At any rate, this is a presentation on sanctification for the Church and common grace for the world. And last night we talked about the problem of rising biblical illiteracy in the world and in the Church. And I'm not saying that the Church should therefore dumb things down and forget about biblical literacy. What I was saying last night is that as we present the Gospel, we need to present it ways that the non-literate biblical or biblically non-literate world can understand the gospel. But then, as you read the New Testament, you are commanded, we are commanded to study the Word of God. And that's why I've asked, therefore, Mr. Irvin, to read 2 Timothy 3. I invite you to turn your Bibles to that We have sung Psalm 19b about how Jehovah's perfect law, or the Lord's perfect law, restores the soul again. Paul has some things to say to Timothy about that topic. So, Mr. Rowan, if you could come and read 2 Timothy 3, verses 1-17. But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty, For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness but denying its power. Avoid such people, for among them are those who creep into the households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth. But just as Janus and Jambres opposed Moses, so these men also oppose the truth, men corrupted in mind and disqualified regarding the faith. But they will not get very far, for their folly will be plain to all, as was of those two men. You, whoever, have followed my teaching, my conduct, my aim in life, my faith, my patience, my love, my steadfastness, my persecutions and sufferings that happened to me at Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra, while persecutions I endured, yet from them all The Lord rescued me. Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evil people and imposters will go on, and from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. But as for you, continuing in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how From childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction and training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good. Thank you. We talked last night about the mercy like heresy and the fact that In the church, in the early church and in today's church, a lot of people want to emphasize the New Testament and forget about the Old Testament. And I just want to point out my scriptures. Timothy had the Old Testament. He couldn't have had the New Testament from childhood. From childhood, he had Genesis to Malachi, perhaps the Law, the Prophets, the Writings, Genesis all the way down to 2 Chronicles in that order. A lot of people are surprised by that. They can't imagine that the Old Testament is relevant. But Paul says to continue in what you have learned. So I just want to zero in on verses 14 through 17. And continue with what you've learned for two reasons, or at least for one reason. Why? Because you know those from whom you learned it. You might want to ask, from whom did Timothy learn? Well, in 2 Timothy 1, verse 5, we have these words. I have been reminded of your sincere faith, which first lived in your grandmother Lois, and in your mother Eunice, and I am persuaded now lives in you also. Timothy was a person of mixed heritage. His father was a Greek as you hear in the book of Acts, but his grandmother and his mother Lois were godly people who knew the Old Testament. They knew their Bibles. And so Timothy is told to continue to reading his Hebrew Bible, or at least his Greek Septuagint, we'll talk about that in a little bit, and to continue reading Genesis through Malachi. Notice a little bit about what Timothy learned. He learned that the Holy Scriptures are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. Of what use is the Old Testament? Well, Jesus makes it very clear. Twice in the book of Luke, we have a reference, at the end of the book of Luke, we have a reference to how the Old Testament scriptures point us to Christ. So I've asked Craig to read the famous story of the road to Emmaus. So I invite you to turn to Luke 24, to read verses 13 through 53. Luke 24, verse 13. That very day, two of them were going to a village named Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem. And they were talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing together, Jesus himself drew near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him. And he said to them, What is this conversation that you are holding with each other as you walk? And they stood still, looking sad. Then one of them, named Cleopas, answered him, Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened here in these last days? And he said to them, What things? And they said to him, Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, a man who was a prophet, mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death and crucified him. But we had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things happened. Moreover, some women of our company amazed us. They were at the tomb early in the morning, and when they did not find his body, they came back saying that they had even seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but him they did not see. And he said to them, O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken. Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory? And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself. So they drew near to the village to which they were going. He acted as if he were going further. But they urged him strongly, saying, Stay with us, for it is toward evening, and the day is now far spent. So he went in to stay with them. When he was at table with them, he took the bread, and blessed it, and broke it, and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened, and they recognized him, and he vanished from their sights. They said to each other, Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures? And they rose that same hour, and returned to Jerusalem. And they found the eleven, and those who were with them gathered together, saying, The Lord has risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon. And they told him what had happened on the road and how he was known to them in the breaking of the bread. As they were talking about these things, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, Peace to you. And they were startled and frightened and thought they saw a spirit. And he said to them, Why are you troubled? And why do doubts arise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is myself. Touch me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see that I have. And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. And while they still disbelieved for joy and were marveling, he said to them, have you anything here to eat? They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate before them. Then he said to them, these are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures and said to them, Thus it is written that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead. And that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things and behold, I am sending the promise of my father upon you, but stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high. Thank you. Focus in therefore on Luke 24 and in verses 26 especially, and 27, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, Jesus explained to them what was said in all the scriptures concerning himself. And again, no Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, Book of Revelation, all of that is based on the old covenant scriptures in the Hebrew Bible. And then going forward in verse 32, they asked each other, not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the scriptures to us. So you have therefore the affirmation that the Old Covenant Testament, the Old Testament is the Word of God and is able to make us wise for salvation. It is something that we should be considering constantly. And then at the end, 45 and he opened their minds. They could understand the scriptures in 44. This is what I told you while I was still with you Everything must be filled that is written about me in the law of Moses the prophets and the Psalms So I commend you the Old Testament as well as the New Testament I think you should be reading and studying both test every day. I commend to daily family worship private daily worship regular weekly worship and ordinances of the church, Christian education hour. Paul to the Ephesian elders says the same thing, and he says in Acts 20 to 27, I have given you the whole counsel of God. As he was saying goodbye to the Ephesian elders, really for the last time, he says in Acts 20, 27, I have not, let's see, 2027, I have not hesitated to proclaim to you the whole will of God. If you only read the New Testament, you only get the partial counsel of God. You only get the partial of God. You need the entire scripture. And in Acts 17, one through two, we get a bit of that. In Acts 17, when they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, he came to Thessalonica where there was a Jewish synagogue. As his custom was, Paul went into the synagogue and on three Sabbath days, he reasoned with them from the scriptures, explaining and proving that the Christ had to suffer and rise from the dead. This Jesus I'm proclaiming is the Messiah, is the Christ. Some