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Guest (Male): Well, thank you for coming back. We covered a lot of territory last night, and you showed great stamina and you're back for more, which is wonderful. You will remember that we started last evening thinking about what we could learn from some confessing evangelicals in Switzerland back in the 16th century, the Second Helvetic Confession, which unpacked for us what it means to learn to read the Bible from the Bible. Or, as they said it, to draw from the Scriptures themselves a true understanding of Scriptures, which means from the nature of the language in which they were written.

Likewise, according to the circumstances in which they were set down in the light of like and unlike passages, and many and clearer passages, and that interpretation that then agrees with the rule of faith and love that draws us to trust in God and his promises presented to us in the gospel, his grace, and love that responds to him, loving him with all of our heart, soul, strength, and mind, loving our neighbor as ourselves, and so contributes much to God's glory and to our salvation. Then last night, we began to talk about what they mean by the language and the many and clearer passages, all those things that are language-oriented in the Bible. Now this morning, we want to talk about life context, the circumstances, and the purposes for every part of Scripture.

Life context is something that's always happening and we often don't think about it. My wife and I are thinking more about it in these last 10 months or so since we moved across the country, landed in Southeastern Tennessee, landed in a much smaller church than we were part of in California, and we realize that we need now to become cross-cultural researchers. We need to be researchers in a new culture, and it's not just learning to say "y'all." It's much more than that. So we came to a small group in our church early on meeting in the pastor's house. I'm changing all the names to protect everyone here, but we learned that we want to pray for Rose, who is the troubled daughter of Joanne and who's going through various things.

Who's Rose? Joanne we finally learned was around the circle. So we know her, but what were Rose's issues? We didn't know. Everybody else around the circle knew. We learned that as the rains came to us, you got snow, we got rain, that the folks living in Wilson's Hollow might be troubled by flooding. Really, where's Wilson's Hollow? I have no clue. Are we troubled by flooding? We don't know, right? And then Robbie and Glenda are able to move back to Dayton, Tennessee, and her parents are just thrilled. Well, that's great. Why did Robbie and Glenda move away? How long ago have they been there? Who are her parents and how do we know that they're thrilled? You get the idea.

All those things, little details that everybody around the circle knew and we had no clue. We understood every word, but we didn't have a life situation. We didn't have that shared experience and we're learning it. We're paying attention. Happily, our little congregation has a pictorial directory. Each family has a whole page and the blank reverse of the page, and so Jane makes little notes every time we learn about somebody. Oh, so-and-so is related to so-and-so. Really, that's interesting. And they moved from out of state. No, no, they moved, this other couple, can trace their great-great-great-great-grandparents back to before the Civil War still in this area. All those things we're making notes, we're making notes.

Now, we come to the Bible, which God gave to his whole church in all the ages, but he gave it in a particular time and place. He gave it through Moses 1,400 years give or take before the birth of Jesus and on through the Old Testament to the last prophet, Malachi, in the time of the exile, roughly 400 years. And then there are 400 years when God gives no more prophecy until suddenly there bursts a real prophet on the scene, a fellow named John out in the desert calling people to repent because God is about to launch his kingdom. And there is someone coming after John who is greater than John. John's not even worthy to untie the latch on his sandal.

And so we come now into what we call the New Testament times. A lot has changed. Among other things, the people of God are no longer under the domination of the Medes and the Persians, which is where they were at the end of the Old Testament. Now they're under the domination of the Roman Empire. Greek is the natural language all over the Mediterranean world, including interestingly in the promised land, though some people speak Aramaic, some speak Hebrew; it's still a living language. But for everyday business, everybody speaks Greek. So here we're now needing to think about a different life setting and getting acclimated to that.

And we're obviously at a distance of almost 2,000 years later or from the Old Testament 4,000 or 2,500 years later in a different part of the world, in a culture that is very, very different, far different from the difference in culture from Southern California, even as crazy as you may think California is. We lived there, we agree. And the sensibility and just the sweetness of Tennessee, or I think probably Central to Eastern Pennsylvania, too. Huge challenge, a huge challenge. I want to do in this time to sketch briefly three types of circumstances or life contexts that we want to try to get ourselves into so that we can begin to listen to the texts of the Bible as much as possible, kind of sitting alongside the first recipients, the first listeners to the Bible.

