by the time you come to the end of the book of Genesis,

00:09:21.460 | then the people of God, the Israelites,

00:09:24.680 | are about 70 strong plus some further children

00:09:28.880 | as they're born in Egypt,

00:09:31.040 | down in Egypt with one of the brothers, Joseph,

00:09:34.480 | being, let's call him a prime minister.

00:09:38.080 | And that sets the stage for what takes place

00:09:41.920 | hundreds of years later with an emperor who rises

00:09:46.920 | and an Egyptian pharaoh who rises,

00:09:49.820 | who has no personal knowledge

00:09:51.880 | or even particular recollection of Joseph.

00:09:53.920 | Too much time has passed.

00:09:55.560 | The Israelites have multiplied.

00:09:57.240 | They're viewed as a threat.

00:09:58.520 | And so gradually imposed servitude is demanded.

00:10:03.520 | And eventually that leads to outright slavery.

00:10:09.540 | And that sets the stage for the second book of the Pentateuch.

00:10:13.200 | That is the book of the Exodus.

00:10:15.620 | And here, the first half of the book

00:10:17.520 | is really the account of the birth of Moses

00:10:20.840 | and then his becoming a young, trained man

00:10:25.720 | in the courts of Pharaoh, brought up by Pharaoh's daughter,

00:10:29.960 | but still racially feeling loyal to fellow Israelites

00:10:34.160 | and loyal to God.

00:10:36.400 | He behaves foolishly as a young man

00:10:39.320 | and finds himself fleeing for his life

00:10:41.640 | into the backside of the Midianite desert

00:10:44.800 | where he's a shepherd until about the age of 80.

00:10:48.360 | And then God calls him.

00:10:49.800 | And through what we call the 10 plagues

00:10:52.200 | and God's repeated self-disclosure to the people

00:10:55.160 | in miracles and in word and so on,

00:10:58.160 | eventually God leads the people of Israel out

00:11:03.000 | across the Red Sea under the leadership of Moses.

00:11:06.280 | That leads people down then to Sinai

00:11:10.160 | and the giving of the law.

00:11:11.920 | And the high point of that is the 10 commandments

00:11:16.520 | in Exodus chapter 20.

00:11:19.520 | And immediately after Exodus chapter 20,

00:11:22.080 | you have the stipulations that come

00:11:25.840 | with the giving of the 10 commandments.

00:11:28.640 | Some parts of holiness and the building of the temple,

00:11:34.560 | of the tabernacle, rather, the stipulations and so on

00:11:38.000 | for the priesthood and all kinds of interesting

00:11:41.400 | little tidbits, what an ephod is

00:11:43.160 | that the priest uses and so forth.

00:11:45.240 | And that goes on until you have the account

00:11:50.000 | of Moses coming down from the mountain

00:11:52.720 | where he has met with God, Exodus 32, 33, 34,

00:11:56.720 | and finds the people already in an act

00:12:01.200 | of craven idolatry, acting as if a calf

00:12:05.080 | that they make of pieces of gold represent Yahweh

00:12:09.760 | and debauched forms of religion,

00:12:12.760 | judgment falls and so forth.

00:12:14.520 | And that brings you ultimately to the sad reality

00:12:17.880 | that the people of that generation don't get

00:12:20.360 | into the promised land, the land of Canaan,

00:12:23.000 | because when they approach that land at Kadesh Barnea,

00:12:26.160 | then most of the spies who go and seek out the land

00:12:31.160 | come back just afraid to go any further,

00:12:33.360 | even though they've seen God do such wonderful things

00:12:35.960 | for them in the preceding release.

00:12:39.920 | And so that generation from 20 and up dies off

00:12:43.480 | through 40 years of wilderness wandering.

00:12:45.800 | And Moses himself doesn't get into the promised land

00:12:49.880 | because of some acts of bad temper and want of faith.

00:12:54.560 | So he dies at the end of the Pentateuch himself,

00:12:59.440 | he doesn't get into the promised land.

