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Good evening. Welcome. It's a privilege tonight to have Steve Schneider come up and share what's going on in Chile and what God is doing around the world. It's always exciting and really an encouragement. And you've heard me say this before. If you only saw what God was doing in this hemisphere, you might get a little depressed.

Even though God is doing great things, we don't see or hear about it as much. But when you see what's going on in the global south, it is really exciting how the gospel is advancing every much as it ever has been. It is taking territory. It is not being shut down, closed out, marginalized.

Men are coming to Christ. Women are coming to Christ. Churches are being established and growing. And it's a privilege to have Steve Schneider here tonight. He is ministering in Chile. And a little bit about him. He and his wife, Leslie, 20 years as CPAs, correct? 20 years as CPAs.

And living in Virginia, and then decided to sell the practice, load up the Truck and move to Beverly. Does anybody even know what that's a reference to? You got it. Okay, so all the 50s and thinking we could Beverly Hill Billies, you know, load up, go, except they found a better deal close to Beverly Hills, right?

Not in Beverly Hills. But anyway, but came to the seminary, the Master's Seminary at the time I did, and we got to know each other there. But he is a living, he and his wife, living examples of selling all and going into the ministry full time. I know they've been involved in ministry throughout their lives, but certainly packing it up, doing the Masters of Divinity, doing the Masters, and then going on to a THM and then also a Doctorate of Ministry.

And ministering now in Chile. And I've asked him to come and share a little bit about the ministry, share with us from the Word, share with us what's on his heart. Tell us about Ebenezer Baptist Church down there. Tell us about the ACBC Counseling Center, which you have now been recognized as.

Just lots of good things happening. And so I just, he was close. He was up in Dallas, and I just couldn't resist having him this close and not come down and share with us. Steve, why don't you come on up? Well, it's a joy and privilege to be with you tonight to share what the Lord is doing in Chile through our ministries.

And it's all by God's grace. He just, He called and did a work in my heart. And we, as Tom shared, just gave me a desire to study and serve the Lord. And we had been in the same time at the Master's Seminary in 2000, and we graduated together in 2006.

We also studied in Gladiator Greek, where we learned Greek in seven weeks, a year's worth of Greek. We studied, we drank, and we ate and slept Greek, Greek, Greek, and then we went into Greek exegesis. And we bled in the arena, and we cried a lot and suffered.

And it was coming from Virginia, where we were, we were in a church that had a large missions program, and I had a desire for missions. I also wanted to have a teaching and preaching ministry also with that. And Dr. Beric and Buznitz encouraged me to stay and get a master's of theology, which would help in the classroom in the New Testament.

And I did it with Dr. Thomas, so we stayed longer. And after that, we moved on. To Costa Rica to study Spanish, and I looked at a lot of different fields for ministry, but the Lord led us to Chile. And let's see. Okay. Well, oh, it's the other way.

Here we go. Okay, to give you a little bit of background on Chile, it's the land of mountains. It's a beautiful country. I thought maybe the Lord might lead us to Colorado because I love mountains. And we almost were looking to go plant a church in Castle Rock, Colorado, and he had other plans.

And little did I know that he was going to send us to Chile. And we're about five miles from 8,500 feet of elevation change right in Pina Olin, which is a community that's part of Santiago. And we're right at the base of the Andes Mountains. And we're at 2,000 feet.

And the mountains are right in front of us are 10,500. There's volcanoes back behind there that are 20,000 feet. And Aconcagua is 23,000 feet, which is about an hour away, just over the border in Argentina. So there's the histories of the Inca Empire. It's more related to Peru, but we've got Easter Island.

It's dominated by the Culture of Catholicism after the Spaniards dominated and came, their influence is still significant. And also, today, we're dealing with about 90% of the churches there are charismatic. But thankfully, God is doing a great work of revival in the country. We're kind of riding on the coattails of John MacArthur's ministry.

