History of Israel with Pastor Jeff Shipley - Overview and Review

It's a good day to be alive in Jesus. And today we are reviewing and beginning a study on the history of Israel. And this is going to be an 8 -12 week study, an idea of how Israel came to be. Now, why, you may ask, in this dispensation of grace, why ask we, the church, need to study Israel?

It's not because I'm a covenant theologian. It's because I believe we can see God's sovereign hand at work, both within the life and history of Israel and both in the life and the history of God's people, the church.

I just want to just point out a couple of things. We're going to break this down into different sections. And today I hope, and I underscore hope, to be able to get to from Abraham to Jacob, covering those three generations.

And then for the next 8 -12 weeks, depending on how we do, if we get long on one, we'll have to maybe add in another week, go from next week from Jacob to Moses, Moses to God's people coming out of Egypt, so on and so forth.

History Is History, and Israel Matters to the Church

But before we begin any of it, I need to make a couple of points. And I think these are very important for all of us to understand. Number one, we've got to understand that there is no secular history.

There is no Bible history. I hear people all the time say, well, that's Bible history. History is history. Things happen at one time, in one place, under one certain set of events. You can have different perspectives on history, but the fact and the reality is that something happened in time and space in a certain locale.

So you have to understand that there is just history, not secular history and Bible history. Second of all, we need to come to understand that God selected the people of Israel, starting with Abraham.

God started a chain of events that is still being played out today. Now, why did God choose Israel? And this is really good for everyone to understand. It's like when I hear people say, well, God chose Noah because Noah was a great guy.

That is not true. Actually, if you look at Genesis six, it says, and Noah found grace in the eyes of God. And then God selected him. In other words, it is not by the works of righteousness, which we have done, but according to God's sovereign choice that he chooses.

Understanding that also with a nation of Israel, Israel was chosen by God for one reason. God decided to. It wasn't that Israel was better looking or they had better whatever. It was that God chose them to be the at that point, the mediator, or I should say, the broadcaster of God's grace to a lost and dying world.

Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the Twelve Tribes

Now, there's three people I would have, you know, today, number one, Abraham, his name later got changed to Abraham. And we're going to be looking at him. And you can go ahead and turn to Genesis three.

We'll be in Genesis three and Genesis 12 today. But Abraham is the patriarch. He is the first guy in identification to the idea of the great nation of Israel. He was living in her. Now, once again, it's important to note.

And we'll talk about this more in a minute. That God selected Abraham because God chose to not because of what Abraham was doing. So anyways, here's kind of what happened. God came and Tara, Abraham's father, grabbed his family.

And they were going to go to what was known as the promised land. They kind of went north and got stuck in the land of Herod. And then subsequently, God called Abraham out of that again to go into the promised land.

So Abraham was finally called at the age of seventy five. And God told him, as we'll see in a minute, that he would be the father of many nations. The second person for you to research and be familiar with is Isaac.

Isaac was the son of Abraham. And in actuality, he was the second son of Abraham. And his his older brother, I should say half brother, was born to Hagar, an Egyptian handmaiden or an Egyptian servant.

And because God and Sarah, I mean, Abraham and Sarah had heard God's plan that Abraham was going to have many descendants. Yet they were old and still had to have a kid. So they thought they needed to help God out a little bit.

And so Abraham slept with Hagar and Ishmael was born. But that wasn't God's plan. God's plan was for Abraham and Sarah. I Abraham and Sarah to have a son and his name would be Isaac. Isaac married a woman named Rebecca.

And Rebecca and Isaac had twin boys. One of them was Esau. One of them was Jacob. And these two twin boys, they were kind of contentious. And we'll get to more of that later. They were kind of contentious.

But Jacob would later become his name like Abraham got changed to Abraham. He had Isaac. Isaac had two twin boys named Esau and Jacob. And Jacob's name would be changed later to Israel. Jacob had twelve sons and those twelve sons became the heads of the twelve tribes of Israel.

That's how you get twelve tribes of Israel from the twelve from the twelve sons of Israel. So that's just a little opening salvo here. And I want to go ahead and talk about Abraham. Now, the time frame in which this is occurring is about 2100 to 1900 B .C.

And there was a couple of places you need to be familiar with. Number one is a place called Ur and this was in that fertile crescent. Some people say it was on the coast. I don't believe that. I believe it was inland in what is now modern day Iraq.

But it was the place where Abraham and his family were originally from. Haran, where they traveled to first before reaching the promised land, was about 300 miles northeast of what the promised land or what Israel is now.

It's in what's modern day Turkey. And so they traveled from Ur to Haran and from Haran to the promised land. Now, to keep all this going and to keep it moving in a in a normal way, I'm going to basically boil three generations of history down into basically three three point sermons.