00:13:01.800 | Then Exodus is followed by Leviticus with a lot of laws,

00:13:06.800 | many of them ceremonial, some of them highly memorable

00:13:12.440 | moral laws like you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

00:13:16.920 | But now you're introduced to the heart

00:13:19.000 | of the priestly sacrificial ritual system

00:13:22.680 | with lots of emphasis on the Day of Atonement,

00:13:25.560 | especially in Leviticus 16 and Passover laws

00:13:30.400 | and holiness code and so forth.

00:13:34.200 | Numbers lays out the numbering of the people

00:13:38.960 | and what will be distribution of land

00:13:41.840 | once they get into the promised land.

00:13:43.120 | Deuteronomy is a kind of review,

00:13:44.960 | Moses calling everybody back to faithfulness

00:13:47.640 | as they get ready to enter the promised land

00:13:49.640 | after all kinds of little historical vignettes

00:13:52.600 | of what has taken place in the 40 year gap.

00:13:56.920 | And then Moses himself dies in the last book of Deuteronomy

00:14:00.680 | and is buried by God himself at a place

00:14:02.880 | that nobody knows about on Mount Nebo.

00:14:05.720 | So that's the Pentateuch.

00:14:07.600 | And in one sense, you see, it ends with a discouragement.

00:14:11.800 | God promises blessings and cursings,

00:14:16.720 | the blessings upon those who obey

00:14:19.560 | and curses upon those who disobey

00:14:22.120 | and guess which way it's going to go.

00:14:24.640 | It's indicated even by the fact that Moses himself

00:14:27.320 | called the meekest man who ever lived

00:14:28.880 | doesn't get into the promised land.

00:14:30.640 | And so the promises of grace

00:14:34.000 | that are scattered through the book

00:14:35.520 | have to be taken seriously to speak as many do

00:14:38.520 | of a kind of Deuteronomic theology

00:14:41.280 | as if it's all merit, blessing and curses,

00:14:45.680 | depending on how you do is too reductionistic

00:14:48.840 | because those blessings and curses issue in constant picture

00:14:53.160 | where in fact, the curses come to the fore

00:14:56.040 | and people fail again and again and again,

00:14:58.240 | driving you to grace.

00:15:00.120 | Then Joshua and Judges,

00:15:01.520 | Joshua brings the people into the promised land,

00:15:04.480 | but Judges shows that in the following years,

00:15:07.280 | there are cycles of depravity

00:15:09.080 | that bring the people down again and again and again.

00:15:11.600 | When the people get desperate enough,

00:15:13.480 | crushed by local peoples,

00:15:16.000 | then God raises up a judge

00:15:17.720 | and the people are spared again.

00:15:21.560 | And a couple of generations later,

00:15:24.000 | they've slunk into the same sort of idolatry and immorality.

00:15:28.400 | Until the book ends again with bleakest despair,

00:15:31.400 | in those days, there was no king in Israel.

00:15:33.840 | Everyone did that, which is right in their own eyes.

00:15:36.880 | And so you begin to say, what we really need is a king,

00:15:40.840 | a king who is just and right and true.

00:15:44.240 | And so during that period of the Judges,

00:15:46.840 | you also get this, the story of Ruth, for example,

00:15:50.320 | and other little snippets.

00:15:52.760 | Then what you have in one and two Samuel,

00:15:55.160 | one and two Kings,

00:15:56.120 | and then reviewed again in one and two Chronicles

00:15:59.040 | is the movement from the period of the Judges,

00:16:02.720 | the last great one being Samuel,

00:16:05.840 | to the onset of kingship.

00:16:07.560 | And the first king of what's called the United Monarchy,

00:16:12.320 | all the tribes together is King Saul.

00:16:14.880 | And he starts off well,

00:16:16.600 | but the people want him for the wrong reasons.

00:16:18.400 | They want to be like the pagans around.

00:16:20.680 | And Saul himself is, despite his height and his gallantry

00:16:25.680 | and his initial meekness,

00:16:28.680 | he's insecure and lashes out

00:16:31.000 | and is angry at anybody that threatens his position.

