00 - Lesson 00: The Overview

Interlocked Series – Lesson #00
The Overview
May 25, 2023
Dr. Robert L. Dean, Jr.
www.deanbibleministries.org

Tonight we’re going to start something a little bit different than what we have normally done in on a Tuesday or Thursday night Bible class. It’s a little different for me because I’m teaching through material that somebody else put together. However, there’s a history here. This is called Interlocked, and it’s been put together and written by Amos and Jen Kwok who are from Singapore.

They lived in Canada until three years ago and I also heard that they worked with John Cross at Good Seed and his ministry up there. Some of you are familiar with him. He wrote the book Stranger on the Road to Emmaus. His background was with New Tribes Missions in Papua, New Guinea. Before I pray, I’d like to give you a little background so you can understand this better.

Back in the 1970s, there were a couple of people with New Tribes Missions, and there was Charlie Clough at Lubbock Bible Church. They were all coming to a realization of the same basic thing, and that is that in the one case at New Tribes, they didn’t know anything about the Bible. They didn’t know anything on Papua, New Guinea about Christianity. Missionaries there were starting from scratch. The only thing they knew was their spiritism, animistic religions.

Charlie was facing a situation where on college campus at Texas Tech, there’s a lot of liberal opposition among the professors to historic, conservative, biblical Christianity. And students were coming up there and they knew Bible stories and they knew some doctrine, but it was just sort of scattershot. As a result of that, it was like their understanding of the Bible was like taking a jigsaw puzzle, 500-piece jigsaw puzzle, turning it upside down on the table and then burning the cover. All they could do is just guess how the pieces fit together.

Unfortunately, that’s how the Bible is taught to a lot of people. If you’re a Christian, you come out of a background where you hear topical message, but the topical messages don’t relate to each other. They may have a sermon on 10 things to do to have a successful marriage, but nothing is really biblical.

Then you go to other churches where maybe a pastor drills down, takes 500 hours to go through the one chapter of Jude, and so you don’t really get an understanding of the framework of Scripture, or you have just hopped around, and you don’t see how any of the pieces fit together. Instead of having a solid front of troops to stand strong against an enemy assault, your troops are just scattered all over everywhere and you’re being infiltrated left and right.

In both the situation on Papua, New Guinea and what Charlie was facing, and other people I’ve talked to have done similar things is that what people need when they’re young believers is to understand what that big picture is on the top of that jigsaw puzzle box. They need to understand what all of Scripture is about and how it all interconnects and how every doctrine, every event is locking shields with one another. They’re interlocked.

Somewhere along the line, the Kwoks were introduced to Charlie’s Bible Framework series. They’ve just done a masterful job of reducing this down to a curriculum that they wrote for 16-year-olds and up. What we’re faced with as a congregation is we want to be able to have a curriculum where we can begin teaching this to those who are at least six years of age, first grade and up, which means you have to figure out how to scale it down to that level.

That’s what I’m working on. I’m trying to give us some guidance in doing that and taking us through the Interlocked series because the assaults that are coming against Christianity today were never expected by anybody in this room 20 years ago.

How do you prepare your kids? If you wait to start preparing your kids when they’re old enough to really understand it, you’ve waited too long because they’re being indoctrinated by a lot of evil forces. You take kids who are going to preschool somewhere. They’re going to do all kinds of fun coloring projects about Earth Day. They’re already being indoctrinated into a pagan view of nature and environmentalism.

It comes in a simplified form, but they get it repeated over and over again. And that kind of thing is just one example of one area of thought where they’re under attack; They’re being brainwashed, as it were, from the time they’re early on in public school.

Some places are worse. Other places are much better. You still have places in Texas where you have teachers that are Christian and understand what is going on and are presenting a solid front. You have many other places where that’s not true. When we were in Connecticut and my wife was teaching in elementary school, there were a number of believers on the faculty, and they would pray for each other and they had a good solid front.

It’s not like it’s the same everywhere, but the culture, the media culture, the education culture is set in opposition to Christianity. People have to learn how to think and you have to train your kids how to think. It’s the parents’ responsibility. With that as the introduction, let’s go to the Lord in prayer.

Opening Prayer

“Our Father, we’re so thankful that You are a God who loves us, and You have loved us in such a way that You provided not only a sufficient salvation, but You have provided a sufficient revelation of Yourself in the Scriptures. It is a sufficient revelation to enable us to deal with every thought that is lifted in opposition to You so that we can learn to take every thought captive for Christ.

“We know that we are engaged in a battle of the intellect, a battle of the mind. It is not an emotional battle. It is not a politically driven battle. It is a spiritually driven battle. Paul reminds us in Ephesians 6:10 that we are engaged in a warfare, not against flesh and blood, but against the spiritual powers of the heavenlies. Behind what we see physically on this earth, there is a raging spiritual war and that goes back to Satan’s revolt against Your authority and against You as the Creator.

“Father, we pray that You would give us wisdom and insight as we begin this journey to go through this approach to Scripture. May we come to understand how all the pieces are important and how all the pieces fit together so that we may have a mental defense against the ideology of the world around us and that we might have developed that kind of tenacity for Your Word that has characterized so many great believers throughout the centuries. We pray this in Christ’s name, Amen.”

