Keep Calm and Carry On

Welcome to our Women's Bible Study on 1st and 2nd Kings, which is entitled Learning from Leaders. Today, we're going to cover 2nd Kings chapters 11 to 17, a big load. And by the end of this lesson, we will have gone through 14 kings combined between Judah and Israel, and we also will have seen Israel taken captive into Assyria. And the ending of our lesson has an extremely somber tone, but the beginning of it, we see some spiritual, unexpected spiritual revitalization, and it's a bit of a roller coaster throughout the lesson. So let's first take a look at our chart of the kings for this week. It's kind of a tangled menagerie. Look at how busy that is. This is the busiest chart of all of our lessons. And I coded in red the ones that we're going to spend some time on, and the ones in between will pretty much just skim through, otherwise we'd be here for two or three hours. But I thought for this week, our best approach would be to go all the way through Judah first, and then go all the way through Israel. So at some point, we'll back up a little bit in your Bible, but you can start by opening your Bible to 2nd Kings chapter 11. And I just want to review while you do that, where we left things last week. In Israel, Jehu had killed the king of Israel, Joram, who had gone to visit the king of Israel. Did I say that right? Jehu had killed the king of Judah, who was Joram, while he was visiting the king of Israel. And in Israel, Jehu had killed the king of Israel. And then he became the king, and he destroyed the house of Baal. And we all clapped for that. We're like, yay, this is fantastic. So we want to find out, both kings died now, but Jehu only became the king of Israel. So what's going on in Judah? That's where our lesson begins. Chapter 11, verse 1. When Athaliah, the mother of Ahaziah, Ahaziah had just been killed in Jezreel by Jehu. When she saw that her son was dead, she arose and destroyed all the royal family. Let's stop for a minute to figure out who Athaliah is. In order to figure that out, I'm going to put our chart of kings from last week. And this chart had shown the descendants of Jehoshaphat and the descendants of Ahab. And I had put a little note on there to let us know that Athaliah was the daughter of Ahab and Jezebel. So the kids of Ahab and Jezebel, you can see on the kings of Israel side, Ahaz and Jehoram, and we have this Athaliah. And she also happened to be married to the middle guy on the Judah side, who was Jehoram. She married Jehoram, or maybe we should say Jehoram married Athaliah, okay? And so she had a great influence over the third king on the Judah side, which is Ahaziah. In fact, in 2 Chronicles 22.3, it says,

So the house, the whole house of Ahab had had a big influence on both sides during this whole time. So that son, Ahaziah, he's now dead, killed by Jehu. So she probably thought, here's my chance. If all the heirs are gone, then I can seize power. And you thought maybe you had a dysfunctional family. This is just way hiked up. I bet their Thanksgiving dinners were terrible. No one wanted to go. Verse two, but, but, but, Jehoshabah, she's going to be our heroine, the daughter of King Joram, sister of Ahaziah, she took Joash, the son of Ahaziah, and stole him away from among the king's sons who were being put to death. And she put him and his nurse in a bedroom, and thus they hid him from Athaliah so that he was not put to death. This is very sweet. She comes in, grabs the little one-year-old, takes him, puts him in a bedroom, which Bible commentators say wasn't really like a place that you sleep. It was more like the original mattress warehouse. It was a place where they kept the beds. So she puts him in a mattress warehouse, but then they moved, verse three, and he remained with her for six years, hidden, now it says, in the house of the Lord while Athaliah reigned over the land. Now I told you at the beginning I had chosen not to put Athaliah on the list of the kings, because not because of the killing and all that kind of stuff, that's been going on in all the lists of the kings, but the reason I didn't put her there is that there really was a legitimate heir during that time. He just wasn't revealed yet. So if you look up some lists of the kings of Israel and Judah, you'll see her on there. I just, I didn't want to put her on ours. So what I want to do now is I want to start a chart for this week. It seems like we always start a chart every week that helps us understand some of the things that we are to apply to our lives. So our chart is going to be lessons that we learn from Israel's last days. And number one lesson that we learn is God's work often happens in the shadows. What I mean by that is that for six years here, when Jehoshaphat had taken the rightful heir to the throne and hidden him away for six years, no one knew that. No one knew that God still had a remnant, that God still had a descendant of David. It seemed like all hope for David's throne was lost, which means all hope for a Messiah had been lost and the people must have grieved. The people must have thought, this is the end. This is the end of the world. And you know what? The same thing happens in our lives too. God is working in the shadows, but we don't know about it yet. And we think it's the end of the world. There's a certain political outcome and we think that's it, it's the end of the world. We're going to