Luke 2:1 And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.

How many times have you heard the passages in Luke recited in Christmas pageants? Perhaps you participated in them yourselves. It is difficult to believe that one could grow up in America during the 50’s and 60’s without encountering Christmas pageants.

What I want to discuss here is the trail we have followed that began in Ezekiel 12. If you were to peradventure where we would have ended up from that humble beginning, the Good News might not have come to mind. Most devotional writers do not write as if our articles are sermons.

This whole series has been from a spiritual perspective about how and why God leads us in fellowship. Line upon line and precept upon precept, God has a plan for His word and its reading. All throughout the bible God has layered in messages leading us to the Good News, the gospel of Christ. It is easy to get lost in the minutia. Studying a verse in any depth should not lead you to a conclusion, it should lead you on to the next thread. Finding those threads and pulling on those strings should make the story unfold.

I grew up in a time when our churches were occupied by sinners who had not confessed Christ. Every sermon ended with an alter call. It was inevitable and became so blatant that there was a total disconnect between the message and the alter call. There was an attitude of get them in and we will save them. There wasn’t much personal ministry where the lay people knew and delivered the Good News from their own lives. “That’s the churches job!”

Maybe so, but the church is a body of believers and with that comes a call to love the lost. Our conversations can be like this tale from Ezekiel. It starts out at one point but eventually ends with the Good News.

Amos 8:11 Behold, the days come, saith the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord:

The intertestamental period is that time between Malachi and John the Baptist. The bible is silent on what happened during those years. Historians provide a record of what happened during that period but it is a secular view. God was silent in scripture but that does not mean He was not present.

During this time there was the end of the reign of Alexander the Great. His kingdom was divided up into four parts. Jerusalem fell under other rulers and their history can be researched. At this time there arose a sect called the Maccabees. Their activities are found in the Apocrypha, the books of the Maccabees. Those are a set of historical artifacts that God did not author. They have been removed from most bible versions.

Out of the Maccabean revolt sprang up a sect call the Pharisees. The Pharisees, the Sadducees and the Essenes did not have a place in the Old Testament economy but arose out of lack of understanding of God’s will. God had remained silent for too long. There is much to learn about this period of time, so much so that we do not have time to go into it here with any great detail.

The essential truth here is that without God’s leadership man reverts back into a place of taking authority for himself, his self-interests and divisions arise within the community. If you had not guessed one of the tactics of war is divide and conquer. The enemy of God was having his way with Israel. Elitism, ambition, greed, zealous piety, and confusion were rampant during this time.

Then the Romans came.