 Who has the button back here that was a random story. I've got We had we had one guy getting serious trouble a teacher He went to it was a big kid. You know there was a confrontation. He went to push the kid here the kid ducked Hit him in the jaw and broke his jaw Oh, yeah, he wasn't hitting him. It wasn't like a closed foot is he went to push the guy and he yeah And he ducked and he hit him in the jaw Yeah, oh, yeah Yeah, no, he wasn't a lightweight either, you know the the faculty guy Yeah, it was it was pretty bad All right enough of junior high and high school Right, yeah, yeah, that all had a purpose Well, here's our final week and this is if you like Thinking about weird stuff in the Bible. This is the you thought the other stuff was weird It's gonna get sort of amped up here a little bit but we're gonna talk about sacred space a little bit again and And the concept of God being in control of chaos, which is another way of saying control Creation but really even more broadly than that being in control of everything and how in Israel I thinking those two things get married in the temple in certain ways and then we'll hit a certain point where Because of the they thought that way about the temple that essentially the temple was the center of of the cosmos there are certain things said in relation to the temple and The throne of God, which of course is in the temple that impacted, you know certain people Between the testaments to think certain ways about the sacred calendar the festival calendar of the Torah and Prophecy, so it's gonna be some weird stuff, but it's really it's really kind of fascinating because There are elements of it that kind of play Into the New Testament and some other things that are more familiar to us But this is sort of a free-for-all tonight, but it's just some kind of interesting stuff Now I had this slide up before when we talked about sacred space and about To sort of wrap your head around the way they looked at their Bible In a number of places you have to be thinking mythically and again, that doesn't mean oh, it's all just a fairy tale What it means is that there's there's a very real supernatural element not only to Episodes in scripture but basically everything all of life is sort of permeated by supernatural activity and meaning so Thinking you know mythically is really important because when writers and their readers are thinking this way What they say will often transcend sort of a simple literal reading Because they want to communicate certain ideas Through metaphor and symbol they want to drop certain vocabulary not so that your mind Parses that word like you would do it if you looked up and it looked it up in a dictionary But that all the baggage that comes with that word Just floods into your mind the illustration. I like to use For our own time period would be something like Las Vegas Okay, you know you we can oh, that's a city in Nevada. Well great Yeah, it is but there's all sorts of ideas crew To the term loss That's that's again just like what no, we're not going to get into that But that again that there are there are terms, you know, there are places there are people there are institutions Even events in scripture that when you brought them into a narrative You did so not just so that somebody could sort of oh, yeah, I can I could it takes like two hours to get there You know like like this literalistic feel But you would be thinking about the place's history and all the stuff associated with it Again that that has you know some real impact again on thinking mythically So we we use that to talk about sacred space which we our short definition was where God is or has appeared And how that was set off from normal space A couple of new elements here where God is by definition Is where there is peace order justice Which again the Hebrew term for that is shalom really all of that is shalom Stated negatively it's the absence of disorder the absence of injustice the absence of anything that's that's chaotic and by chaotic I mean Not just that things are messy and need arranging It's the the the theological concept of chaos has to do with A state of existence that is contrary to the way God wants it Okay, God wants order. He wants peace. He wants life to to run as he designed it to run When it's not that's a chaotic situation So every place that lacks the above Again these the bad things It needs to be made fit for sacred space or everything that has you know the the problems needs to be made fit for sacred space Again a more sort of official definition Chaos describes the state of disorder that would exist in the absence of divinely imposed order On the cosmos in biblical and ancient Near Eastern literature The supreme gods or the god of israel brought order to the universe and subdued the forces of chaos Somebody bigger than people Has to bring bring order to creation That's a little bit above our pay grade our job description And so people in the ancient world would assume that well, that's the gods. That's what they do That's what they're supposed to do If you're in egyptian you would sort of transfer that idea to pharaoh. Well pharaoh is the god around here So, you know, if if something isn't working, it's his fault You know, there's just this, you know, if the Nile doesn't flood and our crops just you would get half the yield And then people start starving. That's his fault Kind of like the president Everything is his fault And again, you know, it was it was a it took on a Not just uh Even though they did this when when that situation arose in egypt that was time for pharaoh's enemies to to propose ideas like Well, he's really not who the gods put here He needs to be run out of town And I had a dream the other night and it's me, you know, I mean, you know, somebody would would become a rival They would use it, you know as a political wedge, but it was it was bigger than that It was scary. This is why the plagues were really a big deal because they upset the natural