Transcription of the Video: Standing at the Crossroad

The ancient land of Israel is a testimony and evidence, if you will, of the greatness of what God did in that country - a testimony to the truth of the words that we find in the pages of the Bible. The people who lived here have left behind a record - an indelible record, if you will, of their lives. An important part of that record is the cities where they lived - ancient piles of debris that contain their culture, architecture, art, their diet, the weapons they used, and even on occasion, their writings. 

These piles of ancient cities often built one on top of the other are called tells. People in ancient times tended to build and live in the same places - maybe because there were occupations there, or a main road went nearby, or maybe most likely of all, a source of fresh water. As archaeologists began to peel away the layers of this ancient civilization, the culture and even the people of the Bible come to light. 

I'd like to ask you to join us on this adventure. We're going to try and understand the people, the context of the Bible. It'll mean some extra hiking, some climbing, some travel to out-of-the-way places. But the end result, I think, will be well worth the effort as we discover, again, that God's Word, God's message, is as relevant for us as it was for them.

One of the greatest of the tells is Tel Gezer. This huge mound of ancient remains stands along the great road of the world of the Bible that connected the empires of Mesopotamia and Egypt. It stands, if you will, as a standing stone along the ancient crossroads of human civilization.

Welcome to Tel Gezer. I just had a chance to walk up the side of the tell so you'll get an idea of the size of this huge tel. It's one of the largest of three tells in the country of Israel. And you can see by the height of the hill we're on, even apart from the artificial debris under our feet, that this is a defensible location. It's a place where you could keep the enemies out. So people settled here, maybe as long as 3,000 years before the common era - 3,000 years before Jesus - they began living here already in the early bronze age.

You're sitting on that. If you just stop and think about that for a moment, that means you're sitting on 40, 50, 60 feet of the life of people for the last 5,000 years. That's all under your feet. Somewhere down under your feet, you have the conditions that were here when Solomon was king, when Abraham walked through this area, when Jesus was here and 500 years ago, let's say, during a Turkish or an Arab period. All of that is right here under your feet. 

The second background thing I'd like to go into is more geography. I'd like to talk a little bit about where we are and why Tel Gezer is here and why it's so big. If you look back to the west here behind where we are in that direction over there, you'll see the Coastal Plain. The Coastal Plain is that band of area along the Mediterranean Sea coast - 10, 12, 15 miles wide, fairly flat, very fertile. Just over in this direction, out here to the east, you see the very beginning of the foothills - the Shephelah - out in the distance. You can just see that line of hills. Beyond it, only about eight miles, start the hills or the mountains of Judea. And we're only 15 miles here from Jerusalem - Jerusalem being at the highest point at the top, at the plateau or whatever of the hills of Judea. Then you start down the back side, down to the Rift Valley, to the Dead Sea, to the Jordan River. So we're standing right where those hills begin.

But what makes this location so significant has to do with the countries around here. If we were to go off in that direction, toward the southwest, we would come before very long to the country of Egypt. It was a major civilization in biblical times. It was the world power. It was technologically advanced. It was culturally advanced. Maybe somewhat similar to what the western world is today - maybe somewhere along the lines of the United States even.

To our east were the oriental civilizations in what we call Mesopotamia. It had different names - called Persia, called Babylon, called Assyria. Now, those two world empires needed each other for economic and cultural reasons. You have to imagine, down there below you on the Coastal Plain was the life artery, the blood artery, if you will, of two civilizations that were connected right here. And if you could control this little location where the road went between the swamps and the mountains, you could, in effect, control world trade. If you controlled world trade, you could control the world. 

So a city like this represented much more than just a big city or an economic base or a place where people lived. A city like this represented where the world could be controlled because you could control the trade that went on internationally. And that's what makes this location so significant. 

What that meant is that right here at your feet, there was  a spot where not only did we have that huge international road - the road that connected the two world empires - but right here, you had another road, really the only road running east and west across the country until you get way up in the north. That road goes across the country, down to the Jordan River and connects with another road that's on the other side of the Jordan River over in the country that's, today, Jordan. 

