Walk Through the Bible

Text for Sermon:  Deuteronomy 18:15-22; Jeremiah 7:25; Hebrews 1:1-2

Introduction.

Before I started preaching the five wisdom books I did a general introductory sermon on wisdom literature in the Bible.  It seemed good to me to do a general introductory sermon on the prophets before launching into the last 17 prophetic books in the OT.

But the real challenge for all of you is to remember what I say tonight because we won’t take up the book of Isaiah until May.  We have a lot of special services between now and then.

The Prophetic Books.

The OT is sometimes referred to in its entirety as the Law and the Prophets.  When it is said that way it is distinguishing between the Pentateuch, the first five books of Moses, and then all the rest of the books.

We can break down those books into subsets.

First, there are the Former Prophets, meaning Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings.  They include the history of Israel, as written from a prophetic perspective most likely by prophets.  They are sometimes referred to as oral prophets because they didn’t leave any records of their utterances.

Oral prophets like Nathan, Ahijah, Iddo, Jehu, Elijah and Elisha.

Then comes the seventeen books we come to now in our journey along the Biblical Route 66.  These are referred to as the Latter Prophets or the writing prophets.

And this subset can be further divided into the Major Prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel.  And the Minor Prophets, the twelve shorter books at the end of our English OT. Those twelve got grouped because they could all fit on one papyrus scroll.

They are not minor because they are of lessor importance, they are not, they are prophets equal in importance to the major prophets.  They are minor because their books are shorter.

The latter prophets make up over 25% of the OT, yet they are often neglected.  They are long, they seem less relevant.  This is the least read and least understood section of the Bible.

All of the “writing prophets,” that is, prophets who have left books in their names (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, and the rest), lived during the time of the divided kingdom, from roughly 800 B.C. – 450 B.C.

The books of II Kings, Ezra, and Nehemiah, give us the historical context for these prophets.  These historical books recount the events leading up to the exile, the exile itself, and the early stages of restoration after the exile.  You could say they lived and prophesied and wrote during the time of the death and resurrection of Israel.

Their messages came in many forms: dreams, poetry, sermons, and even elaborate apocalyptic visions like in Ezekiel and Zechariah.

They are usually in poetic form with all the characteristics of Hebrew poetry, filled with figurative language, striking imagery, and parallelism.

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Text for Sermon: Song of Songs 1:1-45; 2:10-11; 7:10; 8:6-7

Introduction.

All Scripture is inspired by God and all Scripture is profitable for instruction and training in righteousness, for training in wisdom and in the knowledge and love of God.

Song of Songs is wisdom literature, the fifth and final book of wisdom for how to take care of God’s good gifts so that they are a blessing to us and don’t become a curse.

The Poetic Books: Wisdom for Time and Eternity

• Job: Wisdom for Suffering
• Psalms: Wisdom for Worshipping, for praying and praising
• Proverbs: Wisdom for Living, acting, behaving
• Ecclesiastes: Wisdom for Dying, and enjoying life under the sun until we do.
• Song of Solomon: Wisdom for Loving

This book has been titled several ways.  The Song of Solomon, obviously designates the author.  In some Catholic versions it is called the Canticles, which is Latin meaning simply “songs.”  The Hebrew title from verse 1, The Song of Songs, means “the most superlative, or best or greatest, of songs.”

We find a similar construction in other famous biblical phrases: Lord of Lords, King of Kings, and Holy of Holies.

I Kings 4:32 [Solomon] also spoke 3,000 proverbs, and his songs were 1,005.

This is the song to end all songs, the best of all songs.  A rabbi said “All the writings of the Old Testament are holy, and the Song of Songs is the holy of holies”.

Solomon’s name is mentioned at least six times in the book, along with several royal advantages, palaces, gardens, all of which support his authorship, as well as the mention of many wives and concubines (6:8).  He is fairly young, as the youthful exuberance suggests and the low number of women in his harem (140, I Kings 11:3).

Song of Songs is unique in the OT.  The uniqueness of the book is profoundly evident from verse 2 on.

Text for Sermon:  Ecclesiastes 1:1-3; 2:11, 24-26; 12:13-14

The five wisdom books of the OT are all unique in their own way.  They are all so different from each other and from all the rest of the books of the Bible.

Last week I called Proverbs weird.  Well, this week Ecclesiastes is strange.  It has confounded interpreters for centuries and has led to some pretty wide interpretations.

