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Old Testament Basics - Lesson 04.
Old Testament Basics.
Dr. Sid Buzzell.

Lesson Four.
In Lesson One, we talked about the Old Testament. We talked about what it is and why it exists. In Lesson Two, we talked about the flow of Old Testament history. We looked at the 11 chronology books so that we had the story. The next lesson, Lesson Three, we plugged in the color books, the Prophets, and the poetry.

What we want to do with the rest of these lessons is go back and look at each of these time periods, the beginning, the settlement, the kingdom, the exile and reconstruction, and look at it in a bit more detail. So what you see is we're just building, adding detail as we go along so that as you get the story in your mind then you are able to flush it out. It's almost like building a file cabinet, and each of these four eras is a drawer in your file cabinet, and now as we add detail you go back and you know which drawer to open and where to put all this detail.

So if you've got the structure in your mind, the period of the beginnings, the period of the settlement, the period of the kingdom, the period of the exile and the reconstruction, this lesson is talking about this first period, the period of the beginnings. It covers chronologically three books: Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers. It also includes three color books, the book of Job, the book of Leviticus, and the book of Deuteronomy, which is actually a bridge book from the period of the beginnings to the period of the settlement.

Now the time covered by this period of beginnings we have to divide into two segments. Genesis 1–11 , which contains the story of the creation and the story of Noah and the great flood is almost impossible to set specific times on. That's a period of great mystery. Scholars have studied it, but we just don't want to make specific clear time frames back there.

When we can begin to measure time is with Abraham in Genesis chapter 12. Abraham lived around 2100 bc. The Jewish nation began around 2100 bc with Abraham, and that's about as far on the other side of Jesus as we are on this side of Jesus. This period of beginnings then, if we begin with Abraham in 2100 and we go through the end of the book of Numbers, we're looking at about a period of 700 years. It's an enormous amount of time. So stop and think about this period from Abraham to the end of the book of Numbers as about a 700-year period of time.

Genesis is called the book of beginnings. We call it that because it has three beginnings. It begins with creation, the beginning of everything: God created. In fact, the fourth word of the Old Testament in our English translation, "In the beginning God", that's the key. This is a book about God. If you can't get beyond the fourth word of the Old Testament, you may as well just close it up. Because if God isn't at work there, there's really nothing going on that we can believe or understand or make sense of.

So it is a story first of all about God, but it is a story second of all about God and His relationship with the people He created. When we read the story of creation in Genesis 1 and 2, we only find one time that God created anything in His own image, and that was us. And I believe the writer constructed it that way so that we would understand that of all the things God created, nothing mattered as much to God as you and me.

So this whole story that we read is about the relationship between God and the people He created in His own image. Partially that means we were created to understand God, to interact with God, to communicate with God, to love God, to worship God. Why are we here? What is your purpose and mine? There is no higher calling placed on any human being than to know God, to love God, to worship God. That's what this is about.

Tragically, after God created Adam and Eve, they disobeyed God, sin entered the human condition and that relationship that God created us to have with Himself was fractured. There is alienation. And the rest of the story tells about what God was doing to overcome that fracture, to build a bridge back between Himself and the people He created to live in a relationship with Himself.

Sadly, that bridge didn't work very well; and in Genesis 6–11 we read the story of Noah and the flood where God said, "Man is so wicked I'm going to start over again. Just as I started with Adam and Eve, I'm going to start again with Noah and his family and the animals that I put in this great ark." So we have a second beginning in the book of Genesis.

Those people, the descendents of Noah, responded to God pretty much the same way the descendents of Adam and Eve did. And once again we come to chapter 11 of the book of Genesis, and we find the people trying to build their own pinnacle, their own pyramid that will reach to the heavens. And instead of allowing God to reach down and touch them, they wanted under their own power and under their own wisdom to build something where they could get themselves back to God.

And God said, "You know, I'm going to start again, this isn't working." But this time instead of wiping everybody out, God began with this couple, Abraham and Sarah. We talked about them in an earlier lesson. Abraham and Sarah were selected by God because of their godliness, because of their relationship to God. These were people who did follow God and what they knew about God.

God said to them in Genesis chapter 12, "I am going to make you into a great nation. Your descendents will be like the sand of the sea, you can't count them. I will be your God, and you will be my people. Your descendents will be my people, my special people. All of this land that you walk on I'm going to give it to you. It's your land, you own it." Okay, so this Abrahamic covenant entered into a special relationship with Abraham and Sarah and their descendents, the Jewish people.

The rest of the Old Testament is about these descendents of Abraham. God said, "I will be your God, and you'll be my people." He said, "I will give you a land," and then probably the most important, "I will bless you. You and I will have a special relationship. I will be your God, and you will be my people."

Now I'm stressing that. I've camped there just a little bit, because if we don't, we won't understand  that the whole rest of the Old Testament is about the descendents of Abraham, the people of Israel. Now interestingly, Abraham had two sons. His son Ishmael became the father of the 12 Arab nations. Isaac had two sons: Jacob and Esau. And Jacob had 12 sons who became the fathers of the 12 tribes of Israel.

