How to Study the Bible III - Old Testament Cultures
Vern Peterman · Jun 5, 2016
How to Study Bible (2016), No. 22
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4926534254040

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

OK. Yeah, two things. One is that I had so many people asking for the Genesis and Revelation contrast that I included at the top of today's handout this here. Because one of the things we've been talking about is different forms in the Bible. different poetic forms and structures and whatnot. And one of the things that comes out is that Genesis and Revelation, within their first and last few chapters, have some similar, in many cases, contrasting statements.

For example, there's heavens and earth created in Genesis 1.1. and New Heaven and New Earth, and Revelation 21-1, and et cetera. So at any rate, you can take a look at that.

I included also the theme of the throne of the divided kingdom. One of the reasons I included it is I misspoke. I said there were 20 kings in the Northern Kingdom. The answer was checking me. And I need to correct that. It's 19, just like we had in the tournament. But it doesn't matter. They were all bad. They were all bad. So I need to make note of that. So 19 kings in the Northern Kingdom, not 20. And just the same, they were all bad. About nine dynasties, and each dynasty would end with a murder, and they'd start a new dynasty. So evil in the conduct of their kingship, and also evil in the ending of many of those kingships.

OK, so now, one of the things I thought about is We have a six-month long elective on Bible backgrounds, in which we cover Bible cultures, and we cover it in several stages. And that's all fine and well, and what we were looking at doing is trying to condense that. But that's a bit much. See those five books that are stacked there? That would be like trying to cover all that today. So we thought, probably shouldn't do that. Probably shouldn't do that.

And so what we'll focus on instead is looking at what are some resources that are available for you to be able to look things up about Old Testament history and culture. Those two things. Most people can fairly easily think of, okay, here's some resources for Old Testament history, but the cultural aspects are sometimes huge, and they can be a little tougher to find.

So I want to offer that to you. So one of them is a great website, biblehistory.com, no charge, and I found the fellow who runs it is happy to have you print things off, copy them, distribute them, he's fine with all that. maps and charts and little article write-ups and things like that. So, highly recommendable. He's a good guy, seems conscientious and careful, but freely makes everything available. So, anyway, that's one I can recommend. One that is somewhat dated, but still very recommendable, Alfred Edersheim. Sometimes it's pronounced Edersheim. It's Edersheim. It's Edersholm, essentially, what it means in the German.

And so here's Bible Study Tools. Now, one of the things I've done here where we've got some big, long website address, I've changed it to a tiny URL address. So I'm going to put that on there. so that you can get it more easily. The other thing that I'll do is I will post the PowerPoint slide set so you can just copy off of that if you want to do it even more easily.

I assume that's in English. Yes. No, it's very well done. He's done a lot of studies in several different volumes, and by now they're in the public domain. So you can buy them printed, but you don't need to. So anyway, those are recommendable, and he's done a lot of careful study. The only drawback is more recent discoveries are not included. So it's somewhat dated.

Bible timeline resources. I don't know about you, but it helps for me to kind of get, okay, here's the timeline and here's where this is happening. For example, if I had some piece of information about the Apostle Paul, is that going to fit into the time of Abraham? Not so much, right? Wrong time by many, many centuries. So I need to find out, OK, is the cultural information I have, the historical information that I have, am I matching things up to the text?

So I'm studying through Genesis something about the Apostle Paul isn't going to fit, and maybe even something about David isn't going to fit. Moses compiled Genesis, as I've been talk with Megan about. Moses compiled Genesis, but even he was writing about times that were centuries before his time. Looking at that, one place I have a biblehistory.com and I have a tiny url about that. The advantage of the tiny url is that after putting in tinyurl.com there's only usually about 7 or 8 letters or numbers sometimes.

You can get that on there. So there's an online free bible timeline. In addition, here's an example and feel free to take a look at it afterwards. This timeline here covers the whole front pew and this is available from Rose. We keep a copy of it in the church library if you would like to check that out and take a look at it.

There you've got quite a bit of detail as opposed to some of the things that are available. Yeah. When they have, you know, like the first patriarchs, from Adam to Lamech or Noah, would they have their lifespans in lines so we could see the overlap? The answer is yes, and we have that in our, I'll talk about this in a minute, in our Bible background material.