order of things And specifically pharaoh couldn't do anything about it except make it worse You know, when he brought the magicians in they did, you know, it imitated it. Well, that really helps now It's like it was bad now. You made it worse. You know, why can't you do anything here? It was a real assault On their whole worldview Uh back to the quote here the chaotic Unpredictability and latent threat of the sea Often was a factor in this We mentioned the sea before because it's wild. It's untamable. You can't live there You know, it's just it's not where people belong The sea often became a metaphor for unpredictable chaotic dangerous life threatening stuff It's another reason why When when you have a situation like the sea is parted Okay, that shows who is in control of that. It's not just a miracle in the physical world sense It's it's It's the claim of supremacy. You know in relation to every other god Because there's only one who and not only that but that the one who's claiming to be in control Well, there are troops go in there and they wind up dead, you know It's this sort of thing and so this this it's an event that gets referenced In a number of ways and the whole idea of Taming the sea we could go through I'll go through a couple of them here in the old testament But you go through five six seven eight nine of these in the old testament and then when jesus walks on the water When he says peace be still it takes on a whole different flavor There's only only a few times we've ever seen anything like that. It was it was you know, yeah way of israel So like what's going on here Again, it it meant something to them on a real you know sort of cosmic level Now you have literature in the ancient world the bale cycle. I mentioned here at the bottom Is an important one Because bale is the chief rival to the god of israel and in this bale cycle. It's just a collection of tablets His main conflict is a battle against the god of the sea yam yam In canaanite is the same as hebrew yam. It's the same word because their languages are related bale's eventual victory symbolizes the triumph of order over chaos in addition to the sea itself chaos could be represented as a Sea serpent or a great sea beast or dragon That lives in the sea. Why would they do that? You know, is that like a is that like an anatomy lesson? Is this like, you know, real Reporting on some real animal well, maybe some of them thought that there was really a dragon that you know Who's tail and his mouth, you know encircled the entire world and maybe somebody thought that But it became a symbol of The badness the dangerousness of this place So When you came across things like sea and the dragon These terms show up in the bible. They show up also in the bale cycle leviathan rehab and we're not talking about the woman Okay with with josh It's not a slam on her and the deep These terms wind up in The hebrew bible and in some places they actually quote Some of these stories Like the bale cycle. This is psalm 74 These lines basically line 13 down through 15 come right out of the bale cycle Okay, why are they doing that and the the canites thought that bale did all this stuff bale's the one who subdued The sea monster He brings order to the sea to the creation Crush the heads of leviathan all this stuff and the psalmist says no no, it's not bale. It's The god of israel you know first line in 12 it god is my king from of old You read a few lines up a few lines later. It's going to be Yahweh of israel. They would do things like this To be a theology lesson It's not bale who's in control of this stuff. It's Yahweh of israel. They would do it to all different kind of deities It's basically a slap in the face To competing theologies biblical writers did this a lot in this case again, you have the reference if you look at the rest of the language, I don't think I have a a Laser here But look at the language down here You've established the heavenly lights in the sun the day is yours than the night you fix the boundaries of the air. What does that sound like? Sounds like creation language Sounds like something right out of genesis. Well, what happens in genesis? You know wait till we get there in genesis We have the waters are calm the waters the deep the spirit of god is hovering over the waters Hey, that's the way that creation is described here. It's violent Okay, god has to act to bring that into order And it's done through metaphor genesis. It's just you know still and waiting for god to get to work on it Psalm 89 you have another one You rule the raging sea. Oh lord You crushed rahab like a carcass rahab is another one of these beast names That you get in the ancient world the heavens are yours the earth is yours also The world all that is in it you have founded them Creation for an israelite was not just the story of Well, you know, we don't really understand this but 2000 years later There's going to be this guy named darwin that this is going to really kick in the butt. Okay, that isn't the point That's the way we think of creation stories because we have a problem Like like like an evolutionary worldview or something like that We'll take the accounts and start thinking about the things that our culture forces us to think about What they were thinking about is We need someone bigger than us to make us a habitable world And to make it livable It has to be orderly or else we're going to die We're at the mercy Of nature Somebody has to control that and keep it under control and that was how they thought about Creation, which is why they put they set the bringing about of creation In weird language like slaying a sea monster Like that just sounds so odd to our ear Psalm 74 why would you associate creation with killing leviathan? I didn't read that in genesis No, you didn't it's just sort of already happened in genesis Psalm 89 crushing Rahab like a carcass and the earth is yours the heaven is yours you have founded them Oh, yeah, no kidding. But what why