Slides 1 and 2

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to approach a new believer. And along the way, God’s brought a couple of brand-new believers across my path. It’s kind of interesting to find out what kind of questions they’re asking and what’s going on in their life. This isn’t any different than what it’s like if you’re trying to teach your kids or to just try to teach yourself as you grow and mature in the Christian life.

We start with the Word of God. And one of the things that I’ve thought about is how do we refer to the Bible? I’ve heard a few pastors along the way and some Bible teachers along the way make it a point when they mention the Bible they emphasize the authority of Scripture. They remind people that the Bible is the Word of God and that it has been breathed out by God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction and instruction in righteousness.

The purpose of this is that we as believers may be thoroughly, completely, totally equipped for every good work. And when you couple that with the fact that parents have the responsibility to train up the next generation and that we also have a responsibility to help new believers get on track and get focused and figure out how to go forward, then we have to understand not just the basics in terms of doctrine, but we have to understand the basics in terms of the Bible.

Doctrine comes from the Bible, and you can’t separate the two. I’ve heard pastors who are well-trained in doctrine, but they can’t figure out how to communicate, how that doctrine came out of the Bible. What happens when that takes place is you basically cut the ropes that anchor you to the text, and you’ve turned Christianity into nothing more than a philosophy of life that is divorced from the Scriptures.

We have to do two things. We have to make sure we know the Scriptures, but then we have to know what they teach, and we have to be able to connect what the Scriptures teach back to the Scripture. When you’re a new believer or you’re a young kid and you’re starting off and you’re learning the basics we must come to the Bible.

Slides 3 and 4

The Bible is a unique book. It is composed of 66 different books. There’s one divine Author behind all 66 but many of those 66 books are written by different human beings. What we have in the Old Testament is 39 books. Now that number differs from the Hebrew Bible to the English Bible because in the Hebrew Bible they combine some books that they consider one.

We separate them and consider them two, so it’s a matter of arithmetic but the content is the same. In the New Testament you have 27 books. When you add 39 to 27 you come up with 66. There are 66 books in the Bible.

Basically you say, well, so what? You ought to know that kind of basic information. There are 39 books in the Old Testament. and 27 in the New Testament. So why is it important to know the Old Testament? There have been some popular preachers in recent years who have said, we really need to not go into the Old Testament. There are embarrassing things that are there.

You know, the idea, the Old Testament presents the idea that the earth is not millions of years old. It has the idea that there’s no evolution, cross species, macro evolution, however you want to describe that, and that’s embarrassing. And when we’re talking to an unbeliever who has these kinds of ideas, well, that’s hard for us to deal with and it’s embarrassing that we believe this book that has those kinds of ideas in it.

Another thing that came out in a study just released in the last couple of weeks was the realization that during the COVID period and during the period once the woke Antifa stuff started coming out and the emphasis on LGBTQ+ and transsexuality and all of these things that are going on, is that a significant percentage of Christians left Christianity because they thought that Christianity was just against homosexuals.

They had picked up a value system from the culture, and the culture says you have to treat everybody equally, and everything is okay, and that’s just the way they’re made. And then you run into the Bible, and the Bible says something different. It says that this activity is a sin. What happens? When your values are based on cultural standards, people leave the church because they’ve never been taught anything about Scripture.

The Old Testament is important because it predicts and prepares for the coming of the Savior. There are many other things the Old Testament does, but I’m trying to bring this down to a basic level that would be taught to kids between, let’s say, 6 and 10, where your focus should be on their salvation.

The Old Testament predicts and prepares for the coming of the Savior. The New Testament tells us about the Savior and that’s in the four Gospels and explains His work of salvation and what that means for how we should think and how we should live.

The Bible is the kind of book that often isn’t read from beginning to end, but most books have a beginning, and the Bible tells you where that is in Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning.” We know where the beginning is, and we know where the end is, but very few people, including Christians, have ever read their Bible from Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21.

Let me give you a little illustration. Here is a recent book that just been published by Answers in Genesis, and it’s a kid’s book. And so this book has about 140 pages. I’m just going to open it like this wherever it falls to. And I’m going to start reading on page 91. And let’s say I read through pages 91 and 92 and we find out about a character named Nimrod and a character named Jared and a character named Damion. And then I say, OK, well, then let’s skip ahead and we’re going to go to, let’s say, page 109.

There they’re talking about a flying creature. And so we read that and then we decide to go back and we go back to chapter 3. We start reading in chapter 3 and it’s talking about a different kind of creature that seems to have fiery breath. Is that how you’d read a book?

Slide 5

That’s how you read your Bible. And that’s how most people read their Bible. And so they don’t see the flow. They don’t understand that the Bible should go from beginning to end, so that we start with the beginning and go to the end. Well, maybe you don’t understand some things there. Well, neither did I the first time, fifth time, tenth time. But you can’t get to where you do understand it if you don’t read it, so you need to read it. You can say, well, I’m just going to come back to that.

It’s sort of like going out to eat when you’re two years old or 90 years old and there’s some meat on the plate. You just can’t quite deal with the meat on the plate. So you eat the mushy vegetables. And then later on, maybe, when you have your dentures or your teeth come in, then you can eat the tougher meat. That’s how we should approach reading the Bible.