of the Jews were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a large number of God-fearing Greeks. We'll come back to that in a little bit. Not a few prominent women. And then in Acts chapter 18, verses 24 through 28, we hear about Apollos. Meanwhile, Acts 18.24. Meanwhile, a Jew named Apollos, a native of Alexandria, came to Ephesus. He was an alerted man with a thorough knowledge of the Scriptures. He had been instructed in the way of the Lord, and he spoke with great fervor and taught about Jesus accurately, though he knew only the baptism of John. He began to speak boldly in the synagogue, Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they invited him to their home and explained to him the way of God more adequately. When Apollos wanted to go to Achaia, the brothers encouraged him and wrote to the disciples there to welcome him. On arriving, he was a great help to those who by grace had believed, for he vigorously refuted the Jews in public debate, proving from the scriptures that Jesus was the Christ, that Jesus was the Messiah. Recall in high school days hearing a pastor give a statement that has always impressed me. Remember him saying, he was sort of an intense kind of fellow, the Bible is not a lazy man's book. And it is not. The Bible is not a lazy man's book. It is something that you must diligently study day after day. And we're going to sing later on some 119M, which I remember from my Sunday school days. In between ending of Sunday school and church, we would have what was called closing exercises. We didn't do exercises, but we had closing recited verses and so forth. And at 1040, we would be called together and we'd sing Psalm 119 of those days in the blue. It was part 13. Oh, how I love thy law it is, my study all the day. It makes me wiser than my foes, its precepts with me stay. And so that is my commendation to you. To study all of the scripture, there's 1,700 pages roughly of printed material. So there's lots to study. Every time you think you've got it, there's something you'll see that you haven't seen before. something you said well I read first Corinthians two years ago and you'll suddenly see some reading again that God in his spirit works in your heart to see that you had not seen in your previous readings. That will happen from this time until you leave this earth as you study the Word of God. In your handout I have a chart and I'm going to pull this in some of the covenants, at least that are stated explicitly in the Bible. Later on, we'll talk about the chart up there. It's up on the board. On the right hand side, you have a biblical frame of reference for covenant theology, federal theology. And we have a great big picture in Genesis 1 and more specific picture in Genesis 2 and 3 of creation, of God giving a moral law to Adam to not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I would wonder, and I think John Calvin might agree with me, about the tree of life and its role, perhaps as a sacrament in the Garden of Eden. I'm not going to go into that direction, but it's something to think about. the scripture says, of any tree of the garden you may eat, but not of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And so Calvin, in one part of his Institute, talks about how the Tree of Life is a sacrament, or sacramental in nature, and how indeed, in the Westminster larger catechism, the Tree of Life is talked about as the pledge of God's covenant. We have famous people you've heard about, Enoch and Noah and Babel and the Tower of Babel. There are other people I mentioned yesterday as we talked about the line of Seth and the line of Cain. And then we see the corruption of the world and God washing the world with water. And it is at that point that we have the first biblical reference to Barit, or covenant. And God says to Noah before the flood, I will establish my covenant with you. That covenant is really with all of us. That is to say, it is with the whole earth. And it's a promise of God that he won't destroy the earth in the way that he has destroyed the earth in the great cataclysm of the flood. Rather, There is a warning that there is a blessing, but there is also a sense in which yes, we have to have a sacrifice for sin Eventually we'll find out As she is God unfolds his revelation that he is going to destroy the world by fire as we read yesterday in 2nd Peter around 2000 BC we have Abraham starting around Genesis 12 and It's sort of interesting. We don't have, this is the generation of Abraham. Instead, we have, this is the generation of Terah, which is Abraham's father. And Abraham doesn't have his own generation, but Abraham's son, I believe, ties. This is the generation of Isaac. But here you have, this is the generation of Abraham. Abraham is called Babylon. He goes up to the Fertile Crescent, up to Paddan Aram. And then God says, leave Badan Aram and go down into Canaan. And, um, um, I will show you the land. I will give you the thing you need to understand. And it was never explained to me until I really visited the land of Israel is that the land of Canaan is caught in between two huge empires, the Egyptian empire, and the world of Mesopotamia. And from 3000 BC down to 1000 BC or so, Egypt ran things and Abraham lived in the shadow of Egypt. Up to the north is Babylon. There is no real Babylonian empire until about 900 BC. And then there's a series of folks from the north who are headaches for the Israelites. And so you have a power center in Egypt for 2000 years, you have a power center in Mesopotamia for about 700 years, 900 BC down to maybe 300 BC or so. And then there's an in-between period when God blesses Saul to some degree, but certainly David and Solomon, and the kingdom of Israel is able to flourish in a land in between two very scary empires. Because the Egyptians, as you've learned from the book of Exodus, were not nice people, nor indeed were some of the Babylonians, especially the Assyrians. And so in the middle is this world of Canaan. And the Canaanites were not a united people. There was no United States of Canaan. And so God sends Abraham down into Canaan says, I'm going to give you this land. Abraham perhaps wondered what in the world was going to happen because The Egyptians, even later on after Abraham's time, are going to come up in New Kingdom Egypt and try to conquer that east coast of the Mediterranean and dominate the trade routes along the coast of the Mediterranean. The world of Israel is about the size of the state of New Jersey. It is not a big area. If you ever get a chance to go, I really do recommend you to go to just the sense of the land. For all I knew was the size of Texas. I didn't know how big Israel was. It really is about the size of the state of New Jersey. It is not a large amount of territory. Somewhere around 1446 BC, some dispute as to what year it is, Moses leads the people out of Egypt. out of New Kingdom Egypt, which is Egypt at its most powerful point. So when Moses confronts Pharaoh, and we don't know which Pharaoh he's confronting, Moses is confronting pretty much the most powerful person in the world. The only other person who comes close would be the Chinese emperor, but he's far away. And we have then the covenant that God makes, first of all, with Noah. Then the covenant with Abraham in which God promises him the land. And then the people have multiplied over a 400 year period and God brings them into the land of Canaan because he promised to Abraham that you and your descendants will have this land, but not yet because the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet complete. But there came a time when the iniquity of the Amorite was complete. And God brought the Israelites into the land. And the only thing that Abraham really caught in the land in his lifetime was a cemetery plot. Machpelah, a cave in Hebron. And that's it. That's all he got. He got a cemetery plot and he bought it from the Hittites who were in the land and one of the Ites. And so at any rate, you have this promise to Abraham. But as the book of Hebrews says, Abraham saw the future. He trusted God, he believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness. So that therefore Abraham receives the grace of God, believes God, even though he's not going to see any kind of tangible thing except for a cemetery plot in Hebron. After Sinai, after that, Moses gathers the people at the foot of Mount Sinai and you have the institution of Israel as a nation so therefore we call that in covenant theology the Sinaitic Covenant or the Mosaic Covenant and you have the giving of the law, the establishment of Israel as a nation. We move, therefore, from family to nation. You have to have that. All of us enjoy going to the Department of Motor Vehicles for looking at big law books. Maybe a few of us get into it. I worked in a law office for one day in an externship, looked around and said, is this really for me? No, it is not. I had something else I think God was calling me to do. But you need written laws, you need a fairness for everybody. especially as you start to multiply. I've discovered that even there's a difference between a class of 5, a class of 24, and last semester I had a class of 75. And you have to really lay out the law for a class of 75 because there's always somebody trying to move around the rules and the