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Most Accurate Ancient History

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Most Accurate Ancient History
As we jump into week 4 of the 52-week long journey through God’s Word, we are starting to work on our framework for interpreting the Scriptures.
Here are links to the 52 Greatest Chapters Bible Study Resources we are using:
 
1. The MacArthur Study Bible I use: https://amzn.to/33vqwsm
2. Grudem Systematic Theology: https://amzn.to/3y1M1iu
3. The Larger Moleskin Notebook I use: https://amzn.to/3biMwLh
4. The Smaller Moleskin Notebook I use: https://amzn.to/33vTNmN
 
“As an Amazon Associate, I earn income to support us in ministry from qualifying purchases.”
 
 
God’s Word is true, accurate, and worthy of trust. It is absolutely historically true.
What is Biblical History? How do the Books of the Bible fit into History? How do we know the dates of events in the Bible? What are some of the key events in the Bible everyone should know?
 
Biblical History. This class will weave together the history of the Land of the Book from the time that Japheth and Shem arrived after the Flood, through Abraham’s arrival, the time of the Patriarchs, the Egyptian Bondage, Exodus, Conquest of the Land, the Period of the Judges, the Monarchy, the Divided Kingdom, the Assyrian Captivity of Israel, the Babylonian Captivity of Judah, the Return of the Exiles, the 400 Silent Years, the Birth of Christ, the Early Church, the Destruction of Jerusalem, the Diaspora, and all the way to the Re-Gathering and Re-birth of the Modern Nation of Israel. This is a must-see and must-do class to fit all the myriads of pieces of Biblical History together in your minds.
 
Biblical History can be divided into events around key individuals.
We have no exact dates for Adam to Noah: Creation to Flood, and the Flood to Abraham. But the Bible does give clear dates for the other key people.
 
Abraham (2166-1991 BC) to the Exodus (1446BC);
the Exodus to the Temple of Solomon (966BC);
Solomon’s Temple to the Destruction of Jerusalem (586BC); and
the Destruction of Jerusalem to Christ’s Crucifixion (AD30) and
Christ’s Crucifixion to John’s Death (AD 95).
 
Abraham lived 175 years, Genesis 25:7 (2166-1991 BC)
Isaac lived 180 years, Genesis 35:28 (2066-1886 BC)
Jacob lived 147 years, Genesis 47:28 (2006-1859BC)
Joseph lived 110 years, Genesis 50:22 (1915-1805 BC)
Moses lived 120 years, Deuteronomy 34:7 (1526-1406 BC)
 
Jacob entered Egypt from 1876 BC to Exodus 1446 BC = 430 years; 1 Kings 6:15 says Temple built 480 years after the Exodus (966 BC).
 
Daniel 2 gives us History from God’s perspective, and God says there are four Empires that stretch from Daniel’s time to the End of Days.
 
That means no matter what else happens, God who knows the future in advance has mapped out all of human history into four Empires:
 
The Babylonian Empire
The Greek Empire
The Medo-Persian Empire
The Roman Empire

Transcript

First of all, what is biblical history? It’s because, I don’t know if it was last week or the week before, some time I said something about the flood, and the creation, and everything else. I said, that’s just God has written history in advance. Someone said what is biblical history? Is all history, biblical history? What is biblical history?

Second one, how do the books of the Bible fit into history? That’s a fascinating question. Again, it’s the real people in real places, living in situations so much like ours. In fact, look at the Syrian conflict that I talked about a couple of weeks ago. Did you know there’s been conflict in that country for 6,000 years? Right from the beginning with the whole Armenian nation and the everything going on with that part of the world, there’s been conflict in that area. The Bible was written to people that were going through wars, and struggles, and famines, and difficulties just like today. It’s just relating those books to that time.

Then, how do we know the dates of events in the Bible? That’s a good one. I’m going to have fun with that. I hope we get to that tonight because there actually are hard numbers in the Bible. Now I want to preface this by saying, I believe and teach what the Bible says. Two groups of people, both here and in other places, that say that’s what it says but that’s not what it means. I prefer to believe that what God says is what He meant. Like this morning, if six times God said a thousand years; the devil is in the pit a thousand years, the devil a thousand years, he’s in a thousand years, a thousand, a thousand years. If you asked someone in 90% of the churches, in America are about 74% of them, what does that mean? They say we don’t know. What did God say? They say we don’t know. I say, yes you do. He said a thousand years. They don’t even want to say what He said because they already don’t believe it. So, I personally believe what it says. You can get, if you look at this, you can get hard numbers. I’m going to show you dates for events in the Bible.

Then, what are some key events in the Bible that we all should know?