As a pastor, when I teach, I’ve got to teach a one-room schoolhouse. I’ve got people who are pushing 90 or 95 in terms of their spiritual maturity, and others that are barely out of spiritual diapers, and some who aren’t out of spiritual diapers. There’s something for everybody. Not everybody’s going to catch and understand everything that I say because they’re just not ready for it.

When we look at the Old Testament, how are we going to come to understand this collection of 39 books in the English? How do we put that together so we can get a good overview and understand what that cover picture of the jigsaw puzzle looks like?

Slides 6, 7, and 8

We’re going to look at both the Old Testament and the New Testament, and we’re going to develop a little analogy on how we learn anything. But this is what we’re applying to the Old Testament. So here we have a coat rack, and this coat rack has 11 coat hangers on it, and they’re double hooks. You can hang more than one thing on that hook.

These 11 coat hooks represent 11 events in the Old Testament. Everything else in the Old Testament hangs on those 11 coat hooks. If you can understand and think your way through those 11 coat hooks, then you can think your way through the Old Testament.

When we come to the New Testament, we’ve got eight coat hooks. That number has fluctuated a couple of times, so I’m never sure exactly whether we ended up with seven, eight, or nine, but we’ve got these coat hooks. We’re going to develop this as we go along because one of the things that I think about as I’m trying to help the teachers in prep school who are dealing with the age groups is, for example, you’ve got preschool from about two and a half or three to five. You can’t teach them a whole lot. You’ve got about 15 minutes, but you can look at these lessons, and the lessons have major headings. And you can use those major headings and teach them about four or five sentences about each heading. And you’ve communicated the guts of what’s in that section.

Then the next year you can go through this again, or you can tell just the story. We see coat racks like this and you can go in and you can put a hat on it and then the next year you come in and you put a coat on it along with the hat and then the next year you put a scarf on it along with the coat and the hat and then a little later on you come in and you put an umbrella and now it’s pretty loaded up. That’s an illustration of how teaching goes. You take kids at a young age, and you just start telling them the basic Bible stories.

You must tell them in order, not randomly, like telling them about David this week and next week, oh, then telling them about Peter, and skipping all over the place. Start with Adam, start with Creation, and then work your way all the way through your story.

We’re looking for and trying to collect different basic good stories that have been written for reading at each age level. Then you put them together in chronological order so that they begin to see that there’s a chronological sequence. 

You’ll take them through like maybe two years old, three years old, four years old. They hear the same thing each year, but that’s okay. They don’t remember what you told them last week. But if you keep telling them, after two or three times, they’re going to begin to at least get a vague recognition that they’ve heard the name Elijah before. They’ve heard the name Adam before. They’ve heard the name Noah before.

When we look at the material in Interlock, they’ve got this chart that outlines the basic story. You have 11 events there in the Old Testament. You have Creation, and then the Fall, and then the Flood, and then the Tower of Babel, and then Abraham.

The first five events are all in Genesis. And that’s important because that tells us God gives His eyewitness account of what happened then. Modern man vehemently disputes that saying we can’t rely on that book. God didn’t really write that. Moses didn’t write that. That was written many years later. It’s just a bunch of stories that got put together and we can’t really trust it.

You know, if those events in the first 11 chapters of Genesis aren’t literally historically true the way they’re described in the Bible, then everything else in the Bible is built on those and assumes the historical accuracy of those accounts. And so, if they’re not actual history, then the rest of the Bible is built on sinking sand. Let’s just throw up our hands, pitch the whole thing out and go party, modern man thinks.

We have to understand how we are to see the connection between all of these events. We go through these 11 events that take us up through after Abraham, we go into Exodus and see the departure of the Jews from their slavery in Egypt, the redemption of the Jews, the freedom of the slaves from their slavery in Egypt, and then God gives them a law. He’s going to make them a nation.

We learn that a nation needs three things to be a nation. First of all, you have to have a people. Second, you have to have a law, a law code. And third, you have to have land where your nation’s going to be. And so when God brings them out of Egypt, He has a people group. He takes them to Sinai and gives them the law code that’s going to govern their relationships with one another according to the rule of law. And then He takes them to the land where their nation is going to be.

They have to conquer that land and then eventually, several hundred years later, they’re going to establish a king. Then that kingdom will split in two, and then there’ll be the exile, and the Northern Kingdom goes out first, and the Southern Kingdom goes out second. Then there’s going to be a partial return, and then there’s about 400 years of silence, and then Jesus is going to come.

Who’s Jesus? You know Jesus because of what God told Adam and Eve when they sinned at the Fall. You know something about Jesus, because when Noah is going to save the human race, there’s only one way of salvation, and it’s God’s way, and there’s only one door, there’s only one ark, and there’s only one door on the ark, and people just couldn’t escape the flood by saying, oh, I think there’s a better way, or this just doesn’t feel right for me, so I’m not gonna get on that boat. And that was a disastrous decision.

We have to let God determine things. So here we have our chart here where we take the different events and plug them into the coat hangers. And we’re going to walk our way through this tonight. And in the next 40 minutes or so, I’m going to try to take us all the way through the Bible in about 45 minutes. I’ve gone through Revelation in 25 or 30 minutes, and I’ve gone through some other things pretty quick, but this will be a little challenging because we have about 19 different events, but some of them are pretty close to one another.