regulations. I left out In the book of Judges, which come right after Sinai, so I want to put that in there. We have a period of time when Israel is Republic locally and It seems that some judges were effective other judges were ineffective As the judges book of Judges proceeds things get tougher and tougher there are some real hair-raising things that go on and One of the comments is, in those days, there was no king in Israel. Everybody knew that, which was right in his own eyes. Eventually, the people asked for a king other than God, who was supposed to be their king, whom they refused to acknowledge. They wanted an earthly king. They wanted a king that they could see, a king that would lead them into battle. And so around 1040 BC, God gives them Saul. You know the story, Saul fails. And then we have around 1000 BC, David, and God makes a covenant with David in 2 Samuel 7. And so we talk about the covenant with the Davidic covenant. And it's at that point, then, along with the time of Solomon from about 1000 BC, down to 922 BC, we have Israel at its greatest strength. And so as you read your scripture, You have this sense of the blessing of God upon Israel from 1000 BC down to 922 BC. David establishes Jerusalem as the capital. He moves from Hebron up to the north. He wants to build a palace, like a palace that he has for himself, a palace for God, a temple for God. As we well know, David is a righteous king, but he messes up. He messes up big time in his relationship with Sheba. We move on then to Solomon, his son. And Solomon is the one who built the temple. You can go to Jerusalem today, and if you look at the very lowest part of the temple, you'll probably see some of the stones that Solomon worked with as he built a temple. And Solomon rules from roughly 962 to 922 BC. You'll start seeing a lot of circas or sea periods. I have to explain to my students sometimes that means circa, around. There's some debate about which year, 922, 923, 921. It's not that important, at least in my mind, but we get a sense of around. a 40-year period from 962 to 922 BC. The temple is dedicated in the 956 period of time, I think. Around that period of time, we have the blessing of the temple, the presence of God in the temple. What then happens though is, as you well know, Solomon asks for wisdom at the beginning of his reign. God grants it to him and he throws it away roughly the last 10 years. Because from 932 to 922 BC, he disobeys what Deuteronomy said. You will want a king someday, Moses said, and you will have a king. I'm really your king. God says I'm really your king, but you'll have your king But when you do get a king he should not multiply many wives and have many concubines well Solomon had 700 and 300 My voice is not ready to make any more comments about that I wonder how he managed at any rate During that period of time Even with 700 and 300 women to keep happy and have a harem, he essentially does something to keep some of them happy, which is really displeasing to God. He builds temples to their gods and goddesses right around the temple that he had built in earlier years. He gets involved in idolatry, and the anger and the wrath of God comes down, therefore, upon the united kingdom of Israel. And Solomon is told, you will have the kingdom snatched out of your hand. It may not be in your lifetime. Solomon dies, and you have the splitting of the kingdom, and the northern kingdom, and the southern kingdom. And therefore, around 922, you'll see division of Israel into a northern and southern kingdom. The northern kingdom was a period of time when there were 11 dynasties. Most of them ended up in pools of blood. If you look at the Book of Kings, you make a list of all of the kings of the northern kingdom, starting with Jeroboam and his successors. you will have an evaluation of them. Almost all of them are evil in the sight of the Lord. The northern kingdom kings were attracted to the paganism of the iths around them, the Edomites and the Philistines and the people of Sidon and Tyre. They get involved in child sacrifice. They get involved in all kinds of perversions. They're worshiping the Baals. And they're kings in order for them not to have to go down to Jerusalem set up temples and idols, golden calves in Dan and Bethel. So they don't have their allegiance to Jerusalem and the temple in Jerusalem and the king in Jerusalem. So if you make that list, you see evil, evil, evil, evil. There's one good evil guy and then evil, evil, evil, evil, evil for 200 years. I did that one time in a class at secondary where I used to teach. And students seemed to be very bothered by that. She said, Dr. Ritt, did you have to say evil, evil, evil 19 times? He says, yes, because you have to get a sense of the moral depravity of that northern kingdom. These become the 10 northern tribes of Israel. And they are right in the front line of the next empire that is going to emerge, a series of empires coming from the north. coming from the north are going to be first of all the folks in Damascus otherwise known as the Arameans and then after that folks from Nineveh the Assyrians and the Assyrians were a nasty bunch and then after the Assyrians are overthrown in 6 BC by the Babylonians the Babylonians are a famous memory they're further down in the Fertile Crescent they build an empire and then if you read In the book of Daniel, Persians overthrow the Babylonians. The Persians run things in the Middle East for about 200 years. And then after the Persians collapsed, they collapsed in the face of the Greeks. You have the Greeks conquering the Persians. You have a series of empires. And the Northern Kingdom and indeed the Southern Kingdom live in the shadow of those kingdoms. Somewhere around 722 BC, And the Assyrians come down, they destroyed the Northern kingdom and they take the 10 Northern tribes out of Israel. And therefore you have the beginnings of what we might call the Israelite diaspora. Diaspora is word that comes from spore seed, the scattering of the seed of Israel is to say the scattering of the people of Israel. Um, I know folks out here scattered seed for crops. I scatter seed in the cemetery I take care of to grow grass. But here we have the Israelites going in many different directions. The ten northern tribes are lost. There's a remnant left, but not much. And we don't really know what happened to the bulk of the people of the ten northern tribes of Israel. The Mormons said that they walked across Russia and ended up in North America and became the ancestors to the Native Americans. Those who hold to British Israel say they walked across Europe and became the ancestors to the British people. You can respond to the Mormon. the word and what they maintained by pointing out that the Assyrians and the ten northern tribes had the wheel and when Columbus came to America there were no wheels being used, the sledges. Why would the Native American peoples give up the wheel if they had walked across Russia and then had given up the wheel and the advantage of the wheel? At any rate, 722 BC is a turning point. After that, the Assyrians surround the Southern Kingdom. The Southern Kingdom has the Temple of Solomon. It has a series of kings. It maintains the Davidic line, the throne of David. It has some good kings. It has some bad kings. There is a time of reform under Hezekiah, also under Josiah, but eventually the Babylonians are going to come down. They go and destroy the Assyrian Empire. Nobody shed a tear over that in 612 BC and they immediately then neutralize any threat from Egypt and they start putting pressure on the southern kingdom of Judah and the world of Jerusalem. So from roughly 609 BC down to 586 BC, which is what's that? 23 years or so. You have the threat of Babylonians that comes to fruition with the absolute catastrophe of 586 BC. In July of 586 BC, the Babylonians had surrounded Jerusalem. They destroyed the temple in Jerusalem. And you have the exile of the tribes, many of them over to Babylon. Some go down into Egypt. probably Jeremiah is one of those, although he goes reluctantly. We have complete collapse of the Southern Kingdom. It looks like the covenant that God has made with Abraham, with the people of Israel at Sinai, with David, that there would always be somebody to sit on David's throne is coming to an end. And this is absolutely disastrous. But Jeremiah does give a promise, excuse me, And the promise is, is that behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, not like the covenant I made in earlier days, but I will make a new covenant when people truly know the Lord. At this point, some people are brought out into Babylon early. Daniel is one of them, so is Shadrach, Eshach, and Abednego. But then in 586 BC, and a couple of kings, the king Zedekiah undergoes an absolute catastrophe. He is captured as he flees Jerusalem. His three sons are captured. He sees his three sons killed, and then his eyes are poked out, and he is blinded. And you got a sense of the horror of all of that in 586 BC. Nevertheless, there is one line of David in Babylon already. And the Babylonian king that succeeds them, Nebuchadnezzar, shows mercy to them. And in 562 BC, he is restored at least to eat at the king's table. His name is Jehoiachin, if I recall correctly. Certain things, though, happen in this world in 586 