Bible Backgrounds/Church History 2012

Last week we talked about the Egyptian culture, and today we'll be doing the Assyrian culture. And what's interesting is we'll find some lasting effects from the Assyrian empire, even up till today. And we'll see also how it impacted things in the New Testament.

Make sure you have a handout, because we're going to be going through quite a bit of that. Here is the kind of maximum map of Assyria, and it shows the dark area. And by the way, you have this on your color supplement. I believe that's one of three pages, the first one of three. So you have that as a color supplement and there's a fairly large area, keeping in mind that that was the maximum and the hold on Egypt compared to the major part of the empire was relatively brief and tenuous, and Judah was different in that Judah paid tribute, but was self-ruled. That is, the line of kings remained through the Assyrian Empire, and that took place because Judah paid off, paid a tribute to Assyria in order to be able to stay separate. You have this on page one of your regular handout.

Assyria maintained some level of continuity of culture for over 3,000 years. The invasion of the Babylonians marked the end of Assyria's dominance. So Assyria remained as a continuing culture, but the Babylonian Empire, which we'll look at next, ended Assyria's dominance. From then on, they were under some other empire. So what you have here is a light line that shows the Assyrian culture and a darker line up above here that shows when they were more dominant as a culture.

Now, from Genesis 10 to the prophets after the Babylonian exile and twice in the Gospels, Assyria or Nineveh extend over 3,000 years in the Bible. What's the Genesis 10 chapter about? Anybody remember Genesis chapter 10? What's in there? This is the Tower of Babel incident, and so the history of Assyria goes back to the time right after the Tower of Babel, and possibly including the Tower of Babel.

Now you also have this, and it's about a half-page slide, the divided kingdom. This is where, here's under David and then Solomon, and then after Solomon, the northern and southern kingdoms divided. And so we have that, and we'll kind of keep referring to that because it impacts how things developed and who went into exile, etc. You also have on your color section map, we're going to zero in on this part of it here. And so that's on the first page of your color slide set. I mean, you're going to be shuffling paper here like crazy.

Anyway, ten of the tribes were in the northern kingdom called Israel, and the tribes of Judah and Benjamin were in the southern kingdom called Judah. This is one reason why the Apostle Paul would make a point of, I'm of the tribe of Benjamin, because it was the tribe that remained faithful to Judah and still centered their worship around Jerusalem rather than going off like the Northern Kingdom did. So that's the general break between the two kingdoms.

Now what you find is 722, Assyria conquers Israel. There's in fact, we give it the 722 date, there's in fact a sort of a series of invasions there centered around 722. And at that time then, Judah begins paying tribute to Assyria. Not being taken over, but paying tribute. So here is this same color map here. So Judah paid tribute for the self-ruled, and then Egypt was briefly held, at least comparatively speaking.

Now, this philosophy of empire map, I think that's on the top of page two, regarding the conquered peoples, we started that last week, we'll continue it this week, and actually continue on all the way into to the Roman Empire, and one of the reasons why we make a big deal of this is because the philosophy of empire, that is how they carried out their empire, impacted the Jews every time. And we said last time that Egypt captured as needed for slaves, and they maintained territory for defense. They would have kind of a factor of safety, a margin of safety in the area that they held, just for defensive purposes, not because they were interested in expanding the empire.

So the Jews were held as captive slaves in Egypt for 430 years. For Assyria, the Assyrians exiled many Jews from Israel to other areas and also relocated Gentiles to Samaria. And what was the impact of relocating Gentiles to Samaria? How did that continue to have impact on into New Testament times?

Well, they weren't pure Jews anymore. Yeah, they weren't pure Jews. And anybody know what books did the Samaritans end up calling their holy books. It's just the first five. They didn't take the rest of them on, just the first five, and their version of those books is modified to allow them to do what they did in the Northern Kingdom apart from Jerusalem. And, apart from having, you know, valid kings, prophets, everything else. So, slightly modified, it's called the Samaritan Pentateuch. And the Samaritans still, to this day, have copies of their Samaritan Pentateuch, and they still have, you know, a system of priests, etc. Real interesting.

Yes. Syria is a different Syria is a different Yeah, different from Assyria, there is some kind of mixed commonality that we'll talk about in a little bit. But in general, Syria is not Assyria. The center of Assyria is actually in Iraq, northern Iraq, in today's country. Yes?