There's Christian radio, they're getting better teachers that are teaching God's sovereignty and salvation. And John's books are so clear when they hear his messages on the radio and are reading his books. And maybe some of you feel the same way as you were working your way along, learning and growing in Christ and the Word.

You've sensed that things may not have been right, and you're reading His books, and you're like, wow, this is exactly what I know to be true and what I see the Christian life as being. And so a lot of people are coming out of these charismatic churches, embracing salvation by grace through faith.

And many men are wanting to be trained. So it's our desire to be training men with expository preaching. Some general facts about Chile. The population is about 17 million. In Santiago, 7 million. It was first inhabited by the Aracanian Indians, known as the Mapuches. The Spaniards arrived in the 16th century.

In 1810, Chile declared its independence. It's currently a democratic, more socialist republic or government. And in the recent election, we were hopeful that more of a nationalist leader would come out of the election. They've got five or six different political parties, and if you don't get more than 50%, then there's a runoff.

And somewhere out of nowhere, this leftist came to gain the second position, and then this was in November. And then in December, they had the final election, and he won by about 10 points over the nationalists. So we're a little bit concerned. A lot of Chileans are concerned about the direction moving towards back into communism, which existed about 40, 50 years ago.

So if you look at a map of Chile, we have the Pacific Ocean bordering on the west coast. And on the east coast, we have the countries of Bolivia and Argentina and Peru to the north. We live in Santiago. We have extensions in Concepción, and between Temuco and Puerto Mont is the city of Aldivia.

And I'll share more about our travels, my travels. And training to those locations. It's an incredible country with mountain season. This is even farther south in the Patagonias area, Torre de Paine. Chile is a developed country. It doesn't have the wealth that we experience here in our country, but it's known for its mining of copper.

It's one of the biggest mining-producing copper companies and other metals. Along with it, it's just like if you've been to California, where you've got the central part of California that's a breadbasket of just fruits and vegetables, it's the same in Chile as well. Its vegetables and fruits are sold all over the world.

Our goal in our ministry is to commit the gospel to faithful men who will be able to teach others also. It's under our direction of Pastor Pablo Uribe, who's now studying at the Masters Seminary by Distance in a Masters of Biblical Ministries program. It's a 39-hour program. It's below the Masters of Divinity.

He and I serve as the elders of Ebenezer Baptist Church. We came to Chile in 2010, and we were working with a group, and I was teaching in this seminary institute. More classes related to expository preaching, Greek, Greek exegesis, homiletics of expository preaching, and preaching lab. And just due to as these students began to understand the original languages, they developed their own, through their exegetical studies, their own conclusions that were somewhat different than the other leaders that I was working with.

And unfortunately, due to those differences, we felt like we had to move on. And so Pablo and I had been working together since 2012, and we continue working together. And in 2015, I started an expository preaching program through our church, and it included Greek, Greek exegesis, biblical hermeneutics, homiletics of expository preaching, preaching lab.

And after two years, it's my great joy and privilege to hear these men exposit the word. We were evaluated, I guess, on about 50 different items, sliced and diced through preaching lab, through all the professors and pastors at GRACE. And they go through the same evaluation with other graduates that are leaders in our seminary.

And we're excited to see what the Lord is doing with them in their churches. We've decided, last year we Expanded the program beyond the expository preaching program. So we've had three or four cycles now since 2015 for every two years. Our expository program. We've added a third and fourth year program.

This past year, I started teaching Hebrew as well. And this year Pablo began teaching the surveys of the Old and New Testament. And this coming year, we've got We have two graduates, Chileans, Rodrigo Avila and Jose Esteban Camaño, who've returned to Chile. Their church planting, one in Valparaiso, which is about an hour and a half on the coast, and Jose Esteban is in Curico, which is about two hours south of Santiago.

