Listen to the Land (Historical Geography) - Lesson 20

Dr. Cyndi Parker
Listen to the Land
bs600-20
Going Out From the Land
Lesson Transcript 

Okay. So many of our studies have been all about the different regions and where are the connections. And now we have to think of where are the connections out. So before we go there, we're just going to follow. I'm going to do this kind of x luke pairing because we we always pair Luke and acts together almost as a first half and second half of a letter or a narrative that is being told. And the Book of Acts contains a journey narrative just as much as the Gospel of Luke. So if you read any of the commentaries on Luke, lots of them. We'll talk about how we get this journey. And in Luke quite specifically, and since we ended our loop around the land up here accessory of Philippi, I'm going to say Luke is quite particular to put us on the journey with Jesus that goes back down into Galilee, all the way down into the Jezreel Valley, through the Harrowed Valley, down the Rift Valley. And then we're going to pick him up again at Jericho and then we're going to ascend one of those routes. Right. We know there's three routes that come into the land. One of them takes us directly to Jerusalem. And so we've been following Jesus as he goes. And there's kind of a review of his entire ministry as we follow this last journey with Luke. So it's really quite special, I think. So we've done this journey through Luke chapters 9 to 19, and then all of a sudden the narrative slows down a lot in Luke, and a lot of focus is on what is this final approach into Jerusalem like. So some of this we already covered when we were looking at Jerusalem within its larger geographical context. But just to kind of get us back into that mind frame, you know, we have to we have to shrink our horizon lines. Since we've been up in the Galilee, we have to put it all in. And again, we're back into an enclosed mountainous area and we need to remind ourselves of what time of year we're there. So hopefully you remember this. We haven't explored it all that too recently, but this is very strategic. And so within the calendar, where are we in this year? When Jesus comes in for the final time, He and the disciples are going to Jerusalem to celebrate which of these festivals? Passover. Exactly. So we're in this, we've harvested barley, we're getting into April, and we were talking about during the Jerusalem unit how important this is because of Passover and what people are remembering that God and Pharaoh go head to head. You know, there's a redemption from an oppressive overlord. And so as people are being cautious of who Jesus is because of this holiday and Jesus coming in and Passover, I mean, there were several different insurrections that all seem to have been almost yearly during Passover. So it was something people were accustomed to. They were just afraid Jesus was at the head of it this particular year. But it is important, as it always is, to read our scriptures with this calendar in mind, knowing where we are on the calendar. Okay. So we know Jesus goes in, he spends a week in Jerusalem, there's the death and there's the resurrection. And now after we get to the resurrection, there's the how do we how do we know, interpret and understand Jesus now that we've seen what it is He meant by Messiah ship. Okay, so Jesus appears to the disciples. Matthew tells us He hangs out with them in Galilee actually for quite a while, and then they all come back to Jerusalem. And now we're going to start the Book of Acts. Okay, so keeping our calendar in mind, let's look at the beginning of the Book of X. So it says to these. He also presented himself alive after his suffering by many convincing proofs appearing to them over a period of 40 days. And speaking of the things concerning the Kingdom of God gathering them together, he commanded them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait for what the father had promised, which he said you heard of from me, John. Baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit. Not many days from now. So what time of year is it? This is when we pull up our calendar again, it's shovel out. So this is now that we're really good biblical historians and geographers and we're understanding our context. If we have in fact, there are seven weeks between Passover and Shavuot. It's seven weeks is 49 days, right. And if we're 40 days in, we're close to Shavuot. So we're anticipating this. So when Jesus says, stay in Jerusalem, there's like a right. You know, there is another huge festival coming up. What are we remembering with Shavuot? In the Hebrew Bible. This is primarily an agricultural holiday. But by this time, sometime between, like the beginnings of the holiday and by the time we get to the first century. I don't know if anyone remembers. We said there's an attachment of standing at. Oh, it looked like you were getting ready to say. Mount Sinai. Yeah. Right. Do you remember there's a people had attached to this holiday? The idea of this is when we stood at the mountain and God married us, you know, our God gave us everything we needed to know to be fulfilled. Humans in the land he was he gave us to inherit. Right. That is how people remembered this giving of the law, giving of the covenant at Mount Sinai. Okay. Now, just out of curiosity, if you were to put on your Israelite memory and you were to stand at the bottom of Mount Sinai, there are certain things that are quite demonstrative of that time that would have really stuck in your head of what you were seeing and experiencing. So does anything pop up for you? Like when God shows up at Mount Sinai, there's a theme of any of sorts. What kind of things help to display God was there. 