Slide 9

We start off in eternity past. And what we learn in eternity past is God has existed forever and ever and ever. There never was a time when God didn’t exist. So how can you think about something that existed that long when to exist that long you’re not bound by time and everything about us is bound by time. So it’s very difficult for us to think about forever and ever and ever.

Slide 10

Then God created everything. He created even space. Try to think of what was here before God created anything. Because whatever you have in your mind is within a space. But there wasn’t even a space when God created the heavens and the earth. When He creates the heavens and the earth, that’s when He creates space. Before that, there wasn’t even any space. There was just God.

Slides 11 and 12

How do we comprehend that? That is extremely difficult. God created everything in our universe and in our solar system. He created the planet. He created the sun. He created the animals. He created the oceans. He created the water and water animals that live in the water. He created the birds that fly in the air. He created the land creatures, and He created Adam and Eve, the first two human beings.

Slides 13 and 14

The man and woman are integrally related to one another because He didn’t create man separately from the woman. He created first the man and then He took from his rib and made the woman so that they are genetically related and united in one race.

God created every single thing, and He did it in six consecutive days. When we look at Genesis 1, we recognize that probably before Genesis 1–2, that was when the angels had been created. They’re not mentioned in Genesis 1, but we have to bring them into the story because of what happens in Genesis 1, I mean in Genesis 3, that before God laid the foundation for the earth, Job tells us that all the sons of God sang for joy.

Slide 15

That means He created the angels first, and then He created the heavens and the earth. Then we’re also told in another place that among the angels there was one angel who all of a sudden became sort of full of himself and focused on himself. This angel made a transitional shift there where he thought he was more important than God and he wanted to be like God.

The Scriptures call him in some translations Lucifer, but in this material, and I think this is a better translation of his name is he’s called the Shining One. Because the name in Hebrew, Halel ben Shahar, means the bright one or the shining one, the sun of the morning. So that described this one.

He sinned against God, and he wanted to be like God, but he was a creature. So he is violating a fundamental principle, and that is the principle of the distinction between the Creator and the creature. What he wants is to have the creature be worshipped as God. That idea runs through every single religious system that’s ever been invented on the planet. The idea is to worship the creature, the things the Creator makes, rather than the Creator.

God then goes through these six days where He creates the earth, not as it is now, but as it was perfect. And it’s perfect not in the sense that it is morally perfect, but in the sense that it’s exactly what God intended it to be. It’s everything needed to have the correct environment for the man and the woman.

What we learn from Genesis 1 is that, first of all, God is unique. He’s distinct. And you can use the word holy. That’s what holy means. God’s unique and distinct. There is no one else like God.

Second, we learn the Creator-creature distinction, and we learn a lot of things about the Creator.

Third, we learn that God also made three laws or sets of rules for how people are to relate to each other so that they can prosper. Now, we call those rules divine institutions. They’re created by God, and if you violate them, you’re going to hurt yourself just as much as if you violate a physical law, like a law of gravity, and fall down and hurt yourself.

The first divine institution is that every person is in charge of their own life, and we are to obey God. So people have responsibility. That’s the way I would express that to a younger mind. People are responsible for the decisions and choices they make. They’re in charge of whether they say yes to God or no to God. They have to make that decision.

Adam and Eve are put in the Garden, and they’re told that you can eat from any tree that’s here, but you can’t eat from the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They had to choose to obey God, to say yes, and obey God every day, every hour, every minute.

Then a day came when this serpent that was in the Garden came up to the woman and said, “Is there anything here that God said you can’t eat? Well, what about this? If you eat this, God says you’ll die, but you won’t. God’s not really telling you the truth. And if you eat this, you’ll be like God.”

Eve looked at it and held it in her hand. And it looked really good and really tasty. And she decided, well, I’ve got to decide if God can really tell me the truth or not. So I’m going to eat it. And if something bad happens, then I’m going to know God was telling the truth.

She’s putting herself in the place of God. God has said not to eat that fruit. Every one of us does that every day. We make certain decisions. Our parents tell us to do something or not to do something. We decide whether we know what’s best or they know what’s best. We decide whether we’re right and we say no to them or whether they’re right and we say yes to them. If we decide that we’re right, we say that we’re not going to do what our parents say. This is fundamental. Every person is in charge of the decisions they make, and they say either yes to God or no to God.

Second, God made marriage. God is the one who designed the man and the woman for marriage, and marriage was to be between one man and one woman.

And third, God made families, so the parents can teach and train their children and teach their children all about God, who God is, and how we come to know God.

This is the very beginning so what happened? We have Adam and Eve, and then there is the introduction of the serpent. We learn later that the serpent is the devil, and that the devil has gone into this perfect Garden of Eden, this perfect paradise.

Because they listened to the devil and said yes to him instead of no to him, the result is that they become sinners. It corrupts them and it corrupts everything in the world. All of the physical things, the trees, everything else, gets affected, trees, animals, everything, and the penalty is death, which was a separation from God.

That’s the second event. That’s the Fall. They fall into sin. So God told them, don’t eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. When you do, you will certainly die. Now, they didn’t die physically. They probably didn’t even know what death was. If nobody has ever died, you’ve never seen anybody die, then you don’t have a comprehension of what that is.