We're looking at, and we're looking forward to having them begin teaching as part of our faculty and advancing forward towards members, completing our application towards membership in TMAI. Right now, in the Masters Academy International, they've broadened their including of various schools that are in process towards the members applying towards the membership.

We're now considered an affiliate school approved. So and then the fifth year we've got added classes on pastoral ministry. Pastoral ministry. And alongside of that, we've had over the last several years since 2012, biblical counseling conferences. And those are part of the training for these men that want to pursue the full MDiv.

We serve together, Leslie and I, in Ebenezer Baptist Church. I've been serving with Pablo since 2012. He was single at that point, and he was looking for help. He's a recent graduate of the seminary where I used to teach. And we've been working together since 2012. Pablo is the main pastor of our church.

He's an excellent expositor, an excellent pastor in biblical counseling as well. He works in our leadership together with our ACBC certified training center. Leslie has the ministry that Leslie has been involved with with the ladies' ministry has grown significantly. They've got about 40 to 50 women that have been attending the ladies' ministry every twice a month.

Usually they work through books of the Bible or else they're studying with Elizabeth George's material. And she also has a very involved ministry of discipleship where her and two others, Arelli and Carlos. Carla, they work together with her in the leadership of the ladies' ministry, and they are very actively in the lives of the other women.

During the week, they're out two or three times a week visiting ladies and having various other activities with Time in the Word and helping disciple them in their walk with Christ. Our seminary, we broadened. Originally, Pablo and I were working in Ebenezer Bible Institute, and in recent years, we've added our expository preaching program and M.D.I.F.

under Seminario Biblico de Expositores de Chile. And our goal, our mission focus, along with in our church, is 2 Timothy 2:2. And the things you've heard from me in the presence of many witnesses and trustees to faithful men who will be able to teach others also. So that's under the leadership of the elders of our church for the purpose of training expository preachers, teachers, and biblical counselors for the ministry of the local church in Chile and for the glory of God.

And God has broadened our influence. We have groups in Peru that we're working with in our biblical counseling ministry, and our seminary has. We're brought in a lower level, institute-level plan in the future for the Amazons, but that has been basically shut down with the virus. And we also have a student from Paraguay.

So, this is our exploratory trip in 2007. And just to run through and introduce you guys to some of our leaders, here's Pablo and his family with Anita Carlina, Joaquin, Mateo, and Gracia. This is Pastor Rodrigo Rubio. And Pastor Rodrigo Rubio and Juan Pablo here, they were in our first group in Santiago, Chile.

But what's interesting is these men live seven hours away by bus in Concepción and Los Angeles. You say, well, how did they get there? Because I was teaching at that time about six hours every Saturday from March to November in the expository program, two years. These men would get on a bus at midnight, and they had full-time jobs.

And Rodrigo was pastoring his church also as a young pastor. And he took over the ministry that her father had. And she says, you've got to go get trained. So he would get on the bus, and Juan Pablo would get on the bus in Los Angeles, and he would get in Concepción, and they'd go north to Santiago, and they'd show up at the church at 8 in the morning for nine months, for two years.

Every Friday, they were on that bus because they had a thirst to be trained in expository preaching. I did the calculation, it was about a tenth of a year in hours. And so, Rodrigo's really a wonderful pastor and a dear friend and co-laborer in ministry, and it's a privilege to work with them, all of them.

This is Juan Pablo, his wife Victoria, and Amanda. Juan Pablo finished our program, then he went to the Masters of Biblical Ministries program at Masters, and now is working farther on his Masters of Divinity. And this is David Cisterna with his family, Emily, and Nehemiah Abakuk, and Isabella.

They are in Valdivia, and our program grew. I'll share that real quick here in the next couple minutes. So, our expository preaching program is the first and second year, Bible and Theology, a third and fourth year, the Masters of Divinity is a fifth year, and we also have our Nuthetic Biblical Counseling Conferences, which also contribute in courses to the Masters of Divinity program.