Three categories, and then I want to show how that leads to purpose, how we understand where God is leading us, them first and then us, with each text. What does he want the text to do in our lives? So we want to talk about general life context, specific life context, and redemptive-historical life context, and then moving on to purpose. You see that in the outline. Now, we heard last night from the Westminster Confession a mention of one aspect of the life context. God chose particular languages to speak his word. He spoke Hebrew because that was the native language of the people of God of old. That's what the Israelites spoke.

He gave the New Testament in Greek because when the New Testament was given in the first century, it was the language most generally known among the nations, and the gospel in fulfillment of God's promise to Abraham was going out to all the people groups of the earth. But of course language is only the tip of the iceberg. There are whole groups of spheres of shared experience that the human authors of the books of the Bible would have shared with their audiences. They knew geography. They knew something about the politics and the government structures under which they lived. They knew what was going on in family life, class structure, labor, economics, education, what pastimes.

Well, the Israelites didn't do much in terms of pastimes. They didn't have hobbies; they were working for a living. But the Roman and Greek world had time for leisure, for athletics, for art, for music. They knew what were the religious and philosophical options all around, the things that tempted God's people to be lured away, as we find Moses constantly warning the people of Israel, you're free from Egypt now, when you get into the land the Lord's promised you, you're going to be surrounded by all sorts of pagans, don't let your heart be led away. The religions of the ancient world. They knew something of their shared history and their current events.

All those kinds of things we might call general life context, not necessarily the specific occasion that led to the writing of a specific book, but the general background. And I want to illustrate how this can be helpful to you. We began to look last night at the battle between David and Goliath, and in the first verse or so, it tells us where that happened. It happened in the Valley of Elah. You remember the Valley of Elah, right? You've been there. Beautiful, beautiful valley. I've not been there. I just saw the pictures on the internet. God's providence for the internet! I know it's got a lot of downsides, but if God was good to his church to give the printing press with movable print just as the Reformation was about to break forth, his good providential gift of the internet can be used for great good.

So I did do some homework on the Valley of Elah. It's really on the edge between the Philistines' territory on the coast and the allotment of the tribe of Judah. It's about, and this is relevant, six hours' walk from Bethlehem. Why is that relevant? Because Jesse said, David, take these provisions to your brothers. They're waiting, quivering along with all of the Israelite forces and King Saul on one side of the Valley of Elah, and the Philistines out to the west are on the other side. It's also about six hours' walk from the home city of a certain very large Philistine who came from Gath, Goliath. So it's about the midpoint between David's teeny-tiny hometown and Goliath's one of the five great cities of the Philistines.

Now, great cities in the ancient world are not Philly, they're tiny, but it's still a lot bigger. So it's the meeting place. That's important. I'm in a men's group and we've been studying through 1 Kings, and we came to some other battles much later in the history of Israel. King Ahab, not a good king in the Northern Kingdom, was confronted by the troops that have come from the Northeast in Syria, this is before Assyria became powerful, and the first time they besieged the city of Samaria, but the Lord gave the Israelites, not because Ahab was so pious, but because the Lord wanted to prove that he's the true and living God, he gave them victory and they routed the Syrians.

The next war season, everybody goes dormant in the winter, but when spring comes, everybody wants to go to war, the next war season, then the Syrians are back. But this time the King of Syria has been advised, the last time we lost because Samaria is in the hills and the God of the Israelites is pretty powerful in the hills, but if we get them on flat ground, we're set. So the next battle is actually to the east of the Sea of Galilee, if you can picture one of those Bible maps, in the east of the Sea of Galilee near the town of Aphek on the flatland. Lo and behold, the Lord is the powerful God over the flatland, too, and the Syrians get beat again. See, that's significant, to know a little bit of that geography.

New Testament, we come to John 4, and we learn that Jesus is moving from the south, from Judea, the area that was once the tribal land of Judah, up north to his home area in Galilee, and he had to go through Samaria, which on a straight route, you go through Samaria to get from Jerusalem up to the villages of Galilee. Thing is, observant Jews had another way. They took the detour around through the Transjordan, around Jericho, and then they went up the east side of the Jordan and they crossed back over so they would not have to go through Samaria because those Samaritans are compromisers. They are the offspring of the intermarriage of some native Israelites with the pagan peoples that the Assyrians had brought in.

