Rediscover Your Christian Roots: Plato to Jesus, Part 1

Well, good morning, everyone! It is our real privilege to be here. My wife and I really enjoyed. We drove all the way up here. We live south of Nashville, Tennessee, and we just enjoyed the trip up, and we were here yesterday. Learned a lot about the community. John took us around to just meet people. We also, last night, met with a few people here. Had a Bible study and just appreciated how interesting it was. Afterwards, we just sat around and talked. I got asked questions that I did not know the answer to. Why should we talk about history? History is pretty boring in school for many people. It's dates and names and places that mean nothing to you.

They're faraway places and faraway people. Yet the Bible is a book that contains this history of what God is doing. Now, when we study history, the real reason to study history isn't just for dates and names and places. It's to understand context. I'll give you an example. Most of us, and I think look around at the ages of most of us in this room, most of us remember 9-11 and the shock of what happened when they flew those planes into the towers in New York. We were shocked by it. Why would people do that?

What was their reason? How did they do it? Now, if I was going to write about that event from a historical viewpoint, I would start with Abraham and the conflict between his children, because that's what's happening in the Middle East today. And go through that, go clear up the World War I, the fall of the Ottoman Empire, have to go through the time period of World War II, which greatly affected the Middle East, go through the establishment of the homeland for the Israelis or the Jews coming out of Europe, all the things that have happened in these relationships between those people in the Middle East and the sometimes interference from Western powers.

And if you put all that together as your story, at the end of the 500-page book, which you would find out is 9-11 was just about predictable, because you would understand the context in which it took place. And it was a long historical context that led to an event that led to those people doing what they did.

The same way with the Scripture. Many times we pull out the Bible, and we read it, and, okay, what's the historical context? And what's even important beyond the Bible is what happened after the book of Revelation? Because much of Christianity today, if Paul or Mary or Peter or John or James suddenly were resurrected and came alive today and they walked around, you wonder would they even understand what Christianity is today? Would they even recognize it?

What is this? This is Christianity? What happened? You know, someone asked me what the word Hellenization means. I mean, it's not a word that we use. I don't use that in everyday language, right? It's not a word we use. Hellenization, the Hellenes mean the Greeks. Hellenization means Greek culture being imposed on another culture.

And partly what happened in the second and third and fourth centuries, and we're going to have to lead up to that to understand what happened, was the imposing upon Christianity certain Greek ideals and Greek thoughts and Roman thoughts that led to the formation of what is called Christendom. And we need to understand that because at some point we need and all of, I think all of you are here because you're trying to do that in your lives. We have to go back and find out what was original authentic Christianity.

We have to discover that. We have to try to bring that into our lives and live by that and understand Jesus Christ as in his context. I want to start talking a little bit about the Jewish world. The Jewish world of the first century can seem sort of strange to us, and especially in their interaction with Jesus, and why they made certain issues important. Now there's these major important issues that we find as the church forms among the Jews outside who did not come into the church, and those Jews who did come into the church.

And understand, too, that at the beginning of Christianity it was nothing more than a Jewish sect. It was just part of Judaism until they got kicked out of the synagogue. There were reasons they got kicked out of the synagogue.

So why? Why did those issues come up? We have to go clear back. We're going to start with some historical context. We have to go clear back to the Babylonian captivity. And they were taken into captivity in 586, Judah was, and the Babylonians deported them into Babylon. The Persians conquer the Babylonian empire, and they send them home.

Now not all Jews went home. Those who did were faced with a real interesting problem. Babylon's temple was gone. Their religion centered around this temple. So when you look at the books of Ezra, Nehemiah, some of the minor prophets, God told them, rebuilt a temple.

You have Zerubbabel's temple. But not everybody went back. Many Jews remained scattered. They didn't go back to Judea. They moved throughout what had been the Babylonian Persian empire and actually moved into what would become Europe. The diaspora, the dispersion. Now this is important to understand because Judaism wasn't a monolithic religion in the first century. And you just think about how things would change a little bit and how divergent they would be.

The Jews that go to Judea, they center their worship around Zerubbabel's temple. If you're in the diaspora, what do you have? You don't have the temple. But if you could get enough people together, you would have a synagogue. And if you had a synagogue, you could get a rabbi sent. And the rabbi brought the scrolls with him.