And eventually, our plan is to include a diploma biblical counseling program within our seminary. So, I already shared all the different courses: biblical hermeneutics. I spend somewhere between 50 to 60 hours in biblical hermeneutics. There's some influences of Reformed eschatology, and we have to teach these men what that hermeneutic is.

And I walk them through how to interpret biblical prophecy in the prophetic books and how the biblical covenants that were established grammatically, historically, and literally will be fulfilled grammatically, historically, literally, as they've been promised and reiterated so many times through the prophetic books. And I walk them through that, and they study that, and they get projects, and they have to do their presentations on various passages that highlight those items in the prophetic books.

And it's a great blessing for them to introduce the book, explain it in its context, and how it's going to be fulfilled in the future with God's attributes and the hope that's given to Israel. It's a real blessing. So they learn Greek, so this is our cover for the hermeneutics book.

It's leading them to 2 Timothy 2.15, leading them and being a diligent student of the Word of God, cutting the Word of truth with precision. And that's towards the light and using the rails of the principles of biblical interpretation. To guide us to that truth. We have Gladiator Greek.

You who are about to die, we salute you. I found that these students really have, it's a unique system of tables that you need to memorize, and I've condensed them down to 10 or 12 tables that are all condensed down, and they memorize them, and it's really great to see them grow.

And we advance to Greek exegesis, and they learn structural line diagramming. We used to use Bible Works, and that business closed down, that software company closed down. But the man, Randy Leady, who produced that part of the program with the structural line diagrams of the New Testament, has that in a PDF, and now I think it's on Logos.

So we teach these structural line diagrams in the original languages so they can learn Spanish grammar in addition to the grammar of Greek and Hebrew. How many like grammar here? Wow, that's a lot of people doing a good job, Tom. Not too many, sometimes it's just a handful of people in a pretty good-sized church, but some of them are probably, how many are familiar with structural line diagramming?

A good amount. Wow. Praise the Lord. So, anyway, it just really helps. You know, there's a grammatical structure to every paragraph, a paragraph, a unit of thought. And it's our goal to determine what is that the main meaning of the text and what are the main points of the text.

And we believe the grammatical structure dictates what that is, so they learn that and they bleed even more. So here's a couple more maps. The trip that we had to from Santiago, Rodrigo would make on but on the bus, and then Los Angeles is right about here. And Juan Pablo would travel up on his bus.

And then from Concepcio and also coming down to Valdivia, it's about nine hours in total from Valdivia or more to Santiago. So in 2015, we started the first program, and then we repeated the cycle in 2017. And somebody heard about what I was doing, and they invited me to come down to Valdivia.

And David ended up taking over the administration of that. We started that in 2017 and 18. And out of that program, about 23 or 24 started, 10 graduated. This is, I call him Juan Calvino because he usually had a beard that grew out, and he's a little bit trimmed there.

But you can see how he used his wife's whiteboard in the kitchen to write out his structural line diagram. He wanted to show me that. This is our graduation. This is the second group that came through Valdivia in 2019 and 20. Unfortunately, we haven't had the graduation for them yet due to all the limitations.

We were getting ready to have our graduation on December 4th for the year previously in 2020, but due to new restrictions, we couldn't accomplish that. And so Leslie and I decided to come back to the States when they opened up the ability for us to leave the country.

So they've been really, the country has been very restrictive as to the COVID issues and trying to get a handle on that. Also, this is a, we did, I did an expository preaching conference in Juan Pablo's church, his father's church in Los Angeles back in 2008-19, I think.

This is Concepcion. So after the first cycle in Valdivia in 2017 and 18, Rodrigo also asked me, he says, Steve, we've got a whole group of guys that want to study in Concepción. So I was going to move to Concepción, and David in Valdivia says, Steve, We got another group, that second group in Valdivia.

So I started traveling twice a month in having intense weekends in Fridays and Saturdays in each of those areas, in each of those cities. And this is, as I was teaching in Concepcion, and this was a group that started out. We had 14 that graduated out of the 30-plus men here.