[00:07:10] Moses goes up to the mountain and on the top of the mountain, hanging out with Moses is God. And there's wind, there's thunder, there's lightning ready. It's you get that the thief often is often are this like ripping apart of the fabric of nature, like big sounds, right? So fire, wind, all these things. Okay, so we're we're on the eve of Shavuot and Jesus said, don't leave, but stay here. Okay? So and then continues, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you shall be my witnesses, both in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and even the remotest parts of the Earth. Now, this would be my question to you. We've done all these geographical regions. Now there's a part of you as a geographer. I'm going to call you that because, you know, as you're graduating from this course, you can take on that title for yourself. We start to see we start we should be asking ourselves this question maybe. Is this list of places is this purely geographical? Is it memory? Because we know land holds on to memory? Is it a religion? Is it sociological? Like what? What is it that is going on? Well, Jerusalem Place, Identity Boy. And if we were to say what memories are in the land in Jerusalem, like, oh, gosh, everything. Everything is there, right? It has some of the thickest soil of everything that we've seen because it was the capital city of King David. It is King David's city. The temple is there. God's presence has been there. Right. It's been at the heart of so many different things. Jerusalem is significant. It's massively important. Okay. What about Judea? Well, now we're going from a city, Jerusalem, Judea, and now we have a region. And Judea important, right? It's surrounding Jerusalem. There is like a movement out. But we also know of Judea as the place where the Jordanians first returned. Exactly. Here already you're anticipating you've got it. Yeah. It's that this is where they are returning to and rebuilding a life and thinking of. So what happens when God restores us here? What about Samaria? Now, we're not because people talk sometimes they explain this portion, almost like if you drop a pebble into water and it ripples out. But that's not actually what's happening. We go to Jerusalem, we can say, Yeah, it works for Judea. But now we're moving into a new region. And now look at Samaria. What's going on with Samaria? Well, now we have this idea of the northern kingdom of Israel. We have the Samaritans who's actually Jewish. Like we're kind of Jewish. We're Jewish. No, we're Jewish. We're God's people. No, we're God's people. Right. We have this idea. Only these things together are a fully redeemed kingdom of Israel. There has to be, you know, if there is going to be another King, like King David who ruled over the entire nation, we would have to expect that the one who fulfills those kinds of shoes is redeeming the entire nation. So there is something about moving from Jerusalem, the heart of it all into Judea, culturally very Jewish, to go ahead and bring in the others who are pretty much like us, but kind of not in significant ways. Right. Do you see now if it was purely a geographical reference, we would expect in Galilee. Right. Because and Jesus hung out here all the time with his disciples, this is a natural leap, except if we're following this kind of historically and culturally and like a biblical theological way, then we go to Samaria, not up here, but to the remotest parts of the earth. To the complete other. Now, where does the complete other start? Well, right over here at Caesarea Maritime on Virgin Territory, where no story existed before Herod the Great built a little mini Rome. Write everything that would please Rome, including a temple to Caesar. Everything facing Rome. You could almost say, you know, you can get your toes wet. In the whole rest of the empire by stepping into Zechariah. So I would almost argue that by Jesus telling his disciples, this is what the spread looks like. It's like the heart of Judaism absorbing those who have somewhat gone astray from the Israelite story to people who have never heard of the Israelite story. And you're the ones who are taking that message. And then the beautiful part of that is it's really is accessory a matter of time where Paul is going to go on his for his very last journey, the very last time that he's going to head off towards Rome. But Paul is coming in and out of Zechariah several different times. Right. So we're going to keep our eye on that. We're going to come back to that. But we're not going to leave Jerusalem just yet. We're going to hang in there because we need the Holy Spirit to show up. And we should be asking ourselves maybe along with that with them, how do we know? How do we know when the Holy Spirit comes? Like, what does that even mean? Because we haven't even really been talking about the Holy Spirit and who, who or what that is. Right. Okay. So last we heard, we were on day 40 and we were supposed to hang out in Jerusalem. And so then we get this verse that says When the day Pentecost had come. Now we're reading Greek. Right. So Pentecost would be 50. So we're 50 days in. 49 is the night before. Okay. So on the 49th day we are celebrating now we're in Jerusalem for which holiday Shavuot out what is on the minds of absolutely everyone who is there. Mount Sinai. We received a covenant. We married God. God showed up in a big three ofany rite with Moses. Gave us his instructions for how to behave. So when the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven, a noise like a violent rushing wind. And it filled the whole house where they were sitting, and there appeared to them tongues as of fire distributing themselves. And they rested on each one of them and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit was giving them utterances. Okay, so how does the Holy Spirit show up? Fire. Wind. Loud sounds kind of a cacophony of sound when we're all thinking of God showing up at Mount Sinai in the same way. How do we know the Holy Spirit came? Because he looks just like how God shows up. Okay. Now we're in Jerusalem and of course, everyone goes awry. I mean, like, people start gathering and they're like, what is going on? There's this loud sounds people are gathering. And Luke, as we often say, is the writer of the Book of Acts. So Luke is going to tell us that there's a lot of people here and we should look at the list of all these people who