If you get the Old Testament Israelite and the Second Temple Jew living in your head,
you will see the Old Testament a lot differently. And you will see the logic
of the work of Christ to address all three of these rebellions and problems.
Now I've talked about 2 Peter and Jude, messianic expectations.
If this is your worldview, the only solution to this stuff and let's look at what
we've covered so far; we've got Genesis 3.
And as we read today Brand's dissertation, she deals with both the human inclination
to evil, and then the supernatural evil. You got both those things working
in Second Temple Judaism, and I would say biblical theology.
What you have here is you got a couple of problems.
Because of Genesis 3 we have a problem with death, we're now all going to die.
We are separated from God. Eden is no more.
So human immortality is a thing of the past. We're all going to die.
And secondly, we're estranged from God,
we have to be brought back into relationship to God.
There has to be some way to mend that problem.
There has to be some way to mend the problem of death, to overcome death.
And then we moved to Genesis 6. And as if that wasn't bad enough,
we're estranged from God and we're gonna die. Here we're helping to destroy ourselves.
You know, we're getting a little help from the supernatural world.
We learned the knowledge that these beings give humanity, and oh, now we can...
again, we proliferate immortality.
We proliferate warfare and bloodshed, we become idolaters.
We turn our backs on the true God, the only one that can fix the other problems.
Now we turn our backs against him and to these other flunkies, okay.
We've got serious problems.
And in our next session we're going to get into the third rebellion.
That's what happens at Babel, when the nations are allotted to the sons of God.
And that just goes haywire as well. So now we've got the nations fragmented.
If you believe this, you believe that there's only one; God is the only solution to all this mess.
And in biblical theology, the way that works out is messianic expectation.
The Messiah is supposed to be the one, because the Messiah is God's chief agent here.
Whatever the Messiah is going to do, and be about, if you're a Jew, you're thinking
kind of tunnel vision, you're gonna get rid of the foreign powers like Rome.
And the Messiah is going to usher in Utopia, you'll get back to Eden, you know.
And in the utopia then we get to live with God and forever and all that stuff.
I mean, it's much more nuanced than that, in terms of the fullness of biblical theology,
but the average jew, this is why they're expecting a military deliverer,
you know, it's going to give us utopia.
Well, again, in biblical theology with Jesus, it's far more nuanced than that.
And again, all of that theology does come from the Old Testament,
but it's just fragmented all over the place.
There's no like one passage where you can put it all together.
And we'll talk about that too, as far as the Messianic secret and all that.
But you expect the Messiah to fix this stuff.
And if you have the three rebellion thematic structure in your head,
you will see how the work of Jesus
fixes the estrangement problem and the death problem in Genesis 3.
You will see how it fixes the depravity problem. How does it do that?
Because Jesus says, I don't know maybe a dozen times, there's either a statement
or an allusion to the fact that "look, I'm gonna die. You can't fix the death problem.
To fix the death problem, you need a resurrection.
You can't have a resurrection without a death. So I'm going to rise again.
And when I ascend to the Father, I am going to send the Holy Spirit.
That's the new covenant with humanity."
The Holy Spirit is going to take up residence in believers, and he will be the power
to void and fight against depravity. It's that simple.
The coming of the Holy Spirit to be the solution to our struggle against depravity,
to give us the solution.
That can only happen if Jesus accomplishes his work, if the Messiah does his job.
And then when we get to the third rebellion, of course, the gospel was for the Gentiles,
for the nations, to bring the nations back into the fold.
It heals the Babel problem as well, the fragmentation there, and that idolatry as well.
So the Messiah in biblical theology isn't just here to fix Genesis 3.
That's the way we look at it in Christian tradition, because we have been taught
not to see anything supernatural going on in Genesis 6.
We have been taught to never even find Deuteronomy 32:8-9
when it comes to the Tower of Babel story.
If you educate yourself, I mean, if you get the Old Testament Israelite
and the Second Temple Jew living in your head,
you will see the Old Testament a lot differently.
And you will see the logic of the work of Christ to address
all three of these rebellions and problems. It's a fuller picture of redemption.
And if you can see that, then lots of passages in both the Old and New Testament
will all of a sudden makes sense. You'll have a place to put them.
You'll have a means to understand them.
You'll have the framework for understanding them.