Noah's Ark and the Church

              Noah's Ark and the Church
You are there!
Acts 10.34-43 January 17, 1988
You may notice that we have jumped from Nehemiah into the New
Testament portion of your Bible without beginning with the Gospels or the
life of Jesus. The period bet ween Nehemiah and Jesus is very difficult to
summarize, but needless to say the walls and the Temple were rebuilt, but
only with great effort and sacrifice.
Alexander the Great and Ptolemy who followed continued the policies of
Cyrus the Persian who had returned the Israelites to their homeland.
However, in the second century B.C.E., Seleucus, one of Alexander the Great's
Generals made himself a power in the area. Antiochus the IV attempted to
unify his area into a cultural and religious unit. He demanded veneration of
himself as Zeus in the flesh, and promoted the worship of Greek gods. The
greatest of possible corruptions took place with the profaning of the Temple,
the sacred place for Jews to worship. Some Jews resisted and shed their
blood. An altar of Zeus was erected in the Temple and Jews were forced to
eat the flesh of pigs.
Mattathias and his five sons began resistance. Those loyal to the Jewish
Law the Hasidim joined him. Judas Maccabeus, Mattathias' son regained
control of the temple and held a great ceremony of purification in December
164 B.C.E. Priestly leadership split, warred against one another and the
Romans came in to settle the dispute bringing to an end Jewish independence.
One of the names to surface is Herod the Great, appointed ruler of the whole
area by Rome. He divided the area to be governed among his three sons.
His son Herod Antipas ruled during the time of Jesus.
We begin with the first sermon of Peter. Those who listened were Jews
who were attached to the Law with the devotion of those who listened to it
during the time of Nehemiah and Ezra. As a people they had decided there
were to be no more prophets among them. God no longer spoke through the
prophets but through the Law upon which they meditated day and night. The
group that were the intellectual force behind maintaining this stance were the
Pharisees. They were the people who attempted to live by the Scriptures and
when the Scriptures were not as clear as they needed they would extrapolate
conclusions from Scripture in what became known as the tradition of the
elders.
One can understand why they were not pleased with Peter's preaching
about Jesus. For some he was at least a prophet, for others possibly the
returned Elijah, and for Peter and his bunch, the Messiah whom God had
promised from the beginning when God said the serpent's head would be
bruised. It was being expressed with fervor and reached to the outsider, the
Gentile. This particular occasion was a visit to the house of Cornelius, an
outsider, an oppressor, to whom Peter is going to proclaim the Christ event.
So he begins:
I. I see that God has no favorites, but that in every nation the one who is
godfearing and does what is right is acceptable to God.