00:16:34.240 | Eventually he becomes a barbaric in his cruelty

00:16:38.280 | and his insecurity and his rebellion against God.

00:16:41.640 | So he wants to take on both priestly and kingly functions.

00:16:46.360 | And the result is he is killed and so is his son.

00:16:48.520 | There's never a Saul dynasty.

00:16:51.200 | And God appoints as king,

00:16:53.520 | a man after his own heart, we're called,

00:16:57.440 | which is the beginning of the Davidic dynasty.

00:17:00.400 | And that is highlighted in 2 Kings chapter seven.

00:17:05.400 | In fact, two Kings six and seven need to be read together

00:17:09.560 | because when David first becomes king,

00:17:12.080 | he's king of only two tribes in the South

00:17:14.320 | and the Northern 10 tribes remain

00:17:17.760 | under independent governance.

00:17:21.400 | And his capital is in Hebron.

00:17:24.200 | But after seven years, he takes Jerusalem

00:17:27.480 | and becomes king of the entire 12 tribes

00:17:32.480 | and then reigns for 33 more years in Jerusalem.

00:17:35.800 | So in 2 Kings chapters six and seven,

00:17:40.520 | what you find is the confluence of several themes.

00:17:44.760 | You have now the rise of Jerusalem as the capital city.

00:17:48.360 | And that sets an entire trajectory

00:17:51.440 | that finally ends in the new Jerusalem.

00:17:54.160 | This is the city of the great king, the Davidic dynasty.

00:17:57.440 | It's the city now also of what will become the temple.

00:18:02.000 | The tabernacle has moved into Jerusalem

00:18:05.120 | and it is never moved out

00:18:06.880 | instead of being in Shiloh or some other place

00:18:09.320 | moved around a bit within the tribes.

00:18:12.440 | Now, Jerusalem, what will be the temple

00:18:16.320 | and the Davidic kingship are all in one place.

00:18:19.040 | That sets trajectories that run right

00:18:20.960 | through the rest of the Old Testament

00:18:22.280 | and find various forms of fulfillment in Jesus.

00:18:25.360 | So chapter six of 2 Samuel

00:18:28.880 | is the movement of the tabernacle to Jerusalem.

00:18:32.240 | Chapter seven is the establishment

00:18:35.600 | of the Jerusalem Davidic kingship, a moving thing.

00:18:40.600 | And the promise, the groundwork

00:18:46.520 | for collecting the materials and the money

00:18:49.480 | needed to build the Jerusalem temple,

00:18:52.840 | which is undertaken eventually by Solomon.

00:18:55.040 | And the next generation.

00:18:56.240 | So some of these materials are celebrated in Psalms

00:19:01.160 | and in other ways too.

00:19:02.320 | Psalm two is a reflection of the establishment

00:19:05.200 | of the Davidic dynasty looking forward

00:19:07.360 | to a faithful, powerful Davidic king.

00:19:12.360 | So we can track out more of those bits and pieces,

00:19:18.040 | how the Davidic kingship develops in other podcasts.

00:19:21.320 | But right now we need to focus on the storyline itself.

00:19:24.920 | So Solomon then follows David.

00:19:29.760 | And when he dies, his son Rehoboam wants to act powerful

00:19:34.760 | but succeeds only in dividing the kingdom

00:19:39.860 | between the Northern tribes, Israel,

00:19:42.760 | and the Southern tribes based in Jerusalem.

00:19:47.160 | So Rehoboam now is king in Jerusalem,

00:19:51.480 | but of only two tribes, that's all.

00:19:54.720 | And the Northern tribes develop their own king dominion.

00:19:59.720 | First of all, under Jeroboam, the son of Nebat.

00:20:04.000 | And he picks up the tag, Jeroboam, the son of Nebat,

00:20:08.440 | who taught Israel to sin.

00:20:10.440 | And in order to prevent these people

00:20:12.920 | from going regularly to the temple in Jerusalem,

00:20:15.200 | and thus maybe having a divided political allegiance,

00:20:17.920 | he establishes two temples, one way up North in Dan,

00:20:22.480 | and one in the area that is eventually called Samaria,

00:20:26.440 | just North of Jerusalem, but in the 10 tribes.