get to November and half of the Americans are going to think it's the end of the world, one way or the other, right? We think that getting fired from a job is the end of the world. That's it. A divorce in the family is the end of the world. And we have a lot of those things that we think, this is it, we'll never recover from this. And yet what we see in this lesson, that's what they thought, but God was working in the shadows. He had something tucked away that they wouldn't know about until later. And so I hope that this is a comfort if you are in a end of the world scenario in your life. I hope this lesson is a comfort to you to think perhaps God is doing something that I don't even know about yet. Maybe I won't know for six years. Maybe six weeks, but there was a priest whose name was Jehoiada and 2 Chronicles 2.11 tells us that he was the husband of Jehoshabba. So we've got Jehoiada and Jehoshabba. We will just say that they have a J&J problem solving company. They work together so nicely and I think that this is impressive. She was basically the director of concealment and he was the vice president in charge of recruiting and building loyalty among the guards. And so they put themselves to work together and it says in 12 that he brought out the king's son and he put the crown on him and he gave him the testimony and they proclaimed him king and anointed him and they clapped their hands and said, long live the king. So there was this big ruckus and Athaliah heard it when she heard it. Verse 14, she looked and there was the king standing by the pillar according to the custom and the captains and the trumpeteers beside the king and all the people of the land rejoicing and blowing trumpets and Athaliah tore her clothes and cried, treason, treason. When really she was the one that did the treason, but they took her out and they killed her. Verse 17, and Jehoiada made a covenant between the Lord and the king and the people that they should be the Lord's people. Then all the people of the land went to the house of Baal and tore it down. His altars, his images, they broke in pieces and they killed Matan, the priest of Baal before the altars and the priest posted watchmen over the house of the Lord. Okay, so in our last week's lesson, chapter 10, we thought Jehu destroyed the house of the Lord and he did. That was in Israel. Okay, it was in Samaria or in Judah. Apparently what had happened is during this time that Athaliah had reigned, bringing those ideas with her from the family of Ahab, she had established another house of Baal and archeology shows there was something south of Jerusalem. And so a house of Baal had been established because of Athaliah in the area of Judah, but they tore it down. So it hardly got its start. Verse 20, so all the people of the land rejoiced and the city was quiet after Athaliah had been put to death. with the sword at the king's house. Jehoash was seven years old when he began to reign. And again, what we see is God was doing a great work here, but for six years, hardly anyone knew about it. And maybe we should take a sentence something like, God is doing a great work in my life, in my family, in my church, in my community, but hardly anyone knows about it yet. Is that a comfort to you? I think that that's fair for us to look at it that way. Well, the first verse of chapter 12 tells us that he had reigned for 40 years in Jerusalem, and verse two holds an extremely important and insightful comment. Look at verse two. Jehoash did what was right in the eyes of the Lord all of his days because Jehoiada the priest instructed him. Now, sometimes he's called Jehoash, and sometimes he's called Joash here. I'm not sure which one I'll say, but just hang with me. But he did well all of his life as long as Jehoiada the priest had the power of influence over him. So that's our second point for the lessons that we learned from this week is the power of influence. And I think that the writer wants us to understand here and think about the influence that Jehoiada and Jehoash had over the king. Maybe the writer wants us to see this influence in contrast to some of the recent influences we've had, the influence of Jezebel over Ahab, the influence of Athaliah over her son Ahaziah. We've noted the influences, negative influences of people for this entire study. It began all the way back with Solomon's wives, right? But this is one of our first times to really contemplate the power of positive influence. And I think that that gives us something to consider. So how did they positively influence him? Well, first, he was hidden from all other influences for six years, okay? He was tucked away. He basically grew up in the house of the Lord and that had an impact on him. Apparently, he didn't need to socialize with his peers in order to be normal. It was okay. He had one primary caregiver and that was Jehoshaba. She influenced his formative years. And you know what? It cost her something. It cost her something to influence that little boy. He was tucked away, which meant in general, she was pretty tucked away as well. And doesn't it cost us something to raise small children? It does. If we're gonna stay on task and influence them, it costs us a lot. We're hidden away from a lot of the things that maybe we would like to do or that other people get to do. It's not forever, but the power of influence over small children comes at a cost. So let's see how this couple influenced, how their influence affected his reign. Look at verse four. Jehosh said to the priests, all the money of the holy things that's brought into the house of the Lord, drop down to verse five, let the priests take each from his donor and let them repair the house, whether they are, wherever any need of repairs is discovered. Now, why did the house of the Lord need to be repaired? Oh, 2 Chronicles told us why. Let me show you this passage. 