Is there any particular reason why they would in this particular area? Very good question. And that is this. Their strategy was to take not the whole population, but portions of populations and scramble them throughout their empire. Why would they do that? Control. In other words, if you get people who don't know each other, they're not related to each other, they don't even speak the same language. And you start scrambling together, it makes it much harder for those people to start stirring up a rebellion. And so, when you ask for a particular reason, there wasn't a specific reason for why we're going to take these people and put them here, other than their idea of scrambling people.

Yeah. So that's what God did at the Tower of Babel? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, it's a similar thing at a smaller scale and under, instead of godly control, human control. But yeah, similar effect. So their philosophy of empire is scramble and relocate and actually fairly randomly. So I don't know that there was a specific reason, although we do know the particular people that they brought in. We're going to cover that in a minute.

Assyria exiles some tribes, this is on page 2, 1st Chronicles 5.26, so the God of Israel stirred up the spirit of Pol, that is the Babylonian name for the king of Assyria, even the spirit of Tiglath, now here's an interesting thing, Tiglath Pileser, or the Hebrew name also spelled Tiglath Pileser III, the king of Assyria, And he carried them away into exile. So that's 733 to 732 BC. So that didn't end the Northern Kingdom because it was only some of the tribes. So we didn't mark on that previous chart that it ended here, we say 722, because they took away some of the tribes, but not all of them. You can imagine relocating huge populations is quite a project. So it took a while. That was their first move, 733 and 732.

The Reubenites, the Gadites, the half-tribe of Manasseh, and brought them to Halah, Hebor, Harah, and to the river of Gozem to this day. And to this day being the time of the return of some of the Jews to the land of Israel from exile in Babylon. The Book of Chronicles is written to the exiles who are returning to tell them their history.

So when you see to this day, that's what it's written about. And then there was an Akkadian name. So there's got these different languages, Akkadian name for the same ruler here. Okay, now. If Syria exiles some from Israel, 2 Kings 15.29, in the days of Pekah, king of Israel, and by the way, all the kings of the northern kingdom, all bad. There wasn't a one of them that was any good. Some were just worse, worse than others, right? But they were all bad.

So, anyway, Tiglath-Pileser III, king of Assyria, came and captured Ejon and Abel, Beth, Macah, and Jenoa, and Kadesh, and Hazor, and Gilead, and Galilee, and all the land of Naphtali, and he carried them captive to Assyria. The exact location for those tribes, where they took them, is unknown.

It's not stated. You have, and I'm going to zero in on a map, and notice I'm cutting off a part of the bottom part. Stan was asking about that because in order to show everything a little more clearly, but that's Simeon that I'm cutting off. Yes? So if Simeon's down there, why do they call it Judea, the two tribes, Benjamin and Judea? Because at the rebellion after Solomon, Simeon moved to the north and scattered among the other tribal lands. They rebelled along with the other northern tribes, and so the whole tribe, with some exceptions, the whole tribe moved.

Actually, we'll cover that briefly, and you've got a supplement here that's tribes. Ever hear about that? Well, we've got about a six-page supplement in your handout. It may be more than you want, but it at least attempts to cover these supposed lost tribes.

The reality is we've got representatives of all the tribes in Israel backed by New Testament times and before. So no tribes were ultimately lost in the sense of any tribe taking off somewhere. Some of them got moved around in different places and there were certain break-off groups, but there were no ultimately lost tribes. Okay, here are the tribal allotments of Israel here.

And basically what that says is they first took away these tribes here with the red line underlining there. And then here you see on this map, this is the second colored map. And this second colored map shows where they took them. So what you see there is Kozan in this area. Essentially the description is they took them along this fork here of the Euphrates River.

Then, the next one, 2 Kings 17 and 18 tell us about in the ninth year of Hosea, The king of Assyria captured Samaria and carried Israel away into exile to Assyria and settled them in the same general area we talked about before, that fork of the river that went off from the Euphrates, on the river of Gozan and the cities of the Medes, and that's on the east part of the Assyrian Empire. And then it says, in the seventh year of Hosea, the son of Elah, king of Israel, Shaman Eser, king of Assyria, came up against Samaria and besieged it. At the end of three years, they captured it, which was the ninth year of Hosea, king of Israel, Samaria was captured. Then the king of Assyria carried Israel away into exile to Assyria, and then again describes the same places that they took them.