Let’s see, here we go. Biblical history: history as given by the Bible. I hope this projects up here. My consultant, Dan Smith, told me that I should never use dark backgrounds. But when I got done with this, I only had enough time to run over here, and I didn’t have time to make the backgrounds right. This is the essence of biblical history, and here it is, Christ is the theme of all history. The saying, that it’s His story. Basically, you could divide the Bible down into these two pieces. The Old Testament is the account of a nation through which the Promised One would come. The New Testament is the account of the man who is the Creator, who appeared, as the central event of all history. This is why He died, to purchase our redemption. That’s why history is all about redemption, God invading humanity and coming to redeem us. He came to become like us so that He could take upon Himself our sin, so that He could be our Redeemer. The most exalted privilege in life is to know the Creator, to know the one that brought everything that’s in existence into existence; the one who is alive today, working out His plan. The greatest thing in life is to know him. In fact, salvation is knowing God.

Tonight, I was just reading a testimony before the baptismal meeting tonight. It was a beautiful testimony about someone that had been associated with the church their whole life, but only in the last few weeks in a Bible study did they realize that though they knew about the Lord, in their head, they’d never repented of their sins, confessed their lostness. They just thought they were Christian because they knew all this stuff. They came to faith, personal faith in Jesus Christ. That’s what the Bible is all about.

Here’s the Panorama. If you take your Bible and if you’ve made a chart out of it, this is what the Bible teaches. The book of Genesis talks about God who existed before creation. The book of Genesis takes us from the creation of the universe in six literal days, God said 24 hour days, and you don’t have to have Genesis 1 to believe that. Exodus 20, when God was talking to 3 million slaves who had spent their whole existence as slaves in Egypt, He said, as you go to work 6 solar 24 hour days and you get the 7th day off, and you don’t have to work, so in that same 6 solar 24 hour days, I made everything that exists in this universe. I ceased from laboring on the universe on the 7th. That’s how God presents everything that we know in the book of Genesis. Probably, if you hold to what God says, the entire scope of human history is only 6,000 years at the most.

Basically, the flood, if you take the dates that are in the Bible there are 1,656 years from Adam’s first year through Noah, starting with the first drop of rain in the flood. 1,656 years. Then you have the time period from that through Abraham, through the Exodus, through David. So basically, 2,348 years before Christ is when the Ark rested on Mount Ararat and human civilization, as we know it, came into existence. That means the pyramids, the monuments on Easter Island, and all the monoliths around the world are somewhere after this, because there is nothing on the surface of the Earth that hasn’t had a mile of water on it and a whole bunch of volcanoes spewing over it.  So, everything that you see on this planet dates from the flood onward. Abraham was born in the year 2166, lived till 1991. I’ll show you in a little while how we get that number.

The Bible very clearly dates this event, the Exodus. In fact, the Exodus is such an important event that when the temple foundation was laid by Solomon in 1 Kings chapter 6 verse 1 it says that exactly 480 years ago to the founding of the temple foundation, the Israelite nation was brought out of Egypt. So, we have hard dates in the Bible. That’s what it says. Now people say, oh, it doesn’t mean that, but that’s what it says.

David, now we’re getting into modern history, David lived from about 1040 BC to 970, died at about the age 70. The exile, Babylon took the children of Israel into exile. Christ was born about 4 BC. It’s interesting how Christ could be born four years before Christ, but it’s because of the Julian calendar, Gregorian calendar, and all the other changes that have taken place in the calendar.

Basically Genesis, as you see, covers the lion’s share of history as far as from biblical history. The rest of the Old Testament only covers this little snatch, right here, from the Exodus through the exile. That’s all the rest of the Old Testament. There are 400 years, see right here, of silence.

There’s no prophetic utterance from any of God’s prophets. Then John the Baptist booms forth by the Jordan River. That starts the period of the New Testament. The New Testament epistles cover a period of about a hundred years, through about 95 AD.

You see right here; this is the cross of Christ at AD 70. About 40 years after the cross, the Romans came, leveled the city of Jerusalem, destroyed the temple, and massacred, and carried off a million Jews and disperse them through over a hundred countries around the world. In fact, Israel today in Israel today a hundred different languages are spoken because Jews have come back from a hundred different countries from all over the world. God said that He was going to restore Israel as a nation. By the way, He restored them as a nation in 1948, just like He said in Ezekiel. He restored to them their place of worship, although they haven’t done anything with it in the temple mount, in 1967. So, it’s very interesting, that we’re into prophetic territory here. That’s, whoever asked, what is biblical history. It’s history, the way God presents it. It’s history, if you just take what the Bible says and believe it.

Next, this time period that we’re in, theologians have divided our understanding of what God is doing in this whole event. If you take the same biblical history the Bible presents from creation through eternity and has all of these different events of the people that live before the flood and after the flood, and Abraham and the people that lived around Moses’ time, and in the kingdom, and those who were at the church, and those who are going to be here during this thousand year reign. So basically, theologians have divided our understanding of how God operates with them into two divisions. Either covenant theology or dispensational theology. Covenant theology is pretty simple. What they say is, there’s two covenants. The covenant of works and that’s before the fall. Then the covenant of grace and that’s after the fall. But within this covenant, they have seven subdivisions. That’s covenant theology.

