The Old Testament Part 1 #2

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. If you want a big picture view of the Bible, you've come to the right place. We're exploring the drama of redemption, getting a quick overview from Genesis to Revelation. Today, more of the Old Testament will fly past us, so listen carefully and stay tuned. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Master Lutzer, you've taken us through Genesis, Exodus and Leviticus so far. What's up next?

Well Dave, as you mentioned, we are doing the big flyover, so to speak. We could call this series the Bible at 30,000 feet, and today we do come to the book of Numbers, which advances the story, and it will help us as we talk about the storyline of the Bible, the drama of redemption. You know, one of the things that you find in the Old Testament and the New Testament is God's relationship to natural disasters, earthquakes, plagues. What exactly is his relationship to these? Does he just permit them? Does he ordain them? And how can we continue to believe in his love when so much in this world is going wrong? Well those are the kinds of questions I answer in a new book I've written entitled Pandemics, Plagues and Natural Disasters, What is God Saying to Us? Do you have a relative who's a skeptic who tells us that we should not believe in God because of what is happening?

I answer those kinds of objections as well. For a gift of any amount, this book can be yours. Here is what you do. Go to rtwoffer.com.

That's rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. Now let's think about the scripture. Let us move into the Bible as we continue our overview of God's drama of redemption.

Numbers, they're getting ready to go back into the land. Deuteronomy is a recap. It's a recap of what happened and it's Moses' farewell speech. So that doesn't really advance the storyline either.

So notice in your chart, it occurs at the bottom. Now under Joshua, in the book of Joshua, they reenter the same land. They've been in the wilderness for 40 years. Now over the Jordan River, they enter into the land and the land is conquered and it is divided up under Joshua. But, but remember this, there are still pockets of resistance. Some of the Canaanites are still left in the land by design. God says, I'm leaving them there so that, so that they can test you. God always leaves some enemies for Christians. That's why he doesn't exterminate the devil.

The devil exists for the glory and the happiness and the victory of God's saints. Same reason why the Canaanites existed in Canaan. Now after they are there, the period of the judges, you see, the judges are Israel trying to find leaders that will help them in their fight against the Canaanites because these warring tribes continue to become very strong. When you get to 1 Samuel, 1 Samuel is basically the story of Israel's first king, namely Saul. And Saul turns out to be a great disappointment. But the people wanted a king and so God says, I'm giving you Saul. And David begins to enter into the picture, though his story is most prominently displayed in 2 Samuel.

2 Samuel is the story of David. And when you get to David, God gives another covenant to David. And God says, David, I'm going to, through your seed, give you a son who is going to rule forever.

And it turns out to be Jesus. That's why you see the angel comes to Mary centuries later and says, he shall be great. He shall be the son of the most high. The Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David. There you have the fulfillment of the Davidic promise, the beginning of the fulfillment of it. So David gets a special revelation from God. And then what you have is his famous son Solomon.

And that opens first Kings. Solomon turns out to be a great builder and he builds a temple in Jerusalem and it was extravagant. If you'd have gone inside of it, you'd have seen all the gold that Solomon had there because he loved to do things in a big way.

He sacrificed thousands of animals. And Solomon also is one of the wisest people in the world. He is such a, he's a psychologist's dream to analyze because he is so wise. He writes books such as Proverbs.

Most of them were written by him. Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, all of those books relate to Solomon and the temple. Now, if you go to Jerusalem and you have a guide, the guide will always talk about the first temple period, the first temple period. The first temple period is the period of Solomon. And let's suppose that he builds it in approximately 930 BC. And now, because we're BC, we're going, the numbers are going down as we get to the time of Christ. 586 BC, that temple is taken apart by the Babylonians, as you'll understand in a moment.

And so that's a 350 year period, roughly. That's Israel's first temple period. Oh, wait until next week. Don't even think about not being here next week, because I'm going to explain Israel's second temple period and all of the intrigue that is involved there. So that is Solomon. And after Solomon dies, he designates a son by the name of Rehoboam and says, Rehoboam, you become king.

