Topographical - Introduction

Good morning, everyone.

It's good to see you.

Please don't be afraid that I have two screens in front of me.

I we're starting a new series called Topographical.

I'm excited about it because it's about places

and what happens there and their value and their importance

in scripture.

And so yeah, I'm excited about getting into this.

So I just got back from spending a week and a half in New York,

Western New York, which is where I spent

the first 20 years of my life.

I grew up in the same house in the same city.

I went to college about an hour and a half away

for my freshman and sophomore years

and then transferred to a college in the Midwest,

Indiana Westland.

I was going to say, is there a shout out there?

Yeah, OK.

When I was nearly 25, I moved to the Midwest permanently

by moving here and have been here for the last 22 years.

I also said I would just be here two years.

No.

And it's only been two years, multiple times over.

I live in the Midwest, guys.

I say, oh, when I bump into someone,

I have absolutely seen my way through the Midwest goodbye.

We're like, well, guess I'll be going five topics later.

I have definitely stood outside to watch the sky

while the tornado sirens are going off.

But I am a New Yorker, and I have great pride

for my home state and town.

Through and through, I say I live in the Midwest,

but I am a New Yorker.

Because places influence and build us much more than we

often can even identify.

If you grew up here, you might overlook the fact

that the Mississippi River is probably

one of the most defining things about life here.

It dictates a shocking amount of the way we live our lives,

the way it floods, the bend in the river,

the way that influences weather patterns,

and even defines which state people are willing to travel

to go to Target.

All of the history here and how we live now

is informed by this, and not just a little bit,

but in every way, every day.

So when I say I'm from New York, what I often hear

is, you don't sound like you're a New Yorker.

You're right, because I grew up six hours away from New York

City.

When I tell people that I live here in the Midwest,

they think about corn fields and farms.

When we're not from somewhere, it's

easy to reduce that area down to a stereotype or a singular idea.

We don't think of and consider the dimensions

and the nuances.

We don't consider history or distances.

When people hear that I say I grew up

six hours away from New York, they

don't realize that there was more to New York than the city.

New York City did not affect my life, but Canada did.

And if you know about where I grew up, that would make sense.

But if you don't know New York, if you can't picture it

on a map, that would not connect.

Trying to explain to you also how

I know I am home when I go to New York

without seeing the Welcome to New York State sign

also might not make sense.

But because I've taken that journey,

I don't know how many times, I can tell you

that after driving almost eight hours to Cleveland,

sidling along Lake Erie, when I began shifting my direction

northeast, I feel it.

I know that it's happening.

And when I start seeing grapevine fields

and even sometimes smell the scent of Niagara grapes

in the air, I know that I am in the very western corner

of New York.

And I know that when I reach the Seneca Nation land,

I've got about an hour and a half left of my trip.

The land we live on is significant,

and it's a significant informant in our lives.

The distances we travel, the journeys

we take to grandma's house or a commute to a job,

the people and the events that took place there beforehand,

all of it, places are important.

And so we're going to be spending a few weeks visiting

places in the Bible because it matters.

How does the natural landscape inform the story?

How do wars, conquest, events, and even migrations

inform and build an area?

How did the land affect Abraham and Sarah or Jesus or Paul?

What distances were traveled and how far are some

of the cities from each other?

What is the history of the land and why

was that place important for the story of God's people?

Let's pray.

God, I am excited for this.

I'll call it a tour that you're about to take us on

over the next few weeks.

There's so much to gain from digging

into the place of the people, wherever that is,

and understanding more about the dimensionality

and the nuances there.

And so I pray that you would give us excitement in that,

that when scripture talks about a place,

that it would make us curious to find out more

and to go deep with not just the words about you,

but then the places that it took place,

for those things took place on.

So ignite a new curiosity in us, God,

about the where of the Bible as we move forward.

We pray that you add your blessing to your word

and to our time together today and over the next few weeks.

Pray this in your name.

Amen.

Because I am introducing a series,

I want to give an overview of some events in scripture

and walk us through a progression

and give geographical context in the hope that it will,

like I said, get us curious enough to stay tuned

and even give you some encouragement yourself

to dig more into understanding location

when you're doing your own Bible study and engagement.

Guys, I love maps so much.

I really like Lord of the Rings.

And there is, thank you, thank you fellow nerds,

there is a book of maps of Middle Earth and beyond

that you can get.