That's an interesting partial answer to your question, Stan, is where they took them. there's at least some consistency in order to put them back. They took them away from where they were, but they at least kept the groups together. Yes? On this map, where you have it underlined in red, those are the Assyrian captives, and the yellow, is that the Babylonians? No, not the Babylonians. We'll talk about that in just a minute. I know, but we'll talk about that in just a minute. Let's see.

So we have these here where they took away the other tribes around Samaria. Now, so we have the red one is Kozan, and then we have on the cities of the Medes, one of them that's marked up there is Ekbatana. And so that was where they took some of the captives. And then they brought in others into Samaria. and they brought them in from Hamas and Sepharvim, the I-M suffix in Hebrew indicates plural. Location of that is uncertain. What's interesting is that Sepharvim means two book cities. Or book cities. But at any rate, that's probably close to Hamas because they're always mentioned together.

So what that means, and there's the answer to your question here, here are the places where they took them from, Babylon, Qasar, and Hamas, and then the question mark, Sephardim. And so they took them, excuse me, they took those with the yellow lines and took those and placed those people in Samaria. So that's where your Samaritans came from, and they mixed with some Jews that were there, and so you end up with this scrambled population, and that's why in the New Testament times, the vast majority of the Jews wouldn't even travel through Samaria because they felt it was so disgusting. And both their religion, they weren't full Jews, they had all sorts of different traditions, and so the Jews for centuries just stayed away from them. And that's why it was shocking that Jesus went there. And not only that, after going into Samaria, he talked to a Samaritan woman of bad reputation. Completely shocking for him to do such a thing.

Does that answer your question? Yeah, basically the yellow marks out where the people came from that were relocated into Samaria, right? Okay, now, one of the things I had, let me redo this again, up here you'll have in a dashed line around Nineveh. Nineveh was, for a portion of the time, the capital of the Assyrian Empire.

It was an ancient city for a long period of time. Today that city is called Mosul. And we have actually had the Hemingway's son-in-law stationed there for a time. Here is an aerial photo, the origins of Nineveh given in Genesis 10. So that's way back at the time of the Tower of Babel. So a very ancient city. This red line shows the outline of the city wall.

And then, interestingly, this Nebi Yunus there has been, by tradition, called the Tomb of Jonah. However, since they don't allow excavations there, who knows, right? So that may be one of those things that's true, maybe not true. The map of Nineveh and major features, you have this on page three, are shown there, including Nebi Yunus, which, like I say, may or may not be the Tomb of Jonah.

But much of the wall and gate structure is in some degree visible all the way around. So you can imagine, here's Jonah going there eventually, and going around the city and making declarations there. Here's a picture of a portion of the city walls where it's been fairly well reconstructed and maintained, just so you can see what it was like.

Now, the Assyrians were known to be especially cruel to the people that they conquered. Their cruelty is actually recorded on the Assyrians' palace walls. Yeah, that's what I think. The Assyrians' palace walls show their cruelty. This is a picture of peeling a man's skin off while he is alive. Oh, by the way, they didn't leave off the salt. And they were so proud of their cruelty that they put it on the palace walls.

You can imagine why Jonah being told, you know, you can go and preach to these people and if they repent, I won't punish them. He says, why would I want to do that? And so that's why he runs the other way. So this may explain Jonah's reluctance to go to Nineveh.

Here is an instance where they're poking a man's eyes out and pulling someone along with lip rings. This is part of the palace wall structure. The belief in most of the Middle East there was that you needed to have your ancestors' bones kept in good condition so that they could resurrect from those bones.

And so what the Assyrians would do is force people to grind up their ancestors' bones. So, and if they wouldn't do it, they'd just beat them until they were dead if necessary. So, anyway, that's one of the other things they were very proud of. Anyway, that's enough, but you get the idea. So, now they started religion.

What they did is they borrowed the polytheism, the system of religion, from a lot of their neighbors. in that valley there, except they made Asher, where we get the name Assyrian, right? Asher, the head of the gods. So an Assyrian Asher is a god, is also an ancient city, and also the name of the empire. We say Assyrians, but in fact it was Assyrians, right? Assyrians.

Like most kingdoms and empires in the ancient Near East, the population was expected to follow whatever religion that the ruler held to, and the ruler was at once a deity, a ruler, and a military commander. So you find he's the head of religion, he's the head of government, and he's the head of the military. That's the model there among the Assyrians. The Assyrian astral signs, and you've got this on your hand out there, basically very similar to the astrological system that was carried over in the Babylonians from where we got the system that's used today.

