Midweek – The Blank Page In Your Bible Part 2

400 years of history is a long time!  From the time when the exiles return to Jerusalem and rebuild the walls of the city to the advent of Christ in the New Testament we have 400 years of Biblical silence.  This series looks at what happened in those years and how they shape the time into which Jesus comes and how that impacts our faith today.

Transcript

Welcome to part two of this new series, a bit of a different series the blank page on your Bible or in your Bible. For those who weren’t here last week we do have extra copies of the handout from last week if you want that. The video will be available. Certainly the video from last week was available on Thursday morning as well as an audio download if you want to listen in your car.

And hopefully the same will happen tomorrow, everything will be up online tomorrow morning as well. If you ha basically we’re not doing it live because that’s too complicated. But if you do need to catch up, if you don’t happen to be here, and you don’t have the handout, eh, the link within the video file and indeed the audio file if you’re using a podcast application will be there for the handout so that at least you can download it and have a look at it, but there’ll always be printed copies available each week for any that you’ve missed.

So just be aware that if you do have to go and if you happen to miss and need to catch up online.  So just a simple catch up.  Just to make sure we’re all in the same page of where we are. We’re thinking of what we call 400 years of silence. That period between the building and the dedication of the walls in Jerusalem with Ezra and Nehemiah, through to the coming of Christ, those weeks before and months before He was born, that heralding of His coming, that 400 years where really there’s silence biblically, but yet the world keeps turning.

And what we use as a word is pleuroma, which is the fullness of time. That’s how we understand those 400 years. It wasn’t that God wasn’t doing anything. It wasn’t that God was sitting back and having a wee break because he’d been so busy.  No, it’s in the fullness of time, and whenever we turn to Galatians chapter 4, verses 4 5, we read, But when the fullness of time had come,  God sent forth his son, born of woman born under the law to redeem those who were under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons.

We’re actually gonna finish with this verse again this evening because of its significance for what we’re gonna look at, but  we have to understand these 400 years, just as Paul writes to the Galatians that poma the fullness of time. Everything that happens in the four hundred years had to happen  so that when Christ entered into the melting pot of what was to be his time of Palestine, then it would be just the right time  for him to be revealed as the coming Messiah.

So much of what we see unfolding in this intertestamental period was prophesied by Daniel. And that’s where we looked at last week, the prophecy of Daniel. What did Daniel have to say about this?  And we looked in Daniel chapter 8, and there we can pinpoint aspects that Daniel’s prophesying with the life of the main character last week, which was Alexander the Great.

And we looked at those who came after him. Whenever we look at chapter 8 and verses 3, we can see Daniel speaking of the ram in verse 3, and that is the Assyrians, because of the description of where they come from. They come from the east, and they rush to the west.  Then we see the male goat coming from the west and consuming the whole earth in verse 5, and we know that to be Alexander the Great because he came from Macedon, he came from Greece, and he swept across the known world from the west right to the east.

But it’s verse 8 that we’re going to pick up on this evening.  As we think of those who are the four horns that come up from the broken horn. The broken horn itself is Alexander, being that great horn that was broken. You have verse eight there in your handout. Then the goat became exceedingly great.

Alexander, at the age of 32, reached really what was the pinnacle of his success. He did go to Babylon because he wanted to extend eastwards, but he died. I didn’t tell you this last week, but it’s, he probably consumed too much alcohol.  Because he had a party the week before he died with two of his close friends and we’re told that he drunk all night  and the next morning he woke up with a fever.

And so it’s most likely that in some shape or form alcohol had a part to play in his death at the age of 31 or 32.  But anyway, the great horn was broken just at the height of his greatness and instead of it there came up four conspicuous horns toward the four winds. of heaven. Four winds of heaven is prophetic language for the four corners of the earth.

And so as we saw in part one from that verse, we could, from those four horns, pick out the four generals who would replace Alexander the Great. And that’s who we’re going to look at this evening, because the four generals are Cassander, Ptolemy,  Antigonus, and Odysseus. So these are the four generals who came up from Alexander the Great.