So you have two main roads joining together in a junction - the coastal road, which we call the Via Maris (the way of the sea) and the Jericho Road, if you will, or the road that goes up here, into the mountains, and comes out at Jericho. That, again, makes this city very, very significant. 

If we walk from the high place where the standing stones are, down the side of the tell, we come to where the archaeologists have uncovered a huge gate complex, dating back to the time of King Solomon, including city streets, gates, and gate chambers. 

We're sitting in a city gate that most archaeologists believe is from the time of Solomon. I'd like to talk a little bit about city gates and also talk a little bit more about the city that's here. One of the areas of the city, of course, that's going to be really significant is the area of defense. Because as a city grows and becomes this large, you need to defend yourself. One of the primary areas that needs defending is going to be the gate, because that's where there's an opening in your wall. So that's going to create a problem. 

So a real science developed of building city gates over a period of time. You're actually sitting in on of those gates. You have to imagine going off over here-- I just see the edge of it-- is a city wall going in that particular direction, almost toward the east and a city wall going in that direction almost toward the west. Later, if you go outside the gate, you can see some of the stones in the face of that wall. 

Right here, in this opening, is the city gate. Across that opening would probably have been some kind of a wooden or metal clad door that would have swung shut and closed the gate. But that wasn't complete enough for them. They needed more than that by way of defense, so what they would do is they would actually build a room inside of the city wall. And what you're in is a large room that was actually more or less fastened to the city wall and into which the gate opened. They originally may have been as high as 20 or more feet high so that when you came through the city gate, it literally looked like there were compartments to your right and to your left. If you'll notice, there's one, two, three compartments on that side and one, two, three compartments on that side, which is one of the reasons archaeologists concluded that this came from the time of Solomon. Because it's a Solomonic six-chamber gate, three on each side. 

The purpose during wartime would be if the enemy broke through this particular opening and there were soldiers here trying to prevent the enemy from breaking through and maybe even there were openings for the soldiers on the roof - which was then part of the city wall - so if some of the soldiers in here were killed or wounded, you could drop new soldiers down into these compartments and always outnumber the enemy. 

Over time, a city gate like this became the administrative center of life in this tel. So that rather than having all the common people or strangers from wherever going up to wherever the palace was in this tell and meeting with the king in his own quarters, what would happen is you would come here and, in these compartments, would be the various functionaries of the city. If you wanted an audience with the king, the king would come down at a certain time and have an audience here in the compartments of the gate so much so that the phrase in the biblical world, "to sit in the gate", is a synonym for, "to be a judge". An example of that would be in Genesis chapter 19 when the angels come to Sodom and Gomorrah - according to that story down over here at the Dead Sea - when the angels come, they see Lot, Abraham's nephew, sitting in the gate - an actual person of influence in that particular city. 

It also is taught in the Bible, and we'll talk about this much more extensively when we film in Jerusalem at the eastern gate of the city, that the last judgement, the final judgement is held in the city gate. Every major city we're going to go to, we're going to see a city gate.

Somebody asked already about the trench running down the middle of the street. That doesn't seem to be too terribly appropriate down the middle of the main street of the city. That would have been the main drainage channel or the sewage channel of the city. And the water would be rushed through there. Or if it rained, the water would rush through there and it would wash the sewage out under the gate and down into the valley, and there it would lay. That sewage that lay down there became the city refuse dump. You would burn debris. If animals died that you couldn't eat because they weren't clean or the animal had died of a disease or something, you would throw that in there. In the case of certain Bible stories, they even through people's bodies in there. In some cities, the leper colony would be located along that part of the city. Right outside your main gate. 

In the example of that particular condition in Jerusalem, that valley was called the Hinnom and in our language comes out as hell. So the picture in the Bible of hell is not a volcano or hot lava or a roaring fire as much as it is a sewer valley where there's fire because the flesh is burning, the decaying flesh of animals, the worm that never dies, the Book of Revelation says, because of all that rotting sewage.

