Understanding the Bible / Scriptures

[0:00] Happy Mother's Day to all the moms. And then I get to say that to my mom who's here. So my mom and dad walked in this morning like, surprise, surprise.

[0:16] Interestingly enough, my parents were out of town for the winter, and I was house-sitting a little bit, taking care of the flowers and plants. And I was going through their bookshelves a few months ago, and I found this book, What is a Mother?

[0:38] So this is from my parents' bookshelf. But I thought I'd flip through here. You'll never know. You'll never know. I never will, right? But I found this poem I thought I'd read called Memories by Mary Bond Weber.

[0:56] Topped away in the memories of my childhood is the smile of a loving face, a gentle hand that led me. No other could fill its place.

[1:08] When childish woes oppressed me, and I was filled with terrors and tears, that loving hand caressed me when she shared the wisdom of years. Now years have grown upon me, both joy and sorrow I have known.

[1:23] But the memories always linger of that wonderful mother at home. I thought that was a great poem for Mother's Day.

[1:36] Well, we've been, we started last week in Sunday school talking about the topic of keys to understanding the scripture. And we talked last week about, well, we started with a Bible verse from Proverbs.

[1:55] That in all our getting, we should get what? Understanding. In all of our getting, getting understanding. And one of the best places to get understanding about who we are, about where we come from, about anything really having to do with life is from, from the Bible.

[2:19] And so it's important to understand, not just read the Bible, not just study it, but to actually understand it. If we don't understand the Bible, we can't get the wisdom that we need.

[2:32] So we're looking at keys. What are some keys to understanding, to understanding the Bible? Do we, do we know what happened here to my, I just went to sleep, huh?

[2:42] Oh, brother. Well, maybe, can somebody, David, you want to make sure that, oh boy.

[2:55] I want to make sure it stays on, if it goes off. Today, we're going to look at another key. And one of the keys to understanding the Bible is to look at the big picture.

[3:11] The Bible's a big book with a lot of detail in it. And, oh, I just realized, I think I know what happened here. There we go.

[3:24] Okay. Computer fell asleep. The key to understanding the details of the Bible is to understand the big picture. What's the Bible all about? You know, when you get a book from the library or buy, whether it's a novel or something like that, sometimes you'll look at the back of the book and it'll have some kind of summary or the, what do you call the inside pages of the, the leafs of the Bible or not the Bible, of books, right?

[3:53] Forward. Forward. You can, you can find out a little bit about what the book is about and why you ought to read it or a little bit about the contents.

[4:05] So what is the Bible about? The Bible is a history book. It's a book about the history of the universe. It's a book about how everything started and it also tells us about how everything's going to end and then everything in between.

[4:25] Genesis 1.1 says, in the beginning. And then if you look in the book of Revelation, which is at the end of the book, Revelations 21.1 says this, now I saw a new heaven and a new earth for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.

[4:47] It takes us all the way to the end. From the beginning of this heaven and this earth to the end where there's a new heaven and a new earth. It's also a book about people.

[5:02] It's a book about God and who he is and about man and who he is. It's a book about relationships. And the most important relationship that it speaks of is the relationship between God, the creator, and mankind.

[5:26] This last week, the family and I took a trip down to the Creation Museum. Has anybody been to the Creation Museum? Most people here.

[5:36] That's great. What a great resource within like, I mean it's a little over an hour, but within driving distance. It had been, I don't know, seven or eight years since we had been. So some of the kids had never been before.

[5:48] Most of them didn't remember going. But guys, did you have a good time? Everybody kept raving about it after we were done. But one of the most memorable experiences I remember I had going for the first time and then we did it again is they have a, they have a, an exhibit, I don't know if you call it an exhibit, called the Planetarium.

[6:13] Has anybody seen that at the Creation Museum? If you haven't, you have to pay extra, but it's absolutely incredible. So you go in and you look up and there's a screen.

[6:24] It's like a convex, concave, concave, right? Screen. Screen. That, and that has a show about our universe.