Dispensation, I believe that there are seven dispensations. So, in that sense covenant theologians and dispensationalist see the same divisions, but they have totally different ways of discussing them. Calvary Bible Church is historically a dispensational church that teaches the dispensation. By the way, the word dispensation in Greek, the word dispensation is the word Oikonomia. Oiko is house and nomia are rules or laws. When you go to someone’s house you take your shoes off, you’re supposed to wash your hands before the meals, or whatever.  You have rules. It’s how God operated in these different segments; those are called dispensations. Basically theologians, these are in the Bible by the way, they are just divisions that people see as they read the Bible. That conscience is before any revelation of God. Finally, with Noah, human government starts. Innocence is before the fall. Conscience is after the fall. Human government is starting in Genesis. When God says, that if you shed man’s blood by man’s hand shall your blood be shed, there begins to be human government. Then the promise in covenants that God made with Abraham. Then when Moses came along, people were responsible. As Paul said, those who have the law will be judged by the law. Those who don’t have the law will not be judged by the law. So that’s called the dispensation of the law.

Then the Church. Paul said in Galatians that the law, in Galatians 3, was a schoolmaster that brought us to Christ. In other words, that the law can’t do anything except point out. It’s like the teacher that doesn’t encourage you, just says, don’t do that, don’t do that, don’t do that, that’s wrong, that’s wrong, that’s wrong. That’s what the law did. It made us see how far we fall short of God’s holiness. The dispensation of the law is that the people could not get to Heaven by keeping the law, but the law was to show them that they had to obey the sacrificial system and trust in another.  The whole sacrificial system was, that I bring my lamb, I put my hands on it and confess my sins over it because I can’t save myself. So, what a dispensationalist would say is, people have always been saved the same way, but God treated them according to how much knowledge they had. If you remember what Paul says, he says that in time past God winked. He overlooked some things because the people did not know that, but now has declared when Christ came that all men should repent. So, what he’s saying is God treated people differently, but he had one plan of salvation, which has always been substitutionary atonement.

Right from the beginning, at the fall of man, what was Adam instructed? He was instructed to cover himself and his wife with the skins of an animal that was sacrificed for them.  Then they taught their sons that they were to offer the best sacrifices to the Lord. What Cain did, he gave God his produce from the 4-H section of the fair. But Abel brought a bloody sacrifice and God accepted it because Abel did what the Lord wanted.  Substitutionary atonement, a substitute has always been salvation. Salvation, we look back. We’re on this side of the cross and we’re looking back at what Christ did for us 2000 years ago. They, with their substitutionary sacrifices, we’re looking to the offering that God was going to have. It says in the book of Hebrews, the last verse of chapter 11, that they before Christ, could not be perfected without us. at we look back and what Christ did, and they look forward to it. So, this is a dispensational view.

By the way, you see the last one? That God begins operating in another household set of rules during the kingdom. That’s a fascinating time, the kingdom. A major percentage of the Old Testament talks about the millennial kingdom, maybe 10% of the Old Testament and it’s all kinds of rules. Did you know that God, again He can set the rules up how He wants, He seems to revert to a lot of the principles from the Mosaic time during the kingdom. They have to come to Jerusalem. They have to offer sacrifices. You say sacrifices? I thought Christ did away with sacrifices? Wait a minute. Communion is next Sunday night. What is communion? Communion is a memorial celebration, looking back at what Christ did on the cross. It is us holding in our hands a picture of His sacrifice. Did the Old Testament people get saved by killing animals? No, they got saved by faith that God wanted them to realize they couldn’t save themselves, that they needed an innocent substitute to take their place. Those animals were dying in the place of the people who deserve to die because of their sin, in the Old Testament. So, in the kingdom, the millennium time they are offering the sacrifices, all of which pointed to Christ, had to be a perfect male, blameless, spotless, that was innocent, that shed its blood helplessly, throat split, the whole picture. Every part of the Old Testament sacrificial system pointed to Christ, every part. Even the law of cleansing leprosy.

If you read Leviticus, it’s amazing. You take two clay pots. You take two pigeons. You kill one pigeon and actually shed its blood. You put the living pigeon in the pot. You shake it up, and you open the lid, and let the bloody pigeon, that’s alive, fly away. It sounds weird, gross. Now, that’s a picture of Christ. They had to have His death, His burial, and His resurrection. That’s why they needed two pigeons, because priests couldn’t raise pigeons from the dead. They put the blood of the pigeon that died on the pigeon that lived and allowed it to fly out of the pot to show that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, through the sacrifice of His blood is the only way we’re cleansed. Every one of those Old Testament sacrifices, in the dispensation of the kingdom, those sacrifices will be pointing back to the cross. That’s why the covenant theologians don’t even believe in the kingdom, because they can’t process why they would have the sacrificial system re-instituted. No one was saved by the sacrificial system in the Old Testament, neither shall they be saved by it in the kingdom. That is the dispensational view, and how we can explain what God is doing in what He describes in His word, when you look at the whole scope of history. So, whoever asked that question, I hope I answered it.