So you're sitting in a city gate that is probably Solomon's, which means it dates back to 920 B.C. Imagine that laying here for that long is still there. And if you look behind you at that pile, that whole pile is full of stuff that's never been uncovered, and no one knows for sure exactly what's there. 

I think you'll discover with me, that as you look at these places and discover how the people of the Bible lived here in this country, you'll agree that the Bible comes alive and carries an impact - an impact even for 20th century - if you see it in the context in which it was given. 

One of the things that has come across very strongly to me in my time in this country and reading the history of this country particularly from the period of the Bible is that God put the children of Israel on the crossroads of the world. I had always imagined that this country was a little bit like Northwest Iowa - a quiet, rural place where you were out of the way and didn't have to interact with the rest of the world. Exactly the opposite. What you need to feel as you sit here today, you need to appreciate what a crossroads this was. 

God said, "I want to affect my world. I want to create morality. I want to create justice, but I want to create salvation. I want to create my system of living. So I'll put my people where everybody is going to know about them." It seems to me by leaving the Canaanite here, the Israelites were making a serious mistake. Because God gave them this country in order that by living here, they could influence the rest of the world. And in effect - and I want you to hear this real clearly - in effect, whoever lived here exerted a major control on the world. 

By the Israelites saying, "We're satisfied to live up in the mountains," for whatever reason, "we'll let the Canaanites live here," they gave the Canaanites the major influence over the rest of the world and the rest of the culture.

The faith lesson in that, to me, is this. It seems to me that as I read my Bible, that's exactly the calling God gives to people who follow him today. He says, "I want you to live on the crossroads of life. People need to see you (me) so they can see God." And we have a tendency in Christianity to be isolationistic. We have a tendency to pull ourselves off into little, tiny communities, isolate ourselves from what's going on in the rest of the world, and just sit back and kind of take pot shots at people instead of saying, "Our job is to live so publicly, so front and center, that we become a flavoring influence." As people see us, they see God.

Let's look out here once and let me pick up. That ties right in with the faith lesson. What you're looking at down below your feet was at one point a high place. Why isn't it a high place now? Because the tell grew above it. So at one point, that was the highest place. Now, it's down below your feet. There's a tradition, a custom, a practice, if you will, in the Middle East that when something significant of a religious nature happens, or a political nature happens, you take a stone like that and you stand it up. Those are called standing stones, pillars, masseboth if you will.

When God gave the Commandments in Exodus 24 on Mount Sinai, he called the 70 elders of Israel up to the base of the mountain and he had Moses stand up 12 of those pillars like that, one for each of the tribes of Israel so that anybody who walked by and saw them could say, "Whoa. What happened here?" 

And you could say, "Let me tell you what God did."

In 1 Peter, Peter uses that image. He mixes his metaphor, in a sense, to say, "What those were, you are." He does it like this. He says, "You also are living stones being built into a spiritual house." There, he says, "Each one of you is like a piece of stone that God is shaping and cutting and preparing to build this house, which is his world, his Kingdom, his church." 

But I think in the context of the passage, he also has in mind that each one of you is a masseboth or massebah, a standing stone, so that when people see you, they say, "What happened here?" 

My reason for saying that is, listen what he says later. He says, "You're living stones." Then he says, "Live such good lives among the pagans that they may see your good deeds and glorify your God." 

That's exactly what that stone did. You're supposed to see that stone and say, "What's the deal?" And you say, "Let me tell you about God." 

And they say, "Wow! You're God is incredible." 

We are a stone that represents something significant that God did. My view is this. My perspective is this. God put the Israelites in this country so that they would influence the rest of the world. What Israel often failed to do was to conquer the Gezers of their world where their culture was really controlled. My faith lesson from that is that God puts us in the world so that the rest of the world sees us, and through us comes to know him. And our mistake is the same. We tend not to take control of those things that truly shape our culture. That, I think, is a mistake. 

So what are we called to be? Standing stones. My suggestion would be pick one out, have your picture taken next to it, and every time you see it, think, "Wouldn't it be neat if whenever people saw me just by my godly life, that people would say, 'Your God must really be something else.'"