[6:36] And at the end of that presentation, you feel about this small, right? Because it takes you on a journey from our planet to looking at our sun and looking at our planets in this solar system.

[6:52] And then it zooms out to our galaxy with billions of stars in our galaxy. And then you think, wow, that's a big world.

[7:06] And then it zooms out further into the billions and billions of other galaxies out there in the universe. And, of course, there's only, there's a limit to how far we can zoom out.

[7:21] And we know from the, you know, that the universe goes beyond what we can even see or perceive. But it made me think of the scripture in Psalm 8.

[7:34] Psalm 8 says this, When I consider your heavens the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have ordained, what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you visit him?

[7:50] For you have made him a little lower than the angels and you have crowned him with glory and honor. you have made him to have dominion over the works of your hands. You have put all things under his feet.

[8:03] And with the grandness of God and what he created, with stars out there that make our sun, our own sun and our solar system look like a tiny little little dwarf, the God who created all those, made us and we are on his mind.

[8:28] And the Bible is a book about his relationship with us, the one who created the sun and the moon and the stars. Isn't that incredible? So is this a book worth reading and finding out about the God who created us and about his relationship with us?

[8:47] It certainly is. The other thing that answers in Genesis the ones who put together the Creation Museum, they have a great I don't know how to call it illustration, as part of their exhibit they have the seven seas of history.

[9:14] The seven seas of history. And my kids, there's a guy named Buddy Davis who actually helped design a lot of the dinosaurs in the Creation Museum. But he has a song about the seven seas of history.

[9:28] Can any of my kids sing it? Caleb? The seven seas of history. Creation, Christ, and the cross.

[9:41] The montemation that is mercy. The seven seas of history. All right. Good job. Music makes things easy to memorize.

[9:55] Isn't that great? So, creation. So there's seven seas. Creation, corruption, catastrophe, confusion, Christ, the cross, and consummation.

[10:10] And what a great summary of the story of the Bible. I think there's some missing pieces in there. But we'll, so this morning we've got about 35 minutes and we're going to do an overview of the whole Bible.

[10:21] Are you ready? So, I've got it. I had a picture. Is this coming up?

[10:32] If I turn my... No, right? All right. It's coming back up.

[10:43] But I have here, it'll come up in just a second, an illustration of all the books in the Bible. And it helps to kind of color code them and organize them in a cool way. But I'm going to be referencing this.

[10:57] Hopefully it comes up as we go through. But what's the first book of the Bible? Genesis. It's the book, we call it the book of beginnings. Really, Genesis is one of the most important books in the Bible because it lays a foundation for everything.

[11:15] An interesting thing about the book of Genesis, you know, the first 12 chapters of the book of Genesis represents about half of the history of the entire biblical record.

[11:31] So if you think about the Bible as a history book, the first half of all of that history that's recorded there from creation until Christ and a little bit after Christ, right? That's what's recorded in the Bible.

[11:43] That's the span of about 4,000 years and the first 2,000 from creation to a guy named Abraham represents about half of that history.

[11:55] Those first 11 chapters before we get to Abraham, David, do you want to try to hit the power button or something? Sorry, technical difficulties.

[12:07] But the first 11 chapters are somewhat controversial and if you look throughout history, people have tried to figure out how do I understand these first 11 books?

[12:19] Are they real, true history? Because some things in there are kind of, they seem fanciful. There's talking snakes and, you know, a global flood.

[12:34] Water covers the entire world. How could that possibly be? And so over millennia, people have wondered, are those first 11 books real, true history?

[12:46] or is it just kind of mythology or a story that helps us understand things? There's actually a book that came out recently from a well-known Christian apologist, William Lane Craig, who I have a lot of respect for, but he's making a case in his book, I'm trying to remember the name of it, that the first 11 books of the Bible are, what does he call it, mythohistory.

[13:16] mythohistory. What does that mean? Well, anyway, I think he's sorely mistaken, but I think we can take the Bible because when we look at, for example, Jesus Christ, does Jesus Christ, God the Son, does he reference any of the first 11 chapters of Genesis?