And in a moment, we’ll look at where they all settled themselves across Alexander’s empire. But I want to update your timeline. So if you notice, if you compare week one and week two of your timeline, some things have been taken out and others have been put in. The full one is behind me here. On your handout for part two, I’ve kept what I think are the significant moments that we need to remember happened, such as the wall of Jerusalem completed in 445 BC.

And then just 15 years later, we have biblical silence  following the final words of Ezra and Malachi. A significant moment in 386 is Plato starting his academy in Athens. This is really the building of the momentum that’s gonna shape the known world. for the next 300, 400, 500 years with this idea of coming to learn in an academy, not just religious school, but actually coming to learn formally the classical form of education.

Alexander the Great, who really put the wheel in motion there, was born in 356 BC, and then because of his conquests, the Persian Empire came to an end, In 333, with then the coming of the Hellenist, or the Greek Empire, with Alexander. Ten years later, at the age of 31 or 32, Alexander the Great dies outside Babylon.

And then, in 321 BC, we have the death of Alexander’s successor Predacus.  Now, we don’t mention him much, because he didn’t do much. He was basically the sitting duck.  He wasn’t the most powerful, but out of everyone who would come to follow Alexander the Great, he probably was most like him. He was his closest friend, so he knew how to strategize.

Whenever we look at the four generals, they actually weren’t very good, because they started fighting against each other, and then they would start working with each other to pick on another one of them, and so they weren’t very clever. They certainly weren’t able to conquest as much as Alexander had,  The problem with Alexander’s replacement Perdiccas he just didn’t have the backbone.

He couldn’t stand up to these four generals because of the amount of people that they commanded. Then, we move into the family line of the Ptolemies.  And really, these are the folks we’re going to be looking at because they’re the ones that particularly shaped the history. of Israel, of the Palestine that Christ is born into.

So we have Ptolemy I, who’s known as Soter, he dies in 283, having reigned from 321, and then on his death, or shortly before his death, his son Ptolemy II, known as Philadelphus,  he comes into power, and he dies in 246 BC. I like looking at a line like that, simply because it shows us the countdown to Christ, we started this looking at 445, and now we’re almost halfway done.

We’re 200 years later by the time we finish this evening. And we’re getting closer and closer to Christ. And these places, these people have great significance.  So the Greek empire was basically then divided into four. These four horns that came up.  Perdiccas was done away with just two years. He couldn’t control this vast empire as Alexander did, and he was also grief stricken for his friend.

But this is what the empire looks like, and you have a closer one there on your handout. But basically, the four generals, Cassander, he based himself in Macedon. He was a native of Macedon, and so he went home. He settled in home, which was also Alexander’s home, and he believed from there he could actually control the world.

Antinous or we have him there where’s my list of names? Yes, Antinous, Antigonus he takes over this area that really covers that real center part of the empire, with Seleucus coming in the whole east of the empire, taking over Syria, and then Ptolemy taking over from beyond the river down into Egypt.

And that’s significant  for what we’ll think about this evening.  Because Ptolemy I, who was known as Soter, he ruled from 323 BC to 283 BC. He was the one who really  got a grip on the whole situation. Because it turned out that he was quite cunning. He may not have been the smartest of the bunch, but he was quite cunning because he captured  of Alexander.

If you go back to your map on the first page, sorry to make you jump,  Alexander died outside Babylon.  He wanted to be buried over in Libya  at the temple of Zeus,  and so they had to get him from here over to here, but Cassander  decided no, he needs to be buried in the tomb of his fathers.  And so he transports him from Babylon up to Syria, and Alexander’s body remains there in Syria.

At which point, Ptolemy I comes and steals the corpse. And he brings it down to Memphis, down in Egypt, which is well within his territory. And probably the last of Ptolemy’s sons. of the civilizations at that time. There would have been more rural farming down here. Thebes by this time was really in ruins.