The Plan of God in Genesis 3:15 and the Fall

Today, we're going to talk about a plan of God. We're going to talk about a person God chose. And then we're going to talk about a people that he called. First of all, I want you to look with me in Genesis chapter three, verse 15.

Genesis chapter three, verse 15. Now, Adam and Eve going way back before Abraham. Adam and Eve, the first two created beings on the planet. God said, do not touch this tree. Yet Adam and Eve went ahead and did it anyways.

And God said, you are surely going to die if you touch that tree. When they touched it, they continued to live physically. But because of that rebellion towards God, their souls died. But see, that's the awesome thing about God.

This plan from the word go before even he said, let there be light. There was a plan to reconcile his creation back to himself. God wanted to give man free will. I mean, think about it. This Pangea landmass, in other words, all the land that we see today.

There was more or less depending on erosion or whatever. But let's say all of the continents were once one big landmass. I want you to think about the 10 trillion to the 10th hour number of trees, bushes or whatever that were available for the use and available for the pleasure of Adam and Eve.

Now, God said out of all those trees, out of all those landmass. Right. He said, all you have to do is don't touch this one. Just don't touch it. That's all you got to do. You can go do anything you want to do.

You can be anywhere you want to be. Guys, don't touch this one tree. Ladies and gentlemen, as perfectly made humans in the image of God with a lot of spirit. See, they didn't have to be regenerated. They were born spiritually united to God.

God still had to give the opportunity of choice because God doesn't want our religion. He wants our hearts and our hearts have to love based upon freedom, not subjugation. And so he said, don't touch this one tree.

Well, just like a three year old child. What do they do? Don't touch that tree or don't touch the television. And there you go. Right. There you go. They touched the tree. They spiritually died. God banished them from their area of the world.

The Garden of Eden. And he wasn't going to allow any human back in. They were alone. They were destitute. They were absolutely distraught and destroyed because that perfect relationship they had had with God.

The father had now been destroyed. God said this, though, after all of that, he said, hey, guys, but I want you understand. There's a way back. You're not to understand it if I explain it all now. But there is a way back.

Ultimately, there will be a way for you to be restored back to that perfect original state. And then God says this. He said this to the serpent, i .e. Satan. He said this in verse 15. I will put hostility between you and the woman, between your seed and her seed.

He will strike your head and you will strike his heel. Now, that is a very weird verse, but it begins the understanding of from man's viewpoint of God's plan to reconcile a people back to him. It says the plan here is this, that the woman, the seed of the woman and the seed of evil, i .e. Satan.

Right. There would be enmity or hostility between them. But then it says this. He will crush your head, but you're going to bruise his heel. Now, we all know from ninth grade biology that women do not have seed.

Women are the receptacles of man's seed. OK, that's where fertilization takes place. And that's where the baby is incubated in the womb there. But it is the man who has seen. But there's only been one woman in the history of mankind who did not have sex with a human man.

Did not have sex yet became impregnated by the power of the Holy Spirit. And that is Mary. The seed is talking specifically about Jesus Christ. And you can see the masculine pronoun that's given to its singular to that.

They don't say they. It says he will strike your head and you will strike his heel. Jesus Christ will crush the curse of the law. Jesus Christ will crush the bondage that we are now enslaved to the Satan.

And even though his heel will be bruised, he will be victorious. Understand this in the power of God's grace today that it was always God's plan from the word go to reconcile a people. God had a plan.

God knew what would happen. And God not only provided a choice, but he provided a way knowing that man would choose wrong. Look at verse 21, same chapter, chapter three, verse 21. It says this. It says the Lord God said, since man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, he must not reach out, take from the tree of life and live forever.

Understanding that we were made in the image of God, but man now knew good and evil. Before that, man had only known good. But now he was in a desperate place where the choice was not just the tree. Now, a choice influenced by a sinful nature was always going to choose negative.

Now, that seems like a very dire situation. That seems like something that was going to be absolute destruction, absolute hurt and pain. But go back up one verse to verse 21. It says this. The Lord God made clothing out of skins for Adam and his wife and he clothed them.

When someone wronged you, it's like sometimes human beings go to total war. The air of forgiveness and the measurement of grace is so small and how we deal with people who are reproached to us. But God, God had every right.

God had every bit of justice to absolutely obliterate mankind and totally forget it. But he did. It's amazing. When mankind wronged God, God sacrificed part of his creation, i .e. animals. They died so that God could make clothes for Adam and Eve.

The provisional aspect of not just some God way far out there, but a loving father. Remember, when God created everything, he spoke it into existence. But it says when it came to man, God formed man with his own hands and even more beautiful.

The king of kings and Lord of Lords, the God of the universe, who could drop it into his eye and never even blink, bent down and put his mouth to the mouth of man and breathe life. Why? Because it's always been part of God's plan to reconcile a people back to himself.