[13:39] He certainly does, doesn't he? And does he seem to reference them as history? It seems that he does, without a doubt. So those first 11, 12, those first 11 especially chapters are really important.

[13:57] So one, creation. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. In the beginning, God. Before creation, there was God. And then God created everything that is.

[14:09] one of the things that people are interested in, and it doesn't matter where they are in the world, people want to know where did we come from? Why am I here?

[14:20] Where did I come from? How did all this start? Today we have a popular explanation called evolution to try to attempt to explain origins.

[14:33] But evolution fails on so many frames. It's a great story. Evolution tells a grand, interesting, even compelling story. But when you start to look at it closely, it falls apart.

[14:48] How do we get all the different complexity in the world that we have? Evolution can't explain all those things.

[15:01] But in the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, there was something that God said about his creation at the end of each day, or almost each day, not every day, but the end of most of the days of creation, there was something that he said about his creation.

[15:17] What was it? That it is good. That's exactly right. And so, we'll see if we can get this to come up.

[15:29] And so God created a good creation. creation. The next part of the story is that there was something that we today call the fall, in which man, the first man and the first woman, sinned.

[15:44] And they brought death and suffering into the world. It wasn't part of God's original design, but it was something that came after because of sin. But with that, we read in Genesis 3.15, I'll pull out my Bible, that there was a promise.

[16:08] And we see, it's one of these little things, it's a little detail that we may not pay attention to. Just like, you ever read a novel and there's just telling a story and towards the end, right, things get really interesting and maybe there's a mystery or some problem to be solved.

[16:30] And sometimes later on in the book, you find out that a detail early on that was kind of, you know, almost, it was just a small detail in the book, ends up becoming hugely important.

[16:47] And the Bible's like that. As you read the Bible from beginning to end, there are these little details, and once you start to get towards the end, you find out that some of these details are hugely important.

[17:08] I think we might just skip the whole visual because of technical difficulties. But in Genesis 3.15, God says this, and I will put enmity between you.

[17:21] He's talking to the serpent who tempted the man and the woman, or tempted the woman. I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed, and you shall bruise, sorry, he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.

[17:39] What in the world does that mean? Who knows? It's just one of those little details that you just kind of, okay, that's interesting. What does that mean? We'll come back to that later. The next big part of the story is as time went by, sin got worse.

[17:55] People, the Bible says that the thoughts of man's heart was only evil continually. Wow. And God made a decision that he was going to bring judgment on the world and destroy everything that he had created, everything that he had created and started over.

[18:13] And that's the account we have of the flood. sin became unbearable and God judged the world. He saved eight people on a boat and started over.

[18:27] The next big part of the story is the division of the nations into the nations of the world. Why are there nations? Why are there so many languages? You know, the people have tried to study the history of language and you think from an evolutionary standpoint, right, there was probably some kind of original ancient language, right, and then everything split off from there.

[18:53] But as people who study languages look at all the languages in the world and they try to point them back to one individual language, they just can't do it.

[19:05] There isn't, they don't have a source in a single language. And why is that? Well, the Bible tells us God created all the languages or at least the original ones of the world in an instant.

[19:20] And we have the story of the Tower of Babel and God made a division because man was trying, in their pride, mankind was trying to unite, to build something against the Creator, to lift up themselves above God.

[19:40] God divided them. The next big part of the story, we're still here in the first 11 chapters or now we're getting to chapter 12 in the book of Genesis, is a story about a man named Abraham.

[19:57] And God chose this man Abraham out of all the people in the world to create a nation from. Abraham had a son named Isaac and Isaac had a son named Jacob and through that lineage there was a promise made to Abraham and ultimately the promise was fulfilled through Jacob.

[20:20] God made a covenant that he would make Abraham a great nation. And this nation of Israel and the name of Israel comes from where?

[20:31] Anybody know? Israel was the name that God gave to Jacob. Abraham, then Isaac, and then Jacob. And God has done this a few times in the Bible if you're paying attention.