And you can download that online. It's also in our Genesis study that we did in the main service. some years back, and so it's available both ways there, so it's online. You can also ask for copies of it from Sue or Nancy as well, they'll pull it out of the file. So several different ways you can get access to it. And two ways, one is via a vertical bar chart and then via a horizontal bar chart where the lifetimes are stage, one, then the next, one, then the next. So a couple of different formats even. But that's a good question. I think there's a lot to be learned from it. We're going to be taking a look at that briefly here.

Then we also have the Bible Hub, which is more of a columnar, in a column type listing. from going from oldest to youngest, etc. And then we have one more, and then it shows the, I show it in a tiny URL, that's one page Old Testament New. And now take a look at the last page in your handout, and there's another, it includes both Old Testament and New Testament timeline on one page. So you have that, where it's very convenient, one page, and then you have something as much as what you see on the front pew here, where lots and lots and lots of detail. And there's advantages to both. It's nice to have something convenient. I mean, this is almost the kind of thing you could carry around your Bible and use it fairly regularly.

And it's fairly well done, I think. I've looked at the dates, and I think, with rare exception, I would say the dates are pretty spot on. So those are some good resources for timelines. Just kind of looking, OK, here's the context time-wise. Here's what was happening at that time. And so you're matching up where things fit.

Now let's take a look at another one, Bible atlases. Good Bible atlases. And frankly, there are a lot of them, more than I could list here. But some of the Bible atlases, the University Press Atlas of Bible History is a good one. Here's one that I show a link to and then a tiny URL.

190 pages of free maps and they're very good. Color maps, 197 pages of them. of maps are free, they're in color, and you can download and store them electronically. I draw on those from time to time where I like color maps to show the different areas. And free to use. Its origin is puzzling, but I won't go into that. The Oxford Bible Atlas is also available online free. And that's very well done. And the Bible Atlas and the Companion is another one that's out there. And there are actually a number of good Bible atlases. that you can look at.

They tend to focus more on maps. They tend to focus less on giving you a lot of cultural detail. But it's at least a resource that it's good to have. By the way, I don't recommend that you go out and just buy all these things. A lot of them are free, especially if Now, there are also oldies but goodies. And by that I mean... Here would be an example.

Ellis Schott bought a copy of this for like a dollar. And it was done by Reader's Digest about 40 years ago. But it's quite well done, and there's some good illustrations of things that it's hard to get pictures and things like that of. So it's very good for not so much timeline and history and map kind of things. but good cultural background illustrations. And like I say, you can get it sometimes for really cheap, and it's a good resource. I actually use it a fair amount. OK.

Another one is Views of the Biblical World, which is a similar oldie by Michael Aviglione, who's Jewish archaeologist, and taken a lot of culturally relevant pictures. So it's actually lots of colored photographs that he's collected, and he goes from the Old Testament into the New. The Old Testament is four volumes of pictures, and the New Testament is one volume.

That's the fifth volume. But a good resource. I actually don't have all of them, but I hope to collect them over time. OK, let's take a look at page two. So also for historical and cultural background, the Sonderbund Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary Set, Old Testament, in five volumes. That's this one here that I talked about earlier. It's not perfect, but it's a great resource. And here's the advantage in it.

It's just like you go through the Bible and you get Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and you go through chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, that's the way it's formatted. So, if you're looking, for example, for something on Joshua chapter 1, you go through it in Bible sequence. So that's how you look things up. So if you're studying a particular book or passage, you can just open it up, write to the Bible reference. I give the example of Joshua chapter 1, but whatever it is, you can take a look at that. And then it'll give you historical and cultural information relevant to that particular passage. So we've got the whole set.

And that's available. It's also available on Olive Tree Software, where they have the Old Testament in that format. and the New Testament as well. So you get it all on software for both the Old and the New Testament. And I think recently they have it on sale. So that's another way to access the information, if you like that.

And all the free software works whether you've got Apple or the Windows environment. It works on tablets. It even works on phones. So that's another option for you depending on what you prefer. Some people like to have the paper, you know. So whatever is available format for you, one that you favor. Now, it is good material, and it's real easy to use because everything's in Bible sequence, with Bible references and all that. And they've got good pictures where they're relevant and all that.

