What Happened Between the Old and New Testament — The 400 Years of Silence

What Happened Between the Old and New Testament — The 400 Years of Silence.

There is a page between the Old Testament and the New Testament that almost nobody reads. 400 years fit on that page. And what happened during those 400 years changed how the entire New Testament lands. On one side, God is speaking through prophets. On the other side, Roman soldiers patrol Jerusalem. >> [music] >> A king who isn’t fully Jewish sits on Israel’s throne. And groups that didn’t exist a generation earlier are arguing in the temple courts. The Bible doesn’t explain the jump. [music] It just jumps. The gap is 400 years. Four centuries where God does not send a single prophet, does not add a single line of scripture. Malachi, in Hebrew, that name means my messenger, is the last prophetic voice Israel hears. And the last word of that last messenger is not comfort. It is a warning. >> [music] >> And the final word of that last messenger, in the original Hebrew, is cherem, a curse. But those 400 years were not empty. God was still at work, just at a frequency the prophets were not assigned [music] to record. And by the time the silence ended, every piece the gospel needed was already in [music] place. When Malachi finishes writing, the year is approximately 430 BC. Israel has been back in their land for about a century after the Babylonian exile. The temple has been rebuilt. The sacrifices have been restored. And on paper, everything looks like it should be working. It isn’t. Malachi is writing to a people who are going through the motions. The priests [music] are offering blind and lame animals on the altar, sacrifices they would never dare offer to a human governor, but they offer them to God without flinching. The people are withholding their tithes. Men are divorcing their wives and then walking into [music] the temple as if nothing has changed. And underneath all of it, a sentence that lands harder than any of [music] those failures. Malachi 3:14, “It is vain to serve God. What is the profit of our keeping his charge? Sit with that for a second. These are not pagans. >> [music] >> These are not people who walked away from the covenant. These are people who stayed and got tired. They kept showing up. They kept going through the [music] rituals and somewhere along the way the math stopped adding up. We serve him and nothing changes. We obey and the wicked prosper. [music] We wait for the Messiah and the Messiah does not come. If you have ever kept praying, kept reading, kept going to church on a Sunday morning when every part of you wanted to stay in bed and quietly wondered whether any of it was reaching anyone, you already understand the air Malachi was breathing. The silence doesn’t fall on a rebellious nation. It falls on an exhausted one. That distinction changes everything that follows. The 400 years are not a punishment for rebellion. They are something else entirely. And the last word of the Old Testament tells you what the stakes are, cherem, a curse. It will take 400 [music] years and a man standing in the Jordan River to lift it. Then God stops speaking. No prophet, no vision, [music] no word from heaven. And the first thing that happens during that silence is quieter than you would expect. When the silence begins, Israel is living under Persian rule. The Persian Empire stretches from Egypt to India and the Persians, remarkably, are not hostile to the Jewish religion. Cyrus the Great had called himself the servant of the God of Israel in his famous [music] decree. Later Persian kings supported Ezra and Nehemiah in restoring Jerusalem. So the early years of the silence are not dramatic. No invasions, no persecutions, just a quiet century under tolerant foreign rule. But something important is happening underneath the surface. The Jews who came back from Babylon came back speaking a different language. 70 years in a foreign empire had done what no army could. It had quietly [music] replaced their mother tongue. Aramaic had become their everyday speech. Hebrew was fading. And this created a problem that sounds small, but changed everything. [music] If you cannot read Hebrew, you cannot engage with the scriptures written in Hebrew. The solution was the synagogue. Not a replacement [music] for the temple. The temple in Jerusalem remained the place of sacrifice. The synagogue was something different. A local gathering place >> [music] >> where communities could read scripture aloud, pray together, and have the text explained in the common language. The synagogue is not a biblical institution [music] in the Old Testament sense. It does not appear in the law of Moses. It developed during and after the exile as a response to displacement. A room where displaced people [music] could still encounter the word of God. And that room became the single most important piece [music] of infrastructure the gospel would ever use. Acts 15:21. James, the brother of Jesus, stands before the Jerusalem council and says this, “Moses has been preached in every city for generations, [music] being read in the synagogues every Sabbath. Every city for generations. A network of rooms where scripture was already being read aloud, already being discussed, waiting In 400 years, a man named Paul will walk into these buildings [music] in every city he visits and announce that the person those scriptures were pointing toward >> [music] >> has arrived. The synagogue gave the scriptures a room, but the scriptures were still [music] locked behind a