Now, catch this, okay? Rehoboam is appointed by Solomon to be king. The people come to him and say, you know, your dad really taxed us.

I mean, how else do you build the temple? And his hand was so oppressive in terms of taxation. Would you please reverse his policies and take this oppressive taxation away? Rehoboam says, well, give me time to figure this out.

I'll tell you in three days. He goes to the old man and the old man say, absolutely, the taxes are too high, cut them. He goes to the young men and the young men said, hey, you know what you tell them? Your dad, my dad taxed you, but you ain't seen nothing yet. It's going to get worse. And so he goes to the people and takes the young man's advice and says, under me, things are going to be worse.

Oh my, you were under my father's thumb, but you're going to be under my hand. Ten of the tribes, ten of the tribes have a tea party and say, absolutely not. We're revolting and we're going to establish our own capital. And this is the period of what we call the divided kingdom. What you have now is Samaria and Samaria is both a city as well as a region. And we're going to establish a capital in Samaria. And we're going to have our own kings. And we're going to have our own means of worship. Go to Jerusalem?

Absolutely not. We're going to build our own temple on Mount Zarek. Mount, I know the word so well. Mount Gerizim, that's the word.

Sometimes the computer finds it difficult to spit all this stuff out. We're going to have our own thing on Mount Gerizim. We're not going to Jerusalem. So from now on, you have Judah in the south and some of the tribe of Benjamin. And you have the ten tribes to the north under an entirely different king. And in the book of 1 and 2 Kings, what you have is two different lines of kings. You have kings who are ruling over Israel it always says. And you have kings who are ruling from Judah, namely from Jerusalem. When you go to Israel, as I studied there in 1968, I had the privilege, I don't think tourists can do that today, to actually go to Samaria, the town of Samaria.

We were at Jacob's well. And there in Samaria, you still have the ruins of the palace. And who lived in that palace? Well, Ahab did with his infamous wife Jezebel. So you see, you had kings like that ruling. You had prophets like Elijah and Elisha going to Ahab and telling him to repent and so forth.

And so you've got that whole history. Now you have another line of kings beginning in Judah and you've got that whole history. And the kingdoms are divided. And it's during the time of the divided kingdom, you have all of the prophets arising. Because idolatry is everywhere. People are building shrines on every single hill. And they are sacrificing to the pagan gods.

And they're doing it with a great deal of gusto. And the prophets are saying, judgment is coming, judgment is coming. And then you have false prophets. That's why Jeremiah gives chapter after chapter about false prophets who are saying, uh-uh, good times ahead.

Nothing but prosperity. And the false prophets are preaching that. The true prophets are saying, judgment, judgment, judgment, judgment. You take, for example, Isaiah, one example. He is in the southern kingdom. He's going to be exercising his ministry to the kings of the south in Jerusalem. And it says, the vision of Isaiah, the son of Amos, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah. So there you are. He had such a long ministry, it spanned four or five different kings. Now, what happens is this. By the way, look at your chart.

All this today for you. Do you notice that 1 and 2 Chronicles don't advance the story because they are the same history as 1 and 2 Kings, except that they give a different perspective. When you watch football, do you notice that oftentimes they have two people? There's one who calls the plays and then there's another guy in the booth too. He's adding color commentary.

He's adding things that the other left out. Listen, I was reading some chapters in Chronicles the other day. They are so full and so rich. I'm going to be receiving phone calls and all kinds of things, thanking me that you got beyond Leviticus and you are now in Chronicles because you are going to be blessed.

Everybody's going to be blessed. Now, what happens? And look at this. This is in your chart too.

I just can't believe this. You'll notice that Israel is the north, Judah is the south. Look at the bottom of your chart.

Do you see that diagram? Notice what happens in 722 BC to Israel, the 10 tribes. Assyria comes down. Assyria says we're going to conquer you. Assyria takes 27,000 Jewish people.