2 Chronicles 24, seven. It says the sons of Athaliah, that wicked woman, had broken into the house of God and they had also used all the dedicated things of the house of the Lord for the bales. So Athaliah's sons came in there and took a whole bunch of stuff for that house of bale that we just talked about. That's why the house of the Lord needed repair. It was in disrepair because of Athaliah's reign, okay? So collecting funds and making repairs didn't end up being a super simple process. Look at verse nine. Jehoiada the priest took a chest and he bored a hole in the lid of it and he set it beside the altar on the right side as one entered the house of the Lord. And the priests who guarded the threshold put in it all the money that was brought into the house of the Lord. And whenever they saw that there was much money in the chest the king's secretary and the high priest came up and they bagged and counted the money that they found in the house of the Lord. And then they would give the money that was weighed into the hands of the workmen who had the oversight of the house of the Lord. And they paid it out to the carpenters, the builders who worked on the house of the Lord. Now, I like this system that they finally settled on to make this work. I like this system a lot. For one thing, it's our system. It's kind of how we do things in this church. We have the wooden boxes, you know, when people come in. I like it for that reason. I like it because it promoted the idea of people giving as they prospered. As the people prospered they were to bring into the house of the Lord. And I like it because when you're doing things this way you don't just sort of set a budget and say it's gonna cost us 3.2 million to repair the house of the Lord. Now, everybody make pledges, you know. That's not what they were doing. As the money came in, they bagged it, they counted it. They said, oh, now we'll do this project. So I think that there's some great lessons there. However, in verse 15, it says they did not ask for an accounting from the men into whose hands they delivered the money to pay out to the workmen for they dealt honestly. Well, that's great that it worked out that way. But as far as that goes, just because we see something in scripture that they did it that way doesn't mean that God is saying do it this way. No one should ever turn in receipts. No one should ever give an accounting. That's not what that's saying, okay? Accounting for expenses is a wise thing to do in the church, in your home, with your kids, in pretty much any, in your business, right? In any area of life, it is a good idea. But we're happy that they dealt honestly. That's great. Verse 17, at that time, Haziel, king of Syria, went up and fought against Gath, and he took it. But when Haziel set his face to go up against Jerusalem, Jehoash, king of Judah, he took all the sacred gifts and all the gold that was found in the treasuries of the house of the Lord and of the king's house, and he sent these to Haziel, king of Syria. And then Haziel went away from Jerusalem. So Joash basically took some of that that was coming in and he just kind of paid off the king of Syria, which was successful, but we're not told here if that's what God wanted him to do or not. But in Chronicles, we are told that Jehoash did act faithfully toward the Lord all the days of Jehoiada. But when he died at 130 years old, the king began to make others his counselors. I'll show you the verse, look at this. Second Chronicles 24. Now, after the death of Jehoiada, the princes of Judah came and paid homage to the king, and then the king listened to them. And he abandoned the house of the Lord, the God of their fathers, and he served the ashram and the idols, and wrath came upon Judah and Jerusalem for this guilt of theirs. And so once again, we see the power of influence. Now, Jehoiada was influenced badly. He was influenced by others who brought in the worship of the idols. And so we're reminded that influence can go both ways. Influence can be toward the positive or toward the negative. As far as us, as a Christian woman, we should be desiring to influence people as much as possible, like Jehoshaba and Jehoiada. That should be our goal. But let me ask you a question. Was it Jehoiada's fault that Jehoash turned away from his advice after he died and listened to others? No, he was faithful, he was faithful. You can't control what other people do. You can't control the choices that your kids make. You influence, you influence, you influence, and there comes a time when they're gonna decide to stick with it or they're gonna listen to others. So for my part, I say, nope, that wasn't Jehoiada's fault. And this story reminds us to work hard to influence while we can because the time comes when we no longer can. So we ask ourselves the question, who am I influencing in the ways of the Lord? What influence am I having? We should make the most of it. Well, the next king