Now the average person didn't own the scrolls of the Bible. It was too expensive. He could bring the scrolls. And so the synagogue became the center of worship. But what's interesting, and we'll talk about that in the next session, is they also started to attract non-Jews to the worship of the God of the Bible because they saw them in their communities. Where in Judea, they built a Jewish world. In the synagogue, they tried to build a Jewish world, but very few people spoke Hebrew.

Most of them didn't even speak Aramaic, which was the language of Judea at the time. They spoke Greek. That alone would cause some differences. So what we have are different Judaism, if you will. Just like we talk about Christianity today, we're talking about literally thousands of groups with totally diversion beliefs.

If you have the Catholic Church on one end, and maybe the Mormons on the other end, right? And everybody else in between. So we have to understand, if we're going to understand why there's some conflicts in the early church, even though most of the first people who came into the church were Jews. But as they expanded out, there would be conflicts. And there were conflicts inside the Jewish community, or inside the church community. So as the synagogues formed, there was something that happened there that also happened in Judea to those who went back and they rebuilt a temple.

And that is, Torah became the center of everything. Now, the Torah were the first five books of the Bible, although the Torah can mean the whole, what we call Old Testament. But specifically, they became center to their belief system, as should be. It's the center groundwork of the Old Testament, if that's all you have. But they also realized, if we don't do this right, God's going to send us back into captivity.

That motivation became very, very important. When you get to Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament, he's telling them, well, you're sliding back into the old ways. You're moving away from your God. Well, over the next couple hundred years, between Malachi and the first century, there is a movement in Judaism, especially in Judea, to make sure never again. We have to take the Torah, and we have to know it, and we have to protect it.

During the Babylonian captivity, they began to collect interpretations of the Bible. And as they collected interpretations of the Bible, it created what was known as the oral law. It was real. It was important. And if you, it's now sort of, if you, the Talmud, which is basically a lot of that oral law, you'll find a lot of conflicting things in there, because there were arguments all the time about what this meant or what that meant.

And so they would write down all these arguments. They would write down all these interpretations. And they had to make sure, you know, that we write down everything, we argue everything about, we're all moving towards making sure we never ever again are taken into captivity. There were scribes. You'll see scribes mentioned in the Bible. I mean, some of these things I know many of you know, but I want the context of where we're going to go to deal with something in the New Testament.

The scribes have to write down. I mean, there's no printing press. Throughout the ancient world, clear up into the late Middle Ages, things were copied by hand. And then somebody else copied it by hand. And somebody else copied it by hand. We have no original manuscripts of the New Testament.

Of course, there's no original manuscripts of Plato or Horace or Virgil or Tacitus or Josephus. You know, the great writers of antiquity, there's no original books from them, or well, books but scold. So this is what the scribes did. And in the Jewish world, it was meticulous. We have to protect the Word of God so that we will never be ostracized again.

Now, in the third century BC, there is a group of religious leaders that became known as the Fathers. Now, in the Jewish world, of course, the Fathers are Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But these people also were sort of a lesser degree, the Fathers. And they began this movement that we have to really protect what God has given to us. And in one of these tenets, one of their tenets that are really important is, be deliberate in passing judgment, raise up many disciples, and read this, and build a hedge around the law.

Now, why would you build a hedge around the law? I mean, that doesn't make sense. What does that even mean? Well, let's sort of put it in modern terms, maybe make up a little story here. Say you live in a community where nobody steals, and one day somebody steals. Well, that's horrifying. You know, they break into someone's house and they steal something. So, of course, you have a law, and they're taken and they're punished for that.

But you decide what we have to do is make sure we're righteous, that there's no more stealing going on. So you pass another law that everybody has to have locks. Good. Now we have a law that keeps people from breaking the important law. You see what I mean? It's a secondary law, but it keeps them from breaking the primary law. But then one day someone breaks a lock and gets in somebody's house and steals. We've got to build another law. So now everybody has to put a ten-foot fence around their house.

So now you have a ten-foot fence and you have locks. Of course, thieves being thieves, one day somebody figures out, pull bolts over the fence and goes in and breaks a lock and steals. Okay. Now what we need is that everybody must wear blinders as they walk down the street so you can't look at anybody else's fence. That's the concept. And if you build enough of those, nobody can steal. Because the first time somebody walks down the street without their blinders on, the religious leaders come and say, where's your blinders?

Okay. So now I made up that scenario. But you understand. That's how they looked at things. You have to build this hedge so that nobody can actually break this law. The Pharisees were one group that formed with this as their basis. Never again will we let this happen. So they enforced the oral law. Philo, first century Jewish writer. Now I want you to think about this in terms of the oral law. For the man who obeys the written laws, okay, those are the laws that are contained in the Scripture.