They had had a bad history and the Jews, as the woman at the well says to Jesus, the Jews don't share drinking vessels with Samaritans. It's just not done. So why did Jesus have to go through Samaria? Not because that was the only route or the most natural route or the shortest route, but because God had an appointment for him with that woman at that well so that he could bring the gospel to her and through her to the people who lived in her town in Sychar. Geography counts. Class structure, I'm going to have to move quickly through some of these, but here's one. Paul says in Galatians 3:28 that in Christ now, because we are in Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female.

If we do a little bit of homework, we realize that within Rabbinic Judaism, there was a sharp distinction between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female. In fact, from the second century AD, so this is after the New Testament, but it reflects the thought of the time, we have a blessing, a praise to God attributed to a rabbi named Judah Bar Ilai, who says, "Oh, eternal God, King of the heavens, you have blessed, blessed be you because you have not made me a Gentile, a woman, or a slave." You see a few of the sisters chuckling a little here. A little prejudice there? Well, it is prejudice, but the rabbis are thinking if you're a Gentile, you can't even, unless you convert to Judaism, which is a possibility, you could be circumcised and so on, unless you convert, you can't be part of the worshiping community of God's people at all.

As a slave, you have to work. You don't have the freedom that a free Jewish man might have to study Torah. In the first century, we know from other sources that a synagogue could be formed in a city typically outside of Palestine when there were 10 Jewish men who had enough leisure to study Torah and they could call a rabbi kind of as their pastor. And that's the quorum, only the Jewish people called it a minyan. If you have a minyan, 10 Jewish men with leisure to study, slaves don't count. And then what about women? Well, at least in their childbearing years, a bunch of days every month, women could not enter into the worshiping community. If you get my meaning, that's the Old Testament says that.

So there are all those kinds of issues involved. Paul says none of those make any difference now from the standpoint of access to God. You can be a Gentile and trust in Jesus, and you're one with your Jewish believing brother or sister who's trusting in Jesus. You can be a slave or you can be free, and you have access to God. You can be a man, you can be a woman, and you have access to God through Jesus Christ by faith. None of those distinctions make any difference whatsoever in terms of our coming to God, in terms of our worshiping with God's people.

Religion and philosophy, just a couple of examples. We read in Exodus 7 through 12 about the 10 plagues on Egypt. The more we learn about Egyptian religion, the more we learn that those were targeted attacks on the gods that the Egyptians worshiped. The Nile, the river that gives life to Egypt, makes productivity in Egypt as it flows toward the Mediterranean from deeper into Africa. The sun. Pharaoh himself, whose firstborn is killed, who's viewed to be a descendant of the gods. That's all about a warfare of the true and living God who has control of rivers and has control of the daylight and has control of human and animal life against all the false gods that the Egyptians worshiped.

Or you go to 1 Kings 18, my Bible study was there a few weeks ago, and here we have the Prophet Elijah, much later in history, and he says to the prophets of Baal, okay, we're going to make this the showdown at the OK Corral. The showdown at Mount Carmel. You bring your prophets, we'll each build an altar, and whoever can bring fire down out of heaven to consume the sacrifice. You need to know that Baal, Beelzebub, Baal, is the Canaanite god of rainfall, storm, and lightning. Now, Israel is parched because there has been no rain for three and a half years. So Baal's not doing a very good job of bringing rain.

And then if you remember what happens at Mount Carmel where the prophets of Baal shout and cry and slash themselves and get no response because there is no Baal, and then Elijah simply prays and says, "Lord, show that you're the real one." And the Lord sends fire from heaven. The Canaanites thought that should be Baal sending lightning. And then the Lord sends rain because he's the one in control. See, it's all a battle of the gods. Family life, the rights of the firstborn. I mentioned that a little bit last night in connection with 1 Samuel 17. The oldest son, sorry, sisters, it was male. The oldest son would inherit twice as much and have leadership in the family.