But let’s keep one thing fixed in our heads.  Any book that has God as its author must have truth as its subject, and without any error.

We must expect some challenges and difficulties from any book written by a being like God to finite creatures like us.  This is why humility is so necessary.  We are being reminded of our own weakness and ignorance.

Some books require more study, more prayer, more faith and more humility, and even then God’s sovereignty puts limits on human understanding.

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.

Meaningless! Meaningless! says the Teacher, utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.

This wet blanket won’t win many fans. Declaring that all efforts are as empty as “a chasing after the wind” will not be on any motivational posters.

This book starts out low and then gets worse.

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Text for Sermon: Proverbs 1:1-7; 3:5-7; 4:23; 9:10; 16:3,9; 22:3

As we come to the book of Proverbs we have crossed the halfway point of our journey through the books of the OT.

Let’s face it, Proverbs is a weird book, there is no other book in the Bible like it.  Reading it you feel like a BB in a tin can, as the verses ricochet all over the place.  There is no flow, no rhyme or reason.  Almost no two verses are on the same topic.

Let’s begin with a bit of background.  King Solomon is said in Scripture to be the wisest man who ever lived.  In I Kings 4 we read that when he was starting out as king God asked Solomon in a dream what he would like God to give him.  Remarkably of all the things he could have asked for, he asked for wisdom and this pleased God very much.

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Text for Sermon: Psalm 1:1-2; 16:11; 19:1-2; 27:1; 29:1; 95:1-3

Thirty-five years ago Stephen Covey wrote a massively popular bestseller, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People in which he challenged people from mediocrity to self-improvement.

How many people really want to live a shallow, superficial, hollow kind of life?  Do you desire superficial, or spiritual?  And by spiritual I don’t mean holier than thou, or fake, or puffed up, thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought.

Do we desire to be a more Biblically spiritual person, the way God created and intended us to be?  The Psalms give a clear picture of a truly spiritual person who is real, genuine.

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Text for Sermon: Psalm 1:1-2; 16:11; 19:1-2; 27:1; 29:1; 95:1-3

We turn this evening to the second of the five Wisdom books, the writings, right in the center of the OT.  The wisdom books are the heart of the OT.  They don’t contain history or law or prophecy, they are not just about Israel but about the individual before His God.

Job gives us wisdom for suffering, how to fear the Lord despite what happens to us.

Psalms gives us wisdom for worshipping, how to pray and praise God.

Proverbs gives us wisdom for living, how to act and behave wisely, how to fear the Lord.

Ecclesiastes gives us wisdom for thinking, how to enjoy life even in its meaninglessness.

Song of Solomon gives us wisdom for loving in the context of covenant marriage.

The Book of Psalms has several distinctions.  It is the longest book in the Bible with 150 chapters.  If you read five a day, you can finish it in a month.  Someone has said a Psalm a day helps you work, rest, and pray.

It has the shortest chapter in the Bible, Psalm 117 (2 verses) and the longest chapter in the Bible, Psalm 119 (176 verses).  Luther called the Psalms the Bible in miniature.

The New Testament writers quoted the Book of Psalms over 400 times, far more frequently than any other Old Testament book.  Isaiah is a distant second with 47 NT quotes.

It is often regarded as the most popular book, the favorite, and yet is still often overlooked or neglected.  It is in most respects the easiest book to understand, it appeals to our emotions and senses.

Historically the psalms cover a period of about 1000 years, from the time of Moses (ca. 1400 B.C.) to the Israelites’ return from exile (ca. 450 B.C.).  Of course, Psalm 90 by Moses is the oldest psalm.  The latest psalm is probably (137), a song of lament clearly written during the days when the Hebrews were being held captive by the Babylonians, from about 586 to 538 B.C.

Psalms is one of only two books in the Bible that self-identifies as written by multiple authors, Proverbs is the other one.

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Text for Sermon: Job 1:1; 2:3-6, 9-10; 13:15

January has been a rough month for me.  Unlike any other month of my life.

Three doctors’ office visits, one urgent care visit, ER and hospital overnight, a long sickness and then to top it all off, a kidney stone.  In the midst of my pleading prayers for mercy and relief I wondered if this was the hand of God the week before preaching on the book of Job.

But I want to be very careful not to suggest I have great wisdom on suffering.  Yes, kidney stones are unimaginable pain, but it is short lived relatively speaking.  I don’t know the pain of a chronic or debilitating illness.  I don’t know the lifelong pain of the death of a child or spouse.  I see the suffering of the poor in refugee camps, the innocent victims living in Gaza or Ukraine.  So I speak carefully, humbly, knowing there is much I haven’t suffered and much I don’t know.

