📖 New Testament Survey — Unit 1: The Fullness of Time

I. The Thinnest Page in Your Bible

Open your Bible and find the page that separates Malachi from Matthew. It is the thinnest page in your Bible. It is also the longest page in your Bible. Between Malachi's closing line about a coming Elijah and Matthew's opening line about the genealogy of Jesus Christ, there lie about four hundred years of human history — more time than from the founding of the American colonies to today. The prophets are silent. No new Scripture is written. And yet, when the curtain rises again, the world is unrecognizable. The temple is rebuilt. Synagogues fill every village. The Hebrew Scriptures have been translated into Greek. Roman roads connect Spain to Syria. A Jewish king has died and a Roman governor sits in his palace. And in a small priest's village in the hills outside Jerusalem, an old man named Zechariah is preparing to walk into the holy place to burn incense.

This is where the New Testament begins — not at Matthew 1:1, but four hundred years earlier, in a silence that was never empty. During the Intertestamental Period God was not silent because He had nothing to say; He was silent because He was preparing to speak the most important Word He had ever spoken. "God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son" (Hebrews 1:1–2). Four hundred years of preparation for one Sermon, one Cross, one empty Tomb. If you skip this unit, my friend, you walk into Matthew without your shoes on. So we slow down. We honor the silence. We listen for the road being built underneath our feet.

II. The Persian Settlement (about 430–330 BC)

When Malachi laid down his pen, the Jewish community was a small province inside the vast Persian Empire. Cyrus had let them go home in 538 BC; the temple had been rebuilt by 516; Ezra had restored the law in 458; Nehemiah had finished the walls in 445. Most of the Jews who had been carried into Babylon never came back. They settled in the cities of the East and began the long phenomenon we call the Diaspora — the dispersion. Jewish communities sprang up in Babylon, Persia, Egypt, North Africa, and eventually all around the Mediterranean.

One enormously important thing took shape during this period: the synagogue. Its precise origins are debated among historians, though the Babylonian exile is frequently proposed as an important setting in its development, since exiles far from the temple in Jerusalem needed a way to gather, to read the Scriptures, to teach the children, and to pray. The synagogue (literally "a gathering together") met that need. By the time of Christ, every city in the Roman Empire with a Jewish population had one. When the apostle Paul went on his missionary journeys, the synagogue was almost always his first stop, because the synagogue had already taken the Old Testament to the ends of the earth. The Holy Spirit was using a system that had grown up during the silence.

Second, the books of the Hebrew Bible continued to be gathered, copied, and treasured as Scripture. Ezra, the priest and scribe who taught the people the Law and led the great reforms of the restoration community, stands as one of the towering figures behind this era of faithful preservation, even though the exact process by which the Old Testament reached its final, recognized form is not spelled out for us in detail. Stop and feel that for a moment. The pew you sat in this morning has a Bible in it because faithful scribes in and after the Babylonian exile refused to lose the Word. They were running the relay through the silence. They handed the baton to Christ.

III. The Greek Whirlwind (330–167 BC)

In 333 BC a young Macedonian general named Alexander stormed into Asia and changed the world in a decade. He was twenty-three when he broke the Persian Empire at Issus. He was thirty-three when he died of fever in Babylon, having conquered everything from Greece to India. Daniel had seen him coming three centuries earlier — the male goat with the conspicuous horn between its eyes (Daniel 8:5–8). Alexander did not just conquer the world; he Hellenized it. He left Greek cities, Greek soldiers, Greek libraries, and above all the Greek language behind him in every land he touched. By the time he died, the educated Mediterranean world spoke Koine — the common Greek of the marketplace.

When Alexander founded the city of Alexandria in Egypt in 331 BC, he invited Jews to settle there as full citizens. They came by the thousands. Within a generation, Alexandria had the largest Jewish population in the world outside Judea, and most of those Jews could no longer read Hebrew. About 250 BC, under Ptolemy II, seventy or seventy-two Jewish scholars (so the tradition runs) translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. The result was the Septuagint (Latin for "seventy"), abbreviated LXX. This was the first time in history the Old Testament had been translated into another language, and it was a translation God was going to use mightily. When the Ethiopian eunuch read Isaiah 53 in his chariot in Acts 8 and Philip ran up to explain it, the eunuch was reading the LXX. The New Testament writers frequently quote the Old Testament in forms close to the Greek Septuagint, though their quotations reflect a more complex textual picture and do not all derive directly from one form of the Septuagint.

After Alexander's death in 323 BC, his empire splintered among his generals. Judea ended up squeezed between the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Seleucids of Syria, passed back and forth like a contested football for a hundred and fifty years. Pressure to abandon the Law and adopt Greek customs grew steadily. The crisis came in 167 BC.