And I definitely own it.

And I've looked all over it, like, oh,

this is where Frodo left from here.

Sorry, I did.

So I remember things better, though,

when I see it laid out that way.

To know the path and the location where the mountains are

and the rivers divide helps me out so much.

So today is a tour of the maps is what it is.

But hopefully for some of you whose brain works

a similar way, that will help us make connections.

I think what often happens when we read scripture,

we will read about the places, Corinth, Jerusalem, Cyrene,

Babylon, Egypt.

And we give them no more than a passing thought.

We don't really know really where they are

or how much territory they covered,

at what time and place, and what impact that made.

We don't consider the scope of the ancient world,

how far or even close the distances

might be between places.

But when the Bible mentions a place, it matters.

It is a key detail of a story.

And scripture regularly mentions key features of a landscape

or where someone is going or where God is bringing them out

from, a road that was taken.

These things are mentioned because the reader should

know and understand.

And so if we don't, we need to.

We also tend to view the biblical world

through the lens of a modern map,

regardless of the fact that, again, borders have changed,

territories have changed, people groups have moved

from different areas, cities have both risen and fallen,

and even ideas of regions are different.

When I say to you the Middle East,

you've got an idea in your head already.

But it's different than the world of the Bible.

So viewing the biblical world through the lens

through which it was written is important.

Knowing the map then, where people groups lived then,

is incredibly vital.

So before we begin, one major shift

I want to start us off with is that there's,

of the biblical world, the concepts of Europe,

Middle East, and Africa do not exist.

That is a current world view.

There was a Mediterranean region.

So map one, Brennan.

This is an overlay of, Brennan, on the snap, go.

This is an overlay of the Mediterranean basin over the US

so you can get a size of scale, how big it is.

Did anybody know?

Right, it's this big.

So you can see Italy coming down.

The Far East is where you would, like Virginia,

North Carolina is where Israel is.

Florida is Egypt.

I'm not making connections.

California is like the end of Spain.

And so that gives you sort of a concept

of where we're talking about and size.

And so again, there was the Mediterranean region.

There was not Europe, Middle East, and Africa.

The cities that bordered the Mediterranean Sea

were one very interconnected region,

unified by trade and by commerce

and leadership sort of negotiations.

And so by the time we meet some key figures in scripture,

like Abraham, this is an incredibly well-defined

and interconnected, developed area,

which is different from how we in 21st America,

21st century America might look at it.

So map two, Brennan.

Today we're gonna start with Abraham,

Abram and Sarai at the beginning of the Israelite nation.

They would have lived far over on the right.

So Brennan, next map.

I'm totally being like a professor right now.

All I need is like a laser pointer.

We're starting like in that circle,

but even a little bit on the farthest eastern region of it.

Does everybody feel comfortable

with their cardinal directions?

Do we need a review of course?

Anyway, I'm the person that gives directions

and like go north and then Bradley's like, no, thank you.

Turn at the red house.

So Abram and Sarai at the beginning,

they are the start of the Israelite nation.

This is who God makes his promise with, his covenant with.

We don't begin in Israel because it didn't exist.

Where we tend to think much

of the Bible narrative takes place.

They began far east in what is known as the Fertile Crescent.

Anybody remember studying Mesopotamia?

Yes, I had to make a salt relief map of it once.

The map was awesome, but I left it to the night before.

That did not go well with my mom.

So I wish I still had it.

It was kind of glorious.

But Mesopotamia is the land between two rivers.

This is the region we're in.

And so there was actually a lot happening there.

Abram had a whole like community unto himself

of like people and people and people and people and servants

and family and animals and farm, like all of this stuff.

And so it was a very well populated area

and is a seed to what is gonna be highly significant

later on, even though the Bible shifts locational attention,

we need to keep our attention on this area.

We might think that that area is a desert,

but there was a lot happening.

And so we're gonna meet Abram and Sarai in Genesis 11.

And so this is the account of Terah's family line.

Terah became the father of Abram, Naur and Haran.

And Haran became the father of Lot and so on and so forth.

Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot of Haran

and his daughter in-law Sarai, and they all went together.

They set out from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to Canaan.

So they set out from that far east.

Now let me give you a perspective.

That far corner to the ocean there is 700 miles.

So it's not like it's like a little hike.

Like they were, you're packing up and going forever.

So while in Haran, so Brandon go to the next map.