These men are working in the church. Some of them are pastors. Some of them have other vocational jobs. Some of these men have jobs. They have ministries in their church. They've got families. And to add on the demands of studies that might add 15 or 20 or more hours a week to their program, sometimes that becomes a challenge.

And with the virus, it more complicated things. We added the Bible and theology program with the surveys of the Old New Testament Hebrew. We've got theologies this year with historical theology and the theologies one through four. And so a lot of our ministry we were doing by Zoom over the last couple of years.

Thankfully, they were learning and understanding the structural diagrams for the guys that were in their second year of the expository program. And also Hebrew went pretty well. I had to scrape a lot of rust off my Hebrew. And to teach it because it had been some years, and that was the first time through it, so that's always a challenge.

And that's in Spanish, so that you can understand that it was a little bit tough. God has been gracious to lead us. I was very interested after having graduated and impacted by Dr. Street's ministry and teaching at the Master Seminary. He's a leader in ACBC, Association of Certified Biblical Counselors.

Pablo and I, and another man, Arturo Vali Benito, who joined us later on, we've been holding these conferences since 2012. In 2017, we came up to Faith Church, who is one of the leaders in biblical counseling. We got schooled in what was required to have the Track 1 ACBC certified training.

And later on that year, Dr. Street came down and under his umbrella with his ministry in Southern California and the Master Seminary, we were able to do certified Track 1 training. And in that year, we had 42 people attend his teaching through that week. It was really a blessed time.

And we have Juan Moncayo, who's doing a translation. I'll share a little bit about Juan in a second. So. That was in 2017. That was 30 sessions, 42 people. In the second year, we had, I believe it was about 48 people attend, but we added a second track because ACBC has a program where people can get certified.

So you have track one training, then you have 1,000 pages of reading theology and counseling, along with 10 hours of video observation of counseling sessions. After that, you can take a 44-question theology and counseling exam where you have to write out answers of about a page and a half.

And once you've successfully completed that, you are passed on to a fellow or an evaluator, and you have 50 sessions of supervised counseling where you're sending in case reports and he goes over these case reports with you. I got certified in 2019, and our two other leaders, Pablo and Arturo, are there in their process of finishing that up.

Then in 2019, we added a third track. So we had 90 sessions going on during that week. We had about 100 people attending between all of those tracks. I think we had about 58 attend track one training. Over the three years of ACBC training, track one training, we've, by God's grace, He's allowed us to train 148 pastors, leaders, and lay people in certification training, and we're working on a Program to help develop them walk through this process towards a certification.

And also in 2019, we traveled to Peru and did some biblical count introduction to biblical counseling, and we've done different workshops online after the COVID issues. This is Pastor Pablo with Arturo Valley Benito, who is also working in our leadership. He's a great other co-laborer to work with.

These are Daniel Schubert. He's come twice to Santiago, Chile, along with Ed Walde. Ed Waldi had to replace Jeff one year about a couple nights before Jeff was supposed to get on his airplane. His wife was sick being pregnant and he couldn't come. So Ed teaches as an adjunct professor at TMS in biblical counseling, and he was able to fill the shoes without any problem.

And then this is 2019, our photo when all three of them came to do the three tracks, and we did some other teaching as well. So here are some photos of the 2019 program and part of our material that we have. We've got about a 300-page track one training manual.

This was track two for people going through the exam questions. This is track three, handling counseling difficult cases. And this is our group, all the group that attended that year. And Pablo, this is a couple photos of Pablo and I in Peru. This is at Shepherd's Conference with Rodrigo and with Jose Valenzuela, who's a deacon in our church.

Jose Stevan Camaño is a graduate now of TMS in Corico. And this is a Chilean Victor Allende, who's working in a TMS graduate church in New York. So here's our diploma cover and sample diploma of Ector. And our most recent, we had our, we were able to fit in our graduation for Concepción, for the 220 group of Concepción this past in 2021.