Not,  it’s not until Giovanni, whatever his name is from Italy, discovers Thebes in the 1800s that we know that life was there at all. And so really life stops somewhere about here in Memphis being one of the last real big settlements of power. And so that’s where Alexander’s body is led to rest until they build a mausoleum for him up here in Alexandria.

And he’ll move, that’s where the body will be finally placed.  But the reason why Ptolemy did this is because of what he believed about a legend, or in the words of the people writing at the time, a prophecy about Alexander. It was said that wherever Alexander’s body would rest. then greatness would follow.

In other words, whoever had the corpse of Alexander the Great would be the greatest leader.  Turned out Ptolemy I wasn’t the greatest leader because that was just an old wives tale about Alexander the Great’s body, even though Alexander’s body was then put in that wonderful mausoleum in Alexandria.

Ptolemy I fought for 40 years, all of the other generals. To simply hold the territory he had, never mind trying to maintain them. And it was actually Seleucus who was his main agitator.  Seleucus owned really everything of what we know to be Assyria, Mesopotamia, right across, or sorry, Assyria, right across to Syria, just above Palestine that Ptolemy held.

Ptolemy really set his mark by capturing quite early on, around 323, his first year of being the ruler of that area he really settled his claim on that whole region by capturing Jerusalem.  But he did it on a Sabbath,  and we know what happens, leaders who do things on the Sabbath  whenever it comes to the land of Israel.

And so he was able to hold it, but he didn’t know peace in the 40 years of his wars. And coming to the end of his life, he lived to about 84, 85, he made his son Ptolemy II his co regent, and Ptolemy died around December 283 BC. What do we know about Ptolemy I? He acts as a thief. He steals the body of Alexander while en route to Macedonia.

He consolidated, seizing power seizing Jerusalem on the Sabbath, and his reign sees him embattled in wars to secure his territory in Egypt.  But what happens when he dies  is a new era is heralded,  a new era of relative peace for his son Ptolemy II. The wars had to come so that the land would know peace.

Tmy II was known as Philadelphias,  why some places are called Philadelphia, named after Tmy ii, and he ruled from the death of his father in 283 BC right down to 246 bc. And this is the guy, the second ruler of the tome line, who provides us with an understanding of why the world that Jesus enters into is the world that it is.

He really is the one, much of what we talked about last week, he’s the one that really gets it going because he introduces us to the world of Hellenism, or the Greek world. He’s the one who really sets in place what will be the marker for civilization for the next four to five hundred years. And so much like last week, you’ve got a bit of work to do yourself.

If you’ve got a pen there for the middle of page two, I’m going to tell you some things.  And so we begin with the city.  Now, the city  is important in Hellenism.  Remember, it’s called the polis.  Metropolis, if you’re a Superman fan, or cosmopolitan, the cosmopolis  is where we get that word. Politics comes from polis, the management of the city.

And so the city was going to be the heart of Hellenism. It was the place where everyone would be gathered in. It was the place that would draw people to it, to sell and to trade. It was the place that was going to be for learning, as we’ll see. It was going to be the place of magnificent architecture. It was going to be the place where gods would be worshipped.

It was going to be the place where the dead leaders of Hellenism were going to be worshipped.  But, we’ve come across the polis or the city before,  and I want you to think back  to Jesus,  and I want you to remember where Christ’s ministry was the most successful. Whenever we looked at Mark’s Gospel, he went to Tyre and Sidon,  but he also went to a place called the Decapolis.

Tyre and Sidon and the Decapolis We’re all Gentile areas.  And the Decapolis, Deca, simply means ten. Polis means cities. So you have ten cities. And on your page there, did I do it for you? I did on page three. Because we’ll talk about the Decapolis a little bit later. But there you have the Decapolis and the ten cities.

Some of them you’ll recognize, some of them you’ll not. Some of them have completely disappeared and have new names than what we know them now as. But really, they’re in this part of Israel,  just between the Dead Sea, along the Jordan River, and the Sea of Galilee, just north of Perea. And you’ve cities Gadara, Gerasa Hippos, Pella, Philadelphia.