now of Judah in chapter 14, verse one, was Amaziah, the son of Joash. He was 25 years old when he began to reign and he reigned 29 years in Jerusalem. He started off well, even though he wasn't able to remove the high places. That's a sentence that we hear throughout this week's lesson. But he eventually brought back idols from the victory over the Edomites and he set them in the temple, which I find very comical. You go out to war against the people who have these idols that are presumably supposed to protect them and help them win and be victorious. You beat them, and you take the idols that failed to protect those people, and you bring them back and you worship them. It doesn't make any sense at all, but that's what he did. Next, King of Judah, chapter 15, Azariah, the son of Amaziah. And he is also known as Uzziah in Chronicles and Isaiah. He was 16 years old when he began to reign, and he reigned 52 years in Jerusalem, second to the longest reign in Judah. And he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord. Nevertheless, this familiar phrase, the high places were not taken away, the people still sacrificed and made offerings on the high places. We're sprinting. The next king in Judah was Jotham, down to verse 32. Jotham, the son of Uzziah, king of Judah, began to reign. He was 25 years old when he began to reign. He reigned 16 years in Jerusalem. He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord according to all that his father Uzziah had done. Nevertheless, the high places were not removed, and the people still sacrificed and made offerings on the high places. And that brings us to our final king of Judah for today, who is Ahaz. We're in chapter 16. Ahaz, the son of Jotham. Verse 2 says Ahaz was 20 years old when he began to reign, and he reigned 16 years in Jerusalem. And he did not do what was right in the eyes of the Lord, his God, as his father David had done, but he walked in the way of the kings of Israel. He even burned his son as an offering according to the despicable practices of the nations whom the Lord drove out before the people of Israel. And he sacrificed and he made offerings on the high places and on the hills and under every green tree. So, on our chart of what we learn in the last days of Israel and Judah here, my third point is the dangers of coveting, particularly coveting the ways and the things of the people who are opposed to God. Ahaz was having trouble in this moment with both Syria and Israel, so he reached out yet to another country to see if he could get some help. He reached out to Assyria. Verse 7, Ahaz sent messengers to Tiglath Pileser, king of Assyria, saying, I am your servant and your son. What in the world? He's an enemy. He's not his servant and his son. But what's notable here about Assyria is that in just a minute they will come and siege the northern tribes in Israel and take them captive. And here we have the king of Judah saying, we're partners. So he said to him, come up and rescue me from the hand of the king of Syria and from the hand of the king of Israel who are attacking me. Ahaz also took the silver and gold that was found in the house of the Lord, and he sent a present to the king of Assyria. And the king of Assyria listened to him, and the king of Assyria marched up against Damascus, which is Syria. And he took it, carrying its people captive to Kerr, and he killed Rezan, who was the king of Syria. And now this part I think is important. In verse 10, when King Ahaz went to Damascus, this is in Syria, to meet the king of Assyria, he saw the altar that was at Damascus. This was an altar to the god Hadad. Do you remember how many times we had a king Ben-Hadad, son of Hadad? That's actually a demon god. So he sees this altar there in Damascus. Very impressed by it. Coveted it. And the king sent to Uriah the priest a model of the altar and its pattern, exact in all of its details. And Uriah the priest built the altar in accordance with all that King Ahaz had sent from Damascus. Verse 12, and when the king came from Damascus, the king viewed the altar, and then the king drew near to the altar and went up on it. This is the altar from Damascus. And he burned, or in the pattern of, and he burned his burnt offering and grain offering and poured his drink offering, and he threw the blood of his peace offerings on the altar. And the bronze altar that was before the lord, okay, the bronze altar from the house of the lord that had been established there on purpose, he removed that from the front of the house, from the place between his altar and the house of the lord, and he put it on the north side of his altar. It's kind of like taking your RV from the front of your house, let's put it behind the fence, okay? So he moved it back. Sort of tucked it behind that privacy fence for his own personal use. It says in verse 15 that King Ahaz commanded Uriah the priest, saying, On the great altar, this is his Damascus copy, burn the morning offering and the evening offering and basically all the offerings, but the bronze altar shall be for me to inquire by. Do you know what that means? To inquire by divination, okay? In our world, we might think of inquiring like somebody interprets tarot cards, okay? You're interpreting what the cards, this is a demonic activity, you're interpreting what they say so that you're inquiring of them. So he used what was formerly God's altar back behind the