00:20:29.400 | And so there is idolatry and more and more

00:20:33.400 | multiplication of gods as the people

00:20:42.200 | maintain some kind of loose allegiance to Yahweh, to God,

00:20:47.200 | even while multiplying gods on every side.

00:20:50.740 | And in the North, the accounts that are told

00:20:55.160 | in one and two kings, and in one and two chronicles

00:20:58.600 | and so on, are really pathetic.

00:21:02.120 | Each dynasty lasts only one, two, three generations

00:21:05.260 | and then bumped off by somebody,

00:21:06.660 | and there's a murderous rage,

00:21:07.880 | and all their kids are killed because there's a fear

00:21:10.920 | that somebody from the old dynasty

00:21:12.640 | will take over again and so forth.

00:21:14.600 | And eventually, under the press of horrible idolatry,

00:21:18.080 | God sends in the Assyrian army,

00:21:21.880 | and the Assyrians capture the leadership

00:21:26.680 | and transport it off to the ends of the earth

00:21:29.080 | to Assyria in the far North, about 721 BC.

00:21:32.880 | Jerusalem, though it's attacked, is spared.

00:21:37.520 | And eventually, by the time Jerusalem's sins

00:21:41.160 | have been multiplied and multiplied,

00:21:43.040 | then by that time, the regional superpower

00:21:48.640 | is no longer Assyria, it's Babylon,

00:21:50.440 | which has taken over from Assyria.

00:21:52.200 | So Jerusalem is sacked in 586 BC,

00:21:55.320 | and the temple is destroyed, and under Nebuchadnezzar,

00:21:59.600 | their leaders are transported in three successive waves,

00:22:02.900 | culminating in 586 BC.

00:22:06.320 | Now, it's within that framework

00:22:07.920 | that it is helpful to read the opening lines of the prophets

00:22:11.320 | so that you start reading Isaiah, for example,

00:22:14.920 | and the opening verses tell you

00:22:16.400 | that what takes place in Isaiah's prophetic ministry

00:22:20.240 | is under the reigns of so-and-so and so-and-so

00:22:22.040 | and so-and-so.

00:22:23.200 | And Isaiah himself lives during the time

00:22:28.200 | of the Assyrian power, but prophetically,

00:22:31.160 | he looks forward to what's going to take place

00:22:33.840 | under the Babylonian reign as well,

00:22:37.000 | so that his vision covers something like 150 years

00:22:41.160 | of what will take place.

00:22:42.960 | And he foresees not only the destruction of Jerusalem,

00:22:47.960 | but he foresees also, eventually,

00:22:52.960 | not only the exile, but the return from the exile

00:22:55.760 | when God will bring salvation to his people,

00:22:59.080 | and in the far, far, far distance,

00:23:01.200 | like the distant mountains peeping

00:23:03.320 | over the near mountains, he foresees, ultimately,

00:23:05.640 | a new heaven and a new earth

00:23:06.960 | that's going to change the rules of the game entirely.

00:23:10.340 | So in prophetic words, then,

00:23:13.160 | now Isaiah envisages a time when a Davidic son is born.

00:23:18.160 | A son is born, a child is born.

00:23:22.800 | He will reign on the throne of his father, David.

00:23:25.280 | Of the increase of his kingdom, there will be no end.

00:23:28.580 | There's a promise of the Davidic dynasty.

00:23:30.560 | Yet at the same time, he will be called

00:23:33.880 | a wonderful counselor, the mighty God,

00:23:35.560 | the everlasting father, the prince of peace.

00:23:38.040 | We need to track out that Davidic dynasty theme

00:23:40.960 | in the Old Testament.

00:23:42.480 | Meanwhile, then, the people of God go into exile,

00:23:45.320 | and around the years before the Jerusalem people

00:23:50.320 | are carted off to the Babylonian empire,

00:23:54.040 | Jeremiah is preaching in Jerusalem,

00:23:56.660 | and Ezekiel is preaching in Babylon,

00:23:59.760 | carted off by an earlier wave.