Esau, born moments before Jacob, doesn't care. I'm going to get twice as much inheritance in this land that God said my grandfather Abraham and my father Isaac would someday inherit. I don't care. I'll sell you my birthright, twice as much to my little brother for a pot of red lentil stew or whatever it was. And later on, he also misses out on the blessing through Jacob's trickiness, admittedly, but he loses it all. He has no rights of the firstborn. Later on, Jacob's firstborn, Reuben, loses it all, and the rights of leadership goes to Judah, and the rights of inheritance go to Joseph, so two of Joseph's sons receive inheritance. And then obviously we heard last night that Jesse's firstborn, Eliab, is pretty resentful that Jesse's last-born, David, is the one who will be king. That's important to realize how important it was to be the firstborn son in a family.

So, a few examples. How do we learn about this? Well, we can do some reading about shepherding and stewarding in the ancient world, about covenant ratification ceremonies. In the New Testament about Greek athletics, agriculture, knowing that the big three crops in the promised land were grains, oil, and grapes, very important. We can look at our Bible maps in the back of our Bible. We can read good study Bibles. I'm most familiar with the ESV study Bible and the Reformation Study Bible, partly because I got to work on parts of both of them. Not the biblical part, just the comment part. Both of them have really helpful articles that explain what was going on in the rest of the world at the time when God gave the Old Testament and then when God gave the New Testament.

If you want more than that, Zondervan Publishers has printed a wonderful series called the Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary, five volumes on the Old Testament, four on the New Testament, and you can get all nine volumes for just a little over 300 bucks. I did not contribute at all to that. I have a friend who contributed on that one, but not me. So anyway, there are those resources out there. But hey, you've got the internet. Just Google that stuff for free and you'll get some helpful background information, general background.

Category number two, specific background. A specific book of the Bible. What was the background, the context, the life situation that that was spoken into? What was going on in the wider community? Let me give you a few New Testament examples now. Paul writes two letters to Corinth, a city that is in southern Greece, it's actually on a little tiny strip of land, an isthmus, that separates the Adriatic... I'll think of it your side. The Adriatic Sea from the Aegean. Thank you. I was coming up with all kinds of words like Achaia, that's not right. Thank you. You've got to know the geography. It was a navy town, commercial navy town, kind of like San Diego.

It was notorious for sexual immorality to the point where there was actually a Greek verb coined "to Corinthianize," which meant to go out of control sexually. It had its own name for its own complex of sins. So maybe it's not so surprising, it's sad, but it's not surprising that Paul has to tell the Corinthian Christians, "Don't you know you belong to Jesus? Your body belongs to him, not to you. Don't unite your body with a prostitute." Now some in the Corinthian church so overreacted against all the sensuality around them that they said, "Husbands and wives shouldn't even get intimate." Paul says, "No, that's not right either. God has given you to each other. You belong to Christ, but you also belong to each other."

So you see all those issues of confused sexuality that you find in Corinth reflected in Paul's letters to the Corinthian church. North of them is Philippi, and Luke tells us in Acts 16, Philippi is a major city in the northern part of Greece, they called it Macedonia. We have a Macedonia nation now again. And it is a Roman colony. That's a significant term in the ancient world. That means if you're a citizen of Philippi, you're a citizen of the capital of the empire in Rome. You have all the rights and privileges as somebody who was of a noble class. Not everybody born in a city is a citizen in the ancient world. Not you know in the US, everybody who is born in the US is a citizen. We debate about that periodically, but that's the way our constitution's put together.

In the Roman world, if you were a citizen, you had particular rights including, I always love this one, wouldn't we all like this one, exemption from taxation! Everybody else gets taxed, but not citizens. Paul writes this letter to the church at Philippi, and he says, "Our citizenship, you know, you live in Philippi, you know how important citizenship... our citizenship is in heaven." We have the rights and privileges because we are connected to the capital. Our citizenship is in heaven. Think of the letters to the churches in Revelation 2 and 3. Each letter to each church, when you look at the cities in which they were placed and research has been done on them, there are connections with the cities. Laodicea, the last one, the one that Jesus accuses of being lukewarm. Laodicea had two sources of water. One was from cool mountain streams up near Hierapolis. The other was from hot springs like at Yellowstone.