As you get the scope of history there are three major promises that predicate, that influence all of biblical history. One is, God made a covenant with Abraham. He made this covenant with him and said that through the seed of Abraham all the nations on Earth would be blessed. There’s two parts to that. One is, that Paul said in the book of Romans, that everything we know about God has come through the Jewish people. All of the scriptures were written by Jewish people. Well, except for the part that Nebuchadnezzar wrote, but the rest of the scriptures were written by people that were either proselytes to Judaism or actual descendants of Abraham. So, in that sense, because the Bible has brought to us salvation, the understanding of the truth of God that leads to salvation, all of us are blessed. But the ultimate seed, and it’s singular, the ultimate seed of Abraham is Jesus Christ.  He certainly has blessed in offering Himself as a sacrifice. So that’s, God’s covenant with Abraham.

By the way, God promised Abraham with an everlasting oath that He would never break His promise with His people. That’s why covenant theologians say that God didn’t break His covenant with the Jewish people, He just transferred it to the Church.  What’s interesting is, the Lord didn’t know He did that because He doesn’t say anything about it. He said that, I have made an everlasting covenant with Abraham, with his descendants, the Jewish people. That’s why, when you come back here, that’s why this whole period of Israel being restored and what we’re going to see in a moment through the prophets are the future plans God has for Israel. All of that is because He made this breakable promise. Even though the Jews are living in unbelief, God is preserving them. There shouldn’t be any Jews left, they should be exterminated by now. There’s no ethnic group of people that have ever faced so many extermination attempts and it didn’t start with Hitler. It’s been going on in Russia’s pogroms. All of the mess through the Middle Ages of killing the Jews, all the way back to Haman the Agagite, the descendant of Amalekite who tried to kill all the Jewish people in the book of Esther. God says I’ve made an eternal, unbreakable covenant.

A second covenant He made, God made, with Israel and basically it was one of these if/then. He says, if you faithfully serve me, you’ll prosper. If you forsake me, and we covered that last time in chapter 26 of Leviticus, God says I’m going to make you run for your life. You’ll be in fear. You’ll just be scattered throughout. That’s because He made a covenant with them, and they agreed to this covenant at Sinai. They said, everything you say we will do, and they didn’t. That produces this diaspora word, you probably can’t even read that down there, but the dispersion of the Jewish people throughout the whole world. The wandering Jew comes from that covenant God made with them. It’s like the Fiddler on the Roof, if you have ever listened to that, he’s saying why, why, why, why? Because they entered into a covenant with God.

That’s why, this has nothing to do with the question asked, but that’s why divorce is so dangerous. I regularly meet with people that want to divorce each other.  I say, you can divorce. You can get one of these $99 attorneys and just do it. But you know what? It’s like taking glass and throwing it on your tile floor and smashing it all over your house. You’re going to have to live in the house the rest of your life. You’re going to walk over glass the rest of your life. God, He is very focused on covenants. Marriage is a covenant made with God. You break that, you’re walking on broken glass the rest of your life. Yes, you can marry someone else. You can start over again and everything else.  There are many wonderful re-marriages. There is also the breaking of a covenant that was made in the sight of God. The Lord says there are only two things that can take away the covenant. That is the death of the person you’re married to; or their unfaithfulness in departing from the marriage morally, or physically deserting the marriage. So, be very careful. Nobody asked me about that, I brought it up myself.

Thirdly, God made a covenant with David, that his family would produce the Messiah. That’s why Jesus, when He comes at Christmas that we just celebrated, is called the son of what? David. He’s the son of David. The Pharisees and scribes and the Sadducees couldn’t figure this out. He says, how come the Lord calls Himself, the son of David? They couldn’t figure it out. It’s because of this covenant that God made with David, that David was a man after His own heart and that He was going to bless David. That’s why, when David heard this he said, how come, why are you blessing me this way? Those are three big covenants.

Now, a backdrop to all this, to that chart, of the overview of history is what has historically been called the scarlet thread of redemption. The scarlet speaks of blood. So, it’s the scarlet thread of redemption. It says in the Bible, in whom we have redemption through His blood. The scarlet thread is seeing redemption all the way through. If you look in your Bibles, in Genesis 3:15, it says that there’s going to come the seed of the woman who will crush the serpent’s head. That’s what Jesus was doing on the cross, crushing. Hebrews 2 says He destroyed him that had the power of death. That’s what Jesus was doing on the cross. He was destroying the one who had death as his calling card. He destroyed Satan’s power to hold people. That’s why, before the cross all the saints were kept in that place that they were kept in, that we’ve talked about. That I’ve answered several times because until the cross Jesus couldn’t bring them into dwelling in His presence. They had to stay in that place called Abraham’s Bosom until after the cross. Then He brought them up. So, the seed of the woman, the bible said that the Redeemer is going to come through the human race.  The Redeemer, the one who is going to pay the price of sin, the only thing we learn in Genesis is they are going to be human. So, that’s why Jesus had to be the God-man. He had to come in human flesh.