Every day God came like a friend to talk to them. He was teaching them all about the creation and about Himself. Now, after disobeying Him by eating the fruit, they’re separated from God. They hear God and so they run and hide because they’re afraid of Him now.

They didn’t disobey God immediately. They obeyed God for a while, but later first Eve and then Adam said no to God and they disobeyed God and they ate the fruit. And after that they were separated from God, and they were afraid of God.

Slide 16

That takes us through the first event, the Creation and the second event, the Fall. Then we come to the third event, which is the Flood. This event is important to understand because after Eve sinned and after Adam sinned, then the descendants of Adam and Eve became increasingly disobedient to God. They were saying no to God instead of yes to God. They became very, very wicked toward God and toward each other and they ignored God and decided to live as if they were their very own God.

The earth continued to populate, and it grew to billions of people because in those days people lived to be nearly 1,000 years old. When you have people living to be 1,000 years old, their grandchildren, their great-grandchildren, their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren are still alive. Just think about how many people there’d be in the world if nobody had died since 1,000 years ago. It would really have a lot of people on the earth. So that’s what happened.

As the earth filled up with people, nearly everybody rejected God, except for eight people. There was a man named Noah and his wife. And he had three sons and their three wives. Those eight people were the only ones who were still obeying God.

God was still gracious to the people because He sent Noah to warn them that there was going to be punishment coming if they didn’t turn to God. The punishment would be a worldwide Flood. For many years, Noah went all over the world telling people that God was going to send this flood. He was going to punish everybody because of their wickedness.

There was one way of escape, and that was on the ark. And, of course, we know there was only one way to get into the ark. Nobody listened to Noah. No one turned to God. As a result, God decided to end their rebelliousness, their disobedience and their wickedness, and told them that He would completely destroy all of the surface life on the planet and start over. He was going to hit the reset button.

Slide 17

This brought about the Flood. Noah worked on this ark. Everybody ridiculed him because nobody had ever heard of rain before. Prior to this time, Scripture says that the earth was just watered by mist. It was a totally different kind of environment than the one we have now.

Noah continued to build the ark, and there was nobody but his own immediate family, just the eight of them, to get onto the ark. Noah was told to take animals on the Ark. There were seven of the clean kind and two of the unclean kind. And they were all to be put on the ark.

After all the animals were put on the ark, Noah and his family got on the ark, God closed the door, and God sealed the door so they couldn’t get out. Then it started to rain. They’d never seen rain before. and it began to rain, and it began to storm, and the water went up, and there were volcanoes, and there were earthquakes, and the volcanoes threw a lot of ash up into the atmosphere which caused it to rain.

It rained for 40 days and 40 nights. The waters continued to rise for another 120 days, and they didn’t start to recede for a number of days more. You’ve got all this water churning all over the earth and it completely reshapes the earth.

The result is that every living thing on the face of the earth died. Every animal, every bird, every person except for the eight on the ark and the animals that were with them. Everything else died except the fish who were not land animals. The fish were not taken on the ark. They didn’t have any aquariums on the ark.

We learn from this that God provides only one way, His way, for salvation. He created everything. He made everything. Everything works according to God’s rules.

The fourth event comes about 200 years after the Flood and after Noah and his family get off the ark and people married and they have children and more children. They are told after the Flood that they are to scatter over the earth and they’re also told something else.

Remember at the beginning God made certain social laws, personal responsibility to God, marriage, and family. That was to provide for man to prosper even in perfect environment before sin. With sin, however, there has to be some sort of regulation. There has to be some sort of law enforcement. There has to be some kind of government because God has delegated punishment to the human race. 

God said that from that point on, that whenever somebody committed murder, they were supposed to be executed. And that implies that there’s got to be a whole system of testimony and witness evaluation and all kinds of evident evidentiary procedures have to be formed in order to have a just punishment.

Slide 18

The next event is the Tower of Babel. Remember the people were told by God to scatter, but they didn’t. They disobeyed God. They all came together and they decided to build this huge tower, maybe tall enough so that if another flood came, they’d be able to escape the floodwaters.

They build this huge tower and God comes along to see what they’re doing. They had a religious purpose. They are building this to make a name for themselves, a reputation for themselves against God. They don’t want God to be a part of this.

God comes down. He says that everybody is speaking the same language. That means they can conspire together against Him and this will eventually be so destructive for the human race. It will be worse than before the Flood. So God said there’s only one thing He could do to slow this process down. He decided to cause people to have different languages and that would divide the people into groups, tribes, and nations where everyone spoke a common language.

Slide 19

Everyone who spoke the same language will eventually find one another. And then they’ll become different tribes and they’ll go off by themselves and separate, and will break up this whole mob. And I guess, you know, Wyatt Earp comes along later on with a shotgun and breaks up riots in Dodge City, but God did it more simply. He just changed their languages and then everybody had to go someplace else.

After the Flood, God told the people to scatter, but many people just said no and stayed in one place. And they built this high tower and God is going to break down this because what they’re doing is an early form of what today they call globalism. And globalism is a desire to bring all the human race together so that they can rebel against God.