So we have God's beginning here of this plan. And it's not that this is the first time God thought about it. It's the first time it's revealed to us through the lives of Adam and Eve. You go many generations forward in the sons of Adam.

You get to a man named Tara. Now, Tara was a man living, like I said earlier, in a place called Ur. And we think that Tara, for a living, made idols. He made idols. Now, you want to know how powerful God's grace is?

God's grace is so powerful as this. And then while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. God does not choose the person with the biggest King James Bible to fulfill his plan. God chooses people at his own will, by his own predetermined counsel, and does not rely on the religious successes of men.

He relies on the hearts that he chooses. And he changes. God chose a man named Abram, who was living in a heathen city with a heathen father, doing heathen things. Abram wasn't going to First Baptist Church of Ur, y 'all.

He wasn't in Sunday school every day and VBS every day. He was just an ordinary man, lost without the hope and grace of God, whom God selected. And he said this. He said, Genesis 12. Let me flip over there real quick.

Genesis chapter 12, verses one through three. The Lord said to Abram, go out from your land, your relatives and your father's house to the land. I will show you. I will make you a great nation. I will bless you and make your name great.

And I will. And you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and I will curse those who treat you with contempt and all the peoples of the earth will be blessed through you. You see, God's original plan, as we said earlier, was from the seed of a woman.

Now, that woman was going to be born to a very specific people group. All right. God had a plan. Now he selected a person to be the beginning of that nation. He says here in this promise that he makes with Abraham, I want you to notice this.

I want you to notice that the plan is contingent upon God is contingent upon God delivery. He said, I will bless those who bless you. I will curse those who curse you. I will make you a great nation. And then he says this.

He says all the peoples of the earth will be blessed through you. Ladies and gentlemen, the history of Israel is our history. In God's plan, he selected a person to bless all peoples of the earth. You see, through the blood of Jesus Christ, who is of the lineage all the way back to Abraham, to Abraham, God said, I will bring reconciliation, not to just a person, not to just a people group, but all peoples of the earth.

We sit here today and we can celebrate the hope and grace of God because God always had a plan and his plan were for people that he selected. Now, understand this. And the last thing I'd like to show you today, I'd like to show you over in Genesis chapter 15.

Go to Genesis chapter 15. It says this. After these events, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision. Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield. Your reward will be very great. But Abram said, Lord God, what can you give me since I am childless and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?

Abraham continued. Look, you have given me no offspring. So a slave born in my house will be my heir. Guys, do you doubt the plan of God? I want you to understand this. And if you're one of those people that say Christians who doubt are not good Christians, listen to me.

You can't name me a believer in God who has never doubted. Understand that even though God has a plan, his people sometimes doubt his plan. I'm going to be honest with you. As a pastor, I doubt God's plan sometimes.

I ain't a liar. Guys, there are days I look and I say, God, what are you doing here? There are days where God is moving so hard. I feel like a kid holding on to the leg of daddy being dragged across the floor.

But guys understand this. God had a plan. God chose a person. And out of that person, he chose a people. And one of the characteristics of God's people is that sometimes we doubt. God had said you're going to be the father of a great nation.

Yet Abraham looked around. He had no children. He had nothing. As far as an heir. Where is this great nation, God? Where are these many peoples you said that would happen? I'm 70-something years old.

I'm 80-something years old. I'm 90-something years. I have no child. God said it doesn't matter what your situation is. I have a plan. You're a person that will make a great people. In closing, I just want us to understand as we go through this, this is just but the beginning.

The reality of who and what God is and his plan for the history of his people is going to be meted out through many, many different ways. God made a covenant with Abraham. God made a covenant with David.

God made a covenant over and over again. But his plan never changed. The people that he used, no matter how weak they were, he was still going to make them what he wanted them to be. And God's people, even though we're weak in our decisions sometimes, God's people are still called by his name.

Another word for all of that, as I close, is simply this. Grace. Understand me today. It is not your religious tolerance nor your religious adherence that make you selected by God. You cannot find God on your own.

God gives you the very faith and wish is used to believe in God. Word of God tells us Romans four, speaking about this time, thousands of years later, it says Abraham believed in God and it was a credit to him as righteousness.

You see, God's so great that in his plan, he knows that even when a choice is given, we will default to our base natures of total depravity. So God does something even more beautiful. He not only gives us grace, but he gives us the faith to believe in that grace.

I say that today to tell you this. God's plan. He selects persons to begin a work for the blessings of God's people. And God's people may falter. God's people may become faithless. God's people may choose incorrectly or go against the will of God.

But God's plan is never in jeopardy. God's people will never be lost because the immeasurable riches of God's grace and his mercy will never end. I hope you are blessed today and continue to tune in as we walk through this many, many years of the history of Israel.

And I hope you can glean from it some of the realities of God's plan for your life.