IV. The Maccabean Stand (167–63 BC)

The Seleucid king Antiochus IV — who took the title Epiphanes, meaning "god manifest" — decided to wipe out the Jewish religion altogether. He outlawed the Sabbath. He outlawed circumcision, on pain of death. He burned every copy of the Law he could find. And in December 167 BC he marched into the temple in Jerusalem, set up an altar to Zeus on top of the altar of burnt offering, and slaughtered a pig on it. This was the "abomination of desolation" Daniel had seen in vision more than three centuries earlier (Daniel 11:31; 8:13). The lamps went out.

An old village priest named Mattathias, in the hill town of Modein, refused to offer the sacrifice when the king's officers came to enforce the new religion. He killed the officer, killed the apostate Jew who had stepped forward to make the offering, and fled to the hills with his five sons. The third son was named Judah, but he is better known by his nickname — Maccabeus, "the Hammer." For three years the Maccabees waged guerrilla war against an empire. By December 164 BC they had recaptured Jerusalem, torn down the desecrated altar, and rekindled the lamps. The festival of Hanukkah — the Feast of Dedication — celebrates that rekindling every winter to this day. The Lord Jesus Himself walked in Solomon's Colonnade during Hanukkah (John 10:22). He celebrated the faithfulness of a people who had refused to bow.

Take the Maccabean lesson home with you. There comes a moment in every faithful life when the king's officer arrives in the village and the pig is on the altar. He will be polite. He will offer you a way out. The compromise will look small. Mattathias picked up the sword, and three years later the lamps were burning again. There is no Christmas, no Hanukkah, no kept-burning lamp anywhere in the world that has not at some point been kept lit by an old village priest who said no.

The Maccabean dynasty ruled an independent Jewish state for about a hundred years before ending in civil war between two grandsons in 63 BC. Their quarrel reached the ears of a Roman general passing through Syria with an army. His name was Pompey. He took Jerusalem, and the long Roman shadow fell across the land.

V. The Roman Dawn (63 BC and after)

The Romans were not delicate. They taxed mercilessly, garrisoned heavily, and crucified anyone they suspected of rebellion. But they did three things that, almost in spite of themselves, prepared the world for the gospel. They built roads. By the time Paul stepped onto the Egnatian Way at Philippi in AD 50, a Roman citizen could walk on paved highway from the Atlantic coast of Spain to the Euphrates. They kept the peace. The Pax Romana, inaugurated by Augustus in 27 BC, lasted two hundred years and made it possible for an unarmed Jewish missionary to travel from Jerusalem to Rome with nothing but a cloak, a few scrolls, and the gospel of Christ. And they enforced one law in every province. When Paul appealed to Caesar in Acts 25, he was using a legal mechanism that worked the same way in Caesarea as in Athens as in Rome. The empire that crucified Jesus on a Roman cross was the same empire whose roads carried His resurrection news to the ends of the earth. God uses His enemies' infrastructure.

In Judea itself, the Romans installed a half-Jewish, half-Idumean strongman named Herod the Great. He was a paranoid king who murdered his wife, three of his sons, and (according to Matthew) all the boy babies of Bethlehem under the age of two. He was also the most prolific builder the Holy Land had ever seen. He doubled the size of the temple platform; the magnificent stones tourists still touch at the Western Wall today were laid by Herod's masons. The temple Jesus walked through was Herod's temple. Herod died in 4 BC, just months after a star had moved across the night sky and stopped over a stable behind a Bethlehem inn. The first reign Jesus ever survived was Herod's.

VI. The Four Voices of First-Century Judaism

While the empires came and went over their heads, the Jewish people were quietly fragmenting into four parties. Each one was an answer to the same question: How do we serve God under Gentile rule?

The Pharisees answered, "By keeping the Law more strictly than ever." They were the lay theologians, the schoolmasters of the synagogue, the spiritual heirs of Ezra. They believed in angels, in the resurrection of the dead, and in the absolute authority of Scripture. They are also the group that built what they called "a fence around the Torah" — hundreds of additional rules. Over the centuries, the fence got higher than the building. Jesus' bitterest controversies were with this group, not because their theology was wrong (it was usually right) but because their hearts were proud. Saul of Tarsus, the man who became the apostle Paul, was a Pharisee — and the most useful Pharisee who ever lived was the one who finally laid his fence down at Damascus.

The Sadducees answered, "By cooperating with the Romans and keeping the temple running." They were the wealthy aristocracy, the priestly families. They accepted only the five books of Moses; they rejected the resurrection, angels, and the supernatural. They were the religious establishment that arrested Jesus in Gethsemane. Their party died with the temple in AD 70. A theology that has no resurrection in it has no future in it.