Occasionally they stumble, in both the Old Testament and the New, so it's not perfect. Personally, I like to have a cross-check. I cross-check everything several times anyway. But I like to have a cross-check because, for instance, in the Old Testament, they don't take the early chapters of Genesis seriously, in my opinion. They don't take them literally.

And so that's a place where I would say caution. In the New Testament, there are a few places where they either could have brought something up In one case or two, I can think of, they went the wrong route. So at any rate, just with those cautions, they're a good place to start in both the Old and the New Testaments. All right, some other sources.

Peoples of the Old Testament world. is a book that talks about the peoples and the cultures and the histories of the various ones in the Old Testament realm. And so you get a book, mostly text, writing about those peoples, histories, and cultures. Where did the Assyrians come from? How did they carry out life and that kind of thing? And then the University Press Bible Background Commentary for the Old Testament.

That one is briefer. Instead of having five volumes, that's all in one volume. And it's pretty good. I do not recommend the New Testament version. I don't want anybody to hurt themselves. The Old Testament version I think is good. You also have books that are available, and again, I'm not recommending anybody to just go out and start buying a bunch of books.

There's individual books on cultures that are available, and these days they're available sometimes on Kindle or PDF files. I have a lot of them in PDF or Adobe Acrobat files, Jonathan Tubb on the Canaanites, Everyday Life in Babylonia and Assyria by Sags, The Babylonian World by Lech, and Persia in the Bible by Edwin Yamauchi, who, by the way, grew up as a Buddhist.

He's a Christian now. It has been for quite a while. So anyway, and there are lots of books like this available. One of the places I say to check is check with major universities that have museums. And with the museums themselves, Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, has a free Adobe Acrobat book on Egyptian art. You can just download it. And just about all of the universities and major museums will have things like that you can download. When I went to the British Museum, they have an Adobe Acrobat file for free that says, here's all the Bible-related exhibits at the British Museum.

So that's really cool. So they've got pictures, and here's the background. So anyway, these days, especially with a lot of Adobe Acrobat files, lots of free resources. And some of them are very good. OK. The other thing is we had the Bible backgrounds elective here in 2012. And what we did is we did Bible backgrounds for six months, and then we did church history for six months. And so the first half of that is lots of good Bible backgrounds information on history and culture.

And that has a lot of resources, including the chart that you talked about, where you've got all these different life spans of the early patriarchs all graphed together. It is amazing who lived contemporaneously at the same time, but who? I mean, it's really astounding when you lived that long.

And we'll be talking about that briefly here. So at any rate, with some Bible backgrounds, the audio is available online. It's under the archived series. And the audio is available. All the handouts are available, so you can get it there. If you want to get something on paper, talk to Nancy or Sue, and they can get you paper copies of those kind of things as well. And then another great resource is the Bible itself. And here's why I say that, and especially today with a lot of the things that are available.

Tell me, how many resources do we have about what the culture was like before the flood? One. What's that one resource? It's the Bible. And that's the only place we can get information about life before the flood. Yeah, because everything was underwater. Everything was chewed up, right? Everything was buried. Occasionally something, here's for example, there was a guy who was breaking up his coal and found an iron pot. in the coal. Now, problem.

You've got this iron pot that's in coal. Now, coal is supposed to be millions of years old, depending upon the deposit. In many cases, hundreds of millions of years old. So, now the problem, what's the problem? The guy finds this lump of coal and it's got an iron pot on it. What's the problem with that, scientifically? It can't be more than a few thousand years old. Well, yeah, but there's a problem with it scientifically.

Why is it supposed to be much further down the road and why is it to be embedded in coal? Yeah, and there's that, but there's a problem scientifically because you need to find it in place. They have some guy where they've gone in there and they've scooped up gobs of coal and then they sold it to this guy and got it in his house and he doesn't know where that came from. You need to be able to find it in place. and have scientists look at it and say, OK, we've got this coal, and we think it's this old, and find it in place in order to have something that is scientifically verifiable.

