If you were God, and had a desire to share your glory with others, how would you do it? How would you go about “making” others, and revealing yourself to them in a manner they could understand? Would you want them to have “minds of their own” or would you want them to blindly obey you? Now I don’t know whether God asks Himself questions or not, but for we humans, these are valid points to consider. We are going to investigate God Himself, how he works in our lives, how He works in history, and what He expects back from us…the process of this investigation has a name, it’s THEOLOGY…THE STUDY OF GOD. We are going to look at it from a strictly Biblical point of view, no “tradition”…tradition being the long standing practice that has the effect of written down law, but is not. I encourage any who red this blog to check it out for yourself…you should never accept any teaching by anybody without reading the text yourself, praying, thinking and allowing the Spirit of God to open your mind and speak to you by His Spirit in your inner man.
God has revealed Himself in more than one way…creation, the world around us is one way. he reveals Himself much more completely in His written Word, the Bible. And lastly, in Hebrews we are told He revealed Himself in God the Eternal Son.
Our Bible is the written record of God’s plan for His creation and His dealings with them. It was written over a period of 1500 years by 40 different human writers, all but two of them Jews. Of course the real “writer” of the Book was God, the Holy Spirit…the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, translated into Greek just before the time of Christ. The New Testament was written in Greek, and the Book we now have was complete as we have it by the end of the first century AD. when the last of the Apostles died. Moses was the first writer, and it is considered truth that John the Beloved Disciple was the last. He (John) was also the only one of the disciples/apostles to die a natural death. All the rest were martyred. The OT records for us the creation, with the promise of the Redeemer very early in the Book, Gen 3;16…from the fall of man we go on through the early years of history, and in Gen 12 we read of God choosing one man and beginning a nation with him and his descendants. Why did God “choose the Jews?”…God wanted three things to be done by these special and privileged people: He wanted them to (1) write and preserve the Scripture, (2) to be a testimony to Him and His goodness, (3)to be a :pure” people through whom He could bring the Redeemer. The balance of the OT, records God dealing with His people, the Jews. The last book of the OT, Malachi concludes his dealings with the exception of a seven year period, which we will discuss in another lesson. For the next 400 years, God is silent. During this silent period, some of the Jewish traditions came into being. The Pharisees, Sadducees and Sanhedrin came into existence, they were the “ruling body” of the Jews in Jesus day, the group He most criticized.
TO BE CONTINUED………………………
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