00:24:02.040 | And they're both saying the same thing.

00:24:04.160 | They're both saying the people

00:24:05.320 | must not rebel against Babylon.

00:24:06.960 | If they do, they're going to be destroyed.

00:24:09.080 | But they rebel against God, and they are destroyed.

00:24:12.100 | And the huge messages of Jeremiah and of Ezekiel

00:24:17.100 | are that the people are so wicked

00:24:19.380 | that destruction and exile are inevitable,

00:24:21.800 | and the only hope at the end of the period of exile

00:24:24.480 | is that God himself brings them back

00:24:26.440 | and provides a redeemer for them.

00:24:29.120 | So when the people start returning,

00:24:31.920 | then you have the ministry

00:24:34.640 | of the so-called post-exilic prophets,

00:24:37.720 | people like Haggai, who preaches to tell the people

00:24:42.060 | who are returning that they really need

00:24:45.160 | to build the temple right away.

00:24:46.600 | That's the center of the meeting place

00:24:48.820 | between God and human beings that God himself has ordained.

00:24:52.320 | And so a small temple is rebuilt in Jerusalem.

00:24:58.440 | And here's when you find also the ministry of Ezra,

00:25:03.440 | and then a little later, the ministry of Nehemiah,

00:25:06.160 | who is brought back by God himself

00:25:10.640 | to build the wall around the city.

00:25:13.000 | The temple is built before Jerusalem is rebuilt.

00:25:15.980 | Hardly anybody lives there.

00:25:17.320 | They're poor, dirt poor, living in farms around the area.

00:25:21.860 | But the temple is there and is operating

00:25:23.920 | in a low-key, unfaithful, miserable sort of way

00:25:27.520 | until Nehemiah, strengthened by God,

00:25:30.560 | rebuilds the city wall despite a lot of opposition

00:25:33.560 | and invests in a repopulation program

00:25:36.480 | to get people inside and build up the city again.

00:25:39.460 | And that's when you find the final storyline

00:25:43.580 | of the Old Testament under the ministry of Nehemiah.

00:25:46.360 | So you have a number of post-exilic prophets

00:25:49.940 | writing and preaching at that time.

00:25:51.480 | That is prophets preaching to the people of God

00:25:53.960 | after, post the exile.

00:25:56.720 | So you have the pre-exilic prophets

00:25:58.440 | like Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Isaiah,

00:26:01.040 | and the post-exilic prophets.

00:26:03.160 | Right at the turn of the period is Daniel himself,

00:26:07.200 | and then post-exile people like Haggai and Zechariah

00:26:12.200 | and Malachi.

00:26:13.860 | And then what happens in the period between the Testaments

00:26:19.640 | is hundreds of years when the people are really

00:26:23.880 | under one regional superpower or another.

00:26:27.040 | After the Assyrians, as we've said, come the Babylonians.

00:26:30.120 | After the Babylonians come the Persians.

00:26:34.400 | And it's under the Persian Empire

00:26:37.000 | that the Jews are allowed back into the Promised Land.

00:26:40.600 | There was a reversal of imperial policy

00:26:42.920 | and a lot of people who had been transported

00:26:45.080 | are allowed back into their own lands,

00:26:47.000 | including the Moabites, for example.

00:26:48.560 | It wasn't just the Jews.

00:26:50.240 | And God faithfully thus brings his people back to the land.

00:26:55.120 | But the Persians are eventually taken over by the Greeks.

00:26:59.800 | And then the Greek Empire dies when Alexander the Great dies

00:27:04.320 | in the last third of the fourth century BC.

00:27:07.680 | And his land is broken up into four regions

00:27:12.640 | led by four former generals.

00:27:14.760 | None of this is found as history in the Old Testament,

00:27:18.020 | but some of it is predicted by the visions of Daniel.

00:27:20.720 | And eventually Israel finds itself squashed

00:27:25.100 | between a general in the south in the land of Egypt

00:27:28.400 | and a general to the north in the land of Syria.

