In the not too distant future, 27 seconds from now. Matt Women, he got carried away. Talkin' about the fire and the cloud. He did a good job with the history of the presence of God and his glory. Got into Mr. Podcaster mode, and now we got an extra bang-along episode.
SPEAKER_02Do you remember the Daniel Day Lewis Last of the Mohicans from 1992? Let me tell you who does remember it. Me! Because it was great. And that was a formative movie for me. I haven't seen it in a long time. I hope that it still holds up. I suspect it does. I think of the music from time to time. That was amazing. I think it was by two guys, but Trevor Jones is the artist who stands out for me there. I bought that CD when I was a kid. It was one of the very first CDs I ever owned. It was also one of the first, I think, rated R movies I'd ever seen. And man, that music is etched in my brain. It's what heroism tinged with grief sounds like to me. And there's a moment in there where Daniel Day Lewis's character is getting separated from the damsel, the love interest, Cora. And as they're being pulled apart, he says, I will find you, no matter how long it takes, no matter how far, I will find you. And you believe him when he says it. You're like, all right, there's an estrangement that's happening here. It's just clear the way history is about to unfold, that is going to occur. But dang, that's a well-delivered line. The look in that guy's eye, yeah, I think he will find you, and I think it's coming. Likewise, we get a moment like that in the Old Testament where Babylon is coming to town and the temple's getting destroyed, and the kingdom of Judah is being taken apart in 586 BC, but God is still speaking through his prophets, and basically what he's saying to them is this is what needs to happen. This is my work, this is my call, this is my justice, this is my orchestrating of history. But no matter how far you are scattered, I will find you. Not that God ever, you know, loses track of anything, but I'm just gonna play along with the metaphor here a little bit. And specifically, God makes a promise through the prophet Jeremiah to say that in a specific time frame, it equates out to 70 years, that God is going to re-collect his people and rebuild. He's going to make them a people again. And so where we left off yesterday was kind of the metaphorical moment where Korah is being dragged away and everything seems horrible, and all hope is lost, and God's presence is recorded by the prophet Ezekiel as coming up out of the temple and going away. And then Nebuchadnezzar comes to town right after that. All hope is lost, everything looks terrible. But there's this really important line all the way back in Deuteronomy, where God talks about what happens and what will happen per the terms of this ancient covenant with his people, even if they disobey, and even if they get punished or scattered, even if what eventually happens at the hands of Babylon is to happen, God gives them this promise. I'm going to start in verse one. This is a little bit of a passage, but I'm going to read it all. When all these blessings and curses I have set before you come upon you, and you take them to heart wherever the Lord your God disperses you among the nations. And when you and your children return to the Lord your God and obey him with all your heart and with all your soul according to everything I command you today, then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes, and have compassion on you, and gather you again from all the nations where he scattered you. Even if you've been banished to the most distant land under the heavens, from there the Lord your God will gather you and bring you back. He'll bring you to the land that belonged to your ancestors, and you will take possession of it. He will make you more prosperous and numerous than your ancestors. For the attentive reader, all through the story of the Old Testament, which is constantly walking this tightrope, you can just feel that things are about to go off the rails through the whole Old Testament. But for the attentive reader, that promise way back there in Deuteronomy 30, right before the new generation of exiles goes in and takes the land, that promise is always lingering there in the background. Even if stuff gets really bad, the redemptive plan is still on. Even if stuff gets really bad, God is still their God, and they are still his people. And it would seem that his intent is still to make his dwelling among them. But then, as we talked about the last couple of days, time goes by, things go sideways, Babylon comes and destroys the temple. Now the people are scattered to the farthest ends of the earth. Ezekiel's had this vision of the presence of God going away. What's going to happen next? Well, I will find you, no matter how long it takes, no matter how far, I will find you. That's what's going to happen next. Later on in the book of Ezekiel, we get a prophecy that kind of countermands the vision of the presence of God going away. That happens here in verses one through five of Ezekiel 43. This is a vision of future things that Ezekiel is having here. Then the man brought me to the gate facing east, and I saw the glory of the God of Israel coming from the east. His voice was like the roar of rushing waters, and the land was radiant with his glory. The vision I saw was like the vision I had seen when he came to destroy the city, and like the visions I had seen by the Khabar River when I fell face down. The glory of the Lord entered the temple through the gate facing east. Then the Spirit lifted me up and brought me into the inner court, and the glory of the Lord filled the temple. When the man was standing beside me, I heard someone speaking to me from inside the temple. He said, Son of man, this is the place of my throne and the place for the soles of my feet. This is where I will live among the Israelites forever. Okay. Well, this is awesome. This is the Korah and Daniel Day Lewis moment. I'm going to come back, I'm going to find you. I'm