It's one of the problems in, like in Israel, they'll have a problem in other places with antiquities that are just kind of passed along and have not been found in place. So that's why there's laws against taking out antiquities and just Because you need to find it in context. Since we find dinosaur bones and stuff like that when they do archaeological digs, why don't we find human remains from the flood? Well, in fact we do.

Nobody ever says anything about it. No, you won't hear anything about it. If they can't figure it out, they just put it in the back of some museum storage or something like that. Because it doesn't flow with their theory of evolution. No, and I've seen various fossils that are just inexplicable. Yeah, it just gets backpedaled. And data, for example. So here's this dinosaur bone. All dinosaurs are supposed to have died off 63 million years ago.

So if I get a radiocarbon date on it that's more like 30,000 years ago, that's not supposed to happen. On the other hand, it happens fairly regularly. But the answer is, well, of course something's wrong, so don't test it. for radiocarbon, instead of investigating why we have this anomaly. It just doesn't conform to our theory, so it's wrong. Yes, that's right. So yeah, very interesting.

OK, now, so that's before the flood, but there are things after the flood where the Bible is a great resource. And let me give you an example. The phrase, after these things. after these things, starts in Genesis, and continues on into the book of Revelation. And understanding, oh, after these things is used in a historical context, for a historical sequence, in a historical reality, that means when I see after these things repeatedly in the book of Revelation, John is intending to write future history. in the New Testament, including the Gospel of John, is the most frequent user of that phrase. Today, with the ability to do multiple word searches together, we can find all those locations quickly. Which is why when I went looking, I didn't find any other commentary. that made note of the act of these fence breaks, because each of those individual words doesn't get you anywhere, you have too many places where it shows up, but the ability to put those together is now a unique ability.

There are ways in which our ability to study the Bible is as good as it has ever been. OK? In our time, the ability, I mean, I can pull up a, here's a picture of the excavation at Ur, where Abraham grew up, and where Abraham was from, right? I can pull up pictures of the excavation at Jericho, and there's the archaeologist in a report on it. I can look up things culturally and time-wise, and just instantly be places that previously would take quite a trip to the library possibly find those. So yeah, we have some tremendous study ability. So what's really interesting is we have the ability to be quick and accurate to a degree that has never been possible before. But has most of Christendom tracked with that? Most of Christendom has not tracked with that, unfortunately. OK, let's take a look. Another handout, just in front of your timeline, the top says gates. So here is something very interesting.

This is just one topic where in ancient times the word gate had huge significance in a lot of things. In our own time, I've got a couple of gates at my place, and there's no particular vast cultural significance to them. But in biblical times, the gates to a city had some particularly significant meanings. And it's all throughout the Old Testament. And actually, it goes on into the New Testament. Here's some examples.

To possess the gate of a city was to possess the city entirely. If you possess the gate, you've got the whole thing. So then, many cities did not have a designated marketplace within the city, but instead had their marketplace around the gates. 2 Kings 7-1.

So we talked about it, which store am I going to go to? Well, the store you're going to go to, back in Old Testament times, is you're going to go to the city gates. That's where you're going to buy and sell stuff. The next one, the official transactions are often done at city gates.

Genesis 23.3 and Ruth 4.1 and following. So you have some examples here.

Genesis 23.1.

Abraham needs to buy a place to bury Sarah. And the custom is you don't just dig a hole in the ground. You need to get a cave that's a natural cave or one that's carved out. And he needs one right now. And so where does he go to get that? He goes to the gates.

So negotiating this transaction, it's the cave of Machpelah in Hebron. And so not only is Sarah buried there, but several other patriarchs buried there. And they take them back into this long cave. And the last time anyone was back there that I know of, Yegev Yadin, this is an Israeli guy, he's dead now, sent in a 12 year old girl. back there because she could go back through the tight spaces. And he had the Muslim guards go away for a little bit in order for them to be able to do that.

But when he was negotiating for that cave, Abraham I'm talking about, Abraham was negotiating for the cave. The owner of the cave says, I'll give it to you for a break. And Abraham insists, I want full price. And so Abraham is haggling by faith. And according to the customs, because he says, I want full price. Why? Because the owner could then repossess it if you didn't pay full price. So he insists on full price because he doesn't want to all of a sudden have a situation where this cave is going to be somebody else's.