[20:43] God has changed the names of several people, right? And one of the ones that he gave a new name was Jacob and he gave them the name of Israel. So when we talk about the nation of Israel, we're talking about the children of Jacob.

[20:56] Israel, so Israel, this nation, becomes a huge part of the story of the Bible. And if you don't understand that God's focus is on this nation called Israel, you'll be completely confused.

[21:14] It's an important plot line in the Bible. The next book is Exodus. And Exodus is about Israel's enslavement. And then also about Israel's rescue from that enslavement.

[21:31] In the book of Exodus, we have God giving the law to the nation of Israel. This set of rules and commandments given to Israel. And that's really, really important.

[21:44] It comes along with a covenant that if they follow this law, then God will bless them. That's basically it. If they will keep this law, this set of rules, God will bless them.

[21:59] And then if we look at the next four books, including Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, part of the Pentateuch, we call the first five books of the Bible the Pentateuch, we see a few things.

[22:13] One, they're wandering around in the wilderness. God had promised them a land, but it took them a while to get there. it also details a lot out all the, well, it details the law.

[22:31] And then there's another one of these little, tiny little details that comes into play a little bit later in the story. And it's in Deuteronomy.

[22:42] If you have a Bible, turn there and we'll look at it. It's an interesting scripture. Deuteronomy, chapter 18. Deuteronomy 18, verse 15, says this, The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your midst, from your brethren.

[23:16] Him you shall hear. Okay. What's that all about? It's interesting, it's this little detail.

[23:28] The book of Joshua is about this nation of Israel finally conquering the land that was promised to them and entering that promised land. In the book of Judges, we see the people of Israel going back and forth and back and forth.

[23:49] It's a cycle of freedom and then bondage. One of the key verses in Judges is in verse 17 or chapter 17, verse 6.

[24:00] It says this, In those days there was no king in Israel and everyone did what was right in his own eyes. During that time there was a cycle of going back and forth between being under the blessing of God and then being under judgment.

[24:17] And then the next, what, six books, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles is about the establishment of this kingdom that God promised.

[24:29] And a kingdom has three different aspects. It's important to think about this because this concept of a kingdom comes up a lot throughout the scriptures from here all the way to the end.

[24:41] And a kingdom has to have three things. You have to have a land to rule over. You have to have a people to rule over.

[24:53] And then you need a what? A king, right? You need all those three things. That's what makes up a kingdom. So in the first case, we had this land of Canaan, the promised land.

[25:08] The people were Israel. And the first king was Saul. We know that Saul was originally replaced by King David.

[25:22] But all those six books tell about the history of the kingdom of Israel. One of the things that happens in the middle of the story is that this kingdom is actually divided into two.

[25:35] One is called Israel. The other is called Judah. There becomes two lines. The line of David and Judah and then another line. And really, Judah and Benjamin are the two nations that make up what we refer to in general as Judah and the other ten make up Israel.

[25:57] And then finally, at the end of this part of the story, the nations, both of the nations are taken captive and carried away. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah talk about the return from that captivity to rebuild the temple that was destroyed and really to rebuild the city of Jerusalem.

[26:19] And we get into the prophets. The prophets are probably the hardest books in the Bible to understand and read. How many people agree with that? Anybody?

[26:30] A few of you? I guess Revelation is probably the other one, right? And the prophets are, one of the reasons the prophets are hard to understand, they come at the end of what we call the Old Testament, but they actually take place during a lot of the history from the kingdom through the captivity and then through the return from the captivity.

[26:57] All these prophets. We have Bible scholars delineate them into two groups, the major prophets and the minor prophets, but really that kind of division isn't really helpful because all it describes isn't like whether the prophets were like really important or not important.

[27:17] That's what you might think, right? The major prophets were really important and the minor prophets were less important. That's not what it is. The major prophets just means they wrote a lot of words. That's all that means. They're bigger books.

[27:28] The minor prophets, they're shorter books. But, you know, sometimes you can write a really important book in a few words, right? The prophets are typically warnings to Israel, but also other nations, but they also talk about hope for the future.