God does not want internationalism, because He saw that that would be ultimately self-destructive. He punished them by giving them hundreds of different languages. God knows everything so He knows that if they spoke the same language, it would become worse than the Flood.

Slide 20

At this point God began working through one man and his descendants instead of working with the whole human race. That man is Abraham and when God called him it’s because everybody else is disobedient, but Abraham has trusted God.

Abraham’s family were like the other people. They were worshipping nature. They were worshipping God’s creation. They were worshipping the moon. They were worshipping the sun. They were worshipping the things that God had created.

Slide 21

Abraham decided he was going to trust God. And so he trusted God, and because he trusted God and continued to trust God and obey God, God gave him a promise. He told him to leave his family and his friends and to go to a new land that God was going to give to him. He told Abraham that if he listened to God, God would use him to do three things. First his descendants would bless all the people in the world, and second, God would give him millions of descendants, and third, that God would give him some land which would be his and his family’s land forever.

That’s called a contract, the Abrahamic Covenant. Because Abraham had already trusted God for his eternal salvation, Abraham decided to continue to trust God and he obeyed God and left for the land that God had promised him.

God had also promised a son. You can’t have millions of descendants if you don’t have a child. So God promised a son and after that son had grown to be an adult, had grown big, God tested Abraham and told him to sacrifice his son to Him.

This was the son that God was going to bless him with, so Abraham had trouble with that for a long time but when God told him to sacrifice Isaac to Him, Abraham had finally learned to trust that God was going to bless him through the descendants of Isaac. Abraham said yes, I’ll obey God. I don’t understand all of this, but I think God is powerful enough to even raise my son from the dead. So I’m going to take him and we’re going to go to the place near Jerusalem where God had told me to take my son. 

Abraham built an altar there and put his son on the altar. Then Abraham got ready to kill his son. And at that instant, God stopped him. He had never intended for Abraham to kill his son. When Abraham started to do that, God told him to stop and just at that time there was a ram that was caught in the bushes nearby. God told Abraham to grab that ram and substitute that ram for Isaac. What we see here is another picture of the coming salvation is that there would be someone who would be a substitute for the human race and take the penalty upon themselves rather than have us take that penalty.

Slide 22

The sixth event is the exodus. And the exodus takes place about three or four hundred years after Abraham. By this time, Abraham’s descendants had grown to an enormous number. By the time the exodus takes place, there are maybe two or three million of his descendants. And they are called Israelites.

God used a famine where they lived to force them out of their home in the land that God had promised them. This brought them down to Egypt to live. Over a couple of hundred years, they were enslaved by the Egyptians who treated them miserably for about 100 or 150 years.

They are waiting for God’s promise of a deliverer. God provided for them and He protected them all through this time of slavery. Then God provided for them a savior. During this time, this evil king that had risen up and enslaved the Jews continued to refuse to let them let them go. When Moses came, he said that he was a spokesman for God and that the Egyptians were to let his people go.

Slide 23

The Egyptians said no to God. This is what happens in the human race. People are constantly saying no to God. They said no to the Creator God who made them and instead they worshipped many other gods. Gods that were pictured as eagles, gods that were pictured as frogs, gods that were pictured as even flies. They worshipped all these animals as gods.

The Jewish people refused to do that and God loved His people. He was faithful to His promise to Abraham and He sent Moses to deliver them. The Egyptians did not want to let them go, but God brought 10 horrible disasters upon them to force them to let the Israelites go, to free them.

Slide 24

God performed many miracles through Moses. He rescued the people. He saved them from their slavery in Egypt, but the Egyptians wouldn’t let them go. On the last day, God told the Egyptian king, called the Pharaoh, that if he didn’t let the people go, then He would take the life of the firstborn in every family. This included Pharaoh’s firstborn son.

God told the Jews that there’s a way that He would deliver their firstborn. If they would take a lamb and sacrifice it in the place of that firstborn, and then roast the lamb and eat the lamb, which is a picture of their trusting God, then when the Angel of death came that night ,He would pass over their house and not take the life of their firstborn.

God provided a way of salvation by the blood or the death of a lamb. This, too, is a picture of the future Savior, the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ. He was identified with that lamb as a substitute. Whenever a person accepts the death of Jesus as their substitute, then they are going to have eternal life.

Slide 25

Next we come to the law, because after the people left Egypt, they went down to Mount Sinai and God had to give them a law code so they would have law and order in their new nation. These are rules that people live by, rules that teach them to respect each other, to respect each other’s possessions, to respect their privacy, to respect their families, and to respect their children. God’s law was absolutely perfect, and He showed what righteousness was.

In this law code God also told the Israelites how they should worship Him. It wasn’t up to them to decide how to worship God. They were to worship God the way God said to worship Him. And whenever they did it wrong, God wouldn’t listen to them. He wouldn’t answer their prayers. He wouldn’t bless them. Sometimes He would punish them because they were violating His laws and not worshiping Him the way He said He should be worshiped. He promised them in the law code that if the Israelites would obey Him, He would bless them. But if they didn’t, He would punish them.

Slide 26

That brings us to the conquest. The Israelites, all three million or so of them, had a law code and were ready to move into the land God had promised Abraham. The problem was it was controlled by tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people that disobeyed God. These people had been so evil that they had been disobeying God for over 400 years.