So, yeah. Okay, this is the winged bull of Assyria. This is the British Museum. What do you note at Mount Assyria? You might have a hard time seeing it, let me point it out. One, two, three, four, five legs. Why five legs? That's right. So you can see it from the side and the front. But when you look at it diagonally, it looks funny. But nonetheless, those were transported from Syria to the British Museum.

And so they have some of those there. Now, Assyrians had various scholars of the day, and one of them was Celestial Diviners. They were using stars and the sun and the moon and things like that to determine, here's what's going on, and here's when it's a good time to go into battle, and are you going to be successful, and all those kinds of things. This is a Diviner's Manual from towards the end of the Assyrian Empire.

And again, it's a clay tablet with a cuneiform. There is also a terrestrial diviner. There's not just what are the stars and the moon and the sun say, but you know, what are the birds doing? What are the different animals doing and the plants? And so they would have people studying that to try to figure out, you know, what's going on and is this a good season and that kind of thing.

A diagnostic healer. So you have, you know, essentially the early form of medicine there. Now a therapeutic healer, so one was to say what's the problem and the other to say how do we fix it. So you had both of those and then you also had a professional lamenter. Isn't that interesting? And it wasn't just we cry a lot, they actually had various things that they used, signals and timing and here's how you do this and yeah.

Really strange it was it was a scholarly occupation not simply somebody who's really emotional allowance Okay, so here is Assyria the end of Assyria Was brought about when Babylon first was able to rebel and maintain independence but Babylon then attacked the center of the Assyrian Empire at Nineveh and Asher and The Medes and the Scythians, and we have just one arrow, but in fact there was a whole line of attacks from the Medes and the Scythians along the northern and eastern border. So the Medes and the Scythians coordinated with the Babylonians with an attack. And from there they moved towards Haran, which is where Abraham had gone from Ur. for a time, and you had the Egyptians moving in to push the Assyrians out of Egypt and to keep attacking until essentially the forces of the Medescythians and the Babylonians and the Egyptians crushed the Assyrian Empire. So then the Empire that was Babylon essentially took over, not identically, but much of the same territory that the Assyrian Empire had. And we'll show this map next week when we look at the Babylonian Empire.

We've seen this before, but just to underscore it, the tablets tell many stories. In the early history of Assyria, the tablets were the prominent way of writing things, and we have, of course, a great many of them. And so there are, I say that the tablets from Assyria and other adjacent civilizations, we've got somewhere around a half a million of them so far. And most of them not translated. Here is Sipr, which means book, right? So that's an ancient city of Babylon there, where they also had a library bookshelf.

That's how you do your bookshelves when you've got clay tablets. So we have this post-it note, so to speak, from that time. Here is the cuneiform alphabet, and you have this on your handout as well. And so you can see it's all written with the idea you've got a clay tablet and you have a stylus that you sit there and press in certain patterns and then that makes up your alphabet. And so everything has that stylus mark kind of effect to it. And so we go through and use that. Now with those letters then you can figure out what's being written and the next thing is what are the words, right? So that's how they go about with cuneiform.

Now, something that greatly impacted them is, in the 8th century, the Assyrians adopted Aramaic, and they also began writing more things on papyrus, the paper that was produced out of Egypt and places like that. It was a consonant alphabet with no vowels. It's also written from right to left like Hebrew. And a lot of these symbols have some correspondence to the Hebrew alphabet and the way of writing.

So Aramaic has a huge impact, and believe it or not, we're going to look at how Aramaic came into the New Testament times, but there's still some people, a few hundred thousand, four hundred thousand, something like that, who speak Aramaic. Still now, today. They're fighting vigorously to try to keep the language alive. But they're largely centered in Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, places like that. So it's not a dead language, but it's getting close. Yeah, Stan? So do they have to press 1 to do the Facebook Aramaic? Yeah, there we go, yeah. And you can imagine voting. Do you need an Aramaic ballot? No. Okay.

So Assyria had written cuneiform writing on the clay tablets from its earliest years and that of course is something that gets more easily preserved today. So we have more of those clay tablets as long as they continue to use them. But in 752 BC, Aramaic became the second official language of Syria. And as a matter of fact, it continued to be a prominent language until it was diminished by Alexander the Great coming in with Koine Greek. And still a great number of people continued to speak it until about the 7th century AD. And then the numbers have dwindled and diminished to the point where now there's still a few hundred thousand that speak Aramaic. I'm sure it's changed, but nonetheless it's still Aramaic.