And Pastor Rodrigo and his church have a property out in the wilderness. And so we met out there. It was the only way we could meet with all the restrictions they had. We had about 150 people in attendance, and we graduated 14 men that day. And David finished his program the second time through the expository program.

David from Valdivia. So thank you for giving us the opportunity to share. What the Lord's doing in the ministry there. In the time that remains, we're going to take a look at a passage in Nehemiah 8:8, and it's in tune with what we seek to accomplish in our seminary, what we seek to accomplish in our ministry in the pulpit ministry at Ebenezer Baptist Church.

We've had a number of men that have gone through our expository programs that are leaders in our church also. And just as you guys sit at the fountain of expository preaching, I pray that this would be an encouragement and blessing to you to see really the example that we have from Ezra in Nehemiah chapter 8:8, seeing what it is to be in what is expository preaching, what it takes to be a biblical expositor, and what effect it has upon its hearers.

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for your love, your grace, and your mercy that you've lavishly poured upon us and the goodness that we have through your Son and giving us a new life in Christ. Father, in what you've put before us, we just pray that you'd help us to continue faithfully in the Path you've laid out for us and in the advancement of the gospel and the advancement of your kingdom in the training of men to be able to teach others.

Father, I just pray that tonight you would bless our time as we do a rapid walk through this text to see the benefits and the blessings that we experience and to know what is expository preaching and what it takes to be a biblical expositor and what its effect is upon the hearers.

We as the ones who get to sit at the fountain and hear your word expounded week after week and seeing everything else that happens going on in evangelicalism today, we are so blessed to be fed the milk of your word and the meat of your word to grow in Christ together and to advance your kingdom.

We pray that all these things in Christ's name, amen. So I believe that you'll be encouraged tonight as we take a look at this text. We embrace this at our church. This is the ministry that we were entrusted with at the Master Seminary, and I have nothing else to give.

And we want to entrust these to faithful men. And train them and that they would be able to train others also. In looking at this text, we have Ezra. The book of Ezra was written by Ezra, and he also wrote Nehemiah in Chronicles. And it was written between 457 B.C.

and 444 B.C. It was focused on the first return under Zerubel to build the temple. The second return was under Ezra. He arrives and he guides the revival. In Nehemiah, we have a description where he is brought back to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, while Ezra is to rebuild the people through the word of God in a revival and renewal of the people of Israel.

The historicity we see from Israel since the Mosaic covenant, these people had lived in disobedience and they had been under judgment. He sent his prophets. They mistreated his prophets. They killed his prophets. In 722, God took out the ten tribes, northern tribes, to Assyria. And the last two tribes, Judah and Benjamin, they were taken captive.

And three deportations, and in the final one, brought the destruction of Jerusalem. And later we have Ezra in the second return. We see Ezra in 7:10 of Ezra, he says, it says, For Ezra had set his heart to study the law of the Lord, to practice it, and to teach his statutes and ordinances in Israel.

And moving forward to Nehemiah 8:8, 8:1 through 8, all the people were gathered there before Ezra and the leaders, and they asked Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law of Moses. All were gathered before them, men and women, all who could understand, and they listened, capture this, from morning to midday.

Morning to midday. That's about five or six hours. And Ezra stood there before them with a wooden pulpit. We're biblical here, huh? Right, Tom? Pastor Tom? And they all stood up when he opened the book. And Ezra in verse 6, then Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God, and all the people answered, Amen, amen.

While lifting up their hands, then they bowed down, bowed low, and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground. Ground, and other leaders were with them. And our text is: and they read from the book from the law of God, translating to give the sense so that they understood the reading.

And what we're going to see in this text is what is genuine textual exposition. It was a term that was taught to us in seminary, genuine textual exposition. That's what we learned. And you see this in this text. We'll see this in three sections of verse eight. What is genuine textual exposition?