Someone once said, “Don’t trust a man who doesn’t walk with a limp.”  Maybe another way of saying it is don’t trust someone who hasn’t been humbled by a few hard knock in life, someone who hasn’t suffered.

Suffering makes you humble.  Suffering also makes you wiser, it gives you a bit of perspective.

You don’t want to read books on suffering written by people for whom the subject is only intellectual, and not experiential.  But even then you have to be careful.  What lens are they looking through to understand their suffering?  Is it fatalistic or is it Biblical?

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Text for Sermon: Esther 1:1-3, 11-12, 19; 2:15-17;4:13-16; 7:3-6, 10

Everyone loves a good story, and Esther is an exceptionally great story.  It is great literature.  It has all the ingredients a great story needs.

We have a pronounced conflict between good and evil, we have a brave, beautiful heroine, some carousing at the royal court, palace and harem intrigues, a Cinderella motif (an orphan girl marries the emperor), a really fine villain with a cape and a waxed mustache, helpless victims rescued just in the nick of time, profound reversals of fortune, great pride going before a great fall, open battle, and poetic justice. What more could you possibly ask for? DW

Esther shares with Daniel the interesting distinction of taking place entirely outside of the Promised Land.

Esther shares with the Song of Solomon, the interesting distinction of never mentioning God’s name.

There are no miracles, no divine interventions.  There are no prophetic or Messianic promises.  Prayer is never mentioned, nor any of the central elements of Israelite worship.  There is no mention of the temple, of Jerusalem or the Torah/Law.  There is no mention of dietary laws or injunctions against intermarriage with non-Jews.  The book almost seems like a secular story.

“Where is God in all of this?  What is God doing?  Is He absent or is He present?  If He is present, then why does suffering and evil seem to be winning the day?  Why is God so hidden?

God is there but He remains off stage, out of sight, directing and orchestrating but not showing Himself.  This book is like an unsigned painting that makes us search for clues.

As some say, while the name of God is never mentioned, the finger of God is everywhere present.  We are not seeking for God in a place where He is absent, He is clearly there.

In our Bibles Esther is the last of the historical books.  But the events of the story take place between the events of Ezra and Nehemiah during the reign of the Persian king Ahasuerus (or Xerxes I) from 486 to 464.

History tells us King Ahasuerus ruled over the greatest empire on the face of the earth at that time stretching from Egypt to India.

He had a vast army and a navy of fabulous size.  He was a force to be reckoned with, a savage military leader, and a tyrant as an emperor.

Let me kill two birds with one stone and summarize the story in a way that also reveals the great theme of the story.  It just so happens.

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Text for Sermon:  Nehemiah 1:3-4, 11; 2:17-20; 6:15-16; 8:1-3

Introduction to Nehemiah.

Let’s recap where we are in God’s story.  In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  And then God created the human family.  God being a covenant making and covenant keeping God entered into a covenant with His people whom He loves.

In the fullness of God’s time He chose and called Abraham out of the Ur of the Chaldees and He made a covenant with Abraham and God said:

Genesis 12:2-3 I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

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Text for Sermon:  Ezra 1:1-4; 7:1a, 6, 9-10; 9:1a, 4-5; 10-12

Introduction to Ezra.

My second son, Kent, works for a tech company that specializes in enabling online retail companies to process returns.  It is a massive part of online sales.  Amazon processes 3,500 returns every day.  Some online clothing retailers can have as much as a 40% return of products sold.  The logistics behind that are staggering.

Ezra and Nehemiah are about the logistics of a great return, the return of the exiled nation of Judah, some tens of thousands of Jews, from Babylon back to Israel.  Actually Babylon was under new management, having been taken over by Persia, and Persia had a very liberal return policy.  In fact they encouraged it.

Persia by the way is modern day Iran and the surrounding area of the world.  Modern Iranians are descended from the Persians.

There are two returns in Ezra, Zerubbabel in Ezra 1-2; Ezra in 7 and a third wave of returns in Nehemiah lead by Zerubbabel in 7-13.

In the Hebrew Bible, the two books were considered one work.  The two books weren’t divided until the third century after Christ by the early church father Origen.

Ezra and Nehemiah offer the final piece of Old Testament history, one last glimpse of God’s people living out His redemptive plan before the coming of the Messiah.