So while in Haran at the top, they travel up there.

God speaks to Abram and says,

he says, I will make you into a great nation

and I will bless you, go out from this land

and go down to Canaan.

So they go forth to the spot that God says go

and then he goes, and now we're gonna go to another spot.

Now there was already people there.

There was a lot of people there.

The Canaanites, you've heard of them

because the Bible talks about them a lot.

Have you spent time getting to know them?

They inhabited this land.

People already lived there

and God was like, go live with them.

There was a famine, Abram and Sarai have to go down to Egypt.

This begins the biblical understanding

of how often the people in this region

cooperate with each other.

So often there are famines.

Joseph, there was a famine with Jacob's family.

They had to go to Egypt.

Something goes wrong, they go to Egypt.

Joseph and Mary wanna flee their local government,

they go to Egypt.

Egypt is the place you go.

It was rich, it was resourced,

it had leadership that had already been there

for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.

Egypt, let's move on to that.

When we talk about Egypt, go ahead, yep.

Great, Brennan, nice.

It's probably a bigger idea than you even thought it was.

Egypt, we think of it as sort of like

contained to this little area.

It is actually pretty broad.

So you didn't have to go far to get to Egypt.

And when we think about Egypt, what do we do?

We reduce it, don't we?

We reduce it down to an idea of Cairo and the pyramids.

But there's so much more to it.

So when we hear Egypt and we're reading scripture,

we're like, oh, they went to where the pyramids are.

No.

The Nile River Valley was replete with kingdoms

and the history of the kings there

and the dynasties that existed.

There were 30 dynasties of the Egyptian lineage.

And we're in the 12th one by the time Abraham shows up here.

So this is a large, large area.

I just skipped a lot in my message

because I'm just sort of like, guys, I told you maps.

I get real excited about them.

So we see a lot happening in Egypt.

Now over time, we also, as I said,

we meet Joseph who gets captured, taken to Egypt.

He lives there after Jacob comes there

because there's a famine, you go to Egypt.

That's the safe place to go.

That's the resource place to go.

400 years later, we find that the community

that was started by Abraham, covenant with God,

the Israelites, they're now enslaved there.

They've become the inferior community

and they are now the slaves.

They are the lowest rung.

And so this is when Moses is like, look, we gotta get out.

God promised us a land.

I don't even know it.

I'm Egyptian really by culture and by life.

But God promised us a land.

We need to go north.

We need to go far to the north.

It's like if we were to go to Canada,

which is home for you guys.

We're the south.

We don't think of ourselves that way.

To the Canadians.

So they needed to go north.

And keeping this in mind, when we think about

the Israelites leaving Pharaoh's land

and Moses is leading the charge,

the story of the Red Sea is usually where we think,

oh, they've gotten through the Red Sea.

They've left Egypt.

But they've basically only gone halfway through Egypt.

They still have so much more of Egypt.

They get north of that and they're still in Egypt.

And so that matters because Pharaoh did not pursue

the Israelites even through his own territory

because he understood that God was on their side

and he could not win.

And so that, again, is a significant detail and it matters.

So the Israelites have made it up to their promised land.

They're like, we're here now.

We've landed.

Good job, guys.

We're home free.

However, the Israelites feeling like we wanna be

the big guys too.

We've been sort of put under the foot and the thumb

of all the bigger powers.

We're tired of this.

We wanna play like the Egyptians.

We wanna be like the Amorites, the Hittites,

the Canaanites, the Philistines.

They wanted to be cool.

So they were like, we need a king.

That's what makes these other nations amazing.

That's probably why we've been oppressed for so long.

We don't have a king.

We need a king.

So in 1 Samuel 10, this is how it goes down.

Them asking for a king was not a good idea.

So Samuel the prophet summoned the people of Israel

to the Lord at Mizpah and he said to them,

this is what the Lord, the God of Israel says.

I brought Israel up out of Egypt and I delivered you

from the power of Egypt and all the kingdoms

that oppressed you.

But you've now rejected your God who saves you

out of all the disasters and calamities.

And you have said, no, appoint a king over us.

So now present yourself before the Lord

by your tribes and your clans.

Chapter 12, 13 says, now here is the king you have chosen.

It's gonna be Saul.

The one you've asked for, see the Lord has set a king

over you.

If you fear the Lord and serve and obey him

and do not rebel against his commands,

and if both you and the king who reigns over you

follow the Lord your God, good, great.