But both sources of water had to be brought to Laodicea by aqueducts, and by the time the cold water came from the hills or the hot water came from the springs, you can guess what temperature it was: lukewarm. And the ancient writers who talked about lukewarm water in Ephesus said it wasn't only lukewarm, it had a weird taste and smell. Jesus says to them, "You're lukewarm. Unless you get extreme in your passion for me, I'm going to spit you out." Very appropriate illustration for a city there. Individual congregations have their own track record. Hebrews, for example. A couple of different times the writer to the Hebrews talks about how this congregation, probably I think, don't have time to talk about it, Jewish Christians in Rome or near Rome in Italy anyway, how they had previously served others, how they previously had suffered for the faith.

He says at one point, "You've had your property seized because you acknowledged Jesus as Messiah." Now we know from other sources, from Roman sources, that in 49 AD, before this letter was written, the Roman Emperor Claudius passed a law that expelled all the Jewish people, theoretically at least, from Rome, the capital. And some of the Roman sources, a little garbled, but suggest that this was because there was a debate within the Jewish community over somebody named Crestos or Christos who was the Messiah. So they have that track record in the past and the writer is appealing to that to say, you've shown your trust in Christ in a costly way in the past. Now don't give up.

Because in the present, as he talks about them, he's concerned that there are some who might be wandering away, some who might be intimidated by persecution, some who might be persuaded that really they need something more secure than faith in Jesus, whom they now cannot see because he's at the Father's right hand. Maybe they need to go back to the temple in Jerusalem and to that connection with visible Judaism. All that background's really important as you read through the book of Hebrews. Individual congregations have various strengths and weaknesses. Individual audiences have various weaknesses or problems that are the crises that occasion the work, occasion the writing of the letter. So Isaiah, Jeremiah, for example. Isaiah quite some generations before Judah's exile. Jeremiah right when the exile's on the brink. Both of them accuse Israel of being spiritual adulterers, of going after false gods.

Malachi, after people have returned from the exile, they may not be worshiping false gods anymore; the exile kind of got that out of them. But still, the priests don't really care whether they're offering pure animals as sacrifices to God. Still the people are complaining, "God's forgotten us." Read through Malachi and kind of hear because he keeps saying, "Now you say this, you say 'How have you loved us?' You say 'How have we displeased God by complaining that he doesn't seem to be around?'" and then he answers. Those "you says" are clues to the specific occasion of a specific audience. So how do we learn life context? Well, we read the book very carefully, always with the question in our mind, "Why is he saying this the way he's saying it to these people right here?"

Some books are easy. First Corinthians, it's as if Paul has a list that he's going through and he says, "Now I need to talk about the divisions because Chloe's people tell me that people are splitting into different parties depending on which leader they like best." That's Chapter 1 verse 11. And then he talks about, "I'm hearing a report about your sexual issues and you're condoning incest and so on." That's Chapter 5, Chapter 6. "You wrote some things about marriage, Chapter 7, let me answer that. You have questions about food offered to idols sold in the meat market that's right next to a pagan temple, Chapter 8, 9, 10. I need to talk about worship issues because there are disorders there, Chapter 11." It's as if he's got the list and you can just go right through and see these are the needs that the church at Corinth had.

Sometimes we have purpose statements in books. Luke gives us a purpose statement at the beginning of his gospel. "Theophilus, I want to tell you about the things that happened that the eyewitnesses reported to us so that you will know the certainty of the things you have been taught." The word "taught" there is an interesting word. It's actually the word from which we get "catechism." You've been consistently taught in an orderly way. I want you to know the reality. I'm going to give you the witness's testimony. Or John, at the end of John's gospel in John 20, he says, "Jesus did many other things I've not written in this book, but these are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name."

So everything leading up to that point, read those events, those accounts, the teaching of Jesus in the light of what John says is his purpose. First John, he says in 1 John 5, "I'm writing to you who believe that you might know that you have eternal life." I'm writing to reassure you. Some false teachers have come in, you see hints of that in 1 John, and he's answering those so you may have assurance. So purpose statements, sometimes there's heated rebuke like Galatians 1 when Paul just bursts out, "How can you possibly leave the one who called you in the grace of Christ?" Sometimes there are themes repeated like we saw last night, the theme of kingship that goes throughout the book of Samuel from Hannah's song at the beginning to David's song at the end of 2 Samuel.

We can look at other Scriptures to get some of the feel for things too. For example, Samuel and Kings often show us some of the background for particular Psalms, and the little superscription at the beginning of Psalms will sometimes give us a signal: this is the event in David's life. Or Psalm 90, this song actually was written as early as Moses and by Moses. Those historical books then set us a context for reading the Psalms. And there are sources that we can read to get some of that more particular background as well. But the introduction in Study Bibles to each individual book will usually talk about some of the background as well.