describe it this way? The reason they describe it this way is they're trying to teach the idea of Where god is there is order god is the one in control of all order He's the one that keeps us from being exterminated by creation essentially All that You know, we're leading up to something here. You get the same language here. You get the dragon Rahab Was it not you who cut Rahab in pieces who pierced the dragon? Was it not you who dried up the sea yam the waters of the great deep to home? That's that's genesis language Who made the depths of the sea away for the redeemed to pass over Again god in control of the chaotic forces that would try to exterminate israel In all this language is deliberate Here's our genesis reference In the beginning very familiar Darkness was over the face of the deep to home spirit of god hovering over the faces of the waters Face of the waters and god saw at the end Everything was very good. There was evening and morning and that was the sixth day Okay, very good Tov ma'od Is not the word for perfect In hebra. That's tamim. This is an entry from a hebra lexicon How a lot of you care to look it up But The point is Is that when you get to the eden story? Eden like I said two weeks ago eden was a place that had specific geography It wasn't the whole world It was the place where god was it was the model for what life could be everywhere else Was uncertain All that other stuff it was it was very good God had you know brought you know the forces of chaos sort of under restraint under control But man it could just it could just erupt at any point We could have you know storms we could have earth you know all we could have all these natural forces kill us off and so When god go you know goes and creates eden puts you know adam and even the garden he commissions them To subdue the earth and fill it. Okay Yes, they're supposed to work in the garden and maintain that but they're supposed to multiply and go out and bring the rest of the world Into a state like this Like eden that was their job So that you know god's presence his control his rule would spread over the earth Among people and everywhere that they were at That's the vision That's the original vision For humanity for human life in god's world A trusting that god as you obey him That he will bless you And bring order to your world It's very simple set of ideas now The fall of course brings an end to that There's an eruption of chaos eden is no more Which is why sacred space from that point forward Has to sort of get a toe hold somewhere God doesn't give up on the plan He doesn't annihilate humanity He doesn't eliminate everything and just say that was a terrible idea Of course god really can't do that if he's omniscient Okay, god anticipates these things, you know, we know this about the plan of redemption the whole bit But from that point on it's god trying to maintain His promise his plan To work with humans To sort of start the ball rolling again And it happens in in different stories god trying to do this He enters into covenants with people he first well he creates is real out of nothing You know first it's trying to work with humanity as a whole that You know it works until you get to babble After babble you have god saying okay, i'm gonna i'm gonna call this one guy abraham I'm gonna start my own people through him That's why in the story there are direct parallels between abraham's life and adam's life Between the history of israel and the history of adam You're supposed to think about both of them at the same time God's trying to do the same thing again. That's why you have the tabernacle Looks like eden. That's why the temple reminds me of eden You know we talked about this two weeks ago All this is deliberate planning deliberate messaging And tonight, you know, I want to sort of focus on How they thought about sort of the It's not the final installment, but for an israelite what they thought was the final installment of god returning to earth restoring his presence And then everything would sort of mushroom out would blossom out in theory And the lord would return to earth and rule the earth and that was Jerusalem that was mount zion. This is where This was now the sacred mountain wasn't sinai anymore. It's not eden eden Of course is also called a mountain in ezekiel 28 not just a garden. It's none of these other places where god appeared Did things said things We are finally in the land that god chose That god promised for the people that he chose and created We're finally in there. We finally have a king The man after god's own heart, you know again this this template kind of guy And we have a temple So everything's supposed to be wonderful now Yeah, we know the rest of the story and how it turned out, but the way they thought about the temple Even here you have ezekiel 38. Ezekiel of course is writing when the temple's about to be destroyed And he's telling them why this is going to happen But the way they thought about this place about zion and the temple is where I want to camp sort of the rest of the night because it's Again, it's interesting. It's kind of bizarre Very foreign to us, which I think is why it's interesting because it's we just don't think the on these terms But as far as Jerusalem in ezekiel 38 12 Jerusalem is described as the center of the earth Now, you know, like if you did your Surveying measurements and all this stuff. Is that really literally how it's going to work out? No Well, that there's an error, you know the biblical writer must have flung geography or math or It's like look the center of the earth again. It has nothing to do with literal math and geography The whole point is that it's the center Of god's activity. It's the place from which He is now going to fulfill his original plan, you know fulfill his covenants all these things It's it's the headquarters. It's the beachhead. It's the nerve center, you know, think of it that way And you'll get the point. Of course the center of Jerusalem was