The Lord knew that that probably was not gonna be the case,

but he's like, this is the direction you should go.

I advise you stay the course.

But if you do not obey the Lord and if you rebel

against his commands, his hand will be against you

as it was against your ancestors.

The Israelites do realize that they have made an error.

What they've done, they start to regret their choices

and they wanna backtrack a little bit, kind of,

but they don't.

And so what they do as an alternative,

still give us a king, but Samuel, will you pray for us?

Will you pray that we don't fall into dereliction?

Will you pray that we follow the commands of God?

Samuel does say, look, don't be afraid.

You have done all this evil.

God told you not to, you persisted, and he said,

okay, you can have what you want.

Do not turn away from the Lord,

but serve the Lord with all your heart.

Do not turn away after useless idols.

For the sake of his great name,

the Lord will not reject his people

because the Lord was pleased to make you his own.

As for me, far be it from me that I should sin against the

Lord by failing to pray for you.

Of course I'm gonna pray for you.

But be sure, he can't say it enough,

be sure to fear the Lord and serve him faithfully

with your whole heart.

Consider what great things he has done for you.

Yet if you persist in doing evil,

both you and your king will perish.

So Saul, then David, and then Solomon,

each ruled for 40 years each.

The Israelites are like, we're doing great,

we're doing great.

But in 120 years with Solomon's son, the kingdom was split.

So Brennan, next map.

This is what the kingdom of Israel looked like

as one kingdom under Saul, David, and Solomon.

But then going to the next slide,

you'll see what it looks like split.

And then from here, their destruction becomes clear.

It splits into the north and the south.

So in the north is Israel and in the south is Judah.

This was massively significant.

But no nation when split ever is stronger

than when it's united.

In America, we can equate it to the divisions

that separated the north and the south.

The nation of Israel never saw itself

as one true nation after that.

But as factions of a nation that all assumed

that they were the right and the true

called children of God.

It only divided them.

It was never reunited as one.

And because of its split, it became weaker

and it was subject to larger entities.

So what follows is the invasion of these kingdoms.

When you read about the invasions of the Assyrians

and the Babylonians and the captivity in the exile,

which is when most of the prophet books take place,

you should know what this looks like.

We think of the Assyrians and the Babylonians as like,

there are people from somewhere.

East, I guess.

But we've already been to where these Assyrians

and Babylonians are.

We have spent time with them when we were in Abram's

home country, homeland.

So like I said, pay attention to what is off screen.

Pay attention to what's happening in the background.

Because even though we've moved on to the land

that was the kingdom of the Israelites,

the things over in Ur of the Chaldeans have not stopped.

And what you have are these growing powers

of the Assyrians and the Babylonians.

And so the Assyrians come, they take the land of the north.

Few hundred years later, the Babylonians come,

they take the land of the south.

They take them away in full captivity.

They burn the temple down.

They take all the artifacts that were sacred to the Jews.

They take them all with them.

And now again, the Israelites are finding themselves

under the foot of oppressive leaders,

of powers bigger than themselves.

They thought having a king and a kingdom was gonna save them,

and it did not.

God is still challenging them.

Be my nation without the borders.

Be my community without the borders.

I have placed you in a land.

That is important, but it's not the land that makes you,

it's not your boundaries that makes you.

I've placed you here as a gift,

as a place to be that's safe and you're provided for.

The land does matter, but you are my nation regardless.

Your commands to me matter regardless.

So in 1 Chronicles 5,

this is the taking of the first kingdom.

The people of the half tribe of Manasseh were numerous.

They settled in the land of Bashan to Senir.

These were the heads of their family,

but they were unfaithful to the god of their ancestors.

They were unfaithful to the god of their ancestors.

So the god of Israel stirred up the spirit

of the king of Assyria,

who took the Rubenites, the Gadites,

and the half tribe of Manasseh to exile.

He took them to where they are to this day.

So that's the first exile and the captivity.

Some 200 years later, the same happens to the kingdom of Judah

in 2 Kings 24.

During Jehoiakim's reign, Nebuchadnezzar,

I think that's a name that probably,

it shows up a lot in Sunday school,

so we're a little bit more familiar

with the Babylonian exile,

but it is partnered with the Assyrian exile,

and that's important.