Okay, now I want to talk briefly about redemptive-historical background. That's not something that's often talked about when we talk about Bible study, but it's crucial. Every audience of the Bible lived at a particular moment in God's outworking of his plan of redemption. All the way through the Old Testament, it's promise, its anticipation, its foretaste, and then with the coming of Christ, its fulfillment. And the big picture is we move from creation, which is all very good, but Adam and Eve placed in a garden of Eden to be tested. Will they trust and obey their good and loving Creator and covenant Lord? And we know they fall into sin, they disobey, and that fall then leads to Adam's failure, leads to all the woes that we see in this world.

And it leads to our own guilt before God. Even though we weren't consulted, Adam acted for us in a covenant of creation. So the fall puts a cloud of sorrow and sin and guilt over the whole of human experience. Then there's redemption. And I suggested last night that really the beginning of the announcement of redemption comes in God's curse on Satan, who spoke through the serpent. That God will put an enmity, a hostility, a division between Satan and the woman. Satan had enlisted her over onto his dark side. God says, "No, that's not going to be the way it is. I'm bringing her back onto my side, and her offspring will crush your head as you crush her offspring's heel." The beginning of a covenant promising redemption.

And that hope always beams over all of the rest of the Bible as well. Redemption all the way through the New Testament. And then the Scriptures are pointing us to consummation, the climax of God's redemptive work, which is still future for all the biblical recipients and for us as well. Now God structures that by a series of covenants, a series of interpersonal relationships, and we can see that in the very structure of every Bible that we are using. Two parts, right? Old Testament, New Testament. Where did that division come from? It's obviously historical, old and new. What about testament? Well, testament came into English from Latin, from Jerome's Vulgate, the Testamentum, but Latin Testamentum came into Latin as the replacement for a Greek word, diatheke, which was the replacement for the Hebrew word, berit, all of that related to covenant.

So the whole structure of the Bible is related to old and new covenant. Why do we talk about it that way? Because in Jeremiah 31, God promised that he would bring a new covenant, not like the covenant he made with Israel at Mount Sinai, which they broke, but a covenant in which he would write his word into their hearts, in which he would forgive them, in which they would all have access to him. You don't have to say to your neighbor, "Know the Lord," because they will all know me from the least to the greatest. A new covenant. Jeremiah is implying by calling it a new covenant that the covenant at Sinai was the old covenant. What Jeremiah implies, the New Testament Scriptures make explicit.

So Paul, for example, 2 Corinthians 3, talks about himself as now somebody who gets to serve and proclaim the new covenant. And also in 2 Corinthians 3, he says the Jewish people continue to hear read Moses. Moses is read, we think of Sabbath by Sabbath in the synagogue, the books of Moses are read. And then he says the old covenant is read. Hebrews makes the same point in Hebrews 8, where it quotes Jeremiah 31:31 to 34. That's the longest continuous quotation from the Old Testament, all four verses, and he says in God announcing a new covenant through Jeremiah, he sent the signal that the covenant back at Sinai was old, wearing out, soon to disappear.

Old and new covenant. There's the structure. What is a covenant? Well, I've tried to put it in a sentence that expands a sentence that one of my professors taught me and put in one of his writings. So that's in your outline. I think a way to think of it is: the Lord's covenant with his human servants is a bond of interpersonal commitment involving exclusive loyalty, sovereignly instituted by the Lord, expressed through their mutual obligations and enforced by life or death consequences. It's a committed relationship, exclusive loyalty. That really is what the first of the 10 commandments is saying. You shall have no other gods before me, that is not ahead of me, but anywhere in my presence. No other gods. I alone am your covenant Lord.

Sovereignly instituted by the Lord. The Lord begins the process, the Lord sets the rules. It's not a negotiated contract. Once upon a time, we taught our children a children's catechism that said a covenant is an agreement between two or more persons. Well, it's a lot more than that. And the successor to that children's catechism now says it much better: it's God initiating the covenant, God setting the rules, and the rules are exclusive loyalty first, and then specific obedience. So it's interpersonal, it's intimate. It's compared to marriage, but it's also compared to a great king bringing a lesser king under his wing. Now there are a succession of covenants within the period of anticipation.