are here, because these people are going aren't these garlands like. There's a peculiar accent in the Galilee, and yet they're speaking our languages from where we all originate from. These are not foreigners. They're all Jews. They just happened to be distributed there in the diaspora. Why are they all in Jerusalem? Because they're there for the pilgrimage holiday. Okay, so who all is there? Well, we get the Parthians. They're out east, the Medes, the Elamite, all those from Mesopotamia. Judea is there, Cappadocia is there. Asia. Right, Bob. Above a black Egypt like we have out into the European continent, down into the African continent, out to the East Asian, European, African. We have all the continents covered. They're all here. Now, the idea is, of course, they are going to be taking this message of what's happening. They are headed home. So after one pilgrimage feast, you have news automatically spreading to the uttermost parts of the earth. So that is happening. Okay. Turning to Book of Acts. I get so excited over the geography and the people and who's there and who's there. But we really should finish because, Peter, we've seen a transformation in Peter. Peter is finally understanding what is going on. And so, Peter, after we get this list of who all is there and they're a little bit confused about what's going on, Peter gets up. And he gives his great sermon in chapter two, verse 15. These men are not drunk. And as you supposed for it is only the third hour of the day. But this is what was spoken of through the prophet Joel. This is another really good clue that he is speaking to a Jewish audience, even though they're quite distributed around the world, because he's speaking in insider language. He's assuming they understand what the prophet Joel means. So even though Peter is going to tap into like one phrase of Joel, it only makes sense within the big context of the entire book. So he makes reference and everyone else should go, Oh, and I know what the next verses and the next one. And so I'm understanding by Peter does a little shortcut sermon message here. So he quotes Joel and says this is only possible because of who Jesus is and people are amazed. And people start. Repenting or turning from the direction in which they were going to turn and follow in the direction Jesus is pointing the way towards. And so the very earliest Jewish Christian church is born, right? The church, we say the church, but it's there all Jews who are the earliest of the Christians, right? They're all Jews. They're agreeing. They're forming this new community of Jews. And in order to show this, like repentance, this turning, this agreement of belonging to a new group of people, people say, we would like to be baptized into this. Peter's like, great. 300, 3000 people are baptized that day. Now, how can so many people be baptized in a single day? Well, this is all happening in the vicinity of the temple. What's around the vicinity of the temple? But all those mikvah out. So people are it's already a part of Jewish custom to dip in the mikvah. It is part of your spiritual and ritual cleansing before you enter into God's presence. And so now there's a, Oh, we already know what to do. This is actually already part of our practice. There's a dipping into the mikvah. Oh, this is what we have around us. Okay. Now to just bring our Mount Sinai thing to a beautiful conclusion of God's redemption of history. The original Mount Sinai, when Moses is there and God is showing up in this great the OFANY and actually what happens is this little misstep among the Israelites down below. Right. Moses goes back down. There is a golden calf. There is, Aaron. People are rejoicing and there is ramification for what they have done. And Israelites die that day. Do you happen to know if you were to make a super wild guess how many Israelites die at the base of Mount Sinai? 33,000. And so now we have when people are remembering Mount Sinai, God is showing up again in the form of his spirit. We're starting something new. 3000 are born into it. It's a really beautiful layering of history. You just need to know what you're reading. Okay. So this idea of taking this message, we're moving from Jerusalem, Judaism to the ends of the earth. It's not random. Right. There's something specific there. And I think part of the message is we're not like leaving Jerusalem and forgetting it, leaving Judea and forgetting it. We're building. And the the effects of it is even though Peter and Paul and disciples are going to actually the Book of Acts is organized to follow this transition. It's organized with all the stories of Jerusalem. First, only a couple stories in Judea, but then the focus goes to Samaria. And then in chapter 15, we have this grand chapter of all the church leaders, all these Jews who are going, what are we going to do with the Gentiles who come with those who are outside of our story? And what do we do as we take the story that belongs to us here? A messiah that lived here. Like, How do we take this and make it applicable in the other place that has no understanding of this story, no cultural understanding of who we are? The blood, sweat and tears that has gone into being God's people to this point. What do we do? And this is Chapter 15. How do we bring the Gentiles in? Do they need to be Jewish first or not? So what does it mean? So we can watch and we can journey. And we can struggle with the earliest leaders as they step out of the land, because everything gets more complicated when that happens. But we also find that when they step out of the land, they're always inviting everyone to remember that they are all anchored here to the events that happened in Jerusalem. There is always a going back to it has everything to do with what Jesus did in Jerusalem. Do not forget. Go back and visit. Go back and see. There is a going out, but not a forgetting as you go. And then all you need, right, is another historical geography course that takes you out into that land to explore those people, groups and those the next portion of the story, which really is how do we wrestle through some of the complications. So maybe maybe another course, but we're just going to stop with this one here and looking at and just hopefully you've been embedded in your heads how important it is to have your maps and your calendars and your scriptures open at all times as you are reading and studying. Yeah. You have a question? 