language. That is about to change. Alexander of Macedon takes [music] the throne at 20 and conquers everything between Greece and India before his 33rd birthday. He died in Babylon [music] in 323 BC without ever losing a battle. But what he leaves behind matters more than what he conquers. In 332 BC, Alexander swept through Palestine on his way to Egypt. He does not destroy Jerusalem. According to the Jewish historian Josephus, he shows respect [music] to the Jewish high priest and leaves the community largely undisturbed. But what he brings is more transformative than any army. He brings Greek. Greek culture, Greek philosophy, Greek education, Greek language, Hellenization, a cultural flood, not a military program. Within a generation, Greek becomes the international language of trade, diplomacy, and education across the entire Mediterranean. By the time Jesus was crucified, Greek had been the common tongue for over 300 years. That is why the entire New Testament is written in Greek. When Paul writes to Rome, he writes in Greek. When John writes his gospel, he writes in Greek. That is only possible because one [music] king flooded the world with one language three centuries before Christ was born. Alexander dies young and leaves no clear successor. His generals divide the empire. Israel gets caught between two dynasties, the Ptolemies in Egypt, [music] and the Seleucids in Syria. Under the Ptolemies, the Jewish community in Alexandria became one of the most vibrant in the [music] ancient world. And it is there, around 285 to 246 BC, that something happens which will quietly reshape the history of the Bible. The Hebrew scriptures [music] are translated into Greek. Every book, every prophecy, every covenant promise. For the first time in history, the entire Old Testament is available in the language the whole world speaks. This translation is called the Septuagint, from the Latin word for 70. Before the Septuagint, the scriptures of Israel were locked behind a language barrier. After it, any Greek speaker anywhere in the world could read the promises about a coming Messiah, the prophecies of Isaiah, and the covenant promises to Abraham. And here is the detail most people walk right past. [music] When the translators reached Isaiah 7:14, they faced a choice. The Hebrew word in the text [music] is alma. It means a young woman. But the Greek word they chose was not the generic word for young woman. They chose parthenos, and parthenos means specifically a virgin. That single translation decision made by Jewish scholars in Alexandria who had no idea what they were setting up became the hinge of the entire Christmas [music] story. When Matthew writes his gospel and quotes Isaiah 7:14 to explain who Jesus is, he is quoting the Septuagint. He is quoting parthenos. The translators didn’t know they were pre-loading [music] a word that would carry the weight of the incarnation. When Paul stands in a synagogue in Corinth or Thessalonica and opens the prophets to explain who Jesus is, he is reading from the Septuagint. When the early church spread across the empire, they carried a Greek Bible that was produced in silence by Jews who did not yet know what their own scriptures were pointing toward. The scriptures are readable. >> [music] >> The synagogues are built. The language is shared. And then someone tries to destroy all of it. The Seleucid king who took power in 175 BC called himself Epiphanes, God manifest. His own people have a different name for him, Epimanes, madman. Antiochus the Fourth >> [music] >> is determined to unify his empire through cultural conformity. Everyone must become Greek. For most of his subjects, this is not a serious problem, but for the Jews, it is an existential threat. He begins systematically dismantling Jewish religious life. Circumcision is outlawed, >> [music] >> a capital offense. The Sabbath is forbidden. Torah study is prohibited. And then he does something that will become permanently embedded in Jewish memory and in biblical prophecy. In December of 167 BC, Antiochus entered the temple in Jerusalem >> [music] >> and desecrated it. He erects an altar to the Greek god Zeus on the altar of burnt offerings and sacrifices a pig on it. A pig on the altar of the God of Abraham in the temple Solomon [music] built in the city where God placed his name. Daniel had already seen it coming. Daniel 11:31, they shall set up the abomination [music] that makes desolate. The Greek word the Septuagint uses for that abomination is bet a ligman, something so repulsive [music] it provokes physical revulsion. Centuries later, Jesus himself will reference this moment in Matthew 24:15 and use it as a type pointing to a future desolation still to come. But Israel does not lie down. In the town of Modein, [music] a Jewish priest named Mattathias watches a Seleucid official command a Jewish man to offer a pagan sacrifice. Mattathias kills the man and the official both, tears down the altar, and flees into the hills with his five sons. His son Judas, whose nickname Maccabeus >> [music] >> likely means the hammer, leads a guerrilla campaign so improbable that a small band of fighters driven by religious conviction defeats the professional army of one of the most powerful empires on earth. By December of 144 BC, exactly 3 years after the desecration, Judas Maccabeus and his men retake Jerusalem and rededicate the temple to God. That rededication is what the Jewish festival of Hanukkah celebrates, the feast of dedication. In John 10:22, Jesus walks in Solomon’s Colonnade in Jerusalem [music] during that same feast. The Greek word John uses is egkainia, renewal, rededication. A festival born in the silence between the testaments is the setting and in that setting, Jesus says the words that nearly get him stoned. The Father and I [music] are one. The Maccabees rededicated a building. Jesus is standing in that same building [music] making a claim about his own identity that the building cannot contain. The faith survived. The temple Israel had its freedom back. And then they did the one thing nobody expected. They wasted it. After the revolt, the Maccabees established their own ruling dynasty, the Hasmonean dynasty. For the first time in over four centuries, >> [music] >> Israel is a self-governing nation again. They fought for their faith. They won it back. The early Hasmoneans are faithful, but as the dynasty continues, something begins to corrode. The rulers don’t just govern. They take the high priesthood for themselves. King and priest [music] in the same person. And the combination proves impossible to handle without compromise. The high priesthood becomes a political prize. They appoint and remove priests for convenience. They make alliances with foreign powers. They fight each other for the [music] throne. By the end of the dynasty, two brothers, Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II, are locked in a civil war. >> [music] >> And in the desperate calculation that always marks the end of a dynasty, both of them do the same fatal thing. They each ask Rome to [music] settle the argument for them. The dynasty collapses not because the Hasmoneans are bad people, but because they are trying to hold two offices in one human body. And no human body can carry both without the weight cracking something. That failure is a roof written in a century [music] of corruption. Israel doesn’t need another political leader who also handles the altar. It needs something the system has never produced. It is also during this period that the Pharisees and Sadducees fully emerge. The Pharisees, from the Hebrew Perushim, the separated ones, operate through the synagogues, committed to the Torah and the oral law. They believe in the resurrection of the dead. Every synagogue Jesus walks into, every scribe who challenges him, comes from this tradition. The Sadducees are the other side of the coin. Aristocratic, [music] temple-centered, politically connected. They reject the resurrectio, which is why they throw the hypothetical at Jesus in Matthew 22 about a woman who marries seven brothers. They dominate the Sanhedrin, the supreme council that will put Jesus on trial. Every confrontation Jesus has with the religious establishment is a confrontation [music] with structures built during the silence. Both brothers sent ambassadors to Rome. They are about to learn what happens when you invite the [music] most powerful empire on earth into your living room. While the Hasmonean brothers are fighting each other, the Roman general Pompey is reorganizing the eastern Mediterranean into Roman territory. Both Hyrcanus and Aristobulus come to him separately asking Rome to settle their dispute. Pompey sides with Hyrcanus. In 63 BC, he marched on Jerusalem. The city falls. 12,000 Jews are killed. And then Pompey does something that leaves the Jewish world shaken. He walks into the temple. He walks through the outer courts, the inner courts, past the altar of incense, through the veil, and into the Holy of Holies, the room where only the high priest could go, and only once a year, on the Day of Atonement, after ritual preparation, carrying the blood of sacrifice. Pompey carries none of that. He is a Roman general who wants to see what is inside. According to Josephus, Pompey is surprised by what he finds. He expects an idol, a statue, some representation of the Jewish God. Instead, he finds an empty room. And once you see this, you cannot unsee it. The room is not just empty because Israel’s God has no form. If you know your Ezekiel, the emptiness tells a deeper story. In Ezekiel chapter 10, >> [music] >> the glory of the Lord rises from above the cherubim, moves to the threshold of the temple, pauses as if reluctant, and then departs. By chapter 11, the glory has left the city entirely, hovering over the Mount of Olives before it disappears. Ezekiel watched the departure in vision centuries before Pompey walked in. By the time a Roman general pushes through the veil, the departure is architecturally complete. [music] The room is not waiting for someone to enter it. The room is waiting for someone to explain where the presence went. >> [music] >> John’s gospel offers the answer. John 2:19, Jesus stands in that same temple complex and says, “Destroy this temple and in 3 days I will raise it up.” He was speaking about his body. If Ezekiel’s vision casts the shadow, it seems that the glory was not [music] returning to a building. It was heading toward a body born in Bethlehem. Pompey leaves the contents [music] intact. He does not desecrate it the way Antiochus had. But the violation is real. From 63 BC forward, Israel was under Roman authority. Rome is not interested in governing directly if it can find a local client king. That king is Herod. In 40 BC, the Roman Senate appointed him king of Judea, an Idumaean of Edomite descent, the ancient rivals of Israel. Jewish by practice, not heritage. Politically brilliant, personally paranoid, [music] he rebuilds the temple into one of the most stunning structures in the ancient world. The temple Jesus teaches in, the temple Jesus cleanses, the temple