BC. The people of Israel no longer have a temple to worship in. They no longer have a temple. to sacrifice in, and the law of God, which had been designed for the land, could no longer function because there was no land to function and to have a law in. And so, the people of Israel resort to something that may have been going on on a weekly basis in faithful parts of Israel, but There is still some debate as to the origin. They gather together for prayer. They gather together for Bible reading. They gather together for worship or for teaching. They form what is called the synagogue. The synagogue emerges out of the Babylonian captivity. And it essentially holds the diaspora together. So that all throughout the ancient world, and this is what's really important, the synagogues spread and they present to many pagan cultures around that world of Babylon the truth of the Bible, the truth of the gospel, the truth indeed of who God is. That's why, as you read through the New Testament, you hear about God fearing Gentiles. You hear about Cornelius the Centurion. You hear about the Centurion who built the synagogue, I believe, in Capernaum. You hear about other proselytes or converts to Judaism. Many people who are not Jewish, who are not physical descendants of Abraham, in the 500 years before Christ, come to faith in the God of the Bible. And the ancient world, therefore, knows about this Jewish world. Now, certain things happen. The Babylonians don't last very long. They last about 80 years. In 539 BC, the world of Babylon comes to an end. The Persians take over. The Persians are from the mountains of Babylon. They allow these flights to return but not as many return as you might think Some stay in Babylon Some like Esther go to Persepolis others go to Egypt. So you have a continual scattering of and you have a division within the Jewish world that is evident even in the election of Deacons in Acts chapter 7. You have Jews who live in Israel who feel that they are more holy to some degree than those living out in the diaspora. You have Jews in the diaspora who are trying to live in the world, but not be of the world. And yet there is always that temptation. So as you look at the account of Timothy, which I made reference to earlier, what you have is Timothy, his mother was Jewish, but his father was a Greek. And you see the folks who live in Eretz Israel, in land of Israel say, see, see, there's intermarriage, there's corruption. These people out there in the diaspora, they are suspect. They may be true Jews, but surely some of them have sold out to the paganism out there in the world of Tarsus, in the world of Rome or Athens or Corinth. So we have Diaspora Israel and we have Eretz Israel, which is Israel that lives in the land. Somewhere around as I say, 539 BC, Jewish people return, and therefore we talk about the pre-exilic world, the exilic world, and the post-exilic world, or the world after the exile, after 539 BC. And the very end of the scripture comes together under Zechariah, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi. Those are post-exilic prophets. Esther appears in that middle of that exile period in 473 BC. Some of the wisdom literature is collected and we really do have the completion of the Old Testament with Malachi some around 444 BC or thereabouts. In 516 BC, the second temple in Jerusalem is rebuilt. It does not match the beauty of Solomon's temple. The scripture talks about how people wept. Those who remembered Solomon's temple, when they saw the new temple, they were glad to see the new temple, but they knew that it was not the temple that Solomon had built. It was a mere shadow of that. But there is a second temple, 516 BC, down to AD 70. So that's a good chunk of time, 586 years or so. Later on, Herod, who wanted to destroy Jesus and kill the children at the death of him, he spent a lot of money and time on the second temple, refurbishing it. The irony is, is that's happening during Jesus' time. And then there is the crucifixion and the resurrection, the beginning of the New Testament Church. The veil is torn. And just at the point that the temple renovations are completed, it's about 60 A.D., the rebellion in Israel against Rome emerges, and the temple is destroyed in A.D. 70 by the Romans. The Persians run things from about 200 years, 539 down to 323 B.C. In 323 B.C. another fellow comes along from Greece. The Greeks and the Persians met in what is today Turkey, northwestern Turkey. There have been tensions between them. Those of you who may recall your 5th century B.C. Athens history and so forth and the wars with Persia and so forth allowed the Athenian world to grow and expand. But eventually a man from the northern part of Greece named Philip, we have the city of Philippi named after him and therefore the book of Philippians, comes down and he conquers Greece, and he sets things up for his son, who was an extraordinary person, even though he was probably a vile, morally vile person, named Alexander, conquer the entire ancient Near East. Alexander is called the Great, not because he was great morally, but because he conquered and built the largest empire the world had ever seen down to that time. He does it in nine years, from 332 to 323. Probably seems to indicate that the Persian empire was going downhill for many decades before that. And we therefore have the Greek world. What happens is Persian ideas come west into the Mediterranean basin, Greek ideas go east towards India. India is so terrified of Alexander the Great they unite for the first time and form an empire to try to repulse the folks coming down from the Greek side, the Greco-Persian side. And what I didn't totally understand, as I was, for many, many years, until I taught Ancient History, is that the Greek and Persian Empire merged the two cultures together. And so most of you have heard about the Greek world in social studies ninth grade. What you've heard about is pure Greek, Hellenic world of Athens and so forth, and Sparta, perhaps its rival. The world of Alexander the Great mixes Persian culture and Greek culture, and therefore it's called the Hellenistic world, which is a different world from the Hellenic world. When there's a consequence for this, Jewish people start to lose their Hebrew roots. What they start to do is they start to want the Bible in their language. So the Bible in Alexandria, Egypt, the Hebrew scriptures are translated into Greek and therefore we call that the translation of the Seventy or the Septuagint. Sometimes you will see LXX maybe Bible studies. I mean Septuagint says And so we have the spreading of the knowledge of God the beginning of the spreading of the knowledge of God Throughout the Greek world and it's the reason our New Testament was originally written in Greek Because that becomes the language of the educated population for the next three or four hundred years Not all the Greeks got along After Alexander died in 323, his empire breaks up into four different units. The ones you need to worry about and think about are the Ptolemies in Egypt, based in the city that Alexander started to build but never finished, because he never came back to it, is Alexandria, Egypt, which is still there to this day, and the Seleucids, or the Seleucids, I call them the Seleucids, in Babylon, the Fertile Crescent, And once again, the Greek armies clash. And where do they clash? But on the east coast of the Mediterranean in Israel. And so you have rivalry between the two Greek dynasties, the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucus up in the infernal crescent. The Ptolemies managed to get along with the Israelite world fairly well. but they had a fight with the Seleucids and the Seleucids came down after about 200 years and took over Israel. They had a ruler named Antiochus Epiphanes IV who wanted to make sure that people treated him as a god, which is a Persian idea and a Greek idea. And so Antiochus Epiphanes, some of you may be familiar with the holiday called Epiphany, January 6th, which is the revealing of Jesus to the world, to the Gentile world, as the Magi come. Antiochus Epiphanes means God, feel, and so Antiochus called himself Antiochus, the God who has been revealed. And he managed to alienate the entire Jewish population very quickly. He took over the temple in Jerusalem, built a statue there, had a pig sacrificed before the statue. I believe the statue was of Jupiter or of Zeus. This horrified, this was not a kosher thing to do, horrified the Jewish population and they lead in a revolt. And they manage. to overthrow the Greek dynasty and set up what we call the Maccabean dynasty. Some of you may have seen Judas Maccabeus or sections of Judas Maccabeus from Handel's work, but this is Judas Maccabeus who leads in 165 BC against the Greeks and is successful. And there was a 100 year period of time, and we have a separate Jewish kingdom called the Maccabean dynasty. and the Maccabean dynasty ruled Israel. It came to an end when the Romans come in 65 BC. And so this is the setting for Jesus and his ministry on earth. At a certain point, just before Jesus ascends into heaven, We have the question that the disciples give to Jesus, Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom? And I think for many years, I thought that was the Davidic kingdom. But probably what they