The man who obeys the written laws is not justly entitled to any praise. It is not just as he is influenced by compulsion and fear of punishment. In other words, he said anybody can keep, say, the Ten Commandments because they feel obligated to because God told them. Besides, if I don't, he'll punish me. So the motivation to keeping the laws of the Scripture, you know, that could be a lot of motivations. But he who abides by the unwritten laws is worthy of praise as exhibiting a spontaneous and unconstrained virtue.

So we use a sort of modern, ridiculous example. The person who builds his wall 12 feet high is even better. Making sure nobody steals. The man who puts the blinders on and puts them on his kids even so they can't steal, that's good. That shows that this person loves the law of God and doesn't want to steal. And some of the absurdities that was developed during this time period, during the Sabbath, how much weight could you carry and not be work? Some rabbis said it couldn't weigh more than a fig.

And of course, not everybody lived by that, but these were the arguments. One was you could throw a grape in the air and catch it in your mouth and chew it because that's the act of eating. If you throw it and catch it with the other hand, it was work. Now, that wasn't enforced throughout Jewish communities. What I'm saying is those are the type of arguments you have when you think of, I have to keep hedging in to protect the law of God.

Because never again are we going to go into captivity. And so this is part of the world that Jesus comes into. Jesus is born into this world. New Testament church starts there in this world at the beginning. So let's think of this for a minute and think about an Old Testament command and see why Jews had problems with this. Abraham was told you must circumcise your children. It was a command from God. And they must circumcise their children and their children and their children because that is the sign of a covenant.

All your families will know that I have a covenant with them because their males will be circumcised. It was a command. Moses comes along and Moses is told you make sure all Israelites are commanded to be circumcised because that is the sign that I have made a covenant with them, God says, and that shows that they are in a covenant with me.

New Testament church. It starts as a Jewish group and it begins to attract a lot of non-Jews. The teachings of Jesus begin to attract a lot of non-Jews. And Paul says you don't have to be circumcised. And the Jewish argument is that they are not under a covenant with God.

To be under a covenant with God you have to circumcise them. Now it's interesting that in some Jewish communities they allowed Gentiles to come in and they didn't force them to be circumcised. Others did. Remember Judaism isn't just this monolithic religion. There are different ideas. They argue over these things. But the ones who were coming into the church, many of them were saying, but if you break that down, who knows?

The next thing they may be running naked through the streets. I mean, you're breaking down the barriers. Not exaggerating again, but you understand. You're breaking down the barriers. They will start breaking laws. It's a command. Now the Apostle Paul, it takes a while for him to actually be able to explain this. And when he did, it put everything in perspective. Now I've told you all this history to get to a point where Paul says something that was absolutely new in the concepts and minds of both Jews and Gentiles. Because a lot of Gentiles were coming into Judaism and being circumcised.

Some were coming into the church and being circumcised. Because there has to be, if I'm making a covenant with God, there has to be a sign of that covenant. Now if you go through the Old Testament and read about circumcision, there's something in there that was being missed. And that is, the Messiah will come and He will circumcise you in the heart. God says, I will no longer circumcise you in the flesh, but I will circumcise you in the heart. So that has to do with covenant. Circumcision has to do with covenant. So, Paul writes to the church in Colossians.

He's talking here about Jesus Christ. In Him, this is Colossians 2 verse 11, in Him you were also circumcised with the circumcision made without hands by putting off the body of sins of the flesh by circumcision of Christ, now the next verse is very interesting, buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised with Him through faith in the working of God who raised Him from the dead. Paul says, oh, you are circumcised. There is a New Testament circumcision, and it has to do with circumcision of the heart.

And the sign of the covenant that makes you, is the sign that you now have a relationship with this covenant with God, is baptism. Now that made sense. When the Jews argued this, they weren't being overly strict or sort of, wow, why are you making an issue out of this? Because I know if I would have been a Jew in the first century, I'd have been saying, nope, God told Abraham to do this, that makes them the people of God, and if they want to be the people of God, they need to be circumcised. And Paul says, no, no, no, no, circumcision of the heart, it says it over and over again.

And it has to do with baptism. By the way, that's why baptism requires repentance and expression of faith. I don't want to get into that, because that's an issue from the Middle Ages, but you can't have infant baptism, because it's a sign of a covenant, maybe between God and that person. That person. And Paul says, no, we're still circumcised, we're still doing that, but the new covenant has been brought, and that's the prophecies of the new covenant. You put all that together, and now you understand. But see, to understand why the Jews were arguing it in the church, you have to understand the history that brings you up to that point.