the disciples admire in Mark 13. That is Herod’s temple. Built during the silence. Herod dies shortly after the birth of Jesus. He is the king in Matthew 2 who orders the massacre of the infants in Bethlehem, the last king of the silence. By the time John the Baptist steps out of the wilderness in Luke chapter 3, the world has been reshaped in ways that look from the outside like random historical turbulence, but look from the inside of God’s purposes like engineering. Greek has been the common tongue of the Mediterranean for [music] 300 years. The apostles will preach and everyone will understand. The New Testament will [music] be written and everyone will be able to read it. The Septuagint means that wherever Jews have settled, and they have settled everywhere, there are synagogues where the scriptures are read in the world’s common language. Acts chapter 2 lists the evidence. On Pentecost, Jews are present [music] in Jerusalem from Parthia, Media, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Rome, Arabia, and a dozen other regions. They have come from every corner of the empire and they all share a text. Roman roads [music] connect every major city. Paul will travel over 10,000 miles on them planting churches. The Pax Romana means that traveling across the empire is safer than [music] it has been in centuries and the Messianic expectation among the Jewish people has never been higher. 400 years of foreign domination, a string of empires, each delivering oppression. The Hasmonean experiment proves that even [music] a Jewish king cannot fix what is broken. All of it produced a people desperate for deliverance. Daniel chapter 9 had given a prophetic timeline. The time is right. Everyone can feel it. Galatians [music] 4:4. When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, born of woman, born under the law. The fullness of time. In Greek, the word is pleroma and pleroma does not mean that enough time had passed. It means time was filled to capacity. Every piece of the gospel required loaded into history before the son arrived. Not random, precise. Every single year was [music] load-bearing. Now go back to Matthew 1:1. The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Read that after standing for 400 years. Son of David. David’s line was the claim every Jewish person in every synagogue across the empire [music] was waiting for. The Hasmoneans had tried to rule without it. Rome had installed a king from the wrong bloodline entirely. And here, in the first sentence of the New Testament, Matthew identifies Jesus as exactly [music] that. Son of Abraham, the covenant of Genesis 15, the foundation of everything. Matthew is saying the man he is about to introduce is the fulfillment of that covenant, not a continuation, the fulfillment. Matthew traces the genealogy through 42 generations and divides it into three sets of 14. Abraham to David, David to the exile, the exile to Jesus. He puts the exile in the middle on purpose. He wants you to see that the exile, the rebuilding, the silence, the foreign domination, the revolts, the occupation, all of it is inside the story, not interruptions, not blank pages. The 400 years are not a gap between two testaments. They are a chapter with no prophet in it, and that is different. God had not stopped speaking. He had changed the language from prophets [music] to empires, from scripture to infrastructure, from a voice anyone could hear to a frequency you had to learn to read. And that raises a question about where you are right now. If you are watching this and you have been praying the same prayer for longer than you thought you could stand, and you have started editing the prayer, shortening it, trimming it down because repeating the full version feels like talking into a wall, that is nothing happening. That is you are still standing in a room where something is being built that you cannot hear yet. You cannot hear it. Malachi’s generation couldn’t hear it either. And none of what God was building made a sound. If you are watching this and someone asked you last Sunday how you are doing spiritually, >> [music] >> and you said good, because the real answer would have taken too long, because the real answer is that you have been showing up and showing up and showing up, and you cannot tell if anything is different. You are not faking it. >> [music] >> You are surviving a season the way Israel survived 400 years by staying, not by feeling, not by hearing, by staying. Isaiah 43, “A voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” That is the verse all four Gospels used to describe John the Baptist. He is the voice that breaks the silence. But the road he calls people to prepare, God had already been building it for 400 years. [music] The road was ready. The fullness of time had come. And when it came, it came not as a surprise, but as the conclusion of a story that had never stopped being told. The Old Testament ends with a warning and a promise. [music] Malachi 4:5, “Elijah is coming before the great day of the Lord.” The New Testament opens with the fulfillment. Luke 1:17, “John will go before [music] the Lord in the spirit and power of Elijah.” The promise Malachi made while the ink was still wet on his scroll, God was already keeping it. Quietly, invisibly, 400 years of building at a frequency no prophet was assigned to record. If you know someone who has been standing in a silence they cannot explain, send them this video. The page that looks blank was never blank. You just had not learned to read what was written on it.