00:27:31.200 | And they're caught in no man's land in endless struggles.

00:27:34.400 | And eventually a wicked general in the north

00:27:37.280 | in the second century BC,

00:27:38.560 | a man called Antiochus IV Epiphanes,

00:27:40.880 | he decides to impose imperial paganism on Jerusalem.

00:27:45.720 | He makes sacrifice in the temple to Yahweh, to God,

00:27:50.720 | a capital crime.

00:27:51.940 | Owning any part of Torah is a capital crime.

00:27:54.500 | Observing the Sabbath is a capital crime.

00:27:57.020 | And he intends by terror to impose paganism on the people.

00:28:01.300 | And what happens is he kicks off a bloody civil war

00:28:05.340 | that is characterized by endless guerrilla struggles.

00:28:11.540 | People can read about that for themselves

00:28:14.300 | in the writings of Josephus,

00:28:15.500 | a first century AD historian.

00:28:17.940 | And the bloodiest part of that takes place 167 to 164 BC.

00:28:22.940 | And eventually the Jews become strong enough

00:28:26.100 | that there's a set piece of battle by the Orontes River

00:28:29.540 | and the Assyrians are beaten,

00:28:31.420 | the Assyrians rather, not the Assyrians,

00:28:33.340 | the Assyrians under Antiochus IV Epiphanes are beaten.

00:28:36.820 | And for the first time in half a millennium,

00:28:39.260 | the Jews have a right to reestablish the Davidic kingship.

00:28:44.260 | But is that what they do?

00:28:45.420 | Nope, rather the guerrilla leaders themselves take over.

00:28:48.740 | And so when they have a right

00:28:51.700 | to reestablish the Davidic kingship, they don't do so.

00:28:54.900 | And a century later in 63 BC, the Romans take over.

00:28:59.300 | And so the people are under the oppression of Rome now,

00:29:02.220 | the Roman Empire.

00:29:03.220 | And that's the way it is

00:29:05.380 | with a regional local puppet called Herod,

00:29:09.260 | who is operating under the aegis of the Roman Empire

00:29:11.840 | when Jesus is born in Bethlehem of Judea

00:29:15.520 | in fulfillment of the prophecy of Micah.

00:29:17.800 | So Jesus is born then under Roman imperial rule

00:29:21.760 | and lives, serves, dies, rises again.

00:29:26.760 | And the exact date of his resurrection,

00:29:29.560 | some think it's about AD 30, some about AD 33,

00:29:33.040 | but certainly in that period.

00:29:34.720 | And then the church explodes in numbers,

00:29:41.280 | first of all in Jewish circles, then in Gentile circles,

00:29:44.720 | until you have the ministry of Paul and others

00:29:47.320 | with the church expanding throughout the Roman world.

00:29:50.200 | And much of the book of Acts

00:29:52.880 | traces the spreading of the gospel

00:29:55.720 | through the ministries of Peter and Paul and a few others

00:29:58.920 | until the gospel actually is well-established in Rome itself.

00:30:03.480 | And thus, although not politically threatening

00:30:06.240 | the Roman Empire at this stage,

00:30:08.440 | nevertheless demonstrating that as Jesus puts it

00:30:12.200 | at the end of Matthew,

00:30:13.440 | all authority is given to him in heaven and on earth

00:30:16.240 | in the wake of his death, burial, resurrection,

00:30:18.920 | and ascension.

00:30:20.360 | The rest of the New Testament fills out the interactions

00:30:24.860 | between New Testament writers

00:30:26.360 | and local or regional groups of Christians in churches

00:30:30.120 | or regions to address theological and pastoral issues

00:30:34.080 | until you get to the last book of the New Testament,

00:30:37.120 | the Apocalypse.

00:30:38.680 | Here, Christians have divided over the years

00:30:40.600 | about how to interpret that book.

00:30:42.260 | It's worth sometimes spending time to outline

00:30:48.280 | how Christians have understood the future

00:30:51.720 | at different periods of the church's history.