They weren't being crazy. They were looking at the Scriptures. And I find it interesting that it's years after Paul starts preaching that he finally comes up with an answer that puts it all together. They were debating this for decades. What's the answer? What's the answer? Paul lets God lead him to the answer, and he tells the answer. This is why understanding all that history suddenly makes that little two verses and collagions very, very important. I'm going to stop here just for a minute. We don't have the mic. Well, if someone has a question at this point, you can just yell it out if you want to.

I know that's probably… I didn't cover something new for all of you. Some of you are going to be new. But if there's a question, you understand. Yes? In the Jewish world? Did they have two different kinds of synagogues? By the time Paul writes this, the church is already moving out of the synagogue. Now, the synagogues did have different stances on circumcision. His question was, were there two different kinds of synagogues with these two different ideas? Well, yes and no. Some synagogues would say, you have to be circumcised. Others would say, no, Gentiles don't. And some just agreed to live together.

They solved the problem locally is what they did. There was no… The Sanhedrin, as far as I know, never came up with a thou shalt. So it became a local issue that was dealt with there. In the church, it seems to have been the same thing.

They just kept arguing about it. And finally Paul said, no, this is the answer. This is a simple answer. Christians. He said there's even Christians today who believe that they should circumcise their children. And there's no command not to circumcise. The question is, is that on the same salvific issue as baptism? And not anymore. It's a personal decision. But on this level, baptism does become a salvishing issue because Jesus was baptized as an example. I don't know how much more command you want, right? So there, if that answers your question.

But you can see why there was this constant battle going on inside Judaism at one level and inside Christianity at even a greater level over this issue. And it's all solved with baptism. Yeah? I have a question with respect to the study of Apostle Paul in his Jewish context. So I have heard a discussion, a debate concerning why the Apostle Paul didn't want the nations to be circumcised. And that was because he was interested in the fulfillment of prophecies that the 70 nations would be included into God's covenant people.

And that by circumcising them, their distinction as the nations would not be maintained. So would you have an opinion about this?

I don't know. Because it's an interpretation of that. I can't find Paul saying that directly.

So we're sort of guessing if he did that or not. So it's a possible interpretation of Paul.

That's all I can say because I don't have an exact place to go. You know what I mean?

So that's why I look at that. Okay, another one.

Hi. Am I next? No, yes, you're on. Yes. Okay. Just quickly. So the circumcision, I understand that about the, you know, now the baptism replaces the circumcision as the circumcision of the heart, as Paul described. I'm not sure if I understand, though, why the baptism requires repentance and that expression of faith. One's circumcision did not require that. That it was the family of the chosen people of God, including infants.

That's a real good question because why were Jewish baby boys circumcised at the eighth day?

So why don't we just baptize babies at the eighth day?

When you look at the New Testament, there's something very interesting that's happening because the gospel is spreading out to the world.

If you look at the covenant God made with Abraham, there's two things in there that's promised, that he would make them into a great nation, and two, through his seed all nations would be blessed. We know in Galatians, Paul says, Jesus Christ is that seed. Okay. So there's two promises there.

So the circumcision was a sign that you were part of Abraham's people. You were actually part of, it was a tribal covenant. You became this nation.

In the Sinai covenant, once again, it's made with, it's a covenant made with a people.

During that time period, if any non-Israelite came into the covenant, they had to be circumcised. They would circumcise them. When you find the New Testament, what you find is, a message that goes out to the whole world, and you have to decide to be part of this message.

You know, you were an Israelite by birth, and you were part of the covenant by circumcision, and all the women were also part of it because of that. Today, women become part of the New Covenant through Christ, and if their husband, say, never comes along, and he's never baptized, can they be part of it? Of course, why? Because it's an individual baptism.

Our children are given a special relationship with God, but children are also required to make a decision at some point because this is made individual with individual across all around all the world, wherever people, you know, and I don't know where God's working all the time, but he's making sure that gets done. So that's, you don't see in the New Testament, infant baptism. You do see, repent for the kingdom of God is at hand. Now remember, Jesus is telling Jews who have been circumcised, repent for the kingdom of God is at hand. So repentance is a core message of the gospel. So children should be taught that they are called to choose God, and there's a point where they repent and then they're baptized, not because their fathers and mothers were baptized, but because they are personal. I'm just giving my opinion on this. You asked a question that it's an opinion question because it's personal with every one of them.