That was a lot of people in those days. And they take them to Assyria. And what happens to them? They are lost. They're the 10 lost tribes. They were integrated into the other nations and that's it. Years ago, there was a group called the British Israelites. The British Israelites were those who says that the people of Britain are the 10 lost tribes.

But there's no evidence for that. They are totally obliterated in the sense that their identity has been lost. And what the Assyrians did is they brought other people that they had conquered to settle there in the land of Samaria. Centuries pass. What do we read in the New Testament? The Jews have nothing to do with the Samaritans.

Why? Because they were a mixed race. They were Assyrians. There were some Jews, you know, who still stayed in the land. They intermarried.

They lost their identity. They had pagan worship on Mount Gerizim. And that's the end. And Jesus comes and he has to go through Samaria, the Bible says. And there's a Samaritan woman.

Who knows what her race was? And he sits with her and he explains the gospel. And she says, our fathers worshiped in this mountain. I remember being at Jacob's well.

You can't go there today, unfortunately. But sitting there in 1968, there is Mount Gerizim where they found the temple that they built there, the shrine. And she says, our fathers worshiped in this mountain. But you folks, you Jews, you say that in Jerusalem is the place to worship. And Jesus said, hey, neither in Jerusalem nor here. Those who worship the father must worship him in spirit and in truth.

Wow, what a powerful message. So 722, they go off. Then what happens is you have the southern kingdom, the kingdom of Judah that lasts about another hundred and thirty years. Remember, that's where Solomon's temple was built. We're talking about Jerusalem now. And it is there that finally in 586 BC, after the prophets just cry their hearts out, repent, repent, repent. Judgment is coming.

The people say, no, no, no. We like our paganism better. 586 BC through three separate campaigns, Babylon comes. And what you have is Solomon's beautiful temple destroyed so completely that we don't have any artifacts of it anymore. The first temple period is over. The 350 years that it lasted are gone.

First temple period finished. So what happens is now everybody has to go to Babylon from the south, the Jews. Who gets caught up? Who gets swept up in this judgment? The people like Daniel. Remember this, when you have a nation under judgment, if God judges America economically as well, he might. Christians get caught up in this too.

We're part of the judgment. So Daniel ends up and he's in Shushan, the palace there. I mean, he's telling us what's happening in Babylon. By the way, excellent book to study, not only because of its prophecy, but he gives an example of how we have to live differently when we're surrounded by pagans who do not care about our rituals. Nobody in Babylon was keeping the Passover. Nobody in Babylon was concerned about the temple. And so here you have Daniel and his friends and other righteous Jews living there for 70 years until God brings them back. Now, what was the temple, by the way? The temple was simply taking this tabernacle, which initially was a building that could be moved. It was like a tent and giving it a permanent home. And Solomon had done that gloriously. Sometimes people say, we shouldn't give money toward a building.

Let's give it to people. Well, you know, Solomon built that wonderful temple and God apparently was pleased because after the sacrifices, you remember the glory of the Lord came upon it. But now it's totally destroyed. 70 years now, they're going to be in Babylon and then they're going to be brought back this remnant. And then God is going to pick up the story.

And let me say this next week, I will pick up that story too. Where does this leave us? What is the bottom line? The bottom line is what God is trying to convey through all those books of the Old Testament is that sin is terrible. Human beings left to themselves will leave the true God and they'll worship idols and they'll enjoy doing it.

Let me ask you a question. All throughout the Northern Kingdom and the Southern Kingdom, the big issue was idolatry. They would have these shrines on the hill and they'd worship the different pagan gods. Someday I'm going to preach an entire message on this, but what was the great attraction of idolatry? Why were they constantly going back to idols?

A couple of things. First of all, there was some financial benefit that I'll describe at some later time, perhaps if God wills. Secondly, this was a very highly sexualized kind of paganism and you will find people doing all that they possibly can to try to convince themselves that God is not upset with sexual immorality. Whether it is homosexual marriages or whether it is infidelity within marriage, people will do everything to try to justify it and to say that God approves and paganism is waiting for people and paganism says, yes, you can live this way in this sexualized culture and you can still worship the true God too.