[27:50] You can divide the prophets up into four different groups and time frames. One, there are prophets who are prophets to the nation of Israel or the half nation of Israel.

[28:04] Those are the books of Jonah, Joel, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah. Then you have books or prophets to Judah, the other half of the nation.

[28:16] Those are Nahum, Zephaniah, Habakkuk, and Jeremiah. Then you have prophets that were prophets during the captivity while they were taken away. Daniel, Obadiah, and Ezekiel.

[28:28] And then the fourth group is the prophets who prophesied during the return from the captivity and that's Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.

[28:39] So, when you read the prophets, understanding that context really helps. It doesn't help completely because they're still hard, but it does help somewhat.

[28:52] Then we get into what is commonly referred to as the New Testament. But I think that's such a bad way to divide the Bible.

[29:02] Really, the way that I like to think about the divisions, the big divisions between the two big divisions between the Bible is I like to call them the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Scriptures. Because if we call them the Old Testament and the New Testament, it kind of throws an idea in there.

[29:20] It's not necessarily true that one is the Old Covenant with Israel and the other is a New Covenant. And a lot of people think, well, the New Covenant was not with Israel, that's with the different people.

[29:30] Well, actually, is that really true? And by the way, between this Old Testament and New Testament, or the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Scriptures, is a period of about 400 years where there was silence.

[29:48] There wasn't any Scripture written, there wasn't any prophecy from prophets. So, in the Christian Scriptures, one of the things that I think causes a lot of confusion is that people think, well, it's either a whole set of new stories, or God is doing a whole brand new thing.

[30:11] And that's not true. When we start in the New Testament or the Christian Scriptures, it's just a continuation of the same story. It's a continuation. God is still dealing with a people called the Jews.

[30:25] in Matthew 1.1, it's not that God started dealing with a whole different group of people. He's still continuing to go to the Jews.

[30:38] So, in the Gospels, the Gospels is the history of the life, or the four Gospels, is the history of the life of the Messiah, who was proclaimed by the prophets.

[30:51] And we start to, as we read about the life of Jesus, we go back and see some of these hints that we read about before. The one written or said by Moses, that there's a prophet that will come after me, and him you must listen to.

[31:08] And who was that written to? That was written to the Jews in their law. Moses warned, he said, there's a prophet coming after me, and you have to listen to him.

[31:21] Did they listen? Well, that's part of the story, isn't it? As you read through the Gospels, we have this story about Jesus and his teachings, and Jesus is a great guy, and he did all kinds of miracles, and he was proclaimed to be the Messiah.

[31:38] But one of the things that Jesus did during his earthly ministry was he kept proclaiming a certain message. And what was that message? was it trust in the cross?

[31:53] The message was repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. There's that kingdom again. Jesus' message was repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

[32:06] And who was Jesus sent to? He was sent to the Jews. In fact, he explicitly says, this is one of these little details that confuses so many people.

[32:17] There was a woman, a Seraphonician woman. And she came to him and she said, I'm trying to remember, my daughter keeps getting thrown into having epileptic seizures, seizures of some kind anyway.

[32:34] And she's asking for healing. And what does he call her? A dog. And so many Christians are totally confused. Why would Jesus, right? You know, sweet Jesus that we put up in our homes, you know, his picture, why would he call a woman who's reaching out for help in need a dog?

[32:51] Why would he do that? She was a Gentile. She was a Gentile. And if you don't understand that Jesus was sent to the Jews, and when he sent out his disciples, remember, what did he say?

[33:05] Go only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Don't go anywhere else. Only go to the Jews. It's an important part of the story. But his job during those three years was to call the nation of Israel to repentance and to prepare themselves for a kingdom, a kingdom that was promised a returning of the kingdom, of their original kingdom, of the lineage of David, with a king of the lineage of David to come back to the earth, come back to the land of Israel.

[33:42] And then finally it ends with his death, burial, and resurrection, which was somewhat of a surprise to everybody, even his own followers. When we get into the book of Acts, the book of Acts is such an important part of the story.