God had told Abraham, there’s a people in the land I’m giving you, and I’m going to give them 400 years to obey me. If they don’t obey me, then I’m going to punish them. They didn’t obey God and had become so wicked and evil that God said that they were so bad that they were infectious like a bad disease. They were infecting the rest of the human race.

He told the Israelites that they had to go in to this promised land and to kill every man, woman, child, and in some cases all of their cattle. The Israelites had to go take this land in obedience to God. When they obeyed God and took the land at first they were happy but after a while they just weren’t happy with obeying God.

Slide 27

At the beginning, under Joshua, they obeyed God, and when they obeyed God and God’s directions, they would win their battles. But when they would disobey God, when they would do it their own way and say no to God, they failed and lost the battle.

After about four years, they conquered most of the territory, and then they began to disobey God. They went through another 300 to 400 years of disobeying God, and it just became absolute chaos. They decided that the problem was they needed to have a king. Now, it was always God’s plan for them to have a king, but God wanted them to have a king the way He wanted them to have a king.

Slide 28

They were impatient and they wanted to have a king early because every other country had a king. They weren’t looking for a king who would serve under God. They wanted a king who would be like all their neighbors. As a result of that, God warned them about what their king would make them do. They would have to obey him.

If he was a bad king, then it would be as bad as being slaves in Egypt. This king would tax them and take their money. And he would draft their children into the army and into the wars and things would be very bad. The people insisted and this was the beginning of the kingdom of Israel.

Slide 29

There was one kingdom for the 12 tribes of Israel. The first king was King Saul, who turned out to be a very bad king and very disobedient to God. The second king was King David. And David loved God. He loved God with all of his heart. And as a result of that, God made a covenant with David like He had made with Abraham. He promised David that He would send the promised Savior through David’s descendants.

We see this line, He had promised Eve after they had sinned that there would be a Savior that would come from her, from the seed of the woman. Later God identifies that that seed is going to come through Noah. And then later that He is going to come through Abraham. And then later the promised seed is now going to come through David.

Slide 30

All of this was to prepare people for the future coming of the Messiah and the Savior. David’s son was named Solomon and he became disobedient to God after David died. Because of David, God was kind to Solomon and said He wouldn’t punish the nation until after Solomon died. God told him that after he died, he would divide the nation into the northern and southern kingdoms. The northern nation would be made up of 10 tribes.

Slide 31

Sadly, these ten tribes were disobeying God. They wanted to do like the Egyptians had done. They worshipped nature and nature gods, the god of the storm, the god of the earth, the god or goddess who would bring fertility to the earth. Instead of worshiping God, they were worshiping the planet. There are some people today who do this. They worship planet Earth instead of worshiping God.

In the Southern Kingdom there were two tribes. Four of the kings in the Southern Kingdom were obedient to God, and because of that they lasted a little longer than the Northern Kingdom. God destroyed the Northern Kingdom by sending an evil king and an evil empire that defeated the northern tribes. And most of those people were taken captive to other countries.

Almost 150 years later, the same thing happened to the Southern Kingdom of Judah, because they were extremely disobedient as well. God still promised that He would bring a savior, a deliverer, someone who would take care of the sin problem and establish a future kingdom. God was faithful, even though the people were not faithful.

Slide 32

The people of the Southern Kingdom were exiled. That meant they were sent away from the land God had given Abraham. And so for 70 years, the Jewish people lived in a foreign country. God had promised that if they were disobedient, He would punish them. But, if they were obedient, God would bless them. He had told them what would happen.

God told them that if they disobeyed Him, He would send them out of the land for 70 years but at the end of those 70 years He would bring them back.

During that time, God continued to send prophets to them who reminded them that God would be true to His word. God would send a savior to save them from their sins and to provide forgiveness and to establish that future kingdom and fulfill all of the promises.

Slide 33

After 70 years God brought a remnant back. That’s point number 11 on the chart. After 70 years, God allowed some of the Jewish people to return. Not all of them. Maybe only 40,000 at first. And a little while later, maybe another 40,000. And they slowly resettled.

They had to have a nation there for the Messiah to come. God was preparing the way for that Messiah. God fulfilled His promises over and over again. Now, with many of the Israelites back in the land, God could send His promised Messiah and fulfill His promises to Abraham, promises to Moses, promises to David, to all of the Jewish people and to the prophets.

Slide 34

God was faithful to His promises to deliver them from their sin and to someday establish His kingdom on the earth. The key lessons we learn from all of this is first of all, God always warned a long time before there was punishment. There’s grace before judgment. God punishes disobedience, but He prefers for us to willingly obey Him so He can bless us.

Second thing that we see over and over again is that God provides salvation based on His way, not on our way and not on our opinions. A third thing that we learn is there’s always only one way of salvation, and that’s God’s way, and we don’t have to guess about it because He tells us exactly how to be saved.

We also learn that God eventually will punish all evil and fulfill all of His promises. (At this point Pastor Dean teaches the hand signals to go with the chart. To see these watch the video.)