Sarah is buried here. So he wants it for a permanent possession, one that can be carried and passed along to family. So how does he do that? He goes to the gates. That's the place to do it. You don't go out in the orchard. You don't go back into some restaurant. You go to the gates. That's where you're going to do business.

Yeah? Just a question. One of the reasons that they would do this at the gate is that there would be young witnesses. Whereas, say, if you went to a restaurant or in your own home, it would just be your word against mine. Yeah. One is you would have people who were confident witnesses, but that's also where the elders gathered, right? And they would be naturally considered that these are my reliable witnesses. And they not only testified, but confirmed that this is a reasonable transaction. It was done properly. Yeah.

And most of the cities were walled. Yes. So this is where it's kind of like where TSA would be. Because you've got all the people coming in. This is where you're coming in and going out, period. Right. And so if you've got the marketplace there, you've got a lot of people looking at the gate. You've got people looking at the people coming in. So there's always observation of this particular area, right? It's kind of the center of activities, so to speak.

There's kings and royalty often addressed people of varying rank and status at the city gates. There's several different examples of that from 2 Samuel into Jeremiah. So then legal cases and judgments were often brought before officials and elders at the city gates. So you see that in Deuteronomy and frankly elsewhere. Judgments were commonly carried out at the city gates.

If they had a prison, the prison was only to hold somebody until you could get a trial together. And it was typically right near the city gates. And sometimes they might even think you're going to chain them right to the wall and that would be it. So there is no years and years of incarceration as a punishment. We're going to decide right now what's going to happen. When I was in Turkey, they still kind of do that. Because they had this big barbed wire fence area. The fence was probably about 20 feet high. And they just ran people in there that were temporarily imprisoned. And they lived in this fenced enclosure. Temporary prison. Yeah, and so in that culture, there is no, you're incarcerated for years and decades and all that. You're going to decide something. You're either going to pay this back, or you're going to lose your life, or whatever's going to happen, but it's going to be decided right here today. Yes?

Many of the cities had several gates, is that correct? Larger ones did. For example, Jerusalem, over time, even now, has a number of different gates. And as walls move, of course, then you get different gate configurations. So larger ones did, typically a smaller place, one or at most two gates. Actually two gates is rare, so a smaller place. Did they do specific things at specific gates, like sell vegetables at one gate and make... civil decisions at another gate, or was that kind of... Well, yeah, and there were certain variations on here's the place you enter.

Oftentimes, for example, at Jerusalem, the gates would point towards a particular place. Here is the Damascus gate, right? And that points towards Damascus. And then they'll have another place they call the Dun Gate, the southern part of Jerusalem, and that's because you would take in the animals for sacrifice. And that's where they take out the manure.

So you're not taking manure out this gate, this one. This is the only one. So then you had some larger cities had temporary prisons at the gates only to hold someone until the officials or elders could hear their case. Judgment did not include more time in the temporary prison. That just wasn't the outcome. To sit at the gates meant to be honored.

To enter the city gates often meant citizenship. You were a citizen if you entered these gates. Another thing is we think of citizens as citizens of a country. In ancient times, on into the time of the Roman Empire, citizenship was citizenship in a particular city. Paul, for example, was a Roman citizen. And that gave him certain rights and privileges, which ended up impacting the outcome towards the end of the Book of Acts.

So you have that. To lift up the heads of the gates was an expression for opening the gates and rejoicing and welcoming of someone. Conversely, gates that sank are an expression of hopelessness, despair, and defeat in the city. So, where we think of gates as, okay, I'm going to go down to Home Depot and get some hardware, and get some bolts, and get some boards, and I'm going to make myself a gate. And there's no particular attachment to it. You can see in the Old Testament, and actually it carries on into the New, gates were hugely significant, and everything pivoted around the gates. Everything pivoted around the gates. When Solomon became king, he upgraded the gates at Megiddo. He went and paid for upgrades. They had so many chambers at the entry of the gates, and he strengthened them and increased their size. So there was basically always barbarians, right? Yeah, you always had people you had to defend against.