going to make my dwelling among you again, and it's going to be forever. Now, Ezekiel is prophesying this somewhere between 593 and 571. Actually, we know exactly when he prophesied that. So here in the early 500s BC is when Ezekiel is prophesying this. And it looks like what Ezekiel is envisioning is all going to come to pass a little bit later on down the road when Babylon is defeated by a new empire, the Persians. Well, this is great news. Babylon was the problem. Now the Persians are here. It's 539 BC. Persia comes along. Cyrus the Great defeats Babylon. Cyrus is much nicer than his Babylonian predecessors, and he lets the Jews go back and rebuild their temple in Jerusalem. It's not smooth sailing. It takes them 20 years to get it done. But depending on how you reckon it, 70 years to the year, or roughly 70 years after the destruction of Solomon's temple, the Jews, under the leadership of a descendant of David named Zerubbabel, have rebuilt a new temple and they've dedicated it to the Lord. And sacrifices have resumed, and they have a big dedication, just exactly like they did back in the day. And they try to duplicate all the steps of Solomon hundreds of years before them, and how they dedicate the temple. They have a big event, and it goes like this Ezra 6, talking about 516 BC and the dedication of the temple. The temple was completed on the third day of the month Adar, in the sixth year of the reign of King Darius of Persia. Then the people of Israel, the priests, the Levites, and the rest of the exiles celebrated with dedication of the house of God with joy. For the dedication of this house of God, they offered a hundred bulls, two hundred rams, four hundred male lambs, and as a sin offering for all Israel, twelve male goats, one for each of the twelve tribes of Israel. That is very impressive. That is also much more modest than what was sacrificed at the dedication of the first temple. I continue. And they installed the priests and their divisions and the Levites and their groups for the service of God at Jerusalem, according to what is written in the book of Moses. And then that's it. That's the account of the dedication of the second temple. Did you notice what was missing? There was no fire, there was no smoke. The presence of God did not physically manifest among them again. The presence of God, there's no evidence that it was dwelling amongst his people again. And the rest of what we get in the Old Testament is ambiguous. The people kind of hope God is in there. They act like he is, they act like it's the same way things were in the Old Testament. But then as time unfolds between the Old Testament and the New Testament, stuff happens in history that makes it seem like maybe God doesn't dwell in that temple anymore. In the Old Testament, if you went in there wrongly, you died. In the Old Testament, if you mishandled the ark, you died. You can't have the tiger without the claws. It was just too much power to be around. But in the first century BC, a few decades before Jesus, Pompey, the rival and sometimes friend of Julius Caesar, the Roman general, he went to Jerusalem, bloodlessly conquered it, mostly bloodlessly, and just walked into the Holy of Holies. He's curious about it. Nothing happened to him. He didn't find the presence of God in there. So as we come out of the Old Testament and into the New Testament, as we come out of all of this story we've been talking about, uh about the on-again, off-again presence of God, we have this promise from God that I've paraphrased, I will find you, no matter how long it takes, no matter how far, I will find you. I reference the promises of Jeremiah and the prophecy of Ezekiel, like my presence is going to dwell with you again. But we don't see it fulfilled. We don't see it happen through the rest of the Old Testament. And so when we roll into the New Testament, where John starts, where Matthew, Mark, and Luke start, there's a huge question mark behind the text. Where is God? Where does he live now? Our ancestors might not have seen his face, but they saw the manifestation of his presence. There was something physical to it. He was there, and now it looks like he's not. At the time of the outset of the New Testament, the temple has been built up by an outsider, Herod the Great. He's made it bigger and fancier in terms of square footage. It was a bigger compound than even the time of Solomon. But for all of that building and all of that grandeur and all of that money that got spent, there's no moment where the fire showed up. There's no moment where the smoke of the presence of the Lord shows up. But yet Ezekiel clearly said that the glory of the Lord, I mean, it sounded like a roaring lion. It came in through the east gate, and there's a voice in there. And God's saying, I'm going to dwell here with you forever. And it the way it sounds, it's like the fullness of God is going to dwell in there. It's like we're going to see God. It's like it's going to be better than it ever was before. It's like the glory of God's presence in this second temple and in this future envisioned reality is going to be more real, more manifest, more complete, and somehow even more approachable than it ever was in the whole Old Testament. But when the Old Testament concludes, we still haven't seen that. That is one of the couple of biggest tensions coming out of the Old Testament that still would have been on the mind of everybody in the original audience going into the time of Christ, going into the New Testament. So then what do we get here in John 1? Well, we get the answer to that. In Christ, God's presence has returned. He has found you. No matter how long it took, no matter how far, he has found you. What does it look like? Like this. John 1 14. The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We've seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. John says, Jesus just physically dwelt among us. Jesus was in the temple. Jesus was among his people. Who is Jesus? He's the one of whom we have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father full of grace and truth. John the Baptist testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, This is the one who I spoke about when I said, He who's coming after me has surpassed me because he was before me. Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. For the law was given through Moses, grace and truth through Jesus Christ. No one's ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God, and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known. This is the best expression of what the Old Testament prophets called Emmanuel, God with us, that we've ever seen since the garden before sin was introduced into the equation. This is the most drawing close. This is the most accessible. Remember a few days ago we were talking about famous people stories? What was he like? Well, he was humble and he took on the role of a servant. He was even humble to the point of death on a cross. He was God in the flesh. He lived a perfect life. He did miraculous signs and wonders that demonstrate his deity and the truth of the message and the reality of the kingdom of God. He indeed is himself God. He is God in the flesh. He is the Son of God, and He has made God known to us by showing up in the most real, the most physical way that God has ever shown up since the fall. This is a very big deal. And those of you who are hearing me say this, says John, you're invited. This isn't just happy news for the Jews. This is for everybody. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision, or a husband's will, but born of God. And all of those things I just said are spelled out overtly in the text. I just read them to you. You heard it, you put in the work this week to go through all of this with me and learn the whole backstory with me. It's smoking gun obvious. This is what the text means. But there's also, in case you're not convinced yet, another layer of subtlety to this text. The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. That word dwelling is skeneo in Greek. Inside and outside of the Bible, that word is most often used to describe making camp with somebody, to tent with someone. And that quaint image is what the original language employs for the concept of dwelling with people. It's intimate, it's close, it's vulnerable, the walls of separation are down. We're camping, we're tabernacling together. And that is the same root word that we get for tabernacle in the Greek. The original audience, familiar with the Old Testament, would have seen this phrase, and in the same way that they saw, oh, in the beginning was the word in verse one and would have gone right to Genesis one, so they would have seen the word became flesh and tabernacled among us right here. It would have popped off the page and they would have said, Oh, John, I know exactly what you're doing. You're talking about this moment when God was so very close and dwelt among us for a sustained time, when we were in the wilderness, when we were lost, when we were in wandering, God made his dwelling among us, God with us, the glory of God in our very camp. In the magnificent way that John crafted these turns of phrases and with the magnificently detailed and specific word choice he employed, just by choosing this word, John conjured in the mind of the original audience, or a huge percentage of the original audience, that whole story that you and I just spent all week working through by using that word, sceneo, tabernacled, tented, dwelt among us. John is signaling his audience that Jesus is the completion of that loose end from the Old Testament. But where's the presence of God? But where is Ezekiel's prophecy? Where does it actually pay off? Where is this location? Where is God now? Is he ever going to be with us again? Are we ever going to see him again? John's answer is yes. And today, in Christ, all of those prophecies are fulfilled in your hearing. So pay attention to what's about to happen next. And for those who aren't in the original audience, John's message echoes through the ages. John is enormously cognizant throughout his whole gospel of you and me, people who are going to come read this later, people from the farthest reaches of the world who don't have a drop of Jewish blood in us. He's cognizant of us and makes it clear that we are among all of humankind who are invited to respond to this. God showed up. He tabernacled with us, and he's for all of us. Listen closely, hear the story, see what he's done, behold, believe, and by believing, have life. I got excited. I like the way that payoff works. I thought that was a lot of fun. I have had a lovely week. Thank you for processing through so much Bible the last couple of weeks with me. As I mentioned at the end of last week, we're getting very close to the narrative part. And at that point, you're going to notice a real tonal shift, even in our episodes and how we talk about it, because following narrative is very different in terms of the conversation and how we break it down than following this big, grandiose, heady theology and philosophy stuff that's meant to make sense to a Greek-minded person, a Jewish-minded person, everybody in between. So the story's about to take on a different tenor, our conversations are about to take on a different tenor, our rabbit trails are about to take on a different tenor as we are getting right down to the very end of our deep dive into these first 18 verses of this four-part prologue here at the beginning of John. If you loved this part and you're like, man, but I don't want to be done, don't worry. We'll be back to it a ton as we work through the whole gospel of John, however long that takes, because, well, I mean, this is doing a lot of the heavy lift and we can't help but come back to it. Now that we've put in the work, as we move forward, you're gonna notice it left and right. You won't be able to help it. All right, I had a blast. This was so much fun. Onward, next time around. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.