What it takes to be an expositor of genuine textual exposition and the effect that it has on the expository listener. We can see in the first part of this, they read from the book, from the book, from the law of God. We can see here, Ezra and the leaders were directed by the text.

They submitted themselves under the text. They wanted to be objectively understanding what the text was. And they read from the book. And they were there for five to six hours every day expositing the Word of God. And the source that they were using was the Law of God, the Pentateuch, the Torah, the Law, the first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

And they preach the word with authority, and because he is the author, and the author has authority over his writings. There was a return back to the scriptures, the texts. He didn't return to stories, what we see today in many churches, stories and experiences, or jokes, or superficial teaching of the texts, or preaching messages outside of the context of the passage, or humanistic strategies, or methods to motivate people, or an emphasis to build up one's esteem, or health, and wealth.

He was focused on the text. He set his heart to study the law of the Lord and to practice it. So we see him in his study with the training that he had received, with practicing it in his life, and also to pass this on and edify and build up the other people.

And we can see this. He did this with authority, recognizing that the scriptures were authoritative. And he did this going back to the text of the law of God. So we can understand that he was grammatical in his understanding. Look at chapter 9, and you can see we know he was grammatical in this.

In 9, chapter 9, verse 19. Verse 5 in the second part, he says, Oh, may your glorious name be blessed and exalted above all blessing and praise. You alone are the Lord. You have made the heavens and heaven of heavens with all their hosts. Later on, he goes on and gives reference to the Abrahamic covenant.

Later on, he gives more references to how God was working throughout the history of Israel. And he reflected on God's character and his attributes and his goodness and his compassion and his abounding loving kindness towards them. There was a focus centered on Christ or the Lord being the center of this teaching and a high view of God and a high view of Scripture.

It's obvious that they were a slave to the text, nailed to the text or committed to the text of Scripture and married to the text. They weren't going to stray from it and deviate. Today, unfortunately, we have different views of how we treat Scripture. Some interpret, allow, and don't even know that they're teaching some of the things that they believe theologically are derived from a bad hermeneutic, a bad form of interpretation.

Some are interpreting Genesis 1, the six days of creation, allegorically. There are men in history. Of the early church that interpreted it allegorically, that day one for Augustine, day one represented a time from Adam to Noah, day two, Noah to Abraham, Abraham to David, David to the captivity, the captivity to the first coming of Christ.

And day six is represents the time of the Gentiles when they were represented by the beasts and the reptiles, and they came to accept Christ in this time. And day six, he jumped over to Revelation 20 to allegorize that we are now in the millennium. And he allegorized that.

Ezra didn't spiritualize a sense, or other biblical authors didn't have a sense of spiritualizing the church into these prophetic books. They were textual in the sense that in their interpretation, they did not recognize human covenants that were created by men, produced by men, that weren't derived from the text of Scripture, but they focused on the Abrahamic covenant, which was grammatically derived.

We see that in the text in Genesis 15 with the word Beret, which signifies means covenant. It was grammatical. That event was historical, just like the six days of creation were grammatical. Revealed in chapter 1 of Genesis. There were historical events, and it could be read and interpreted literally, just like all of us read it, and our kids read it.

And the dear women that had been in Chile, that have been exposed to the gospel when the first missionaries came there, and it was read and presented to them, they understood it in a simple reading of the text. We don't overlay a biblical theology over scripture and other isotetical forms of interpretation.

I understand I have till 7:10, right? So I'm going to fly now. We also see that, so in point one, we see he was textual, we see he was genuine, and it was exposition. And point two, genuine signifies that he was always focused on the authorial intent of the biblical author.

So when he was talking about going back to Genesis and creation, he was focused on articulating what Moses was communicating to Israel in those texts. There's three words that are important. Parash is the first word in the second part, translating to give the sense. Translating means in this word parash that it's to make distinct or to declare or to make an exact statement.