Ezra and Nehemiah don’t get a lot of attention from pastors except when a church is in a building project, then these books come in handy.

Passage: II Chronicles 1:1; 3:1; 7:14, 19-20; 36:14-17, 19-23

When we talk about the Bible we use an incarnational analogy.  Just as Jesus is fully divine and fully human, so the Bible is fully divine and fully human.  It is divine in that it is the Word of God.  Like God it doesn’t lie, it is without error, it is eternal, trustworthy and true.

It is human as God didn’t set aside human personality in giving us His revelation.  It was not dictated from heaven.  It is the product of particular persons at particular moments in history, people influenced by their life and times, by their cultures and backgrounds and upbringing.

But the chronicler is not just a journalist, a recorder of facts.  This is more like a painting than a photograph.  There are no uninterpreted facts, he is a teacher and theologian, writing to influence, to minister to the needs of his people.

The message of II Chronicles is an unvarnished, brutally honest account of what happened and why, and yet in the midst of the honesty there is still hope.

Even when all hope seems completely lost, God’s covenant-keeping mercy triumphs over His covenant-demanding judgment (Stan Guthrie).

This is why Chronicles focuses on the southern kingdom of Judah.  For the northern kingdom all hope is gone, their wicked apostacy has been judged permanently, there is no more grace for them.

Just to quickly recap where we are, like Samuel and Kings, Chronicles was one book.

I Chronicles mirrors the history of II Samuel which is about David.

II Chronicles mirrors the history of I and II Kings which is about Solomon and the kings.  It covers 400 years of Israel’s history.

II Chronicles 1-9, Solomon

II Chronicles 10-36, all the rest of the kings.

400 years, from the building the temple to the destruction of the temple.

Both Chronicles were written for Jews who were returning to the Promised Land from their 70-year exile in Babylon.  These post-exilic Jews needed a reminder of who their God was, what He was like and how He worked.  In the mind of the Chronicler the history of Judah from David to the last king provided the best lessons to show the people God and His dealings with His people.

We see good kings who make catastrophic decisions, mediocre kings who are redeemed with a wise response, terrible kings who repent and find forgiveness. These are real people, who have moments of greatness and weakness, and who need to learn the importance of humility, wisdom, obedience, and prayer.

There are four lessons the Chronicler wants to drive home as the people of God begin their drive back home to Judah and the Promised Land.

Gods glory and greatness.

Peoples sin

God’s judgement

The resolution

Passage:  I Chronicles 1:1-4; 2:1-2; 3:1; 4:1; 8:1, 33; 9:1-2, 10; 29:10-19

Introduction to I Chronicles.

I and II Chronicles are two of the most neglected books in the Bible.  All of those dear saints who set out in January to read straight through the Bible in a year, if they make it past Leviticus they usually die in the Sahara Desert of I Chronicles.  If the genealogies don’t get them then the redundancy after reading I and II Samuel and I and II Kings will.

Many find themselves asking, “I just read this, why do I need to read it again?”  It is unfortunate that our English Bibles don’t follow the outline of the Hebrew Bible.  In the Hebrew Bible, Kings and Chronicles do not stand side by side.  In the Hebrew Bible Chronicles is at the very end.  Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, Chronicles.

The Chronicles cover the same history as the books of II Samuel and 1-II Kings.

I Chronicles mirrors the history of II Samuel which is about David.

II Chronicles mirrors the history of I and II Kings which is about Solomon and the kings.

But they are not the same.  Over fifty percent of the material in Chronicles is unique, not found in II Samuel or 1 and II Kings.

Just as the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John each offer a different perspective on the life of Jesus, so the books of Chronicles recount Israel’s history with a different perspective and purpose in mind.

I and II Kings gives more attention to Israel, to the northern kings and their apostacy.

I and II Chronicles gives more attention to Judah, to the southern kings and their apostacy.

The books of Kings emphasize the interaction of kings and prophets.

The Chronicles emphasize the interaction of kings and priests.

The two audiences are different.  Samuel and Kings were written around 550 BC, in the wake of Jerusalem being sacked by the Babylonians.  Chronicles was composed over a hundred years later as many Judeans had returned to Jerusalem from captivity in Babylon to rebuild the temple and the city walls.

The Chronicler is retelling the story of Israel to an exiled generation of Israelites.  He is showing them that as a small remnant, they are still God’s people, and they still have a place in God’s redemptive history.

This is why he starts with genealogies and why his genealogy begins with Adam.