Slides 35, 36, and 37

In the New Testament we start with the arrival of the promised Messiah. How does He show up? He’s a baby. Many people believed on Him when He came but most of the people did not believe on Him. The people who believed on Him realized that He was their promised Messiah, the prophesied Messiah, because of all the miracles that He did. They knew He would be the One to save them from their sins and to give them eternal life. Many others, most of the others, just rejected Him.

They continued to be disobedient to God. But in fact, they became more and more angry with Jesus. until they just hated Jesus so much, they planned a way to kill Him and to have Him killed like a common criminal. This led to His death.

Slide 38

The Cross is the 13^th point on this chart. Jesus was absolutely perfect. He never sinned. He always did what God the Father wanted Him to do. He was always obedient. Many people hated Him so much that they killed Him and crucified Him on a cross. While He hung on that cross, the skies turned so black, they were just as dark as you couldn’t even see your hand in front of your face.

During that time, for three hours, God punished Jesus for our sins—yours and mine. It is a legal punishment and that is the only time in all this suffering that Jesus cried out. He cried out because at that point His legal fellowship with God was broken. Jesus said, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” When it was finished, Jesus said, “It is finished.”

He had paid the penalty for sin for everyone. He was the substitute for your sins and my sins, just like the lamb, just like the ram, all the sacrifices in the Old Testament. He was our substitute. So, they made sure He was dead at the end of the day and one of the Roman soldiers stabbed Him in His side and out came what they described as water and blood.

Slide 39

When a person is dead in that kind of a situation, the blood will separate out into clear liquid and red liquid. That’s what they were describing, which proves that Jesus was dead. He was buried in the grave of a wealthy Jewish leader who had secretly believed on Him.

The other Jewish leaders were afraid that the disciples, His students and His friends, would steal the body. So they sealed up the tomb with a huge rock that no single person could move. They sealed it so that it would be clear if anybody tried to break that seal and steal the body.

Slide 40

The next morning, when His friends came to finish preparing His body, they discovered that the tomb was empty. What did they find? They found that the stone was rolled away, the tomb was empty, and Jesus’ body was gone. Jesus had risen from the dead.

Later that day, he appeared to his followers, and over the next 40 days He appeared to His followers. He ate with them, He drank with them, and He had this new body that could even pass through walls. He could just dematerialize or just disappear. He had a very different body than the one we have now. The 15^th event is the resurrection because Jesus rose from the dead and just in that same way, we, too, will rise from the dead. After this He ascended to Heaven.

Slide 41

Then the Church began. The Holy Spirit descended on a special feast day for the Jews called Pentecost. All the people who believed in Jesus were now part of this new body of believers that is called the Church. It was a new spiritual entity. God was not turning His back on Israel. They still had God’s promises, but He was just not going to fulfill them until Jesus returned.

The Church is a new unexpected entity. The Church is the body of Christ, which is what those who believe now are. And this is the Church Age. So far, it’s lasted almost 2,000 years. So what’s next?

Slide 42

The 17^th thing that we see in our chart is the Rapture. God prophesied through the apostles in the New Testament that in this new age, the Church Age, Christ is going to suddenly return without any warning and all those who believed in Him will be taken immediately to be with Him and meet Him in the clouds in the air. And that’s called the Rapture. They are snatched up into Heaven to be with Jesus.

Slide 43

What happens on the earth after that is just absolutely horrible. There will be earthquakes, and there will be massive storms like you and I have never seen. There will be incredible wars that will kill millions of people. All of this will take place, but during that time hundreds of millions of people are also going to be saved. They’re going to realize that Jesus was the promised and prophesied Messiah who died for their sins, and they’ll believe in Him.

Those who survive the Tribulation will be there when He returns. And when He returns, that is what we call the Second Coming. After those seven horrible years, Jesus returns to destroy the works of the devil and the Antichrist. The Antichrist and his partner, the false prophet, are going to be sent to the Lake of Fire. Satan, or the devil, is going to be chained for 1,000 years and then he’s going to be released at the end of that time.

Slide 44

All through those thousand years Jesus Christ and Church Age believers are going to be ruling over this Messianic Kingdom. There will be perfect government for 1,000 years. But then Satan is going to be released at the end of that thousand years. He will deceive hundreds of millions of people, lead a rebellion against God, and God will destroy all of them. God will finally punish the devil and all those who have rebelled against God and rejected his Savior, Jesus the Messiah.

This is the most important issue for any of us to think about. Will we believe in God’s Savior? Will we trust Jesus Christ and His death on the Cross for us? Or are we going to continue to be disobedient and to rebel against God and try to act like we are the Creator instead of God?

That is the story of the Bible. It took me one hour to explain all of those 19 different elements that make up the Bible. Every time we work through this, we’ll go through the little hand signs and everything so we can get that locked down into our brains.

This is what we should be teaching the kids. If you are five, six, seven, eight, nine years old, and you learn this and it’s repeated over and over, then you can think your way through the whole Bible, which we just did. You know how many Christians can do that? Probably less than just a minuscule amount can think their way through the Bible from beginning to end.

It’s what we should do because all doctrine hinges on that. Let’s close in prayer.

Closing Prayer

“Father, thank You for this opportunity to study and go through this. We pray that we can remember it and that as we go through the Bible that we will continue to learn more about You and how everything that You have revealed to us fits together so that we can have a clear understanding of the big picture of what Your plan is. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”