The king of Babylon invaded the land

and Jehoiakim became his vassal for three years,

but then he turned against Nebuchadnezzar and rebelled.

The lord sent Babylonian Aramaean, Moabite,

and Ammonite raiders against him to destroy Judah.

So people were taken, but not everybody was taken,

but once this guy rebelled,

Nebuchadnezzar was like, all right, you're all going down,

and took whatever was remaining.

Surely these things happened to Judah

according to the lord's command

in order to remove them from his presence

because of the sins of Manasseh and all that he had done.

The king of Egypt, so kind of jumping back

to the king of Egypt,

did not march out from his own country again

because the king of Babylon had taken all his territory

from the Wadi of Egypt to the Euphrates River.

So Egypt, big Egypt, is now becoming smaller.

This bigger power is getting bigger and bigger and bigger

and starting to take another power

that felt like they were king of the world.

The way I said to Greg earlier, I was like,

it's like the next fish just eats the littler fish.

The next empire just eats the next one.

So please note at this time the Egyptian kingdom

reached as far east as Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

It gives us a sense of how big they got

and then how much bigger another group had to be

to take them.

So Second Chronicles 36,

Nebuchadnezzar carried to Babylon all the articles

from the temple of God, both large and small,

and the treasures of the lord's temple

and the treasures of the king's and his officials.

They set fire to God's temple

and broke down the wall of Jerusalem.

They burned down the wall of Jerusalem.

They burned all the palaces

and destroyed everything of value there.

We are leaving nothing for you.

You don't even have a place to come back to.

The kingdoms of Israel and Judah were in captivity

for some time.

All the while, this eastern power is evolving.

So out of Babylon, emerging sort of adjacent to it

is this guy named Cyrus the Great.

He's the first guy to gain the title The Great to his name,

which feels silly now to be like Cyrus the Great.

But it was a big deal.

He was the first.

And he becomes ruler of what is known as,

you don't have to remember this,

but it's significant, the Achaemenid Empire.

That's the next map.

The Achaemenid Empire, oh, that's the captivity.

I should have gone to that one a while ago.

Next one, there we go.

The Achaemenid Empire, to this point,

is the biggest empire that's ever existed.

Remember how I said, keep your eye on the east.

There is something brewing there.

Don't be distracted, pay attention.

This is the largest empire the world had ever seen.

But Cyrus the Great was a bit magnanimous.

He, to the Israelites, seemed like a good guy.

He wasn't, but he was better than the previous guy.

So it says, in the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia,

this is 2 Chronicles 36,

in order to fulfill the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah,

the Lord moved the heart of Cyrus, king of Persia,

to make a proclamation throughout his realm

and also to put into writing.

This is what Cyrus, the king of Persia, says.

The Lord God of heaven has given me

all the kingdoms of the earth,

and he has appointed me to build a temple

for him at Jerusalem and Judah.

You should know, Judah makes a difference, right?

Because now you know that the kingdoms are split.

Judah does not mean Israel, it means the southern kingdom.

Any of his people among you may go up,

and may the Lord their God be with them.

He's letting them go.

He knows there's nothing to go back to,

but this is a bit token.

He sends them back with their artifacts.

He even sends them back with money.

But they're not going back to the kingdom of Judah.

What are they going back to?

They're just going further east in the Persian,

or further west in the Persian kingdom.

Cyrus owns all of it.

It's his.

They're not going back to a homeland.

They're just going further west in an existing empire.

They're not out from underneath him.

But he's been good to them.

And the thing is, Cyrus knows his empire's so big,

he doesn't care.

He actually appreciates all these little regional signs

of religiosity, and he's like, oh, that's cute.

You should do your thing again.

That's pretty cute.

So I'll set you up.

It's like cute little local folklore.

So yeah, sure, go ahead.

And so he sends them back with that.

And they're like, wow, that feels good.

That's the best we've had in a long time.

So over the next few hundred years,

Nehemiah asks if he can rebuild the temple.

The prophets are speaking to Israel.

They're trying so desperately to get them to come back

to God and to remember the God of their ancestors.

This is about where we end the written Old Testament.

What happens in between in, and I'm not gonna do a ton

in the New Testament if you're like, oh my gosh,

are we just getting to the end of that?

And we have another testament to go.

I'm not gonna do what I just did

to set up the New Testament.

But the Old Testament writing ends,

but there's something called the intertestamental period.

And what happens in there is important.