Right, and so you've got the city, that's why you've got the walls, and you've got all these native and other people living out in the countryside that are basically always trying to get in, or you've got more to worry about. It's a big deal. I mean, it's hard. You would want to have, you'd actually want to minimize the number of gates, because the more gates you have, that's a potentially weak point. You'd want to strengthen the gates that you have.

July 1, 70 AD, the Romans started the battering rams at the gates of Jerusalem. Did they succeed? No. They couldn't get through the gates, and so they broke through by other means. They broke through by other means. By the middle of August, a month and a half later, they'd broken through, but it wasn't through the gates. So the gates held. They had to pick another means, and of course the Romans will ultimately keep at it until they win.

But it's just an instance. A gate is usually a weak point. You want to minimize them. You want to have them as strong as you can because you have enemies attack. So anyway, this is just an example where the Bible itself often provides lots of cultural information. OK, so back to our story line here. Let's go to, I'd like us to go down to the bottom of page three. We're going to run out of time here.

We have two worldviews of cultural development. And Nancy was puzzled as she was proofreading this for me, so I want to make sure I explain it so that you aren't puzzled. In the evolutionary view of cultural development, which does not include a worldwide flood, the idea is that civilization develops gradually.

And what were some of those places that civilization first developed? Ur. Pardon? Ur. Yeah, Ur and Mesopotamia. And so that includes Ur and Haran, that entire area along the Euphrates and Tigris River Sea, that that area is developing. Where else? And you've got Egypt along the northern part of the Nile River is developing as a civilization. And by the way, the great pyramids, those predate Abraham. They predate Abraham. They were there when Abraham came, and they were fairly new. So you have Egypt.

Where else do we have civilization beginning to develop? Another location that you have is over in India and China. So you get the Asian civilizations beginning to develop. So you've got that spread of civilization. And so Europe and America, they were long later. So we're late comers compared to the world's history. So you have civilization developing.

The biblical view of cultural development is you have culture developing from the time of the fall. And who was the first one to build a city? The Bible says Cain was the first one to start building a city. So you have the development of culture of different kinds, metallurgy, marriage, You have the development of culture and then the flood cuts everything off and from there you have both those who quickly start establishing civilization and those who are migrating in cultural decline.

Because of migration, right? You don't have big towers and city walls if you're migrating, right? Just don't bother, because you could be moving on. So the migration pattern tended towards a decline of culture. Whereas staying in the area around where the ark landed and around the Tower of Babel tended to allow for culture to develop quickly because they were more settled and situated. But those who migrated to other areas, there tended to be a possibility even of decline.

We've lost what we used to have because we're This is a partial answer on the top of page four to Jim's question. This is a partial answer where you've got this bar chart, and you see the length of time that different ones live. What it doesn't show is that they're staggered. And that's in another chart that's not in here, but we do have it available.

And just think through culturally, what does it mean When you start having people, or you have people who are living centuries, see an average commonly of nine centuries, what does that do culturally? Yeah. Well, it shows that Adam was able to pass on a lot of information to the generations that followed him. Okay. I mean, you're always giving more and more information and people are growing from that information. Yeah. In other words, what happens now is we'll have some generation overlap, but it's fairly minimal. Crystal?

Will there be more continuity and unity of tradition, culture, and ability to organize? Yeah, and the ability to pass things along and contact. I would sit down and talk at length to my grandfather, who lived to age 97. And so he and I would have lots and lots of conversations. And imagine talking to somebody who's been around 500 years. Whoa. And let's think about something else.

How long, roughly speaking, are women in our time and culture able to have babies? Only about 20 more years. Until they're 50s. A few decades is probably a fair summary. Some shorter, some longer. But a few decades. Can you imagine if you had babies for a few centuries?

What's that going to change? That's going to radically change how things happen. And it's going to change your perspective on subsequent generations and whatnot. I happen to have been able to have a fair amount of, by going through records and hearing my grandparents tell stories and things like that, I have a fair amount of information about my great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents, a covered wagon chest and things like that.

But I can go back maybe a couple of generations and have lots of contact information, but that's kind of unusual. Not everybody can do that. Imagine if you could have some kind of personal continuity for centuries. How many of us have talked to our, personally, to our great-great-great-great-grandfather? Right? Not too often. Yes? I'm just kind of chuckling. My dad had two aunts and an uncle who were both younger than him. His mom was the only child. And we've always thought, well, that's pretty funny.