When we get to Abraham, we find in Genesis 22 in verse 18, that this Redeemer is going to be Jewish. See, that’s why we have the Bible. It’s the slow narrowing down of who is going to be this Savior, this Redeemer this One that was promised, that would shed their blood. By the time we get to Jacob we find out that they’re going to be not just a human and a Jew, they are going to be from one of the 12 tribes, the tribe of Judah. We’re, it’s narrowing down into tribe. Then through David, we find it’s actually the family of David. That’s why Joseph had to go to Bethlehem because he was of the house and lineage of what? David. This whole drama of redemption is God telling what is going to take place.

By the way, the devil didn’t know. That’s why the devil tries to destroy all humans by the demon intrusion that prompted the flood of Noah.  Then once he finds out it’s Abraham, he gets Hagar involved. He’s trying to dilute the seed and have this Egyptian woman ruin this plan. Then he’s got Jacob running off into a far land, hoping he’ll get waylaid and killed. The angels are watching him as he’s sleeping on a rock at Bethel.  Then here, the devil is doing everything he can, from trying to have goliath kill David, to having Saul try and kill David, to having David running for his life, and then going into adultery, hoping God will kill him and he won’t have this promised seed. So, Satan has always been at work. By the way, when it was found out by Satan, that it was Jesus what did Satan do? Tries to have all the babies killed, couldn’t do that. He tries to drown Jesus when He’s sleeping in the boat, that didn’t work. He tries to get a crowd to stone him to death on numerous occasions. Satan doesn’t want Christ’s work to be accomplished. That’s why at the cross he was sorely disappointed.

Let’s just focus first on this first section. It was one of the questions saying, how do we get dates from the Bible? So let me show you some dates that we get in the Bible.

First of all, the patriarchs. Archs speaks of high or old and patri of father. So, it’s the old fathers or the high fathers, the patriarchs, the ones who are the high fathers, the exalted ones. Abraham is the one that God calls to himself. Abraham was a gentile that became a Jew, became the first Jew, became the father of the Jews. We know from the Bible exactly the date he was born. I’ll show you how we get that in just a minute. Abraham actually had three wives. Here’s two of them. Hagar. Sarah, his actual half-sister wife, his wife of his youth. Hagar, the servant girl.  There’s going to be one that he marries after Sarah dies. Again, Satan is trying to mess up the plan. Because God made Sarah not conceive, now remember the Bible says God grants. Now we do a lot of things and there’s all kinds of whole medical science for conception ology, but the bottom line is there is no conception of a child apart from God. It means there’s no accidental babies. That’s why that poor Senator that said whatever he said was so vilified during the campaign season, because the guy sounds like he’s a believer.  What he said is even a child conceived through rape, and there are several in the Bible that are conceived through rape, is God’s; because He allowed them to be conceived. But no one asked me about that, so I shouldn’t go down that line.

Here comes Ishmael, because Satan is trying to ruin the plan. He has Abraham figure out how to circumvent having children the way the God planned, and he’s going to have his own way.  He gets Ishmael and Ishmael is a really blessed fellow. Ishmael, because he’s a son of Abraham, fathers 12 sons too. Did you know that if you read carefully in the Bible, it’s not just that Jacob had 12 sons. Ishmael has 12 sons, and his 12 sons are the people that made $1 trillion last year selling us oil. Those are the descendants of Ishmael; they’re doing very well. All of Abraham’s descendants are doing really well, but God says no, here’s my son of promise.

By the way, this is what the whole conflict is. Who is the Lord? Is it Yahweh, that said that the son of promise is Isaac? Or is it Allah, who the Moslem say Ishmael is the one, is the son of promise.  The Quran says that Abraham offered Ishmael on the alter and God says, don’t kill Ishmael. Ishmael’s my promise one. When we get into Revelation 6, I don’t want to spoil it for you, but did you know that the Moslem Jesus is in the Quran very clearly, there is an antichrist, there’s a false prophet, all the things that are in the scripture Satan has duplicated. Fascinating. We don’t realize how much Satan has been at work, right from the beginning. As soon as God identified Abraham as the family through which His nation is going to come, Satan’s been busy. I’m not saying every descendant of Ishmael is satanic, but I’m saying the arrival of Ishmael was part of what Satan was planning to do. But God is using it for His glory.

Isaac is born when Abraham is 100 years old, you see right there, 2166. In the year 2,066 BC Isaac’s born. They send off the servant to find a wife for Isaac. Isaac gets married when he’s 40, doesn’t have any kids until he’s 60. He waited a long time too. Then he has twins, Jacob and Esau.  What’s fascinating is, Esau who sold his first born right as a son, inheritance, to his brother for a bowl of soup… who does Esau align with? He intermarries with Ishmael. In fact, Esau in the Old Testament, he is the father of Edom, the Edomites. The Ishmaelites and we’ll see later when I do Keturah and also Lot, Abraham’s nephew, all of those people have intermarried.  All of them have become the enemies of God. I’m talking about in the Bible, not today. But they have aligned themselves, the Edomites, the Ishmaelites, and the sons of Dedan, and all the other Keturah descendants are all lined up as enemies of God in the Bible.