[34:00] The book of Acts tells of what happened after Jesus died, and then it ends with the last part of church history, or at least biblical church history.

[34:17] But there's a tremendous storyline that we need to follow in that book about what happens. Acts is probably one of the most misunderstood or even just neglected books in the Bible as far as trying to understand it.

[34:34] But it's pivotal to understanding so much, especially of what we call the New Testament or the Christian scriptures. In the book of Acts, in the beginning, what happens?

[34:46] Is there an immediate shift from Israel to a different group? No. That call to the Jews to repent and to wait for or expect or prepare for the kingdom that's coming is continued, at least in that first part of the book of Acts.

[35:10] But what we see happen is that Israel as a whole, or at least the leaders, reject that call to trust in Jesus as the Messiah, to believe the prophet that Moses talked about.

[35:24] They rejected him. And God, there's a plot twist in the Bible. And God calls a man named Paul to be an apostle, but not just any apostle.

[35:46] What kind of apostle is he? Or what is he an apostle to? To the Gentiles. And that's different. We had other apostles, right? We had the twelve original apostles, and they were apostles to the Jews.

[36:02] But this Paul guy, he's an apostle. He's like the thirteenth apostle, right? Some people think, well, maybe he was the twelfth apostle. But who was the twelfth apostle? Matthias, right?

[36:14] A lot of people missed that. Matthias was the twelfth apostle. Paul was the, you know, quote, thirteenth apostle, but he was called the apostle to the Gentiles.

[36:29] That's as Christians, sometimes we have a hard time looking back without our Christian filter at the rest of the Bible. But if you can do that, you can imagine how shocking and what a huge turn this is in the Bible, in the book of Acts, for God to turn, we find out later, away from his people, Israel, and towards a people called the Gentiles.

[36:57] Gentiles. And there's this turn from the Jewish kingdom to a group called the body of Christ that is made up of Gentiles.

[37:12] And this kingdom, this whole kingdom thing is just, some people think, there are some people out there who think that the whole kingdom thing was just completely got rid of, it's taken off the shelf, or was taken off the shelf.

[37:25] But actually it was just put on hold. We're putting it on hold. God is turning to a group of people called the Gentiles, and this people called the Jews.

[37:39] We're putting that whole thing on hold, but not forever. We'll find out. When you're reading through the book of Acts, or really any place in the New Testament, it's important that there's four groups of people that we need to consider.

[37:56] If you can identify those four groups of people whenever you're reading, it'll help you to understand the details in the scripture. One, there are unbelieving Jews. Jews who may believe in God, but when I say unbelieving, they don't believe in the Messiah.

[38:11] They don't believe in Christ. They don't believe that he is the Messiah, or he's the one that Moses talked about. Two, you have believing Jews, those who believe and trust in the Messiah.

[38:23] Gentiles. The third group is you have unbelieving Gentiles. That's most of the Gentile world. Some of them have never heard, some of them have and have rejected Jesus.

[38:35] The fourth group is the believing Gentiles, those who trust in Christ and in his atoning blood for their sins. Those are four distinct groups, and if you end up mixing those groups, you'll have some confusion in understanding the New Testament.

[38:56] The next set of scriptures are what we call the Pauline epistles. These are letters written by Paul. Let me see if I can remember all of them.

[39:08] Well, I'm not going to try. I wish we had our visual up here. I could just point to them. But the Pauline epistles, it actually ends up making up most of the New Testament. And Paul's epistles, one, are written to who?

[39:25] Believing Gentiles, the body of Christ, this group of people called the body of Christ. And he usually splits up his books into two parts. Spiritual teaching about who we are as Christians, what God made us, designed us to be as Christians, our spiritual identity, and two, practical ways in which we can live as Christians.

[39:50] Practical ways in which we can live as Christians. The next set of epistles or groups of books are commonly referred to as the general epistles. In general, in the sense that they aren't by Paul.