It's personal with every one of them, and that's really important. You know, you just didn't become a Christian. You didn't slide in on your parents' codes here, code tells. You are baptized because you make a personal commitment. So anyways, that's my opinion on that. I'll tell you when I have an opinion, and you know, that's how I look at that. There was someone up here.

A confession of faith. We have to confess that we know Jesus Christ. We believe in Jesus Christ, and you know, we've repented, and He is the sacrifice for our sins. Without that, you know, so they have to come together. Okay. Just to clarify off of his question, the circumcision and the covenant did not provide salvation to all of the Jews and the Israelites who were circumcised. So it's a different result as well, and is that correct in saying that? That's a real good point. That's an excellent point. Salvation is offered to the New Covenant. In Jeremiah, God says to Israel, there will come a time I will circumcise your heart. Salvation is offered, but just keeping the Ten Commandments, you can't earn salvation. There has to be a sacrifice, and all those Levitical priesthood sacrifices, picture Jesus Christ. So yes, that's a very good point. Okay, well we'll go on and cover just a little bit more, and it's almost break-dead. Of course, we've got 15 minutes late, but we'll still stop at 10 till.

There is another person I want to mention here, Herod. Herod was an Edomite. He was a descendant of Esau. He was the king over Judea when Jesus was born. He was a tyrant. But history knows him as Herod the Great, mainly because he built incredible water aqueducts. He built a Masada.

He built Caesarea in Caesarea Palatine, which is to this day considered a marvel of construction.

He had concrete in water. Two thousand years later, it's still there.

They have broken down that concrete, just a little minor point, but one of the reasons why they think they mixed animal blood in it, and somehow that coagulated it did something chemically.

So anyways, that's the theory. So he is in, and he's going to have an impact in his descendants.

You'll hear a grip on different ones mentioned throughout the New Testament. So they have a great impact on what happens in that first century church. The Romans allowed the Jews to govern themselves in terms of the Sanhedrin. The Sanhedrin had 70 members. It actually had more, because the Romans, every time there was trouble in Judea, they would come in and fire the high priest. Well, the Jews said, you can't fire a high priest. Well, they had to point a new one, so there'd be two high priests. This number sometimes was 72, because they just keep all the high priests there. You get fire high priests, but they would come and do it.

So the Romans had an interesting viewpoint of things. One is, we don't care what religion you have, just sacrifice to the emperor. In fact, we want you to go to your Yahweh, and I know that's pronounced different ways, but we want you to go to Yahweh, and we want you to sacrifice to Him for the emperor. Just remember, Jupiter, who's our head god, we beat you. So our god's bigger than your god. But we believe in your god. We want you to sacrifice to your god.

We want you to have your religion. They also had enormous freedom of business, because the Romans, all they wanted was your taxes, and they wanted you to accept Roman culture enough that there was peace. They believed they could merge Roman culture with local culture, and have Pax Romana, the Roman peace. And so there's peace and harmony, because everybody gets their own religion, and everybody makes money. Well, of course, life doesn't work out that way, and the Romans never figured out why so many people just didn't make money and worship your god, and be happy, because we're giving you a better life. And when you didn't do it their way, it was brutal. Absolutely brutal. You know, Roman roads are a certain length wide. That way, that how wide they are, not length, but width, is based on the marching of a Roman legion, and the wagons they carried. It used to be in the ancient world it would take a year to get an army from one place to another. They could move an army across their empire in three months. That was remarkable speed. That was like, you know, jet airplanes. And that's why there's one place in the Bible where people are rioting against the Christians, and the mayor says, stop this, stop this. If you don't, Rome's going to hear about it, because you know what happens if you're having a riot? Oh, you can argue all you want. You can have all your local politics. We don't care, but you have a riot. A legion shows up. And those people don't disperse. We kill every one of them, because there's peace in our empire. There was peace enforced by the sword. Okay. There's peace in our empire.

So, as long as you worshiped your local God, and you made money, and you paid your taxes, and they would come in and build Roman baths, and Roman aqueducts, so you'd have running water. They'd do all kinds of things for you. So, it's an interesting relationship between the Romans and the Jews. Okay. We're going to stop here, because we're going to go to Philo next. So, it's time for a break, right? So, let's go ahead. There's some coffee, and there's some... looks like really good cookies over there, and some different things. So, let's take a 10-minute break, and be ready to start right again at 10 o'clock.