It's making clear by revelation. Or explication or explanation, and in addition to that, with the form of the verb being a pual passive passive in this text, it's an emphatic or intensified what they were translating. So they were scrutinizing, they're examining, they're investigating and studying carefully and exegetically this text in order for them to communicate its significance to the people.

The second word was som. It means to lay down and fix, establish, to fix conclusively with authority. And the third word is to have understanding. But when we get to the next phrase, so that they would have understanding what the text meant, what's distinct from this particular word sense or secale is there's an aspect of considering or pondering or understanding with having insight or comprehension.

But when we go to the third point, we get to the third point. Trying to jump over to my notes here. And we get to the third point, so that they understood the reading. We have Sakal and we've got bina. Binah is the idea that people were given a greater level of discernment of the teaching.

So they were translating the text to give them an understanding of the text so that they would understand the reading. This word bina is an idea that they have more discernment. Not just a general understanding of what the text means, but it's giving them discernment. And you can see that as you sit under expository preaching week after week, you're growing in the knowledge of the Word.

You're growing in the knowledge of Him. You're growing in what His divine purpose is and what He's accomplishing and how you're applying that biblical truth in your own mind and life. And it's giving you discernment. In Chile, when you go to the ferias where they're selling vegetables and stuff on the street, and you give them a 20-mil bill, which is about $25 or so, $30, they hold it up and they can note whether it's a fake bill.

It's just like people who work for the Treasury Department, they can see exactly what a U.S. dollar bill is fake or true based on some of the details of it. And we know that. Based on us having been trained well week by week with the Word of God, we have the This precious understanding, and it doesn't happen overnight.

It happens over time with its being a gift of God, and it requires persistent diligence on our part to take what our teachings and apply them in our hearts and minds to understand what is being articulated and to practice it. So, overall, from this text, given our time is short and we need to wrap it up, but we can see from this text that Ezra taught his, he was textual and what he was articulated, he was using the text of Scripture.

That's what we are fed with it week after week. It was translated to give sense to the meaning of it, it was based on authorial intent. We don't have the liberty to articulate and bring our own preferences to scripture and impose over the text. That would make us, rather than, we are taught at masters to be biblical exegetes.

And if we want to bring our theological preferences or our forms of interpretation or practices to study the word, and we want to put our preference over what scripture says, we're not a biblical exegete, we're an isegete. Exegete means the guide out of, isegete means that we're reading in things that the author never intended.

With allegory, because the meaning is always in the mind of the interpreter, not based on the original biblical author. So, in conclusion, we have the benefit of also having discernment, growing in the Word of God. It's expositional, and so we have genuine textual exposition delivered to us through biblical expositors, and its effect is to grow us in Christ and give us more discernment.

And fortunately, we were just a little short on our time today, but I hope that you were encouraged to see what the Lord's doing in Chile and encouraged by the text tonight in a quick examination of what was communicated here by Ezra in his reading of the scriptures to the people of Israel as he was rebuilding them.

Thank you. Do you want to pray, Tom? Well, thank you, Steve. Thank you for coming down here. Thank you for Leslie bringing her with you, and thank you for the ministry in Chile. Thank you for the. I know it's been a long road down there. I know you have gone and have spent a lot of hard time.

And we want to pray for you and just thank you. Heavenly Father, we do thank you for this evening. We thank you for the ministry in Chile. We thank you for what you are doing around the world through your people. And, Father, we just pray for the Schneiders as they go back and prepare for another round of ministry.

Father, I just pray that you would bless them, equip them, strengthen them in every way. Father, that these men that have gone through in the families, the wives and the children, and all that is involved in the churches and make the sacrifices, Father, we just ask that you would bless them thoroughly, and Father, that we would see a great awakening there in Chile.

And thank you for, bless the ministries, bless all the biblical ministries that are happening. And, Father, we just thank you in Jesus' name. Amen.