Just for you to know, Esau who the Bible calls Edom is the father of King Herod. There’s another way Satan, was at work. King Herod becomes the king of this side of the genealogy, and he doesn’t belong there. Herod is from this side. He’s from over here, he’s an Edomite. He’s not a Jew, he’s an Edomite, but he became the king of the Jews. When the descendant that came down through Judah, Jesus Christ, when He came, Herod tries to kill Him. Again, Satan trying to destroy the plan of God. These are, by the way, the 12 sons through Jacob. The four wives of Jacob, the 12 sons, and all that. I don’t even know if anybody asked me about that.

There’s the other half of the family tree of Abraham. His first wife. Second wife. Last wife right here, Keturah. After Sarah died he takes another wife and has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 more children. 7 (Ishmael), 8 (Isaac), perfect family. Eight. Just seeing if you’re listening but look at what his descendants become. The Saudi Arabians today by their geographic location are the descendants of Sheba and Dedan. Then all of these, are what we call the Bedouin people today. They live in, and their still, if you go to the land of Israel, you see these people living there in tents. You can go to a Bedouin tent today and see exactly what Abraham lived like. Very simply, with their herd and flocks around.

All of these, Keturah’s children and descendants were sent by Abraham, he sent them with all kinds of treasures and said, leave the area where my son of promise is living and go to the east. So, they go east to Saudi Arabia. They sent off Hagar with Ishmael to the same place. Esau joins him and intermarries along with this nephew Lot who had the Midianites. Lot had two children, two incestuous children through his daughters, the Midianites and the Ammonites. What’s interesting is, one of the descendants of the Midianites is Amalek. So, all of the enemies of Israel, even today, if you read the Psalms it describes the final battle that there’s going to be. Psalm 83 tells about the final battle Israel is going to have with their enemies. It lists off the descendants of Sheba and Dedan, the Amalekites, the Ishmaelites, all of these people, the Midianites, and the Ammonites. All of them are relatives of Abraham. All of them are tied to Satan’s desire to destroy that scarlet thread of redemption by intermarrying and destroying the lineage. A lot of prophetic history is based on the Keturahite and the Hagarite descendants, as well as Esau’s.

Now in biblical history, getting back to one of those questions, the Exodus. Some of you might wonder how we get that 1446 date, I will show you that in a minute. Basically, from Moses in the time of the Exodus, there’s the 40 years wandering in the wilderness, then there’s the conquest of the land of Canaan by Joshua, and that goes right into the book of judges, the time of the judges, and the final judge is right here, Samuel. Samuel anoints Saul, and Saul is the people’s choice but not God’s choice. Then Samuel anoints, David. This starts the amazing work of God in Israel, and that’s very central. To show you a little, this is to answer the Bible question, so let’s all turn to 1 Kings 6:1. Somewhere in the questions is how do we know dates in the Bible? So, I’m going to give you a quick lesson.

1 Kings chapter 6. I’m going to show you something very interesting. 1 Kings 6:1 tells us something about Solomon’s temple. “And it came to pass in the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel had come out of the land of Egypt.” So, here’s 480 years. The 480 years is before the event we’re reading in chapter 6, verse 1. What we’re reading about there is that, “in the month of Ziv, which is the second month, that he began to build the house of the LORD.” This is a historically find-able date. In fact, if you look on Google, look at Jerusalem’s 3,000th anniversary. Jerusalem celebrated their 3,000th anniversary because even secular people say that David, Muslim scholars won’t say probably, but normal Western scholars will say that David reigned in Jerusalem, 1000 BC. Most people accept the reality that David lived because we have the Psalms, we have the Jewish people, and we have all the history. David reigned as king until 970 BC. David reigned from 1010 to 970.  In 970 BC his son, Solomon, sat on the throne. Solomon got busy building his own house and got busy marrying all those women. Finally, he got down to building the temple in 966 in the fourth year of his reign he started building the temple.  If you add those two numbers together, 480 years before he started building the temple, it takes you to a hard number. 1446 BC.