fence now to inquire and do, and they did kind of weird things like looking at the animal parts and making predictions of what the gods would do based on what the liver looked like and what all this stuff looked like. So that's Ahaz. And then he also removed, remember all those big bronze oxen that were under the basin where we studied the building of the house of the Lord? He got rid of them. I don't know what he did with them. He melted them down and used that, but he just put a stone under it. So that was gone too. The only redeeming thing that we find in this narrative is his replacement, and that's in verse 20, And Ahaz slept with his fathers and was buried with his fathers in the city of David, and Hezekiah his son reigned in his place. We get to study Hezekiah in our next lesson here. And again, it just, it shows us, you know, we talk about the power of influence. Ahaz was a terrible influence, but God can trump terrible influences. Hezekiah is a great guy, and it's going to be a joy to go on the upside of the roller coaster ride when we get to him. But we learn from this leader here the danger of coveting the things and the ways of people that are opposed to God. This altar in Damascus was a thing that belonged to the people that are opposed to God. He saw it. He wanted it. He took it. He built it. He put it into his world. And, you know, we should take note of that. Did you know that not all cultures and all culture practices are equal? You know, not all religions promote human flourishing. We learned in this lesson that Ahaz killed his own sons in sacrifice. Huh, I wonder what altar that he used for that. It just makes you wonder. It doesn't say. But coveting the things and the ways of people that are opposed to God. You know, sometimes we want to be so progressive. Do you think Ahaz wanted to be progressive? Oh, look, this is new. This is look what they're doing. Let's bring that into our world. It's a temptation, isn't it? To be progressive. You know, I want to show you a verse from Jeremiah 6, 16 that speaks to this.

Stick to the ancient ways. But Jeremiah went on to say, but they said, we will not walk in it because they were coveting progressive things. OK, now we're going to move to the Israel side. OK, and don't worry, it's not going to be as long. OK, we're going to scoot through this, but we're going to pick up that second column. So we have to go back to chapter 13 now. All right. So as chapter 13 begins, it says that Jehoahaz, the son of Jehu, began to reign over Israel and Samaria. And he reigned 17 years and he did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. And as God often does in cases such as this, look at verse three, middle of verse three. God gave him them continually into the hand of Haziel, king of Syria, and into the hand of Ben-Hadad, the son of Haziel. So God brings enemies. This is what he did all through Judges, right? It's God's way. But there's a really bright spot here. And I want to see what happens in verse four. It says Jehoahaz sought the favor of the Lord. It worked. He was repentant and he sought God's favor. And the Lord listened to him, for he saw the oppression of Israel and how the king of Assyria oppressed them. Remember in our last lesson that Elisha went to anoint this guy and he stared at him for a long time and then he starts crying. He goes, I know what you're going to do to Israel. Yeah, that's where we're at. OK, so it's very oppressive, very bad. But yet, Jehoahaz turns back to the Lord. So here's our fourth point of lessons that we learn, is that God will never spurn repentance. People don't go, they don't get too far gone, is what I'd like to say. Jehoahaz was described as doing evil, so the Lord brought discipline. He responded. He changed his ways. It's never too late to seek the favor of the Lord. And maybe it's good for us to have this reminder because, do you sometimes pigeonhole people like I do? It's like, you're that kind of a person. You're someone notorious. Like, all hope is gone. And this chapter kind of tells us, no, that's not truth. That is not truth, to think all hope is gone for a notoriously bad or evil person. And so we have some proof here. Verse 10, Jehoash, his son, began to reign over Israel and Samaria, and he reigned 16 years. He also did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. However, the notable thing about him is his interaction with Elisha. So I wanna take a moment to look at that. Verse 14, now, when Elisha had fallen sick with the illness of which he was to die, Jehoash, they changed his name here, so I'll keep saying Jehoash, king of Israel went down to him and wept before him, crying, 'My father, my father, the chariots of Israel and its horsemen.' And you've read this before, right? This is kind of a way of showing respect. This is like end of life sort of respect. And Elisha said to him, 'Take a bow and arrows, draw the bow, open the window eastward and shoot. All of which Jehoash obeyed.' And then Elisha explained to him what this dramatization was all about. That is the direction of Syria. And Elisha said in the middle of verse 17, he goes, 'The Lord's arrow of victory over Syria, for you shall fight the Syrians in Aphek until you have made an end of them.' So now we know that victory in military battles requires both skill and courage, but it also requires some faith and some perseverance as well. And when Elisha gave