the temple That was where everything focused on it's where the presence of god was Now we looked at this a couple weeks ago and I mentioned that hey, if you compare the pictures tabernacle Temple there are some differences And the differences are Kind of strange in some respects. We're not going to hit all of them, but you've got two pillars here Joaquin and Boaz Which you know, if you're familiar with like the freemasons man, they make a lot of hay out of that The two pillars there But I want to focus on number two number two and number one number two is the bronze sea And number one is the bronze altar now the altar is just a bigger version of the one in the tabernacle But you know, you don't have this In the tabernacle Okay, that's because it's going to signify something New we're not not not new like it's never been thought of before but in a new way Anybody Can look up first kings seven real fast. I want you to read Whoever can do that these four verses Just to get a little bit of description in our heads And this is not a devotional passage This is not one of those I memorized this, you know in college First kings seven 23 through 26 made the sea of cast bronze Yep White was five cubits and a line of 30 cubits measured in circumference below its brim Were ornamental buds And circling it all around 10 to a cubit all the way around the sea The ornamental buds were cast in two rows when it was cast It stood on 12 oxen three looking toward the north three looking toward the west three looking toward the south Three looking toward the east the sea was set upon them And all their back parts pointed inward It was a hand red thick Its brim was shaped like the brim of a cup Like a lily blossom It contained 2,000 bats Give us another verse or two He also made 10 carts of bronze four cubits was the length of each cart four cubits It's with three cubits its height And this was the design of the carts we had panels and the panels were between frames On the panels that were between the frames were lions oxen and cherubin And on the frames was a pedestal on top below the lines in the oxen were reeds of plated work every cart Had four bronze wheels and axles of bronze And its four feet had supports Okay Just again just some added detail there What do those things I mean just a little little bit of a We have plant ornaments We've got you know, I want to say lions and tigers and bears We've got the animals there. We've got the cherubim Anything coming to mind Okay It's again, it's this wilderness again the wild you know garden of Eden the cherubim and all that kind of stuff You've got 12 oxen You got three the four groups of three They're all pointing in different directions You've got these stands that the thing is on With wheels Okay, it makes you think of Eden What else would it might make you think of? It's going to come a little bit later If I say cherubim and wheels Ezekiel, yeah, okay. Just so just hold that thought Again, it's sort of a menagerie And What's interesting about it we want to focus on we're going to focus on a couple things It's already in you know, you when you go into The temple proper You're going to have the giant cherubim there You're going to have you know all the decorations of the garden and again the wildlife and all this sort of stuff We talked about This sort of brings some of that outside And you've got a sea it's called the sea of bronze Now Myers in her uh Anchor bible dictionary article says this just to hold out a few excerpts here It's really big in fact that the amount of water in this Is a lot more than you would ever need for washing Okay, even if like you were pigpan. I mean it just it's just it's huge She says just as spectacular as the size and the sea of bronze was its ornamentation Under its rim was a series of cast decorations two roads of gourds The rim or the brim itself was made of lily work Most amazing as of all was the way it was supported on four sets of bronze oxen with three oxen in each set Each faced the direction of the compass Keep that in mind the compass With their hinder parts facing inwards supporting the basin Now albright very famous biblical scholar Who is he died in 1971 or something like that? His parents were missionaries I'm a big fan of albright even though he sort of gets poo pooed now because He just believed too much of this stuff Taught at johns hopkins for many years. I think I think he's a wonderful guy but albright Sort of you know went off on a tangent here and he thought well, you know, what about the The oxen here and then you have the cherubim. So it made him think in one article. He wrote which I don't I don't quote here of Ezekiel's cherubim faces, you know 12 elements 12 cardinal points 12 You know with the compass points the four compass points it made him think of the vision in Ezekiel and the reason he thought that was because well You have to know a little bit about the vision of Ezekiel. Okay, it was not a flying saucer All right, so let's just get that out of the way It's also not like an early Leonardo da Vinci plan for an actual flying object What the what the 12 or what the cherubim were This is stock description of a divine throne. I could show you lots of pictures of divine thrones They are on oxen The oxen will you know will have wings They'll have the different faces. Okay, this is just this is what a royal throne looked like It had wheels. You could move it around. It was portable All that stuff fire again the presence of god sign. I all these things sort of accumulate in in Ezekiel It's not a coincidence that in Ezekiel The four faces of the cherubim correspond to the four cardinal points of the Babylonian zodiac Ezekiel's living in Babylon. He's writing to people who are living in Babylon All of this imagery you can find in Babylon including the eyes The eyes in ancient text were references to the stars If you had animals with eyes in them that was a constellation. This is astronomical language The point of Ezekiel's vision