And OPIS  cities that Jesus traveled in.  But the whole reason for having the Decapolis by Tmy, the first or by Tmy the second was because although they may have settled Jerusalem.  There was still war coming on the eastern border. And so by building these ten cities of the Decapolis, Ptolemy II was really building a barrier, a very physical barrier of defense.

Ten cities that could not only defend  the Greek Empire, the Ptolemy Empire, but also they could herald what was coming. They could be the lookouts. They could be the place of spies to see what was coming as they clashed with Seleucus. And so the city not only became an important strategy for how Hellenism would grow around the world, but to maintain power, the Decapolis was that buttress.

It was that place where Ptolemy II was saying you can come this far  and no further.

And yet where was Christ’s ministry most successful?  As we’ll see later  in the Decapolis.  It was there that people responded.  It was there that people followed.  And where was he rejected? Just as the prophet said, he was rejected within his own Jewish areas.  Ptolemy the second gives us the Decapolis.  The Decapolis that is the springboard  of the gospel mission of the church.

Back to page 2 in your handout, that’s the cities. The world of Hellenism, though, was all about the syncretism in religion. If we were to synchronise our watches, we would all make sure that they were at exactly the right minute and the right second. We all know what it means to synchronise. That’s what this simply means.

Synchronising religion means making sure that all religions are effectively singing from the same hymn sheet.  And Ptolemy II was very clever at this. The picture that you have on the screen  is the god Serapis.  And this is the god of the sun.  But this is a god that has a Greek face, but all the trimmings around it  are Egyptian.

Because Ptolemy II was based in Egypt, and so he had the Egyptian religion to merge with the Greek religion. And just like the Greek religion, the Egyptians had a sun god.  And so Ptolemy synchronized what we call it synchronizing,  but he basically moved the Egyptian religion to what the Greek belief was.

And in Alexandria, he built a temple. For this God, Serapis, this God of the sun, so that both Egyptian and Greek would come together  under one religion, but yet each believing it was their religion,  so therefore there was no religious battles or difficulties. He was able to keep the people calm and at peace because he synchronized the religion.

Spring forward  the 200 years after Ptolemy II, and what we’ll see in weeks four and five,  why Israel becomes a hot pot, a melting pot,  because whenever synchronization was tried further north. The Jews were having none of it. They were faithful. They were monotheists. One God and one God only, the God of Abraham, the God of Jacob, or the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.

And so that’s why you have the Essenes, that’s why you have the Maccabees, all coming to either maintain a very strict Judaism, or to fight as the Maccabees did, because they weren’t going to be synchronized with whatever Greek and then Rome wanted them to be. In synchronizing the religions in Egypt,  move forward 200 years, and you then have the melting pot of the revolts  that come out of Palestine,  all because 200 years religion was attempted to be synchronized so that there would be harmony among the people.

Ptolemy II’s long finger reaches deep into the history of scripture.

The next part of the world of Hellenism is the library, and this is an artist’s impression used of what archaeological information they knew in the 1800s. The library was to be the place of learning,  and so they would build a library, and there was a beautiful library, one of the wonders of the ancient world in Alexandria, along with the lighthouse in Alexandria and we’ll come to look at that in a moment, but every center They wanted a library.

A place where not only records would be kept, but where people could learn. Not religion, but classical education.  It’s believed that the Archimedes screw, you know that idea of water going up an Archimedes screw? Was first developed at concepts of it at the library in Alexandria.  So this was a place of great learning, a place that a pupil of Aristotle really got founded and organised in its very infancy.

And so the library was to be the place of centre, and whenever you came to Alexandria you don’t have this map, but in the Royal Quarter here, the Royal Quarter, number one up there at the top in the harbour is called the Royal Harbour. And right across from the Royal Harbour and the Royal Palace was the museum, which was also the library.

These two things went hand in hand. And right across from the library you had the Pharos Lighthouse, which was the third greatest wonder of the ancient world, and in fact there are still ruins of that lighthouse at the bottom of the sea in the harbour there in Alexandria. The library.