[00:23:23] So as we look at the geography and look at the history, the idea of looking back and being reconnected is sometimes different than what we normally think of, that we're inviting the Jews to be a part of us or we're inviting the, you know, people outside to be a part of the Gentile movement. That is what we look at is Christianity, and it's almost backwards. 

[00:24:03] Yes. And I would say there's so much history embedded in even the way you made that statement in terms of. I mean, there's Eastern and Western ways of looking at things. And remember I said in one of our previous lessons, we were talking about how the world is turned upside down. As soon as Alexander the Great comes from the West, he brings a whole new way about thinking of things. The Greek philosophical way of thinking is how we modern day in the West think right? And we think that's natural. But we've just absorbed that. Like we've grown out of that Greco-Roman way of thinking that is not natural to this part of the world, this part of the world, like free for people who live in Southeast Asia, the majority of the Asian continent, and in certain parts of Africa that are an honor, shame culture, that are driven by narrative, that protect the family and honor their past. They get the biblical context more intuitively than we do because we are the inheritors of the western way of thinking. Right? There's a lot to be learned by our brothers and sisters who understand Scripture in the more like natural way, I would say. So there's a there's a lot of history there that comes from I would say this is what makes acts tricky is there's a whole cultural way of understanding the world that Peter and Paul are having to deal with as they start interacting with Gentiles is. Not just the Jewish story, but how do we view our like what is our worldview created from? Like all of that changes in the Book of Acts. And even when we look at their earliest church fathers, everything is changing all the time, which that part of history is fascinating to me. We just don't have time to do do it this course through. But it is it is really important. And I would just affirm and agree with the way that you phrased that observation. So people always say, okay, now what? Right. Like, okay. Like we don't. Okay, fine. You know, but where do I go from here? So I'll give you two different resources. One, this is my new book. So encountering Jesus in the Real World of the Gospels. I spent a lot more time in the book looking at the development, the changes, the evolution of Judaism. It's not exactly the same as the Israelite religion. It has developed and changed because culture has changed. And so we look at all of that and we look at some of the information would sound familiar because we do the calendar, we do the roads, we do all of that, and then we look at Jesus interacting within that community. And all of this is based on all the questions people have been asking me when I teach in Israel and in churches modern day. The other one. This is also a brand new book by Dr. Paul Wright. He is my mentor in understanding how the land works. And he has been teaching the land of the Bible. He's been living in Israel for two decades now and this is his newest book and I would highly recommend it because a lot of what I am teaching is in a way echoing him. This just is a book that goes into because it is a book has the luxury of being able to go a lot deeper into some of the details. So if you want to dig in even deeper, get his book, which is available on all of the places where you buy books. I'll mention a few other things. I mean, aside from there's several different podcasts that you can go to and listen, that dude context, which I think is is beautiful, but the lexicon geographical commentary is a series, and I'm a contributor to that series, and it is a way of going through and creating a commentary on the Bible with a geographical lens. So what happens? And so and that you can get electronic versions of it, you can get the print version of it. And it's just another really great tool. Lexan geographical commentary of the Gospels. Of Acts. Of the Pentateuch. Of the historical books. And of the songs and prophets. The last one is an out, so it's a brand new series and slowly being released. Those are all things that I would immediately point to and say, Go get these resources, go get a whole series of maps, start drawing and coloring maps, and come with me to Israel. Yeah, go on your own. Now that you're your resource, they're giving you the resources. Go rent a car and go explore and see. But get the feeling of the land in your bones and in your muscles and smell things and taste things and talk to people. Thank you for joining me on discussing some of my most favorite things to be discussing about the Bible. It's been fun to have this class here.