00:30:54.000 | They have tended to one position or another.

00:30:57.320 | At the, in the first half of the 20th century,

00:31:00.880 | a vast number of Christians in America

00:31:03.360 | called themselves pre-millennial, pre-tribulationists.

00:31:07.580 | But one must remember that in the period of the Puritans,

00:31:11.040 | for example, the overwhelming majority

00:31:13.340 | were post-millennialists and a few pre-millennialists.

00:31:17.800 | There were no all-millennialists.

00:31:19.500 | At the moment, all-millennialism is on the rise.

00:31:21.560 | If you don't know what those terms are,

00:31:23.080 | don't worry about it.

00:31:23.920 | Because my point in this survey is that

00:31:27.560 | all of these groups, without exception,

00:31:30.200 | do understand that the ultimate hope of the church

00:31:33.520 | is not some sort of millennial splendor.

00:31:36.240 | The ultimate hope of the church

00:31:37.760 | is the new heaven and the new earth,

00:31:39.600 | resurrection existence in a remade, reconstituted universe

00:31:44.600 | that includes resurrection existence,

00:31:46.840 | where there's no more death, there's no more sorrow,

00:31:50.640 | there are no more tears or pain or suffering.

00:31:54.280 | The old order, Revelation 21, is passed away.

00:31:57.480 | It can be seen as a new Jerusalem.

00:31:59.580 | It can be seen as a bride finally consummated

00:32:03.760 | in union with Christ.

00:32:04.800 | It can be seen as a new heaven and a new earth,

00:32:08.080 | but spectacular, holy resurrection existence

00:32:11.240 | with the glory of glories being

00:32:13.800 | that they shall see God face to face

00:32:17.880 | in a way that even the angels of heaven can't see God.

00:32:20.760 | The angels cover their faces with their wings

00:32:23.200 | and cry, "Holy, holy, holy."

00:32:25.300 | But according to Revelation 22,

00:32:28.040 | God's redeemed people actually gaze on God.

00:32:31.840 | And in vast, picturesque descriptions

00:32:35.760 | of what this existence will look like,

00:32:37.660 | we are treated to visions of work and of song

00:32:42.200 | and of praise and of righteous living and God-centeredness

00:32:45.080 | and glory to him who sits on the throne

00:32:50.080 | and to the Lamb forever and ever.

00:32:52.440 | - Oh my, that is an incredibly rich history

00:32:55.040 | of the Bible storyline.

00:32:55.920 | Thank you, Dr. Carson.

00:32:57.520 | So many themes have been mentioned here in this episode

00:33:00.800 | and we'll begin to pick them up now one by one.

00:33:03.760 | And next time, we'll focus on the doctrine of creation.

00:33:07.000 | And that'll be in a few weeks.

00:33:08.400 | We'll give you a call again.

00:33:09.760 | Thank you, Dr. Carson.

00:33:10.840 | - Okay, blessings, bye now.

00:33:12.440 | - That was Dr. Don Carson, the co-founder

00:33:15.680 | and president of the Gospel Coalition.

00:33:18.040 | He is the editor of the new NIV Zondervan Study Bible.

00:33:21.480 | And next time, Dr. Carson will give us

00:33:23.300 | a biblical theology of creation as it runs

00:33:25.680 | throughout the Bible from Genesis to Revelation.

00:33:29.800 | This has been a special episode

00:33:31.500 | in the Ask Pastor John podcast,

00:33:32.880 | a longer weekend episode, and it's been made possible

00:33:35.960 | by our partnership with the Gospel Coalition.

00:33:38.520 | We appreciate our friends over there.

00:33:40.440 | We return on Monday with John Piper

00:33:41.960 | to look at how Christians should tolerate

00:33:43.640 | the religious beliefs of non-Christians.

00:33:46.860 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.

00:33:47.800 | Have a wonderful weekend.

00:33:49.040 | (silence)

00:33:51.200 | (silence)

00:33:53.360 | (silence)

00:33:55.520 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

An Overview of the Whole Bible

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