Yeah? In that first point you have, for instance, Acadian. What is that? Acadian is the language that you see in more like the cuneiform, like this. And this is a sample of Aramaic. An Akkadian was fairly widely used. It may even be that Moses was trained in Akkadian, given that he was brought up in the Egyptian court. We have some correspondence from the Egyptians in Akkadian. So Aramaic was used instead of Hebrew, and we give several references in Ezra, Daniel, and Jeremiah, places in the Old Testament. So if you learn Hebrew, to read the Old Testament, you can't read all of it because these parts are still in Aramaic.

Alright, here is an Aramaic amulet, very interesting. Here is Abraham, and you see he's got the knife, and here's the altar, and here's Isaac, and here's the hand of God, and here is the ram in the thicket. And this is all spelled, Genesis 22, that information is spelled out here in the Aramaic, which goes like this from right to left. So very interesting. So that's an ancient one. I tried to find a date for that and I couldn't. Now, Aramaic continued to be used on into New Testament times, and it shows up in the New Testament, and we'll look at some examples here.

John 1.42, he brought him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him and said, You are Simon, the son of John.

You shall be called Cephas, which is translated Peter. Cephas is an anglicized pronunciation, it comes from the Aramaic word kephas, which is like Peter, means rock or stone. So Cephas, when we say here's Peter, is he Simon? Is he Peter? Is he Cephas? Well, in Aramaic it would be Kephas. And so it's anglicized to sound like Cephas, but actually Kephas was what they would call Peter. So imagine Peter, depending on what language you're talking to, could be called several different things. Cephas actually comes from the Aramaic there.

When Jesus was on the cross, we'll be taking a look at that this next Friday. Good Friday service. Jesus was on the cross. He was up there. He said, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani. That was Aramaic. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Psalm 22 verse 1. In Aramaic.

Additionally, John chapter 1, 1 and 14 says, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. And we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth. In the ancient Jewish commentary translations, which are called Targums, Whenever God walked on earth and interacted with humans, they use the Aramaic term Memra to refer to God. Memra means word. In the beginning was the God who walked with us. Right? So when the Jehovah's Witnesses tell you that this isn't God, they are quite wrong. Yes, Dan? So is Memra the same thing as Logos?

No. Lagos in the Greek is more the idea of message and transmitted word. Christ is also called the Lagos, but there are different concepts as well as different languages. So you feel that John is using Here's the thing. He wrote Lagos, but in the Aramaic language, which would have been commonly spoken.

It would have been Memra, which actually, given the tradition, would have actually been the word implying God is with us. In other words, in the Aramaic language and culture and pattern, it would have had a slightly different influence, or inference, but it would have indicated that God is with us very directly. Yes. not been that much of a stretch. No, no, not at all.

This is one of those instances where John 1, 1 and 14 is written in Greek, but the people of that area would have understood that the Aramaic would imply this is God with us. As a matter of fact, in the Aramaic version of the New Testament, that's how it's written. Okay, here's another map, this is also in the color portion of your handout, page 3. Here is Palestine in the time of Jesus, and here's Samaria in this area here, and here's Judea. By the way, why are the Jews called Jews? Yeah, because of Judah, and so think about it, that's only one tribe. Yeah, that's true. But think about how this happened.

What were the two tribes that stayed together in the Southern Kingdom that became Judah? Benjamin and Judah, right? But what happened is as things got bad in the Northern Kingdom, either morally or spiritually bad, or as the Assyrians began to attack, people from all the northern tribes who said, I've had enough of this, moved where? They moved south into Judah. And they all spoke with slang, a southern drawl, you know. Judah, right? So they all moved south.

So essentially, Judah had representatives from all of the tribes. And so then as that group Judah, as that group was brought over into Babylon and then brought back, this Judah, or Judea, ended up becoming the name for the people, Jews. was the fact that he had all these different wives, and so he brought in all these different gods into Israel. When I first heard about that, I thought that was really peculiar and probably only pertaining to what Solomon did, but actually what you're saying here, it was a culture of the time, because basically the Assyrians accepted the gods of all their neighbors. It was a means of getting along, right? It was a means of getting along. It was also something where, hey, we don't have to invent anything.