[40:04] We basically have Paul's epistles and then everything else. But I think a better name to give those epistles is we can call them the Jewish epistles because they're written by Jews.

[40:16] Now, Paul was a Jew, right? But one of the interesting things about Paul is he was another one of those who got his name changed. God changed his name from a Jewish name to what?

[40:27] A Gentile name. Saul is a Jewish name. Paul is a Gentile name. He was to be the apostle to the Gentiles. In a sense, God made Paul a Gentile.

[40:39] And, you know, that, I say in a sense because that wasn't completely true. he remained, of course, a Jew. But these Jewish epistles are written by Jews who were continuing in the law and the kingdom.

[41:02] And that's such an important distinction to make in understanding those books and those letters. There are letters written, and most of them, it's stated explicitly.

[41:14] They're written to the Jewish people, to Jewish believers in Messiah. That's important to keep in mind. The last book is the book of Revelation.

[41:26] The book of Revelation is a book about the future. But it's a book, I think you can split it up into two parts. It's a book about the future for Israel, specifically, but then a book about the future of the whole world.

[41:44] It's a book about the future for the new heavens and the new earth. So, that kingdom that was promised will ultimately be restored to Israel.

[41:57] It'll include a land, a people, and a king. And then Revelation is a book about the future judgment of the whole world.

[42:11] This is what's going to happen in the end. The whole world will be judged. And ultimately ends with the future restoration of paradise. What God originally intended, what he originally created for the world to be, God will bring about in the very end.

[42:30] One of the things that I kind of tried to weave in there just a little bit is that this man, this God man, Jesus Christ, the Messiah, is woven throughout the Bible from beginning to end.

[42:47] And there's people who have written up lists of every book in the Bible and tried to show how Jesus, the Messiah, God the Son, is woven throughout every single book of the Bible.

[43:04] And it's actually, you know, some of them may be a little bit forced, but not very many. I'm just going to read a few.

[43:15] In Genesis, Jesus Christ is the seed of the woman. In Exodus, Jesus is the Passover lamb. In Leviticus, he's our high priest in numbers.

[43:26] He's the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night. in Deuteronomy, he is the prophet like unto Moses. I'll skip through a few. In Proverbs, he is our wisdom.

[43:39] In the Song of Solomon, he is the loving bridegroom. In Malachi, he's the son of righteousness. In Matthew, he is the king of the Jews, the Messiah. In Romans, he is the justifier.

[43:53] In Galatians, he is our liberty. In Ephesians, he's the head of the church. In 1 and 2 Thessalonians, he's the coming king. In 1 and 2 Timothy, he is our mediator.

[44:05] In Hebrews, he is our perfection. And then I'm going to go to Revelation. In Revelations, it says, Jesus is the king of kings and the Lord of all lords.

[44:17] Amen. So, in summary, understanding that whole big picture of the Bible, the story line in the Bible, so important.

[44:29] If we don't understand that big, you know, the big storyline, all the little plot twists, we want to understand the details. Amen. All right. I'm going to, well, we have a few minutes, I guess.

[44:40] Any thoughts or comments or questions? Joe? One other thing. Paul, when he was converted, he's the Gentile, the apostle of the Gentile, but he didn't go to the Gentiles right away.

[44:57] He actually went to the Jews. He went to the synagogue in Damascus and preached Christ. It wasn't until he went to Mount Moriah. He's got his education, his three-year education, that the mystery came down to us about the Gentile.

[45:12] At first, he was also Hebrew scripture, you might say, versus Christian scripture. He was part of the, and the gospels, of course, are more Hebrew, obviously, Hebrew scripture than the later books that Paul wrote.

[45:27] Yeah, that's a great point. So Paul said, Paul, his ministry, or his, he said, I always go to the Jews first and then to the Gentiles.

[45:37] Give them an opportunity, right? How did that turn out, usually? Not well. Unfortunately. Of course, the same thing happens with Gentiles, right?

[45:48] A lot of times, he went to Gentiles and they rejected him as well. Happens today. All right. All right.

[46:14] Well,