The covenant with Adam, which he broke at Eden. A covenant of grace in which God promises a second Adam, the offspring of the woman. A covenant made with Noah and all the earth to keep history flowing despite human sin. God will not wash the world clean of evil by water again. He's going to sustain the variation of the seasons while he works out his covenant plan. Covenant with Abraham. God's going to bless Abraham, giving him great offspring, giving him a homeland, making him a blessing to the nations. Covenant later on with Israel through Moses. Now the nation is not countless like the stars of the sea, but they're a lot more, and now God's making them, constituting them a national people and giving them a covenant in writing.

At this point, the five books of Moses with the Exodus 20, 10 commandments right at the heart of it. Covenant with David. I'm running quickly here, but I'm so encouraged that Jonathan Master is going to talk about each of those covenants, which means right now you need to put on your schedule June 14 and 15 and be right back here if that tantalized you just a little bit to learn about those covenants. Those all flow into the new covenant in Jesus Christ. And we need to think about every text, where were those people in this flow of covenants, and how does that influence how they would have heard it? And then where we are in this privileged position where all those covenants are fulfilled in the new covenant. How does that influence how we can read these scriptures?

All of that contributes then to this issue of purpose. We want to think about what God intends each text to do because he meets his people at their point of need. Sin has done a lot of terrible things in our situation. The Westminster Shorter Catechism says that as a result of the fall into sin, we've come into an estate of sin and misery. And it unpacks what sin and misery look like. I like to think of it in terms of how sin has influenced and tainted and infected every part of us. God keeps us from being as bad as we possibly could be. Even unbelievers are not as bad as they possibly could be. But sin affects how we think, cognitive disobedience.

It affects how we choose, moral rebellion. It affects what we love and want, affective misdirection, and therefore it affects what we do, behavioral, and it ruins relationships. That's all sin. And then there's misery on top of that, that we're guilty before God and facing his wrath and curse, that we're enslaved to these cycles of disobedience that we would love to be rid of sometimes, but can't get ourselves rid of, that we feel emotional distress, fear, anxiety. The world is out of control. Sometimes there's persecution, sometimes there's oppression and injustice in society. We need to as we're reading a book we need to say what aspects of our fallen condition have a falling condition focus? There's some aspect of sin and misery that the first audience was experiencing in a very severe way and that has its correspondence with the things that try and test and threaten us as well.

How does that purpose then come to expression? Or we could say it positively because the New Testament talks about Scripture being given for particular purposes, and with this I'm going to wind up this first session. Two texts: 2 Timothy chapter 3 verse 16 and Romans 15:4. Paul says to Timothy, "All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, training in righteousness." Every time we read a part of scripture we should say, what is God intending to do one or more of those things for me in me? For them, but for me too. To teach me, to reprove me, to correct me, to train me in righteousness.

Or think also about it in terms of another purpose statement that Paul gives, Romans 15 verse 4. "Whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction [teaching], so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope." How is this Scripture given to encourage me? How is it given to give me hope? Those are important questions to be asking arising out of the life context in which God first spoke the word, but then arising out of the particular needs that those people had that have a resonance with what I need. And then God's purpose to push me, move me, move us together closer to the image of Christ through the Scriptures: teaching, reproof, correction, training in righteousness, encouragement, and hope. Let's pray together and ask the Lord to apply these to our hearts.

Father, we thank you that you speak and act with particular people at a particular time and a particular place. You didn't give us some timeless set of principles, but you show yourself engaged with people with serious needs that only your grace and your saving power could fulfill. So Father, we even thank you for the distance of years and the distance of culture and the distance of experience that makes the Bible sometimes hard for us because that shows how personal you are and how personally engaged you were with your ancient people. But you're the same personal God personally engaged with us today.

So Father, as we study this aspect of your word and how you spoke to them then and speak to us now, again we would acknowledge that we need your Holy Spirit to give us light. We can do some homework, but only your Holy Spirit can open our hearts to see your purpose in our lives, to deepen our faith, to flame our love for you and others into full flame, and so to bring glory to yourself as you apply the salvation that Christ has achieved to us by your Holy Spirit. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

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