But imagine here. So if Adam lived to 930 years and the sunset lived to 920, you would have cousins and siblings and what we would consider generational. I'd like you to meet my third cousin ten times removed. My first cousin we just happened to be 500 years apart. But it's also the fact that Adam's around.

I mean, it's cool listening to older generations talk about their stories of their life. Can you imagine the story that Adam had to tell? Holy smoke. Well, I think it brings out a good point that if a person doesn't understand the length of ages that people have, They won't understand that the information is very clear about what God had promised.

And so there was no missing it. I mean, just in my life. You know, I have a personal attachment to what my great-great-grandfather has done and how it's gotten us here. And I didn't know that. So just that you have that many hundreds of years, those who would want to follow God would not be missing out on any information. Because these people would have said, here's your information. So that they got on track is pretty standard.

Let's take a look at page five, and I'm looking at the slide that's titled Making a Covenant. And this is another one that's very significant throughout the Bible. It's very significant throughout the Bible, and it's an example of where we look to the Bible to gather our historical and cultural information.

In the time of the patriarch, human covenants had three common elements, an oath, and swearing by a deity. So that's why you'll sometimes have God saying, I swear by myself. Swearing by a deity and a physical gesture or sign, which could vary over time. The physical gesture might be, we have a meal together. The physical gesture might be, I put my hand under your thigh while I make this oath, right? And it might be a sacrifice, as it was in the case of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It would be a sacrifice to confirm it. So there was the particular content, and there was swearing by a deity, and then there was a gesture of some kind.

So here comes Jesus. The New Covenant was made in the Old Testament by Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah. That's the content of the New Covenant. It's not going to be fulfilled until the coming Millennial Kingdom. But it's confirmed, the gesture or sign is Christ's death on the cross. So that's why Jesus would say, this is the new covenant in my blood. That is the gesture or sign God uses to ratify and signify the new covenant.

I see some eyes. Yes? the covenant that God made with Abraham. He made a covenant with Abraham. We're still in a time where it hasn't completely been wrapped up. That's right. The covenant made with Abraham is not done. That's one reason God doesn't just say, hey we're done folks. This is it. It's because he made a promise to Abraham and he's going to keep it. and make subsequent promises as well.

Yeah. So if I heard this right, you said that the new covenant is going to be fulfilled in the millennial kingdom, and the sign of it is the cross? Yes. It was one of the things accomplished on the cross, Christ's death on the cross, is the signification or ratification of the new covenant that God made with Israel.

And the content of that is the quintessential Passage is Jeremiah 31, 31. I'll put my spirit within them and they will know the law. They know rabbis, they'll need the rabbi. They will know the law and be empowered by the spirit to live it out. Do you know the Ezekiel passage? I'd have to take a look at that. I think it's 3 in 39, but I'm not sure. So this is the Valley of Dry Bones, if you want to take a look at that. That's the passage I'm talking about. And I can email you all of it.

But the point being that here's a covenant that was established under Abraham. There's something that God does actually before that. When was there a covenant before Abraham? Adam. No, there's Noah. This is essentially the Edenic covenant, but ultimately with Noah, right? Noah is the prior one who has the covenant. And so, what was, there's an oath, what was, who was making an oath? God. God was making an oath, and what was his oath?

He wouldn't flood the earth anymore. Wouldn't flood the earth anymore, and what was the sign? Rainbow. Rainbow, okay. Here's the sign or gesture or, you know, something of that sort. and God's Word by Himself. So you have the three parts of the covenant, and you see those follow through into the New Testament. Where do you find out about that? In the Bible, by examining the Bible itself. I presume in Isaiah, was it 40 and later where it talks about that, or do you remember that? I'd have to look it up. Because there's about a dozen passages between Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. And it's in those three books.

Now I say that the question starts Jeremiah 31.31, but I'll email it to you.

We're out of time. Before people start pressing their noses against the wall. Thank you Lord for your word. Thank you for the resources that we have available to us. We really do live in an extraordinary time. A time where understanding your word is now possible more than ever before. And we just ask that you would help us learn and to use it so that we can know you better. We pray in Jesus' name.