The Persians continue to pick battles

with these other regional entities,

most notably this little Western Greek community

called the Spartans.

If you're familiar with the story of the 300,

the Spartans took on Xerxes.

This is the Persian kingdom that they took on.

But the Persians are threatened by no one

until a power comes out of all places,

Macedonia, north of Greece.

And while the scriptures keep our eyes focused on one place,

there is always something happening somewhere else

that we should keep our eyes on, right?

Nothing ever just pops up out of nowhere.

Something is always brewing.

And so while the Persians are sometimes taking on

these little regional tussles with the Spartans

and the Athenians and the Corinthians,

the north, as Daniel puts it, comes sweeping down.

The Book of Daniel does talk about Alexander the Great.

And Alexander the Great is noted as sweeping down

from the north.

So next map is Alexander the Great's empire.

Huge compared to the Persians.

He ate them up.

He's entirely swallowed them.

And what he did was really, really important.

He unified the known world under one common language

of Greek while maintaining regional languages.

He created a Greek world,

which we know is the Hellenistic time period.

And this is the world that creates the bedrock

of the New Testament that we walk into.

All the territory you see here

was ruled by Greek Macedonians.

So the name Cleopatra, everybody knows that name.

She ruled Egypt after Alexander the Great.

She wasn't Egyptian.

She was Macedonian.

This whole region is run by people

out of Macedonia and Greek.

That makes a difference in how you unify

and construct an area.

Alexander set up a full infrastructure, a full,

I mean imagine that as the United States.

Like that's the concept here.

Common language, regional differences

that you're allowed to keep, he encouraged that,

but highly interconnected.

Now, one more entity that we haven't paid attention to

coming from the West is a little group

in a town called Rome.

You might have heard of them, the Romans.

We have not been paying attention to them.

In fact, nobody has been, which is problematic

because if you go to the next map,

Rome has all of it.

But the world that Rome took, Rome had been

a small, quiet kingdom that developed into a republic

and stayed that way in their own lane for about 500 years

until the time of Julius Caesar, another name we know.

Do we know where he fits in history?

Here.

At his death, his son took leadership and decided,

you know what, we're no longer a republic.

We're an empire.

That's what we're doing now.

We take all of it, and he did.

Alexander's world was left fragmented after his death.

Remember, a fragmented world is gonna be weaker

than a unified one, right?

All these powers fought for territory after Alexander died.

It worked to Rome's benefit.

So Rome was growing as this unified power into a world

that had existing landmass, but it was an existing

infrastructure and an existing united language.

But it was fragile.

They were easy to overtake.

Had Alexander not established a unified everything,

Rome would have had a harder time,

but the groundwork had been done.

And it wasn't just done by Alexander or the Persians

or Israel or the Egyptians or, or, like it had all built

on top of each other.

So by the time we meet the apostle Paul,

who carries the message of Jesus to the entire known world,

next slide, this is the Roman Empire.

It is ready for the gospel.

It's entirely ready, because everything has been

completely brought under one, one collective,

interconnected community.

And it sets Paul up to be the citizen that he is.

So in Acts 22, I promise I'm almost done,

Paul speaks to the crowd.

He is arrested, but he's got some things up his sleeve

for the centurions and crowds that have developed.

So he says to the centurion, can I address the crowd?

He says this to the commander.

And so the guy goes, do you speak Greek?

I do, because that's the world I live in.

And he goes, aren't you the Egyptian who started a revolt

and led 4,000 terrorists out into the wilderness

some time ago?

So Paul decides, he's like, I'm gonna take this up a notch.

I'm gonna flex a little bit.

I'm gonna speak in Aramaic, which is a local

or a regional Syrian, it's a Semitic language

with Syrian dialect, which was used as kind of

a common language in a region that Paul was born into.

So again, the preservation of the regional dialects

with a full common, sort of like a national language,

shows up as really, really valuable here.

So Paul said, I'm a Jew born in Tarsus of Cilicia,

which is southern Turkey, which has been completely

taken in by this empire, the empire's previous,

brought up in this city in Jerusalem.

Do you see how all these things that had happened before

and the way the land had shifted, the people groups,

the conquest had set Paul up in this unique way

in this moment?

I was brought up in this city in Jerusalem.

I studied under Gamaliel and was thoroughly trained

in our law of ancestors.

I was just as zealous for God as any of you are today.