is that Marduk of Babylon Was viewed as the ruler of the cosmos Marduk controls space and time The passage of time the epics of human history And you Jews are sitting here in Babylon by the river Kivar Why because Marduk just kicked Yahweh around Okay, that that's Babylonian theology in Ezekiel's day You're here because your god got beat by our god And what Ezekiel is saying is he lays the whole thing out the whole worldview out That a Babylonian would understand and who does he put on the throne? It ain't Marduk Marduk isn't there The whole point is that yep We're here in Babylon, but The god of Israel is still on the throne. That's the inaugural vision of the prophecy And then he goes through and he explains. Here's why you're here Boy, you were bad But you're not going to stay here either Now you take all of that back The the astronomical imagery in the you know the pointing to all you know four points of the compass Telegraphs who is in control? Of the heavens why are the heavens important because the heavens are how you measure time That's how you measure the passage of time sun moon stars who created those things That would be the god of Israel Who's in control of those things if you're in control of those things you're in control of history Because those things are linked with time So if you were reading Ezekiel The message is very theological god is still on the throne. He has our destiny in his hand It looks really bad and it is But he has our destiny in his hand When you superimpose that to temple architecture The message is This is the center of the cosmos This is the place from which god controls time and eternity and human history There's a couple of other interesting things about it Again the bronze sea if you just look at the gallons it's 17 000 gallons You know 27 feet you've got the qubit measurement there Four feet high again. This wasn't in the tabernacle. Why? Because this is a this is a picture if you control the sea if the sea is calm If the sea is in the place Where god is Time and eternity and history are well in hand It's fixed. That's why it's not in the tabernacle because the tabernacle was mobile Not only couldn't you get all that water, but how would you move it? Okay, this is a fixed object When they get in there, they build it and it's not only that But even this is a slap in the face To Babylon, Mesopotamian religion Uh Yeah Myers continues in the temple of Marduk There was an artificial sea Marduk is the chief god during the you know the time of the exile It was called the ta'amtu sound suspiciously like Tiamat the deep Okay, some Babylonian temples had an opsu sea a large basin again to commemorate this idea It represented the waters of life at the holy center Ancient Israel shared this notion of a watery chaos being kept under control by Yahweh and again the forces of chaos the things that would would destroy us The great molten sea near the temple's entrance would have signified Yahweh's power and presence now In Ezekiel 40, I'm going to go back. I want to pick up one now. Let's do this There's one there's another object here So this is again a symbol of god's control of the forces of chaos And it's a counterpart To what the Mesopotamians have as well Now when it comes to this object It actually gets called this is a really kind of a strange thing The altar hearth in Hebrew is Har El Four cubits from the altar hearth projecting upwards on and so forth Har El Is the Hebrew equivalent of a Sumerian term Sumerian Mesopotamia Babylon. Okay, they're they're all using the same languages there the Aralu This term in the same passage Is to be connected with Akkadian Aralu a term for the nether world About which the chicago-assyrian dictionary marks that it was inter alia a cosmic locality opposite of heaven Although we should note it does all right that the ancient israelites may have understood this term as the mountain of god That's literally what har al means the mountain of god cosmic mountain Sacred space. Where else would you expect that but in the temple? Okay That's just a page from the chicago-assyrian dictionary making the point The cosmic locality opposite of heaven. Let's think about that Now it's the nether world in Mesopotamia, which is the realm of the dead in israel How would you think about that? Think back to the whole world tree thing the thing that connects heaven and earth and under the earth It goes through the altar, which is where you sacrifice Okay, there's a death metaphor going on there There's a substitutionary metaphor going on there. You're going to wind up in the nether world unless you're rightly related to the god of israel Okay, there's a salvation metaphor going there So you have two objects in the temple that talk about god's control over the things that want to kill you and this notion of To avoid eternal death We use this altar Again to be a substitute for you. There's a lot of theology packed in just those two objects And it's not just sort of operating on an earthly level. It has everything to do with again You know who's in control of all of life and death who's in control of life and death And our eternal destiny who's in control of all of history Again, these are big big thoughts and they are tied to this place Jerusalem this temple and even within the temple some of these objects This is the cosmic center of everything For an israelite Now let's talk about how this relates to how they thought about what happened in the temple You got stuff going on every day You've got The bronze sea there God has all the forces of chaos under control We've got some of the architecture The four cardinal points, you know With the oxen That's telling us God is in control of the heavens and the earth and the passage of time and history and all this stuff You got that going on In the temple. Well, we use the temple. It doesn't just sit there So we have daily sacrifices. We've got weekly things going on We've got to do sacrifices at the temple to, you know, commemorate