That’s the year God says the Exodus took place. Boy, that makes life fascinating. Did you know today, if you go to wicked pedia, it’s actually Wikipedia, but it’s wicked too, if you go there and look up which pharaoh was sitting on the throne in 1446 BC. No secular, and even a lot of Christian scholars believe God’s date. This is a hard number that God established, 1446 BC. Most of them say that the Exodus was in 1200 BC during Ramses. I think that’s because Disney made a movie, I’m not sure. There’s no reason in the Bible for that but since the movie says it was Ramses, Disney said it, everyone believes it. But God says this number. If you look at Wikipedia and look up what guy was sitting on the throne, then you know what the Wikipedia article says. Fascinating. I like it so much; I’ve copied it out. I don’t want them to remove it. It says the pharaoh sitting on the throne then is an amazing pharaoh, that something happened to his first-born son, dies prematurely and his second born son becomes the Pharaoh. That’s the only, of all the pharaohs in Egypt that you read about on Wikipedia, only that one does it say that about and its true. In the records of Egypt, this Pharaoh’s son did not become Pharaoh, his younger son did, which was really amazing. That’s all because we know what happened to his oldest son. He died in the night of the original Friday, the 13th, because we know that Passover’s on the 14th of Nissan. So, the night before when the firstborns were killed was Friday, the 13th of Nissan. Which is where the tradition of Friday the 13th comes from, right from 1446 BC. It’s not a joke either, that’s true.

The rise and fall of the monarchy and really quickly, where do the books of the Bible fit into history someone asked in the questions. Where do the books of the Bible fit into history? Basically, this 1st and 2nd Samuel just covers the life of Samuel, Saul, and David. The Kings basically covers heavily the end of David’s 40 year reign, all of Solomon’s reign, and then the kingdom after Solomon, all the way to the exile by the Assyrian’s of the Northern kingdom. There’s another hard number we know from history, 722 BC. The Babylonians came along in 586 and destroy Jerusalem, carted off the Jews. What’s interesting is that 1 and 2 Chronicles doesn’t seem to be the same. The reason is, the purpose of 1 and 2 Chronicles is to keep those bloodlines of the priests and of the Kings, the genealogies. For that’s why it’s called Chronicles. It has all those family tree charts, because this is where the proof of Christ lineage. It’s interesting, through 1 and 2 Chronicles we understand what’s going on with Joseph. Mary’s lineage goes through Solomon, Joseph’s lineage goes through Nathan. Joseph is one, that was a true man, that was a descendant of David. But Mary went through a line where her child would not be cursed.

The two lines, if you read Chronicles, there was one king that was a real bad guy called Jeconiah. What a name, Jeconiah.  Or Coniah he’s called also. They take the Je off. This guy is cursed by God because he was so wicked an apostate. God said, no descendant of yours will ever sit on the throne. Again, Satan was jumping up and down because this was destroying the descendants of David. But it’s interesting that under David, the royal line splits between Solomon and another son of David, Nathan. Solomon’s line had this Jeconiah guy that is cursed. But Nathan, another son of David’s is the family tree, if you read in Luke, that Mary descended through. This is the family tree that Joseph descended through and that’s why Joseph was not, we already know it, but Joseph couldn’t have been the father of the Messiah because he was from this curse line. That’s why if you ever get bogged down reading Chronicles, there’s a real reason for it. God is even in the minutiae of the genealogies, showing His divine plan.

Basically, the books of the Bible. Again, someone asked about the dates. 1 Samuel covers up from Samuel to Saul. 2 Samuel covers although the way through David into Solomon. Kings starts with David’s death and goes through all of Solomon, the divided kingdom. In 930 when Solomon dies, he has a rascally, to use term, son by the name of Rehoboam.  He was a real rascal. He wouldn’t listen to the elders, he listened to his buddies. Rehoboam was very proud, he was raised in too much, and he’s the one that said that my little finger will be thicker than my father’s thigh. I’m going to get every dime out of you I can in taxes, and the kingdom split.  Jeroboam took the Northern half, and this is when the monarchy becomes divided. The southern kingdom took two tribes, Judah and Benjamin. The northern kingdom takes 10 tribes and Jeroboam doesn’t want them trotting back to Judah, to Jerusalem, to go back with the southern people. So, he institutes the golden calf worship in Dan and Bethel. He actually brings Israel into idolatry, and it just reeks devastation on them.  What the Lord does is, He cuts them off in 722. The Assyrians come through, kill them, exile them, and then they never return. They are sent to modern day Syria, modern day Iraq, and modern day Iran. Just sprinkled all over the world. God is patient with the Southern kingdom. He allows them to go on for another 150 years, but they slowly succumb to the idolatry. So, Babylon comes and destroys them. All of that is in 2 Kings.  Also, all of it is in 1 and 2 Chronicles.

We can give the stats on these two teams. The northern team, Israel, had 19 kings reign 250 years. So, that’s an average of about 12+ years per king. The southern kingdom had 20 kings that went an average of 18 and a half years. This is telling seven different dynasties. Jeroboam goes for a little while, but then Jeroboam because of his idolatry is cut off. It goes into dynasty after dynasty, seven different dynasties, almost every other king is from a different dynasty until Assyria take them into captivity. The southern kingdom is one dynasty: the house of David and the Babylonian captivity. There are three dates for it.  You say, why can’t you figure out which one? There’s reason for it.

This is just a listing of the kings. Every one of the northern kingdom kings were bad. It’s hit and miss in the southern kingdom, there are good and bad. We already covered that.