Both the descendents of Abraham through Isaac, and the descendents of Abraham through Ishmael, claim this promise that God made to Abraham as their own. And that's why if you read this morning's paper, and it almost doesn't matter which morning we're talking about, you read still about the hostility and the competition between these two descendents of Abraham as they decide sometimes through warfare whose land is this really.

So what happened with Abraham in 2100 bc is still affecting our world today in ad 2100. So it's quite an interesting moment in history. As you read the story of Abraham's descendents through Isaac and Jacob and then Jacob's 12 sons, we understand that 11 of Jacob's sons were hostile toward the one son named Joseph because Joseph was the favored son. It was apparent to the 11 other brothers that Joseph would inherit the majority of Jacob's vast fortune.

So in their minds, Joseph had to be gotten rid of. So they sold him into slavery, which is sort of tragic when you think of 11 brothers selling one of their brothers into slavery. But that's what they did. And the slave traders took Joseph down to Egypt. Joseph became a slave in Potiphar's household. He was so faithful to God and to his master that he rose to be the head slave, the steward, the keeper of Potiphar's household. Potiphar's wife took a liking to Joseph and tried to enter into an illicit relationship with him, which Joseph absolutely refused.

She told her husband, Potiphar, that Joseph tried to attack her, and Potiphar threw Joseph into prison. So he went from being the favored son of a fabulously wealthy farmer to being a slave. He worked his way up to be the steward, the head slave in Potiphar's household; and now he's in prison. So once again we see this faithful man of God rising wherever he was. Wherever God put him he rose to the top, and now he's running the prison.

It was at this time, while Joseph was managing Pharaoh's prison, that Pharaoh had a dream and it frustrated him because he couldn't find anybody to interpret the dream for him. And then somebody told Pharaoh that this prisoner named Joseph could interpret dreams. Well, Joseph did interpret the Pharaoh's dream, and the Pharaoh was so pleased that he made Joseph the prime minister of Egypt. So here now Joseph has risen again a third time to a place of prominence, but in this place of prominence he's ruling one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations on the planet.

Well, there was a great famine up in the land of Canaan where Joseph's 11 brothers and his father Jacob were living. So, through a series of events, Joseph invited his father and his brothers to move to Egypt. And they lived out their lives on this very prime real estate in Egypt as guests of the Pharaoh. And that's the end of the book of Genesis.

And then there's a 400-year period where we don't really know much about specifically what went on. The next book in this period of beginnings is the book of Exodus, which opens not with the people of Israel living as guests of the Pharaoh, but as slaves. They cried out to God for deliverance. God raised up a man named Moses, who led them out of Egypt into their new land.

Many of you are familiar with some of the events that occurred during this time. The 10 plagues on Egypt were part of God's process of allowing the Pharaoh to let his people go. The parting of the Red Sea occurs there as the people of Israel were moving out of Egypt into the desert, and God opened up the sea to help them escape from Pharaoh's armies.

The period of manna, God feeding them bread in the wilderness, water from the rock, all these things occurred during this period of time. The high point of the book of Exodus is when the people of Israel stopped at Mount Sinai, and there we realize God gave them the Ten Commandments. We realize God gave them these other 620 laws that regulated their life politically, socially, religiously. But what God really did there is turn them from a great big family of Abraham into a real nation.

He said, "You have a King. I, God, am your King. You have a constitution, this law that Moses brought down from the mountain. That's your constitution. You have a land. You're heading there. It's your land. You have a promise: if you obey Me, I will provide for you and protect you. If you disobey my laws, I will not provide for you and I will not protect you, you're on your own."

And then the rest of the book of Exodus just tells us how these people moved across the desert right up to their land. Well, God didn't raise Moses up primarily to take the people out of Egypt. The goal was not just to get out of Egypt, but to get into their land. That goal was thwarted. The people came up to the edge of their land. They sent 12 spies in to check out the land. Ten of those 12 spies came back and said, "You know what? God was right, that is one beautiful land. You wouldn't believe the fruit and the vegetables and the beautiful architecture, wonderful land. However, there is a problem: great walled cities, highly trained armies. Giants live in that land, no way we can go in that land and take it as our own. We're out of here."

Well, Moses and Aaron (Moses' brother, the high priest) and Joshua and Caleb were four people who stood up against these people who could not believe God, who refused to go forward into the land. But they lost that battle. And the people turned back from the land, refused to go forward. But then they discovered they couldn't go back either.

There's no way they could go back to Egypt. So the dilemma was: we refuse to go forward, we can't go back. What are we going to do? And God said, "You only have one option. Live out your life here in this desert." So the next book that we look at in this period of beginnings is the book of Numbers, which is a tragic story of this generation of Israel wandering around in the desert until they died. It's a sad story of people who say, "I know how to live my life. I don't need God to tell me. I'm afraid of what God has out there. What feels secure to me is what I want to do."

The people of Israel were not the last people to disobey God and spend their whole life meaninglessly, aimlessly wandering around until they die. God says, "I have a better plan. Follow Me, I will take you to places you never dreamed possible."

I have to make that choice every day. Am I smarter than God, or is God smarter than me? Am I going to follow my own wisdom, or am I going to come to this book, including the Old Testament, and say, "Lord, what's Your way of living?" It seems to be a pretty simple choice, doesn't it?