But it’s the library, that idea of the library that would influence Jewish faith.  So they didn’t push everything away, but how Hellenism set up its style of learning filtered into the Jewish customs. As the Pharisees and the Sadducees came to be in about a hundred years from this time,  they started to teach and train just like the Greeks.

I knew, of course, it was religious teaching,  but it was a formal classroom,  set in a formal age, in a formal structure,  with a formal curriculum of what boys were to learn.  And so the library became the library that the Hellenists wanted became a marker for how the Jews would learn their faith.

I’m moving on from the library and closely linked. The world of Hellenism also gave the Septuagint.  The Septuagint is if you’re reading some books and it says  LXX, that’s the Roman numerals for the Septuagint, and that is the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible.  And so because, as we’ll see in a moment, language was important, the Bible became translated into the language of the people.

And because it was considered a book of learning, because you worshipped every and any God, then it was placed in every library. So very quickly, those who could read could begin to understand the Old Testament scriptures. And so the Septuagint became part and parcel of life. The Old Testament, part and parcel of life within the Greek Hellenistic world.

And the this translation of the Old Testament is still used today. In fact in Union College we would have looked at parts of it as we were learning Greek to look at some of the differences in how language changed between the Old Testament and the New Testament, with the New Testament of course being written in Greek.

And then the final thing that really we want to look at in the world of Hellenism is the coin,  the common form of Greek, the standardization of the Greek language. Remember what Alexander the Great wanted. He wanted a one world.  And that was to be a Greek world. And of course, the one way to do that is to have one language.

And as you can imagine, with an empire the size of the Greek empire, You might have had Greek, but you might have had different dialects of it. Little words being changed here and there because of pronunciation, because of a broad accent or something like that. And so coin, which by the way is where we get our term, coin the phrase, to coin a phrase,  to standardize what we’re saying.

The common form of Greek came about. The significance of that was not only with the coming of the Old Testament into the Greek language, and also the writing of the New Testament in the Greek language, but whenever the Apostles and the early Church went out on its missionary journeys, they had one language.

One universal language for the known world. They could go, and they could proclaim, and they could preach, and they would be understood because of what Ptolemy II had put in place, the coin, the common form of Greek, so that would be understood. That’s one of the key things in all of this.

Unknownst to the very pagan Ptolemy II, God was using him to lay the foundations for what would be the journey of the church.  Following Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension. And this is where we turn in our Bibles this evening, to right to the end of Acts and Acts chapter 28.

The final part of Acts 28 is Paul in Rome.  And then. People come, there’s an appointed day that people come, he shares with them the gospel and how he knows it both Jesus, both from the law of Moses and from the prophets and also from the testimony and witness of Paul himself, and some go away in disagreement.

But in verse 25 we read and disagreeing among themselves they departed after Paul had made one statement. This is what Paul says, the Holy Spirit was right in saying to your fathers, through Isaiah the prophet,  go to this people and say, you will indeed hear, but never understand and you will indeed see, but never perceive.

For this. People’s heart has grown dull and with their ears they can barely hear and their eyes, they have closed.  Lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart. and turn, and I would heal them. Therefore let it be known to you that this salvation of God has been sent to the Gentiles.

They will listen.

These five forms of Hellenism  that Ptolemy II brought about, which was really the brainchild of Alexander the Great, led the foundation for what Paul is talking about here right at the end.  We all know that the prophets said that the Jews were going to be ignorant of the Messiah. We know that through the time of Christ himself.

We know that through the birth of the early church. That the growth in the church came from the Gentile nations, just as Paul had said. Therefore, let it be known to  you that this salvation of God has been sent to the Gentiles.  They will listen.  And the reason why, firstly because of the action of God in working in their hearts, but working through, as God does, human history, Ptolemy II lays a foundation for society, a Gentile society that will be open to hear the Gospel, but also a society that will allow the Gospel.

Now, of course, the Romans come, and it’s during the Roman times that this happens. But what the Romans do, as we will see, is they build on what Ptolemy II has, they Romanize it. But then we have the Pax Romanis,  the Roman peace,  which allows, as Paul we know, to defend himself as a Roman citizen, but also to travel freely without let or hindrance.