certain times of the year the festivals Everything in an israelite's life Really connected in some way to the temple You kept order in and through the temple so that you could live your normal your life outside the temple Just as a normal israelite and you could feel safe You could feel that life wasn't going to just, you know, kill you at any moment You know, this is where you're protected from the elements of nature And if you're rightly related to God You're not committing again these, you know, these horrible acts of moral impurity that pollute the land and would cause God to leave Okay We spent time on that last week If you're doing what God asks you to do Everything is going to work. In other words, everything's going to be orderly. You'll have a good life Won't be a perfect life because you're not perfect But God's going to stay here. He's going to be with you You're going to have eternal life. You're not going to, you know, you know have You know, end up spending an eternity of divorce from from your God All these big theological thoughts the temple was supposed to remind them of that And as you went through your year You would do certain festivals You know you to commemorate certain events you'd have Passover Right, you would have the feast of tabernacles the feast of booths You know all these different festivals that commemorated how God Had intervened for you in the past How he had kept you from chaos How he brought you through the sea how he created you out of nothing All of these things that would operate on the calendar were supposed to remind you Of these episodes as an israelite and they all took place At this This place, you know the temple now in the temple god has a throne This throne in some passages and namely in Ezekiel one, but there are a few passages and kings and chronicles It's referred to as the merkava Gold star if anybody knows what merkava means the Hebrew term It means throne chariot Think of Ezekiel. You got the throne and it's on wheels It's both. It's dual purpose The thing can move, you know It's it's a throne chariot And Again, this is when we get to Ezekiel we see the most explicit vision of it And it's standard where you would portray a throne, but it takes on importance And conceptually in different ways This is by rachel ellior. She's an expert in merkava Stuff in Judaism In the holy of holies the divir of Solomon's temple two gold plated cherubim shield to cover the ark with their wings Their appearance revealed to david as a divine pattern. I mean god actually says what you're building here is according to a pattern That's in the heavens, okay It's described in parallel passage and chronicles which explicitly links the cherubim with the heavenly chariot throne in that passage the the The lid of the ark is called the merkava this throne and The merkava was a representation of the ritual order of cyclic ritual time In Ezekiel you got the four faces the cherubim correspond to the four points of the zodiac Why because it's constellations we can watch the constellations. They have an annual circuit It's orderly. It never changes And Jewish thought went something like this Well, look at the perfect order of all that That's pretty fantastic In that the heavens to quote psalm 19 declare the glory of god There's like eight different verbs in there for speech and communication In psalm 19. This is just a fantastic thing. It's it's regular Not only doesn't it ever change but like who could change it? You know the god made this and god's in control of it And they thought well, you know, how does that how does that work? I wonder what would happen if we start like keeping a calendar And counting days between events And why would god tell us like hey, you know, you we work six days and on the seventh you rest And what's this business with seven? Why you know, why do we have multiple sevens? You know, why you know all these questions and you've asked them if you've read this stuff, you know, what What's up with the numbers? Well, it turns out The merkevo was a visual representation because it mapped time Of the ritual order of cyclic time measured in Sabbaths of days These are called weeks if you've ever done the 70 weeks of daniel, you know story weeks and days Weeks days and years you can use the terminology for all of them The fourfold annual seasons in turn subdivided in accordance with a fixed sevenfold order Similarly the concept of sacred time derived from the seven days of creation Accordingly, there are seven days in a week Counted in Sabbaths of days seven days of performance performed by each priestly course serving in the temple Seven days of consecration seven week intervals between harvest if you took the whole virtual calendar and divide it by You can actually divide it by four It's evenly divisible In this calendar Let's see here if I have the one up here Yeah, let's go with this one The priests the priesthood that came out of the old testament exilic period Again think of Ezekiel Ezekiel is when they start the exile And they're developing you know Ezekiel's writing about all this stuff They came up with a calendar that works with perfect mathematical symmetry and it corresponds to all these biblical numbers It's kind of a marvel. That's a mathematical calendar. It's not an astronomical calendar They believe it began on day four of creation. Why day four? What's created on day four the timekeepers The sun the moon and the stars So that that's the first day of god's calendar So they begin on the fourth day And all of the numerically significant events if you keep what's called a 364 day calendar with all these divisible by seven You know 49 all these numbers If you keep that calendar every feast day every Sabbath every Passover falls on the same day every year It never varies It is perfectly mathematically precise It requires no adjustment And all the numbers again correspond to these numbers that you see in the bible a lot these multiples Now they believed that it