have in mind is this Maccabean kingdom. Are you going to be the Messiah who is going to set up the kingdom, throw out the Romans, and lead us on into victory like Judas Maccabeus did? All through this time there is a promise of a Messiah who is going to come. When is he going to come? And we in the Christian world say he came somewhere around 4 BC. came to earth, Jesus the Christ, born around 4 BC. There's a reason why Jesus is born 4 before Christ. The man who made the calendar 500 years later, a monk, had limited library resources. He got his dates mixed up and He said that Jesus was born in 1 A.D., but then we figured out that Herod the Great died in 4 B.C., and we know that Herod is alive before Jesus is born because he wants to try to destroy Jesus. So, then we have what you're familiar with, the earthly ministry of Christ somewhere between 26 A.D. and 33 A.D. We have the emergence of the New Testament Church there in that period after 33 down to 95. But what does happen is the Jewish world at this time is greatly divided. There are people who hate Romans. There are people who are working with Romans like Matthew, the tax collector, and Zacchaeus, the tax collector. And in 66 AD, a rebellion is launched by the zealots, not really in Jerusalem, but by the coast. And the Romans, who are at the peak of power, say, we cannot have any kind of rebellion. We must crush it. And so in AD 66 and AD 70, the rebellion is crushed, culminating in the destruction of the Jewish temple in AD 70. the scattering of Jews and Christians from Jerusalem. A law is passed, which is not totally, how should we say, it's not totally enforced until it's enforced for a while and then Jewish people are sort of let back in. But there's another revolt, which you don't hear as much about in 132 AD under a man named Bar Kokhba, and that's it. Bar Kokhba leads a revolt, the Romans come in, they have actually found archaeological remains from the Bar Kokhba commune, so to speak, and that is crushed in 132 AD. And now everybody becomes part of the diaspora, the spreading of God's people in the Christian world all over the ancient world, sometimes persecuted. But you also have the scattering of the Jewish people all throughout the ancient world. And that continues down to the present time, although some would see the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 as the beginning of the end of that. But certainly the New Testament period goes to an end in 80-95, which is the latest paper in the Book of Revelation. And we have essentially after the destruction of the Temple, the separation between the Church and the world of Rabbinic Judaism. Now there's something else that I didn't talk about, which I should have talked about when we talked about Septuagint, and that is that there is a concern to obey the Law of God out there in the Diaspora. And some Jewish people start to use the book of Torah, the book of the law, as a means by which they could analyze the law and try to apply it to their situation. You may recall there are things about seeds, there are things about sacrifices, but they can't sacrifice in Babylon. So what they do is they start to develop laws, which ultimately were organized by Greek philosophy, essentially Greek rationalism. These laws are oral, they are traditional, they are not written down. Eventually you have a group of people who say this is the extra law of God that everybody needs to obey. These become the Pharisees. And the Pharisees have what is called the Oral Torah, the Oral Law, that is not written down, but they want to impose it upon the rest of the population of Israel in the 200 years before Christ. As you look at the groups that Christ encounters, Samaritans, scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, publicans who have sold out to Rome, people Jesus really tangles with are the Pharisees. Both you scribes and Pharisees and so forth and so on. And you can find that certainly just before his crucifixion in Matthew 25 or so. After the destruction of the temple, the Pharisees come together. They're the one group that actually does survive, along with the Christians. And they say, my goodness, we almost lost our oral law. They had begun to say that that oral law had been handed down from Moses orally through the generations. Even though as you look at it, you can obviously see Greek rationalistic thinking that had come from Alexander the Great's conquest and the culture of the Greeks. But what they do is they then write down that law for the next generation. That becomes the foundation for rabbinic Judaism. We call that the Talmud. The Talmud is the oral tradition written down, which is the extra laws that are not found in the scripture. So now we start seeing the conflict that Jesus has, because what is happening is we have people adding to the word of God. And that is a challenge both for Christians and for the world of Judaism. What is the Word of God? What is required by the Word of God? How do we work out the Word of God in the Old Testament and the New Testament in a world out there that is detached from the land of Israel? And so I never really realized that until I taught world religions, sort of figured out what the Talmud was and who the Pharisees were. And that becomes, therefore, one of the departure points between the world of Rabbinic Judaism and the synagogue and the world of Christianity. You remember that Paul goes to the temple and he worships in the temple even though he's a Christian. But once the temple is destroyed, you do have a bifurcation and you have a whole series of good works that you're supposed to do. or not do, or works you're not supposed to do on the Sabbath, for instance, the world of Pharisaism, and you have a whole world of what is going to be essentially interpretations of Old and New Testament by people called the fathers of the church, patristic literature, as individual theologians are going to work on how is it we're going to work out the Word of God But as the gospel spreads to Egypt, to Rome, to Spain, to Turkey, and goes in lots of different directions. So I've just given you Old Testament history in an hour, or thereabouts, under strange circumstances. Turn to the back page, though, because there are some more things that are happening. One of the things that happened is that church starts to put its own thinking about what is going on in world history. And what I've given you is essentially an outline of critical turning points in the way the Christian world has thought about its belief. First of all, we have, of course, the emergence of the New Testament. The New Testament is 300 printed pages. It's in Greek. Not everybody has access to the New Testament. In the ancient world, many people are non-literate. They are not reading and writing, listening, they're hearing. That's why Jesus says, he who has ears to hear, let him hear. That's also why Moses says 1500 years before, hear O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one. So there are people who read and people who do not. And as people are asked, what do you believe? There came a need for a short, what we might call, elevator talk. I don't know if you've run into that term. But a one-page summary of what the Christian faith says. And this essentially, I think, becomes important for people who are going to die for the faith. If you're going to die for the faith, how do you explain the entire New Testament in one hour, two hours, three hours before you leave this world? However, if you have a creed, a short summary, I believe in God the Father, we're in the Eastern world, we believe in God the Father, baker of heaven and earth, you do have a sense of the outlines of the key critical things within the belief of Christianity. So somewhere between 200 and 325, You have the emergence of the Apostles' Creed. I believe in God the Father, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ His only Son, our Lord, and so forth and so on. It is a composite development. You can go find Schaff's Treatise of Christendom. He has a whole chart, and he says he has various versions of the Apostles' Creed, and not all of the versions contain the exact same phrasing. But by around 300, we do have a sense of the outline of the basic doctrine of the Christian faith. It's a real simple, easy way to remember. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, the Church, and End Times. What's going to happen to me when I die, and what's going to happen to the universe? There it is. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, Little C Catholic, the Holy Universal Church, resurrection of the dead, and what's going to happen in the end. So you have this nice outline of Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and Church. But what happens is, as the church grows, you start having people talking about things. You give enough people time and efforts, and they start to speculate. Around 300 AD, there was a man named Bishop Arius. He says, I have a whole new way of explaining who God was before He ever existed. There was a time when the Son of God was not, and then He came into existence. And so God the Father created God the Son. And people scratched their head and said, no, is that right? Because you see, if there was a time when the Son of God was not, is He truly God? Because He's therefore not eternal. He came into being. And therefore we have a major, major debate in the church. All during this time, the church is being persecuted by the Roman Empire. They're wanting people to recognize Caesar as God. Many people are dying, but Miracle of miracles in the year 312 AD Constantine converts. He does not baptize until his deathbed but many of his followers are baptized. We have mass baptisms and everything changes with the conversion of Constantine in 312 AD. At this point the barbarians are invading on the western side of the Roman Empire We don't have time to give him a thumbnail sketch of Roman history. But what happens is Constantine says, I need to build a new Rome. I need to be near where the action is. The barbarians are attacking. And by the way, the eastern side of the Roman Empire is the wealthy historic side. I better protect that side. And so by imperial decree, he builds a new capital, names it after himself, Constantinople, and you have Istanbul. today. But he also sees that there is division in the church over this whole issue of who is God and what's he like before anything ever existed. And so he calls together and finances a church council called the Nicene Council. And the Nicene Council meets the Council of Nicaea and They discuss a lot of things, they write in Greek, and they hammer out the Nicene Creed, which is an expansion of the Apostles' Creed. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Catholic Church, and the resurrection of the body in end times. And the Nicene Creed becomes the framework for the next 1,500 years down to the present day. Those of you who have sung, perhaps, in a choral group, you may have sung Bach's D Minor Mass, a Thuring work, you may have sung Mozart's Requiem. There was always the Credo. It's in Latin, generally, on this Western side of the world, Europe and America. But it is the Nicene Creed. affirming that there was never a time when the Son of God was not out of existence. He has existed from all eternity. And so that was settled in 325, slightly modified in 389 AD, and you therefore have the affirmation that the Son of God is of the same substance with the Father and is co-eternal with the Father, eternally begotten of the Father. Well, the church moves on. There's a lot of different people coming into the church because of Constantine's conversion. There's some bright folks, and as I say, you give enough time to people to think, and they start to think, what about? And the next question is, well, if we have the Son of God before the foundation of the world, eternally begotten of the Father, What do we have? Jesus. Is Jesus as the eternally begotten Son now incarnate? Is he more God than he is human? Is he more human than he is God? You have what I consider to be the toughest stuff to teach in church history, which is the Christological controversies of the 5th century. Don't worry about all the groups. There are all kinds of groups, and I never did really learn them all that well. But they debate this in the church, more God than human, more human than God, and they come together again under imperial sponsorship in AD 451 at the Council of Chalcedon. They've had a couple of earlier councils. This is the Fourth Council of the Church, and they hammer out the Chalcedonian definition about the person of Christ. The thing to remember about the Chalcedonian definition is that they affirm that Jesus is the God-Man, a unique individual. He is fully God and fully human, a unique entity. He will never be reproduced or anything like that. He is equally 100% human, 100% divine. The definition is not easy to remember. It is, however, enshrined in the doctrine of Christ in the Westminster Standards and really in all of the Protestant Reformed confessions. But please note now the change. The change is moving away from God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, the Church, and times to a specific problem. Who is Jesus as the Incarnate Son of God? And so what you have is a Council of the Church addressing a specific problem, which is the definition of the person of Christ. in AD 451. These two definitions, these two creeds, the Nicene Creed, the Shorter Apostles Creed, along with the Chalcedonian definition, become the foundation for Christian theology in all directions for the next 1,000 years or so. Actually, though, we have another bright fellow coming along. His name is Thomas Aquinas. Thomas Aquinas lived from 1225 to 1274. He flourishes from 1250 to 1274. He's not writing theology when he's five years old. But by the time he gets to be 25 in 1250, he is writing things. And he is writing at the time of the highest power of the Roman Catholic Church and of the papacy, the 1200s. And Tapas Aquinas has a big, ambitious vision as to what he wants to do. He actually does want to sort of try to pull everything together. He's at one person, and I do emphasize that he is one person, but he does pull together a whole pile of issues that various theologians have discussed over many centuries. And he writes a book in the last nine years of his life, and he never finished, called the Summa, Summa Theologica, from 1265 to 1274. And I can give you the seven sections of Thomas's Summa, the medieval's love number seven. God, creation, man, man's purpose, specifically ethics and morality and law, Christ, sacraments, and times. And then he has an appendix on purgatory and what happens to you when you die. And so you have a return to some attempt to pull everything together and not focus in upon one issue of the issue of the person of Christ. Now I'm giving you a great big picture, but one of the things to remember as we think about all this is that There are lots of individual theologians, but what I consider more important than even what John Calvin says on page 574 of his commentary on the Book of Joshua and so forth, is what the Church says together. And so I tend to be interested more in the confessions, what the Church has said together, than what some individual theologian says, because you will always find some error of some nature, even a fellow like Calvin. You will always find something wrong somewhere. And the church saying things together, I think you're going to find error, as the Confession of Faith Westminster says, in any church confession, but it's going to be a lot more constricted and it's not going to be It's going to be in the eyes of a watch of many more people than just simply one person. So we have Thomas Aquinas. File him away, because as you know, in 1517, Martin Luther is going to challenge the Roman church 500 years ago, 502 years ago this October. and challenged the idea of indulgence as a release from the time in purgatory, which is not for unbelievers, but is for Christians, to finish out their temporal punishment, their penance that they didn't finish on earth. A whole other story. The whole question of how is one right with God emerges with Luther. And Luther, as you well know, leads a whole host of people out of the Western Church. And we have a cataclysmic split within the Western Church. And the focus, therefore, is not so much on who God is. When you read the Nicene Creed to this day with the Roman Church, who Christ is with the Roman Church and the Castelloni definition. But the question is, how are we right with God And in that rightness, what happens to us when we die? Because the Roman church to this day says that when you die, you need to be sort of improved. You need to be purged of your sin. And you therefore need to go to purgatory. you're not totally justified, you're progressively justified. And therefore, people said, well, I don't like the idea of spending a long time in purgatory. I know I've been a bad person. I pay a little money or do some special penance, like make a trip to Jerusalem or a trip to Rome or something like that. And so the church, especially in the late medieval period, starts getting involved in issuing indulgences for money. Now, talk to the Roman church to say, oh yes, but you're supposed to have a repentant heart, even though you pay indulgences for money. But there was a lot of corruption in Luther's time. That is what Luther then challenges. So we then have the emergence of Protestant confessions. And it is at this period of time that we have the confessional articulation of covenant theology and the federal theology. And before I talk about that, I want to get to the next item. The Roman Catholic world decided it needed to respond to the Council of Trent. And so, I'm sorry, the Roman Catholic world decided it needed to respond to the Protestant world. And so they called together a council. between 1535 and 1563. It didn't meet continuously, but it met off and on in the Italian Alps in Trent, Italy. And they essentially talk about reforms. And there is actually a movement in Trent, early in Trent, to maybe give Luther and the Protestants some hearing and some leeway. But eventually, Tridentine Catholicism emerges from the canons and decrees of the Council of Trent. And it concludes in 1563. It essentially affirms everything that Martin Luther denied and denies everything that Martin Luther affirmed. It excommunicates the entire Protestant world and mathematizes them in the Tridentine Creed in 1564. And we have the beginnings of the wars of religion, but we have a split. We're