Playlist: Intertestamental Period (topic)
The Intertestamental Period
Sermon by Martin G. CollinsThe roughly 400 years between Malachi and Christ were a "dark period" with no prophet or inspired writer, yet they were full of activity that shaped the world into which Jesus was born. Beginning with Nehemiah's reforms against Sabbath breaking, neglect of the ministry, and intermarriage, Judah passed through six eras: Persian, …
What Happened Between the Testaments?
Sermon by Martin G. CollinsThe roughly 400 years between Malachi and the New Testament, when no prophet or inspired writer spoke, were far from empty: God used them to prepare Judah and the world for the Messiah and the gospel. Power passed from Persia to Greece under Alexander and then to Rome, and Jewish history divides into six periods: Persian, …
Matthew (Part Twenty)
Sermon/Bible Study by John W. RitenbaughThe source touches the Intertestamental Period only in explaining the "tradition of the elders" behind the Pharisees' clash with Jesus. About 200 years before Christ, the Pharisees persuaded the Sadducees and other religious-political parties in Jerusalem to concede that the oral law, interpretations of Scripture passed by word …
'But I Say to You' (Part One): The Spirit of the Law
Sermon by Richard T. RitenbaughThe roughly 450 years from Malachi (c. 420 BC) to John the Baptist (c. AD 25) were a long, unstable stretch in which Israel, caught on the land bridge between empires and prone to earthquakes and other disasters, struggled to pass religious knowledge from one generation to the next. After the exile, the returnees resolved never …
Chronicles: Answered Prayer
Sermon by Richard T. RitenbaughChronicles was written post exile in the late fourth century bc around the time of Alexander the Great. This places the writing in the Greek period in intertestamental history. The chronicler summarizes the lessons of Israelite history from the perspective of a Jew in the intertestamental period looking back at the time of the …
The Covenants, Grace, and Law (Part Sixteen)
Sermon by John W. RitenbaughThe period between the Testaments, spanning roughly four hundred years from Malachi to Matthew, witnessed extensive developments during which Judaism became a corruption of the religion God delivered to Moses. This era produced a syncretic system blending elements of paganism with fragments of truth and binding them through …
Government (Part Two)
Sermon by John W. RitenbaughThe Intertestamental Period spans from roughly the time of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Zerubbabel. During this period God practically disappears from the scene. The period begins around the time that Alexander the Great invaded Palestine, which occurred somewhere around 327 BC. Alexander conquers Palestine and takes it away from the …
The Spirit World
Sermon by Richard T. RitenbaughMisconceptions about angels increased in the centuries between the close of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament. These ideas reflect deuterocanonical, pseudepigraphical, and Greek literature of the Hellenistic period from 323 to 30 BC. Jewish views on angels developed during pre-New Testament and New …
The Angel of God
Sermon by Richard T. RitenbaughThe Jews between the Testaments sought to expand the Bible's sparse information about angels into a complete angelology, initially to satisfy curiosity about what Scripture only sketches. This effort soon turned diabolical as demons influenced their thinking, leading through Philo and other Neoplatonists to the view that demons, …
The Bride of Christ (Part Two)
Feast of Tabernacles Sermon by Mark SchindlerThe water ritual involving the drawing of water from the pool of Siloam and its procession through the Water Gate to the Temple altar originated a few centuries before Jesus Christ, very possibly during the Maccabean period. That era encompassed Jewish armed resistance and the rededication of the Temple after the persecution …
Inventing Goddesses and Demons
Sermonette byThe Jews turned a Babylonian myth of Lilith into a fabrication about a woman before Eve. Some translations suggest Israel sacrificed to a demon named Azazel.