And so the bedrock is what is the fulfillment. of what Paul writes. But of course, going back to what we know about the Decapolis  and our application for today, we know that in Matthew 4, verse 25, where we read, And great crowds followed him from Galilee  and the Decapolis, and from Jerusalem and Judea,  and from beyond the Jordan.

It wasn’t just the Jews, even in Jesus time that came. It was the Gentiles, from those beyond the Jordan.  And the Decapolis, and do you remember where the first missionary was sent?  Into the Decapolis.  Jesus heals the man and he goes back home and he proclaims in the Decapolis all that Christ had done for him.

You see the significance of what we’re learning about Ptolemy  is that no one could have imagined  the impact that the Gospel would have on the Gentile world, yet they were the ones who responded to Jesus.  And so when we go back to the verse that we began with, But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, Born of a woman, born under the law, To redeem those who were under the law, So that we might receive adoption  as sons.

In that fullness of time, God used  the corrupt  and the pagan, Ptolemy the second.  that within human history a foundation would be led, that would be the springboard of the gospel,  so that we would know it in our time today.  God is at work in every place and at every time. We may not always recognize it immediately, but he continues to rule and reign and work all things in time, so that his plan of salvation will flow from one generation.

To the next,  so the time in which we’re living.  As we think about this impacting us today,  knowing how God works, knowing how he worked 300 years, 400 years before the coming of his son, that Jesus would come into the world at just the right time. How does that make us view today?  And so you have three questions to think about as you go home, questions that invite us to look back so that we can retell the story of how we’ve seen God at work, even though we did not know it at the time, but yet now we can look back and see God at work.

And having learned from that then question two, what confidence can you take from this that God was at work?  How do we know that He’s at work here and now? And because of that then, how does that shape our prayers? How do we pray?  Because of what we know about God. And by the way, that’s how we should always pray.

Our prayer should always begin first and foremost, with our knowledge of God.  ’cause how can we pray if we don’t know him and who he is, then we can’t effectively pray. We have to worship him in prayer by knowing who he is. So then we can pray what is aligned with his heart.  And then thirdly,  this is a repeat question.

I can remember doing this before. I can’t remember which question. Oh yes, it was the series on prayer that we did.  I repeated the last question every week. But how can this be a message? Learning what we learn about God, how can this be a message of hope to our own hearts, and a reason for our hope that we can share with others?

See, it’s all well and good learning history, and if you’re like me, you probably enjoy learning it,  but it has to have a significance, and I hope tonight we’ve seen its significance played out in the New Testament that we’re familiar with.  But yet knowing it to be the plurimo, the fullness of time,  that God at work in human history very practically through Ptolemy II.

So that the gospel will be spread, that we know it today, and that is our hope, that we proclaim and profess to the world around us.  Next week, whenever we’re back on part three, we’re going to be looking at how Daniel, looking at the Bible, this blank page in the Bible through Daniel’s  eyes as we take a little bit of a look at the prophecies.

that Daniel has, particularly in chapter 11. If you want to prepare, then, not only is this your homework, but have a wee read at Daniel, really from Daniel 8 to the end of the book. And we’ll dip into that next week to see what Daniel teaches us, not just about Ptolemy,  but also what comes after Ptolemy as well.

So let’s pray as we finish.  Our Father God, we thank you that we can learn these things by what has been revealed to us through scholars of the time, but how we can see it as a fulfillment of prophecy, but also how we can see it playing out in the life and times of Jesus Christ. And what significance that is, not only for the early church, but for us today.

We thank you that you are at work throughout all of history. You’re at work throughout all of time, and we praise you that we can have this confidence that as you worked in the past,  So we can believe You at work now and in the days ahead, no matter how hopeless this world seems. Father,  we pray  that You will lead us in Your Word,  that our eyes and hearts will be drawn to You,  and we will have great confidence in You as the God over all.

So be with us as we live and as we learn. In Jesus name, amen.