not going to talk about all the wars of religion and all that that involves. end up with the problems that that led to. But I do want to point out that Thomas Aquinas, when we talked about him earlier, is Cantonized so that he becomes St. Thomas Aquinas. Around the corner from Nyack College is Stack, St. Thomas Aquinas College. And it comes out of the Thomistic tradition. It's a Roman Catholic college. And Thomas Aquinas is sainted and he becomes the foundation for Roman Catholic theology from the Council of Trent on down to the present day, down to Vatican II at least. There's something you need to know about Thomas Aquinas. Thomas Aquinas loved Aristotle. and he adopted Aristotle as his guide. We don't have time to discuss all the little details, but I think that you need to understand one thing. Aristotle liked to organize things. He wrote a book called Categories, and everything has its place. Everything is laid out in the Aristotelian worldview so that nothing is left, how should we say, at loose ends. There is this sickness in which the Aristotelian worldview dominated the medieval world and the Protestant world as it comes out of the medieval world couldn't quite get away from it. It's sort of like how I depend upon the computer and all of us really depend upon the computer. I wondered 40 years ago what would I ever do with a computer and now the computer is the other half of my brain. I just use it all the time. I don't know how it works. But I use it. And as you look at the Protestant world, they also utilize some of the organizational categories of Aristotle. And they just used it because that's what Trent was using. And they're responding to Trent. But everything is laid out with precision. Are there some other things that happened in the Roman world in which Aristotle gave a lot more credence to human ability? That's not the issue for me at this point in what I'm talking about. The issue for me right now is the organizational structure that you get, and that's going to be challenged. The Protestant confessions then, start to organize things as they respond to the Roman Catholic world. And you can spend a lot of time, it's actually been nicely done by a man named Dennison, from the Reformed Heritage Bible, reading through four volumes of Protestant confessions in a chronological fashion. And you can start seeing how especially as after the Council of Trent finishes its work in 1563, the Protestant confessions become much more precise. And the Lutheran world is sort of responding in Luther's time to the crisis of what's going on in the Roman Church. But even Martin Luther has a, and he's sort of a disorganized fellow as far as I'm concerned. Calvin is a lot more organized. It's true, though, that Martin Luther says, I don't like these classics. They're leading people astray. But in 1521, his sidekick, who you don't hear as much about, a man named Philip Melanchthon, starts to organize Lutheran theology in a methodical, systematic way, because that's what he's been taught from childhood, to organize. So one of the things that happens is to some degree, at least in the Protestant world, we do move back to this comprehensive vision. The focus is going to be on how is man right with God. The focus is going to be the doctrine of justification. Just at the point that the Protestant confessions come to their culmination with the Sinister Standards 1643-1648, the Second Helvetic Confession, the Congregational Confessions, there's Confession of 1648, the Baptists sort of baptized the Westminster Standards to make a Philadelphia Confession, the London Confession of 1689 or so. Just as that is happening, a new revolution is emerging in the European world. That's the next line there. The beginnings of the scientific revolution and the scientific mindset and the scientific method And what happens is the period of confessions really comes to an end as the Western world starts to become fascinated with the methodical, systematic world of astronomy and physics, later on biology, but certainly astronomy and physics, where, like Aristotle, everything has its place, you try to account for everything. But you account for everything from evidence that you can see or at least evidence that can be mathematically organized and mathematically articulated. And so there are four people that are big right during this period of time. They're happening right during the Reformation. 1543, Copernicus proposes a different way of thinking about the solar system. with the Sun at the center and the Earth revolving around the Sun and explaining therefore sunrises and sunset differently. After that we have Kepler proposing flat elliptical orbits rather than round orbits that Copernicus composed with Kepler in 1587. You really do have, it really works mathematically. After that, you have Galileo with his telescope looking up into the sky, seeing things that Kepler and Galileo said mathematically occurred. And then finally, you have Isaac Newton, 1642, born 1687, writing the Principia, which essentially articulates the laws of gravity. Isaac Newton is an extraordinary fellow, the guy discovers the loss of gravity, and then in his spare time and competition with life, goes and invents calculus, and then has a nervous breakdown. And so it's a sad story. There's some evidence that he was a believer and a Christian. But this is now changing the way people are looking at the world, because then they start to say, yes, we can talk about mass and weight and acceleration and classical mechanics. We can scientifically predict things. You start having people counting stuff and saying, well, we can statistically predict things. That's going to come in a little while, especially in the 1700s or so. So what you have there, is the European Enlightenment that emerges. And we're familiar with that. It's sort of the worship of science. Science is going to answer all questions. And to some degree, depending upon where you were in the European world, the Enlightenment could be the darkening. Because, you see, you can say, well, if we have all these predictable laws, we don't need God. We don't need God. Or else God started the world and then ran away. And we have all of these predictable laws of sunrise, sunset, and things like that. And so you have that European Enlightenment. And essentially, and that's why I have this lower diagram here, scientific revolution that leads to the Enlightenment. God is not against science. He's against the worship of science, which is what happens in the Enlightenment. And then you have a backlash starting around 1800 against enlightenment, which people don't realize. And that marks, to some degree, modernity. We're all familiar with rationalism and naturalism. Eventually, Darwin is going to propose his theory of evolutionary development and so forth. What we're less familiar with, and we don't take into account, especially in the church, is the backlash against that, which is going to say, I don't want to be scientifically analyzed. I want to experience emotion. I want to experience nature. I don't like living in the new cities that are emerging. I don't like the Industrial Revolution. I want to explore my inner soul, my inner psyche. And so that really does affect, well I do miss a solid Pope. That does affect the way people in the church are going to articulate their theology. Because you see, once you start saying, I want, we might call a discussion of my emotions, my inner soul, you start having people like, that you're less familiar with, slippery folks like Schleiermacher saying, well, we have given up Thomism, we've given up Protestantism because of the Enlightenment, we really can't believe the Bible any longer, what are we left with? We're left with our feelings, with our emotions, with our inner psyche, psychology starts to develop in the 19th century and so forth. And the turning point really is Schleiermacher 18, 19, 18, 20, when he rewrites systematic theology based upon our feeling, our apprehensions of God, and not on a organized way of scripture and that leads then to all kinds of things that you hear about in the modern church where the church hardly becomes the church after 150 years. But please note, and I've really become very conscious of this in the context in which I've taught for the last 20 years, when you start having people emphasize the inner emotion, you start leaning into movements that seem to be sort of okay, you may disagree with them, but Pentecostalism, Charismaticism, it's all emotion, it's all feelings, it's all what my inner soul, and we're moving away from not only scientific and any kind of objective truth, we're moving away from classical reformed confessionalist, you know, Lutheran, or, well, reformed Calvinistic. We're moving away from the objectivity of the Word of God. We're moving away from truth, what, completely. And we're moving on into some of the things we're seeing today. Almost a, shall we say, a dualism. in which what really matters is my soul, my inner emotions. What I do with my body doesn't matter and therefore if I want to identify as whatever it is that people identify as transgender in one form or another, that's my inner soul and I can do what I want with my body. I can even have surgery to change it. And so That's where that modern theological movement is