These other people are using this system. The only thing we'll do is we'll make our god, Asher, the primary god. And other than that, we'll just keep the whole pantheon. So Solomon actually, I know that he veered away from the one true god, but actually what he was doing was?

It was culturally standard and acceptable. Yeah. His problem was he had multiple wives, and he had too many alliances and too much dependence upon Egypt. Going there for horses and chariots and all that. So at any rate, here you find in New Testament times, there's Samaria, and the Jews say, we're not having nothing to do with this. Why? Because the people, as we saw in the other map, the people were coming from these other areas into Samaria.

And there was essentially a lot of Gentile and pagan influences. Now, here's another one. Thomas the Doubter. Thomas is credited with taking the gospel to the people of what had been the Assyrian Empire, who spoke the dialect of Aramaic, similar to that which was spoken in the land of Israel. So if you're wanting to go out and tell people the gospel, it's real easy to go to another place where they still speak Aramaic, right? And so he would go to the Jews in the Parthian Empire, to the east of the Roman Empire, he'd go to the Jews there, many of whom still spoke Aramaic, and he could talk to them. Without having to learn a different language or anything of the sort, he could talk to them, he could write things for them, and tell them about Christ.

And other apostles did this as well, but he was one of them. He went on to India, Madras, India, and established a church there. So Nineveh, the capital of Assyria for a portion of its history, is located near modern Mosul in northern Iraq. So that's right up here. That's where Matt The Hemingway son-in-law was stationed for a bit.

Now, moving into modern times, one of the things that drove Aramaic out as a major language was when the Muslims came in. Muhammad died in 632 AD, and the Muslims went out with the sword towards Asia, they went into North Africa, and they went into Europe. By 100 years later to the year 732, that was when they finally turned around the Muslim invasion in Europe and tourist France. When the Muslims went everywhere, first they went north and then they went out into these areas, they drove out the Aramaic language in great part and replaced it with Arabic. And it was one of those things, kind of like Alexander the Great, you know, you will learn this language. Our sword says so, right?

So there are two major sects of Islam, and this is an interesting thing, there was early on a break in the two parts in Islam, and that break in the two parts continues to today, and we call them Sunni and Shia, or Shiite. Most, about 90% of Muslims are Sunni. They believe that successors of Muhammad should be chosen by the community. They do not believe in an intermediary, middleman between Allah and the people. But the Shia, Shiites, is about 10%. They think Muhammad's successor should be his relatives. and they believe in an intermediary called an imam, or sometimes you'll hear other titles, and those with religious authority rule in the government too.

And so now you have Islam spread this way, starting here, here's Mecca, here's Medina, and heading off in these directions. And then here is the way we have it in modern times. The darker green color here is the Shia. So you find it prominently in Iran. A portion of Iraq. And those are Shia. And the rest are Sunni in character. Most of Islam. Yeah, no Sunni disposition. Yes, that's right.

And so that's what we have today, but that move drove out the Aramaic language. Aramaic was still a dominant language into the time of the Muslims. And no matter which group, they ended up driving out the Aramaic speakers. Not entirely, again there's still some left, but in great part.

Let's see. Okay. Questions? Comments? Wendy's dizzy. What's that? Exasperations. Yeah. Yeah, one of the things I think is amazing is to think of languages as a pattern, tended to well outlive the empires that started them. Here's Aramaic, still spoken by a few hundred thousand today, still spoken prominently even into New Testament times, centuries after the Assyrian Empire has ended. Think about it, here's Alexander the Great, he dies off, And Greek continues to be spoken in the Eastern Mediterranean as a dominant language and culture for six centuries. And then what happens? The Roman Empire falls apart and what language ended up being prominent? Latin. So that's an interesting pattern, is that the language continued on for centuries after the empire itself fell apart. Yes. Yes. Sharia law. Sharia. Yes. Yes. Sharia law. The Sharia law is the totalitarian law of Islam. And one of the reasons for a lot of resistance to it in this country is because It is of a philosophy to take over.

What happened is here's the family of Muhammad and you end up having brothers and uncles and cousins and all that. Essentially it's a family feud. And so they end up having this squabble And instead of killing each other off, they ended up making two different divisions of Islam. And so essentially what you have is a long-standing family feud. If you called it the Hatfields and the McCoys, you'd have a good equivalence. And they hate each other to the death. They hate each other to the death. And there are regularly deaths because of the conflict between the two groups.