was so perfect that it has to reflect the mind of god God set this up. It's in time in tune with the heavens It never alters. It never needs adjustment If we follow it, we can be sure that we are never out of sync. What's going on in earth on the temple In the temple is never out of sync with what's happening in heaven As in heaven So on earth They had a whole developed theology Of what we do here Is not only a mirror of what god is doing It not only is what god wants us to do, but he commanded us But if we don't do it Then chaos erupts This is why when you have very liturgical religions, okay, Judaism, you know, especially in ancient Judaism Some of this works, you know into Questions in christianity about have you ever wondered like why they fought so much over When to have Easter This is a debate that went for centuries They like fought wars over when we date Easter This is why Because we got to get it right To be in sync with god We must get it right. Now the reason they had the problem is because the Pharisees did not use this calendar They used a lunar calendar Which requires them to add a month every now and then To make everything realign And if you were among the people who the kumran is where the where the dead sea scrolls are associated with This is why they left the Pharisee the Pharisee priesthood Just before jesus day and during jesus day. They left and went out in the desert To keep This calendar In a temple that they didn't have they didn't have access to it because the temple's back in Jerusalem So they actually like have these long texts where they imagine themselves doing this stuff So that god would know hey somebody's tracking with this It just sounds incredibly crazy and bizarre, but they thought they're the only we're the only guys between you know Life on earth and complete annihilation Because of this calendar stuff Again to our area. This is like this is like loony tunes But again, they thought why Pharisees? Why are you refusing to map time? According to the way god told you to map it. He laid it all out and they had a big fight over it That's actually why they left And to our area. That's just crazy stuff Now I'll just give you one thing if you take their calendar And you map out jubilee cycles Again, you can do it. Oh, you just need a computer nowadays just computer programmer gotta be really good at math They expected messiah's appearance to be sometime between 3bc and 2a d That's a freebie for those of you who've seen my lecture on the birth of the messiah Because they're the only ones in antiquity that actually plotted it out correctly They had the right window Everybody else didn't Okay, it's just to me. That's just really kind of interesting that they There's a big question in academia. Were the priests at kumran when jesus showed up? Did they all convert? Because it's like Okay, we were expecting that And and you know academics like to fight about that stuff because there are similarities between their theology and the new testament There are things things that carry over But they actually they actually got it right Uh, you know, you can't get it If you follow the Pharisees calendar, and here's here's, you know, this is the one last thing If you use the calendar followed by the Pharisees the lunar one where you have to add months every now and then The birth date of jesus wouldn't have fallen in the same period. It wouldn't have been a jubilee year, but but If you use the biblical chronology, jesus began his ministry in a jubilee year And why is that significant? Luke 4 14 through 19 The day jesus begins his ministry He walks into the synagogue at nazareth and says what? What does he quote? He quotes the jubilee passage He quotes isaas 61 and mixes in a little bit of the leviticus stuff So this is the year that the captives are set free, you know all the you know, he quotes the passage and he says this day This scripture is fulfilled in your hearing I mean, I actually think he meant that Like he knew what was going on Uh, but again, this is this is just sort of really it's bizarre. It's a little bit crazy but The people who are living in the first century who are tracking Things like calendar and chronology and messiah and by the way, they're not too crazy because Doesn't any you know, we have people who do that today I'm not one of them. I'm not a prophecy geek. Okay This I find interesting But I'm not doing the blood moon thing and all that kind of stuff But they were doing it in the ancient world and they were using a very specific method to do it And it was based on the role of the temple in sacred space Certain objects in the temple and what they symbolized That that's how they that was their system And it has these weird synchronicities With what you actually see in the new testament now last slide If you go to ezekiel 40 through 48, which is a passage about what? The temple the idealized temple There are 60 references To jubilee numbers And they're multiples Not six 60 That's a lot And again people who are into calendar and chronology have noticed that why are all these numbers Either a jubilee or half a jubilee or a seven or something like this Why do they sync up with this view of the calendar? again If you're able to think about this beyond just sort of a literal correspondence Oh, it's about building and a construct a building Well, it'd be nice if they put a put a roof instructions for a roof in there The the temple in ezekiel 40 for the 48 does not have a roof Okay It lacks certain other things that you would expect in the temple based upon the temple of Solomon and they're not in there either So it just again, it just makes me wonder this i'm interested in this subject Boy, that's a lot That's a lot of things that's a lot of ways to when people are reading about a temple It's a lot of ways to make people think about jubilee Release of the captives Setting the captives free Redeeming the land Can all these concepts that go with jubilee and if you look at how the new