I persecuted the followers of the way to their death,

arresting both men and women and throwing them into prison

as the high priest and all the council

can themselves testify.

I even obtained letters from them to their associates

in Damascus, which is in Syria,

and went there, he's been to Syria,

to bring these people as prisoners to Jerusalem

to be punished.

And then he testifies about his experience

on the Damascus road.

When God revealed himself to him,

the scales fell from his eyes,

he saw that Jesus is the true way,

and he tells of this whole experience in this moment.

The crowd listened to Paul until he said this.

Then they raised their voices and shouted,

rid the earth of him, he's not fit to live.

It's a little dramatic.

As they were shouting and throwing off their cloaks

and flinging dust into the air,

the commander ordered that Paul be taken to the barracks

and that he be flogged and interrogated

in order to find out why the people

were shouting at him like this.

As they stretched him out to flog him,

Paul said to the centurion standing there,

is it legal for you to flog a Roman citizen

who hasn't been found guilty?

Listen to the centurion's response.

He was terrified.

He heard this and he went to the commander

and he reported it.

What are you gonna do?

This man is a Roman citizen.

It was illegal to flog a Roman citizen.

He said, yes, I am a citizen.

The commander said, I had to pay a lot of money

for my citizenship.

And Paul says, I was born a citizen.

I love that.

And he outranks the centurion because of this.

As a natural born Roman citizen who speaks Greek

but also knows the regional language of Aramaic,

happened to live in Jerusalem

because all these areas are interconnected

and by the way also had connections to Damascus.

Those who were about to interrogate him

withdrew immediately.

The commander himself was alarmed

when he realized that he had put Paul,

a Roman citizen in chains.

He could have gotten in big trouble.

The world that Paul was born into

was ripe for the spread of the gospel

and it was ripe for Paul to do it

because of all these things.

It wasn't just on the day Paul decided to listen to God

and say, yes, I'll go forth.

Well, you're equipped.

Right, fine.

It wasn't just what happened that day.

It is what had been happening in the land

for thousands of years before that.

And knowing that makes what he is saying so much more rich

and gives it the depth and understanding

of how perfect the timing was that God chose then.

I am entirely aware that this was a very academic overview

of the world.

Let's give Brendan a hand too for running with the mats

by the way.

It largely got us to the New Testament,

but where progressions, the migrations,

the movement over the map,

where these things happened and how is significant.

And it's seen as a progression.

It provides insight into what we read

and how we learn scripture.

These stories, they are not isolated

and they are not single shot events.

They are results from the things that came before.

And every time the Bible mentions a place, it matters.

It matters.

And so I encourage you, when you read of a place,

if there's a detail, get a map out, be the nerd,

get a map out, Google Earth it.

That's super fun.

I love Google Earth.

You can even like walk ancient ruins.

Like you can go to Corinth, you can go to Damascus,

you can go to Persepolis,

you can go to these places on Google Earth.

And so all these internal references,

be curious, guys, be curious about scripture.

When things show up and you're like,

oh, I wonder where that is.

Stop and look it up.

I took, quickly, I took a friend back to New York

with me a number of years ago and when we got back,

she said, I feel like I understand you better.

Having seen the land that I grew up in,

the place, the town, the community,

experiencing the place informs the story.

So as you engage with scripture,

please let curiosity guide you.

Be open to where you are.

Even like do some side like,

okay, what year did this happen?

What's happening somewhere else?

Because remember, things are always brewing somewhere else.

This little Roman Empire decides to take over everything

because nobody was paying attention to them.

Things like that.

So anyway, be curious as you read scripture.

It is full of so many fun things

and over the next few weeks,

we are gonna be going to some of these places

and hearing stories about how important the where is.

Let's pray.

God, I just pray that you keep us curious,

that you keep us interested in that

as we're reading scripture, things would jump out to us

and we would be, we would think,

oh, I should go look up where that is.

I should follow that bunny trail.

I should see who else was here.

I should check that out.

And so, yeah, give us that curiosity and that energy

to go seeking, to seek more out of your word

because it's there, it is absolutely there

and ripe for the picking.

But we need your help.

We need your help with that kind of curious energy.

We don't chase our curiosity, especially the way kids do.

And so there's a lot to be learned from their example.

But God bless us as we read your word

and make it alive to us in new ways

as we continue to follow you.

We pray this in your name, amen.