going. That's why in the liberal Protestant seminaries, which are, by the way, declining, you have all kinds of people saying the latest thing. But it's totally detached from not only the Bible, but also from what classical historic Christianity has said. During that same period of time, you have the emergence of biblical You have the emergence of biblical higher criticism. You've heard about that to some degree. But the scientific revolution in the Enlightenment is going to lay the foundation, starting around 1800, for people saying, we want to scientifically analyze the scripture. We want to look at the scripture from a scientific perspective. In many respects, there are some things that lead to that are very helpful. That is to say, you're going to grammatically analyze the Hebrew of Hosea or something like that. But it also means then that you're going to place the canons of scientism above the scripture and say that's the ultimate and final truth. And so the church is going to spend a lot of time in the next 200 years into the present They're responding to those issues. We don't have time to get involved in all of that today, but you do need to be aware that you have biblical criticism on one side, essentially saying parts of the Bible are partially true, but not totally true. And then you have other people going to say, well, since that's the case, let's just worry about our feelings, our emotions, and our romantic How should we say, experience of Jesus? And then we have another movement, which probably some of you are familiar with. I'm actually less familiar with, although I have this a lot of time. analyzing it, you probably should spend some more time really digging in. There is the emergence of dispensationalism. A man named John Nelson Darby started talking about epochs and how God deals with people throughout those epochs. And we don't have time to get involved in all the details of that. I've been reading a little bit about dispensationalism. Paul Robertson, I bought the book because people have been talking about it, and he talks about the old school field reference Bible of 1909. And the new Schofield Bible of 1967, which these days isn't all that new. But at any rate, old dispensationalism, new dispensationalism. Dispensationalism does not have a confession of faith that you can say, this is it. But it does have authors, many of them coming from Dallas Seminary. south of here, that have a very definite sense of dealing with people through the ages, not through covenant necessarily, but through dispensations and administrations and so forth. Dispensationalism will be, by definition, premillennial. We in the Reformed Presbyterian Church do not object to premillennialism. We leave that up to the person, that's to their conscience and their study of scripture. We reject dispensationalism, though, because of its non-covenantial basis. And if you want to get a summary of dispensationalism, you can go to Old Schofield, New Schofield, and actually get the Dallas Seminary catalog, which does have probably the closest, at the back of the seminary catalog, the closest, shall we say, confessional articulation of dispensationalism. A dispensationism, though, makes a bifurcation between Israel and the Church. That's perhaps, in some sense, part of our issue as covenant theologians, in that we believe that God saves the Jew and Gentile. The Gospel goes to the Jew first, and then also to the Gentile, and that all become one in Christ. that there is not necessarily a separate existence, a separate way of Israel coming to God apart from Christ and apart from the apart from justification through Christ and apart from the rest of the church. Dissensationalism will also support usually a national Israel of some sort invariably so that therefore it's It's not right to in any way try to criticize Israel. We're getting into very, very fraught topics. And I'm not really qualified to speak of that. I have not studied this in great detail. But I do know that in the North American world, especially as I listen to the radio and so forth, there are some extraordinarily gifted dispensational preachers, and they have lots of things to say, and then they get torn down the book of Revelation or something like that, and, you know, I say, well, no, I'm afraid that's not the case. The Bible is not a lazy man's book. Amidst all of this, we have the unfolding of God's covenantal mercies. And I know my voice is beginning to go. I need a rest. But covenant theologians will talk about, let's see, covenant theologians talk about the covenants that are articulated in the scripture, the covenant with Noah, Abraham, Israel, with David. And this is all before Christ. Okay? The covenant with Noah, Abraham, Israel, David. The promise of the new covenant. And then, the new covenant We have Jesus saying at the last supper, this is the new covenant in my blood and dying on the cross. And fulfilling all of the Noah, Abraham, Mosaic, Israel, and Davidic promises in the new covenant. And then that new covenant goes to the ends of the earth. that is first articulated as a way of organizing theology in 1535, I think it is, by a man named Heinrich Bullinger, who writes on the substance of the Covenant of Grace. And so there's your early covenant theologian who organizes theology according to the covenants. So what I want to make you aware of is that there are different ways of organizing theology. and that theology is not necessarily sort of a cut and dry thing. There are individual theologians. There are confessional statements by the church. And you need to be aware that we have an Apostle's Creed, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. We have in the Holy Catholic Church, we have an issue, who is Jesus? We have Thomas Aquinas articulating Roman Catholic theology, but it's not articulated really until the Council of Trent and the whole church passes it. And then we have a series of Protestant confessions, that are going to become more and more detailed. Eventually, starting in 1562, by a man named Zacharias Ruslanus, we're going to have the articulation, the first articulation of what is called the Federal Theology. The Federal Theology is to articulate a covenant on the first Adam. and how that covenant is unfolding in Noah, Abraham, Israel, David, and lead ultimately to the second Adam, who obeys God, takes the place of the first Adam. And we saw last night how the apostle Paul does that. He doesn't use the term relative works, Greek and the covenant. But he does talk about the first Adam, the second Adam, and especially Acts 17. And so I commend that to you as you think about how to spread the gospel to a world that knows nothing about the Bible, whether it be in a remote part of the world or whether it be in North America. And to know your audience, I am able to talk about Abraham, Israel, Hosea, Covenant, David. To this audience, I know that you have been reading your Bibles to some degree, maybe to a large degree, I hope. But I do know that you are here because you're concerned about these issues. The federal theology then developed confessionally. First of all, in the Irish Articles of Religion of 1615, then it is articulated finally in the Westminster Standards of 1643-1648. You can have elements of it in Reformed theology, Calvin's time, but you don't have the articulation of an Edenic covenant so to speak, in, for instance, Bollinger's On the Substance of the Covenant of Grace in 1535. It is something that emerges as theologians discuss and debate. So you have to be aware of that, that in many respects theology develops, it develops in response to issues, At times, it gets misguided as Thomas Aquinas and medieval theology, the Council of Trent. But federal theology is a way of making us think about the first Adam and the second Adam. How the two Adams relate, how it is that Jesus, the God-man, fully God and fully human, as the second Adam, fulfills the role of the first Adam in obeying God perfectly, taking upon himself the wrath and judgment that you and I deserve. I'm not always one who articulates things, covenant of works, covenant of grace. I think one of the things that frustrates me is that there are various names for the Edenic covenant, covenant of works, covenant of grace, covenant of nature, Adamic covenant, pre-fall covenant, prelapsarian covenant. which try to articulate things. But Covenant of Works especially, I think, is a response to some degree to what Trent is saying about works and works righteousness. Covenant of Works emerges first in 1585 by a man named Dudley Fenner. And he puts it into a system that is a modification of Aristotelianism called Ramism. and up and then it it sort of becomes part of the Framework of Protestant thought in the next reform thought in the next 20 years 30 years 1585 to 1615 and it is the Irish Church actually that articulates it first So with that being said There is the next stage, and actually the Lord has given me my voice back, but I need to take a break, and I think other people need to take a break, which is the application of that. I have some thoughts about the church, the state, and the kingdom of Christ. When you start talking about endemic responsibility, you can go into lots of different directions. We'll talk about church and state, but it's time for us to take a break.