testament talks about the temple Who does it talk about? I just gave it away Jesus Jesus is the temple. He refers to himself as the temple And he refers to you as the temple because you are members of his body Again is all of that a coincidence See, I I don't think it is a coincidence. I think it marks a really really intelligent frankly divine mind They they knew what they were trying to telegraph and it actually worked in real time Which I think is kind of remarkable So the purpose of tonight was again to do a little crazy stuff But some of the crazy stuff again What I want you to to encourage you to do is when you're reading through scripture Assume that none of it is throw away material Okay, there there may be a reason why It has this set of instructions this set of numbers It might just mean more than Especially if it has to do with with ritual and sacred objects and something god is doing Okay, there might be something more behind it And then always checking the new testament to see what they do with it They do really unusual things with certain passages that wouldn't occur to you but seemed Intuitive to them or they would turn around and say well You know when we were when we were over here We remembered what Jesus said to us and it didn't make any sense when he said it but now it makes like kind of sense And they'll they'll they'll run with it It's high it's hindsight. We have the benefit of lots of hindsight. We have 2,000 years of hindsight Hey, they had they had hindsight and they could look back and and things just sort of pieces You know fell into place. That's what I'm trying to encourage you to do I don't expect anybody to remember this or really necessarily even you know care to go back and go through it the lesson for tonight is Read carefully and don't assume anything is there by accident Because it may not be It may not be they may think about it quite differently Yes, yes, it's all It could all be more profitable than you can even imagine, you know And again that that to me that that's entertaining is not the right word, but it's it's what It's just kind of neat Okay, I mean that that's kind of a dumb word But it's just kind of neat that there could be so much packed into the description of an object Well, who cares about you know, the okay, the altar is bigger big deal. You called it Har-El. What do you do? Well, it's the mountain of God. That's why it's a big deal and the Babylonians have one too, but ours is better You know, we're we're basically, you know poking them in the eye They're just things like that lurking in the background of a lot of passages And it you know, it takes work to ferret some of that stuff out But that's why they call it bible study You know bible studies not bible readings spend a little time on it newt a little bit And you know, you'll find some really interesting things Just trajectories you can just run on And I like it. It just makes me appreciate Again, the it makes me appreciate scripture Uh, something more than um It's more than Shakespeare. Okay Um, it there's there's just an intelligence behind it. I'm not trying to diss Shakespeare anybody's a Shakespeare fan Uh, but there's just an intelligence behind it that you won't find in anything else So anybody have any any questions any? Now that we're into crazy time crazy talk, but Go ahead There there are images that are common to both No, there's the there are points of both that telegraph the same ideas, you know one is Order you know holding chaos in order the other one is again time in history and the cosmos That's a really good question because we're not actually ever really told You know the scholars assume well, it's water. What do you do with water you wash? You know, it there's no passage that ever has them washing in it. They're never directed, you know It it was just kind of there. It's supposed to mean something Yeah, I think when they lose the temple by definition, you know, you're going to lose most of that Now you could go back You could you could observe Passover Technically see that The regulations for Passover in Exodus 12 are actually a little different than they are in Deuteronomy For instance in Exodus 12 you're allowed to hold Passover in your house You're not allowed to do that in Deuteronomy there are other differences But that's the most obvious and Deuteronomy presumes that they're in the land and then it becomes a central Ceremony for the nation like collectively But before that you could do it in your house So this is what it's it's an illustration of the kind of thing that Jews did We don't have a temple anymore We want to keep Passover So we're basically going to do the best we can here You know, we're going to keep the Passover We're going to hold in the house with family and all that kind of stuff So you could still do things like that but as far as the sacrificial system until they build the second temple You know, which is modified then by Herod second temple is roughly 516 bc All the way into the second century And presuming they're allowed to do it They could they could do it but there was a period in between there that they just they didn't have any of that That's when you get the synagogue developed when they're in exile All they can do is teach they can teach scripture They can do Passover in their house They can try to keep, you know, some of the laws that I mean, you're still going to have priests You're not going to really have the regular courses because there's really no point to that because we don't have a temple But you can do some of those things and keep the Keep the system alive in as many ways as you can You know, without that It's if you're really orthodox. Yeah, you do the best you can without that, but but that's why they push Yeah, yeah So, you know for for the ultra orthodox, this is why the rebuilding a temple is a crucial thing, you know to restore everything Um, they they do the best they can No, this is pre pita Anybody else all right, thanks for coming