Yeah. They believe that Muhammad actually arose from the dead, right? Let's see. Here's an interesting thing. Muhammad had contact with some Jews, because we talked about the Jews that were taken to Babylon and in that area. So Muhammad had contact with the Jews. He also had contact with a particular, I would say almost a cult group of Christians. And so he had some exposure to them. He called them both people of the book. So you had this, you know, here's how things are going to happen. What they see is that Muhammad will come back. Muhammad will come back. And so will Jesus. But Jesus will point everybody to Muhammad. He's going to come back on the rock right there where that mosque is, correct?

Now that I'm not sure of. You may be correct. I just don't know that. No, that was supposedly where he ascended. So you have some interesting parallels with the Christian idea of a second coming and that kind of thing. And even including Jesus, who is called Isa. But it has Jesus being subject to Mohammed. do with the people that were there, with the gods that were there, with any kind of influence whatsoever. And obviously they didn't do that. Now, later on, he takes these same people that he knew could be influenced by the Canaanites that were in the land, and he takes these same people and he puts them in Babylon and Assyria and these other places where obviously the influence is going to be even greater. How does that fit? I mean, he knew that they couldn't live with these outside influences without being totally destroyed by them, and yet he sends them to Babylon and Assyria and Egypt.

Pantheism areas. You know what? Here's the interesting thing. The future of Israel is spelled out in the book of Deuteronomy. No, not just the curses. That's a part of it. But the future of Israel is spelled out in Deuteronomy. They were told that they would end up being scattered around the earth. And they were told there, you will be here and wish you were there. You will be there and wish you were here. And that in the end you will be brought back to the land.

So Deuteronomy actually spells out the future of Israel. And so what has taken place fits with what Moses wrote about in Deuteronomy, including their wandering. And what will happen at the end is Jews at the very end will come back, even though a great many of the Jews in Israel now are agnostic or atheist, they will come back because they'll recognize that only God could have saved them. There's no other way they can credit their continued existence, especially with the threats during the tribulation period.

Yeah? Isn't one of the things that makes Shia Islam and Iran so dangerous is that they believe that this 12-feet-long, who's known as the Messiah, is going to come back, but in order for him to come back, They've got to either convert the world to Islam or destroy those who won't believe.

Yeah, and this is the more radical elements in Islam. This is one of the things that is difficult. Whereas Christianity, we consider persuasion of hearts and people choosing to believe to be a central part of our Christian understanding. In Islam, that's not the understanding.

The Sharia law, that Winnie was asking about, is totalitarian. Everything is to be operated that way. Islam is to rule the world. It must. And essentially, anything different from that is a contamination and tainted form of Islam. So yeah, it is absolute and dominant to the core. That's what Sharia law is. That's what the teaching is. It doesn't come alongside and say, let's persuade these people. It uses whatever power it can to say, you will be Islamic or you'll be dead.

Mercy and grace are not part of their language. No. No. No, I'm afraid not. Now see, in Christianity we say that the Holy Spirit convicts hearts, but that's not an absolute thing. It's not like the Holy Spirit will convict you and you're not going to resist it.

We say that there is a place of a person choosing for or against believing. And we consider it important. We don't come up to somebody with some physical threat and say, you know, you're going to become a Christian or else. We don't do that because we consider their willful believing to be an essential part of Christianity. Islam is not that way.

So, yeah, Ben? Oh, there have been centuries of time when Christians were forceful about what they did. Yeah, it's unfortunately happened a number of times. And unfortunately the Jews have been the ones who have been subject to the forced conversions.

However, today that's not considered to be the case, and it wasn't originally. Think about the first hundred years of Islam, the sword went in all three directions, to Asia, North Africa, and Europe, and it was only military opposition that stopped it from continuing on. The first hundred years of Christianity, how much of Christianity was spread by the sword? Not.

So the fundamental, when we talk about fundamentalists, the fundamental character of Christianity is not by the sword, even though Ben's right, later on that came to be the case, quite badly, but it came to be the case. With Islam, that was the way it was from the very beginning, from the outset.

I think that's second buzzer, so we'll call it good. Lord, we thank you for Thank you for your word. We thank you that as we look at history here, certainly many tragic and painful events, we thank you that in the end you will sum up all things in Christ. You are the master and manager of history. And to that end, that everything will be summed up in Christ. We are thankful for that. And even as we look at threats in our own world today, those threats will ultimately be overcome by Christ. And we do give you thanks, Lord, in all things. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.