The Essenes answered, "By withdrawing from a corrupt nation altogether." They retreated to monastic communities in the desert; the most famous was at Qumran by the Dead Sea. Their library, hidden in caves at the time of the Roman siege in AD 68 and rediscovered by a Bedouin shepherd in 1947, has given us the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Old Testament in existence. Christ never asks us to leave the world; He asks us to be salt in it.

The Zealots answered, "By picking up a sword and driving the Romans into the sea." One of Jesus' twelve disciples, Simon, is called "Simon the Zealot" (Luke 6:15). The Zealot movement reached its climax in the great revolt of AD 66–70 that ended with the burning of the temple. Sword-faith is the oldest counterfeit of gospel-faith. It always loses, because the kingdom Jesus came to plant does not grow out of the sword's furrow.

Four parties. Four answers. None was the right answer. The Pharisees offered legalism, the Sadducees compromise, the Essenes withdrawal, the Zealots violence — and the country needed something none of them had. The country needed a Savior. So do you and I, this morning. Christ alone is the door none of them could find.

VII. The Fullness of Time

Step back and look at the picture. By the year 5 BC the world had been brought, by silent and invisible providence, to a moment that had never existed before and would never be repeated. "But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law" (Galatians 4:4–5). What is the fullness Paul is talking about?

There was a common language — Koine Greek, understood from Spain to Syria. For the first time in human history, a missionary could preach in one language to a Roman governor, a Jewish rabbi, and a Greek philosopher in the same room. There was a common road system — Roman highways meant the message could move at the speed of a fast horse from Jerusalem to the heart of every empire on earth. There was a common peace — the Pax Romana meant an unarmed apostle could carry a scroll across two thousand miles and not be murdered for his trouble. And there was a common need. The Stoics had not solved sin. The mystery religions had not solved death. The legalism of the Pharisees had not made anyone holy. The world was ready.

God had been building the road for four hundred years. "Behold, I send My messenger, and he will prepare the way before Me" (Malachi 3:1) had been being fulfilled the whole time. The four hundred years of silence were the four hundred years of road-building. And let me press this on you, my friend: God is doing the same thing in your life right now. The seasons that feel like silence are usually the seasons of road-building. Trust the silence. The Builder is working.

VIII. The Curtain Rises

And then, one ordinary morning in or about 5 BC, an old village priest named Zechariah drew the lot to enter the Holy Place of the temple and burn the morning incense. He had probably waited his whole life for the chance. He stepped through the curtain. The smoke of the incense rose. And to the right of the altar of incense stood an angel. The four-hundred-year silence broke that morning, in a single sentence: "Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer is heard; and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John" (Luke 1:13). It was the messenger of Malachi 3:1 — and Zechariah's son would be the messenger before the Messenger. The Sun of Righteousness was rising.

And the Remnant were waiting. Old Simeon, who had been promised by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death until he had seen the Lord's Christ, stood in the temple courts and recognized a poor village couple's forty-day-old baby boy: "Lord, now You are letting Your servant depart in peace, according to Your word; for my eyes have seen Your salvation" (Luke 2:29–30). Old Anna, eighty-four years old, a widow who had not left the temple courts in decades, came at that very moment and gave thanks to God.

Do not miss who they were. They were not the religious establishment. They were not the wealthy. They were an old priest who could not speak, an old soldier of the Spirit who would not die, and an old widow who would not leave the temple. They were the kind of people the world overlooks and heaven keeps records on. Every revival in church history has run on the prayers of unnamed Annas. The Holy Spirit knows where you are sitting tonight. Keep the lamp lit. Keep coming to the temple. The Lord you are waiting for will walk in, and you will recognize Him.

IX. To the Threshold of Matthew

We have come to the threshold of the New Testament. Behind us are the law and the prophets, the kings and the priests, the captivity and the return, the silence and the synagogue, the road and the road-builder. In front of us are four Gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, John — each one a different angle on the same Lord. Matthew will show us the King. Mark will show us the Servant. Luke will show us the Son of Man. John will show us the Son of God. Then comes Acts, where the road that Rome paved gets walked by the apostles. Then come the Epistles. Then comes the Revelation, where the road ends not at Rome but at the New Jerusalem.

Eleven more units lie ahead of you. Twenty-seven books. One Story — the same Story we have been reading since Genesis 1, now arrived at its great central chapter. "For all the promises of God in Him are Yes, and in Him Amen" (2 Corinthians 1:20). Every promise of the Old Testament finds its yes in Jesus.

So take a breath, my friend. The thinnest page in your Bible is now behind you. The road has been built. The Servant has departed in peace. The Remnant has recognized her Lord. And the King is walking out of the manger toward His throne. Open your Bible. Turn the page. Behold your King. Amen.

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