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Dead Sea Scrolls Revelation
00:05:19
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| The Dead Sea Scrolls. | |
| What did they do to you? | |
| What is a person and knowledge in your head in relationship to the Bible? | |
| Do you understand what I'm saying? | |
| Yeah, yeah, definitely. | |
| Well, for me, they were incredibly inspiring. | |
| Are they important? | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| I actually came to this topic because of Dr. Ken Johnson. | |
| He's been doing this longer than I have, but I came across it. | |
| It held my interest for a long time, which a lot of times that doesn't happen. | |
| But, yeah, I find them incredibly interesting and definitely important because they provide context to the Bible and some questions that we might have about how to interpret the Bible. | |
| They can help. | |
| Exactly, because God allowed people to find these Dead Sea Scrolls at this time, this past what? | |
| How long has it been? | |
| A decade or something? | |
| 70 years. | |
| How long? | |
| As far as the since we've been finding them? | |
| About 70 years for the basic Bible teachings, and then as far as the doctrinal part, the last 20 years. | |
| Okay. | |
| They're showing pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls. | |
| That's what it looks like, though, when you see them. | |
| When you go and see them, you see them if you've gone and seen them and traveled around and scholars had to really piece them together. | |
| Yes. | |
| And came up with the Bible. | |
| To me, I mean, it was really important to me in my ministry. | |
| The whole idea that the Jews believed the same things that we did. | |
| The Pharisees apostasized and changed the story. | |
| So everything is the same. | |
| And not only the same, but answers to questions that I've had, timings, dates of prophecies, when things would be fulfilled, how they would be fulfilled, both first coming and second coming. | |
| A lot of the stuff is still fragmented, but there's a lot of it there that we can easily piece together. | |
| Wow. | |
| Josh, did John the Baptist have a connection with the Essenes? | |
| I believe he did, yeah. | |
| I think there's enough evidence to say that there's at least a connection there, especially if we look into some of the ancient texts of the time, not just the Bible. | |
| But one thing that it's probably one of the weakest pieces of evidence, but it's one of my favorites because it's interesting. | |
| In the Gospels, we read that John the Baptist had a diet of locusts. | |
| And I don't know why we're told that. | |
| Why did he have that one? | |
| Well, why do we have that? | |
| Yeah, what an odd detail. | |
| Well, if there's, like my good friend Dr. Michael Heiser says, if there's something weird in the Bible, pay attention to it. | |
| It's important. | |
| In Israel at that time, locusts were not actually a delicacy at all, except in one place, what we call today Qumran. | |
| And so there's a connection there. | |
| There's several others, too. | |
| The Essenes were known for having a type of apprenticeship program. | |
| They would bring kids into their community and teach them, you know, bring them up in the priestly stuff and that kind of thing. | |
| Well, what's interesting is when we read about John the Baptist's father, you know, he's working in the temple, but John doesn't follow in those footsteps. | |
| John's off in the wilderness, probably Qumran, probably leading the school of the prophets. | |
| And there's some really interesting stuff about that, too. | |
| That is. | |
| Wow, that's true. | |
| Wow. | |
| So that's powerful. | |
| They were training them in the temple then. | |
| Wow. | |
| Go ahead. | |
| I'm sorry. | |
| Oh, about John the Baptist. | |
| We're just going to say that that's one reason why we need to take the early church fathers, the first and second century, put them together with the scrolls, and we have a complete picture. | |
| Hippolytus actually has a list of those people who ran the school of the prophets, and it goes up through John the Baptist, and it's very obvious that's who we're talking about, and then up to Agabas, who was mentioned in the New Testament. | |
| And so it talks about the changeover and the miracles and the history. | |
| And there's other church fathers that talk about him running schools, the School of the Prophets. | |
| So there's actually a lot of old data. | |
| So Kim, what was the difference? | |
| What was there between the Levite priesthood and the other priesthood? | |
| Anciently, there was a Melchizedekian priesthood, and a Melchizedekian priest is someone who's a king, prophet, and priest altogether. | |
| And then later on in the time of Jacob, Jacob, inspired by the Holy Spirit, broke the Melchizedekian priesthood up and created a kingship under Judah, Levi for the priesthood, and then the school of the prophets elsewhere. | |
| And so at that point, you have a Levitical priesthood that starts. | |
| Levitical priesthood had mandates on it, like a mandatory time of start, mandatory retirement, which is not true with a Melchizedekian priesthood. | |
| And that's why in the book of Hebrews, you've got several chapters detailing the differences and why our Lord is a Melchizedekian priest, not a Levitical one. | |
| Why is this kind of thing important for us to know? | |
| Well, for one thing, just to understand all the ancient prophecies, the way things were broke up and the way they come back together, to understand there's a school of the prophets that was set aside for a time and then would be brought back according to Isaiah chapter 29 and others. | |
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Dead Sea Scrolls Predictions
00:00:50
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| Do you find a thread of God through everything you discover? | |
| In other words, there's like a godline somehow through all of it. | |
| Do you know what I'm saying? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah, definitely, because you've got the Dead Sea Scrolls talking about the virgin birth, the Messiah coming, the exact date on when it would happen, the exact date of when the age of grace would start. | |
| And they actually called it that too. | |
| Yeah, they actually called it that happen. | |
| Wow. | |
| That's powerful. | |
| It is. | |
| Apparently, weird heretics. | |
| We inherited our Christian doctrine from the Essenes, which makes sense. | |
| That's actually where the Essenes went. | |
| There's this big question in academia. | |
| Where did the Essenes go? | |
| They just seemed to disappear. | |
| No, they accepted the gospel and took the Great Commission out to the world. | |