And the people bought the lie. Of course, the major message is God's grace, God's grace. You see, in our culture today, politically correct and I know that what I've said today is not politically correct exactly, but in our culture today, people always ask this question, why doesn't God just save everybody? The Bible nowhere answers that question. It answers an entirely different question, namely, how can God save anybody? That's the issue because God is so holy. We are such sinners. The $64 question that is answered in the Bible is again, how does a holy God connect with and how can his presence be among his people when they are sinners?

That's the big issue. And by the way, the presence of God is always the distinguishing mark of God's people. Always Old Testament, New Testament. When people walk into Moody Church, what they should see and hear and as we sing, they should say, surely God is in that place. It's always the presence of God. And what God is saying is that sin is terrible and you can't come bumbling into his presence with your sin unless you have some way that that sin can be forgiven and cleansed. And that's where Jesus comes in. Jesus is going to be born centuries later and he's going to fulfill these Old Testament rituals and he is going to say to you that if you believe on me, you'll be reconciled to God. But if you don't, the wrath of God abides on you no matter how content you are with your sinfulness, the wrath of God abides on you. The bottom line always has to do with how do we manage our sin?

That is the issue. And with that today, I close. Would you join me as we pray together? Father, we thank you today that you found a way by which you could dwell with your people without compromising your holiness or being contaminated by us. Thank you for Jesus, the one mediator between God and man. Thank you that the seed of the woman crushed the head of the serpent and we walk today in his victory. We thank you in Jesus' name.

Amen. You know, my friend, it's always wonderful to see the big picture, to understand God's drama of redemption. And that's what this sermon series is all about.

It is always about redemption, always about Christ. You know, as you look about today, sometimes it is difficult to believe in God, isn't it? We think, for example, of COVID and the destruction of much of our economy, the difficulty and the fear that is in the world.

How do we relate to that? What is God's relationship to that? You know, frequently there are pastors who tell us, trust God. Well, fine, so far, so good. But what if he doesn't answer your prayers?

What if you find that you cannot pay your rent? What if you discover that you are not healed? In a new book entitled Pandemics, Plagues, and Natural Disasters, what is God saying to us?

Those are the kinds of questions that I answer. We need a hope that is so solid that we can continue to endure in the midst of unanswered prayer, in the midst of illness. We need to be able to prove the faithfulness of God. Now this is one of the last days that you'll be able to receive this special resource.

And I say special, because I think it's a wonderful book to give to unbelievers, to give to skeptics, and to remind people that it is possible to believe in God's love and to have faith when all the evidence around you seems to be opposite to that. We go on believing. The title of the book Pandemics, Plagues, and Natural Disasters, in a moment I'll tell you how it can be yours. But I need to tell you that I end the book by telling the story of a young woman in Haiti. The earthquake has come. She lost her 18-month-old child in the rubble.

She's getting onto a bus. And I notice that she has a Bible in her backpack as she is walking up the stairs. If you can believe this, she says, God is our refuge and strength. Imagine that kind of faith. Yet that's the kind of faith that God wants us to have. Here's what you do for a gift of any amount. This book can be yours.

Pandemics, plagues, and natural disasters, what is God saying to us? Five chapters on what God is saying, two chapters on what we should be saying to God. Here is what you do. Go to RTWOffer.com. That's RTWOffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337.

Thanks in advance for helping us. Together we are making a difference. Running to win is now in 20 different countries because of you.

1-888-218-9337. You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois, 60614. Running to Win is all about helping you understand God's roadmap for your race of life. The history of Israel is like a roller coaster, up and down, over and over. Rebellion against God always led to judgment, followed by repentance, restoration, and inevitably, a slide back into rebellion. On our next Running to Win, more from the Old Testament on Israel being taken into captivity for disobeying God. This is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.