These are the prophets that line up with them.  It’s just for you to know the dates of the book. Jeremiah is during the time of this Jehoiakim, I mentioned right here. Daniel is after Zedekiah. Ezekiel is after that. Just to give you a perspective during these very difficult last days.

But let me show you something here. Babylon, King Nebuchadnezzar is raised up by God to become the first world empire. In the year 605 BC, as he’s on his way to fight the Egyptians and others, he swings by Israel, knocks down part of Jerusalem’s wall and carries off Daniel and his three buddies. That’s how they get to Babylon, Daniel and the three. Then, Nebuchadnezzar just warns them and gets tribute from them. He goes home and keeps conquering everything. He swings back by eight years later, 597 BC and this time he picks up Ezekiel and takes him to Babylon. That’s where you read the book of Ezekiel. Daniel has been there for eight years; Ezekiel shows up in the third siege. This is when God said, enough is enough. This time Nebuchadnezzar systematically breaks down the entire wall, all the way around, levels the temple, and just murders all the people. Those that he doesn’t murder, he takes them to Babylon; anybody that could help him out. Now, why three different times? Because God has warned in the book of Leviticus and warned through the prophet Jeremiah, that Israel is going to have to do two things. They have this servitude as a nation, where they’re going to serve another nation for 70 years. But also, God says a second thing, that Jerusalem is going to be desolate with its walls broken down and horribly lying desolate, like the book of Lamentations talks about, for 70 years. Nebuchadnezzar didn’t flatten the place until 586.

So, this one ends with a decree from Artaxerxes. But this servitude, they are allowed to go back by Cyrus, but they weren’t allowed to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, and to get everything going, and to put the walls up, and become a real city until the second decree. Basically, Cyrus let them go back and they started building the temple, but Artaxerxes let them go back and wall their city and become independent.

Now again, showing you for whoever asked about the dates, Daniel is right there. He is in the sixth century BC, Ezekiel follows him. The book of Chronicles is chronicling all this because the book of Chronicles is written and finished by Ezra. Concurrent with Ezra is Haggai, who is prophesying that they need to spend as much money building the house Lord as they are on paneling their own houses with cedar, while they’re building the temple. Zechariah is talking about the ultimate future state of Israel, and we’ve read Zechariah prophetically. Nehemiah follows Ezra. By the way, Ezra was the one that copied the Bible, that started the scribes, that actually started the synagogue and all of that. Then of course the final Old Testament prophet was from Italy (This is a Bible joke), his name is Malachi (said with an Italian pronunciation). Malachi (Hebrew pronunciation).

It is getting late, one more minute, we have to go. Let’s see where we’re ending.

This is where we’ll pick up next time. I think this is the most significant thing of all, I mentioned it this morning. While Daniel is in Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar has a dream. Nebuchadnezzar dreams in Daniel 2, that he sees this tall image that has a head of gold, and it has this neck down to waist of silver. You notice that the metals get cheaper and stronger. Brass, waist down and then iron down to the feet. The last thing is iron mixed with clay in the feet. Basically, Daniel is told by God that he’s seeing time, from Daniel’s time in the sixth century BC until the second coming.  What God tells Daniel is, there is going to be four world empires.

Babylon was the first. The Medo Persians are the second. The Alexander the Great Hellenization of the world is the third. The final empire, Rome, supposedly falls but Rome only broke into pieces. Each of the pieces of Rome – Germany, Spain, Britain, we could go and on, every piece of the Roman Empire has had its day ruling the world. In fact, the greatest extent was Great Britain. What happens is, Rome in some form… and we’ll talk about that next time… comes back. Only it’s a mixed bag. It’s iron and clay. So, there’s a lot of Rome and also, it’s in two parts because there’s two legs. This one body goes down into two legs and all of that is significant, but we’re going to talk about that next time.

Also, what’s interesting is Daniel has a second vision. Nebuchadnezzar sees this, Daniel hears this. This is man’s view of civilization; gold, silver. This is God’s view of humanity; we’re voracious creatures, beasts, monsters, killing, plundering, pillaging. All of that is in the Bible, as we started in Romans 15, so that we can have hope.

Let’s all stand. It’s 7:15pm and let’s close with a word of prayer. I wish I would have answered all the questions but there were too many. Three is enough, but let’s bow.

Father in Heaven, thank you for your scriptures. No matter what we’re facing right now, people before us have faced some form of the same struggles. Loss, physical, emotional, spiritual battles. Your word is written to tell us that you are the God that dispenses comfort. You’re the God that can increase our patience. You are the only one that can give us hope. I pray that tonight that we would believe what you have said, that you are in charge of history and you are working according to a plan. We just want to get in line and do what we’re supposed to do in your plan. I pray we’d search your word every day, prayerfully, and just voice to you here we are Lord, send us to do whatever you want us to do.  We’ll ask you to do that for your glory, in the precious name of Jesus. And all God’s people said, Amen.

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