him, Jehoash, this next set of instructions, he said to him, 'Take the arrows and strike the ground with them.' Now, we don't know if that means bundle up all the arrows and one, two, three, strike. It could have also meant take the arrows and strike the ground, like shoot them out that same window down to the ground, like one at a time, either way. But it says in verse 18, he only struck three times and he stopped. And Elisha reproved him and said, 'You should have done more.' And he said, 'Now you will strike down Syria only three times.' And if you scoot right down to verse 25, that's exactly what happened. Then Jehoash, the son of Jehoahaz, took again from Ben-Hadad, the son of Haziel, the cities that he had taken from Jehoahaz, his father in war. Here it is, three times Jehoash defeated him and recovered the cities of Israel. Now, this was very gracious of God to deliver him in this way. But I also see a principle with this dramatization with the arrows. And maybe a principle that can be personal for us because if our faith is large and if we persevere in the Lord, we can seek the Lord to just like, it's like, don't stop at three, go find all the arrows that are sitting around this room, shoot them all off. What I see in that is ask God for bigger, more. Look, you guys, I am not a prosperity teacher, okay? But this passage kind of leans to tell us don't protect God from, I don't think you can do very much, so I'm just gonna strike three times. We don't have to protect God. We can say, he knew what was going on. Elisha explained it to him and he stopped short. And sometimes we know what's going on. We don't wanna stop short. We wanna ask God big things because sometimes we need big things. So we don't have to protect God and say, I think three is about all either he can do or all he wants to do for me, okay? So now let's scoot back up to verse 20 because I wanna cover that passage about Elisha's death, which I think is just great. Verse 20, so Elisha died, they buried him. Now bands of Moabites used to invade the land in the spring of the year. And as a man was being buried, behold, a marauding band was seen and the man was thrown into the grave of Elisha. And as soon as the man touched the bones of Elisha, he revived and he stood on his feet. And I just love here that God tosses in one last miraculous thing connected with Elisha when Elisha had absolutely nothing to do with it. It almost like puts the seal of approval on all the previous things he did when he was conscious to say, see, that was all me too. But now this one, this just proves that it's all me because you're dead, okay? But I'm still working through you. I just love it. I just think it's great. It reminds me that God doesn't need me all as much as I think he might need me. I can be dead, God's gonna do something great, okay? And now what we're gonna do is we're gonna go rapid fire through that long list. In Israel, okay, Jeroboam, the son of Joash, reigned 41 years. Zechariah for six months, who was assassinated. Shalom for one month, who was assassinated. Menahem maybe for 10 years, followed by his son, Picaiah for two years, who was killed by his captain, Pica, who reigned for 20 years. And finally, we come to the last king of Israel, which is Hoshea for nine years, but he was shut up in prison. And if every single one of them was characterized by that familiar phrase that we have read since the very beginning, since Jeroboam, it's some variation of, and he did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and did not depart from all the sins of Jeroboam, son of Nebat, which he made Israel to sin. Every one of them. And so this brings us now to the final important passage in this week's lesson, that the Bible studies really been building up to these two important passages. Here's the first one. It's in chapter 17, verse six. In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria captured Samaria and he carried the Israelites away to Assyria and he placed them in Hillel and on the harbor, the river of Goshen and in the cities of the Medes. You know, really just that one sentence, just that one sentence, it should cause a reader to stop and to be sad and to grieve and to say, how did we get here? Well, we know how we got here because we studied all the passages. But this brings us to our last lesson that we learned from leaders today, which is number five, God will not hesitate to discipline his own, okay? God did not reject his own by allowing them to be taken captive. He was disciplining them. And I wanna show you a passage from Hebrews chapter 12 that teaches us this.

So we learn about the character of the Lord. The Lord does not cast off, but the Lord disciplines and that's what's happening in Israel here. So I'm gonna finish this passage starting in verse seven and I want us to put one eye on history, the history of what actually happened and I want us to put the other eye on applying it to my own life and any parallels that I see in my life because the apostle Paul told us that all scripture was given to us for our to understand from what happened in the past. So let's start with verse seven. It says, this occurred because the people of Israel had sinned against the Lord, their God, who had brought them up out of the land of Egypt. Verse eight, and they walked in the customs of the nations whom the Lord drove out before the people of Israel and in the customs that the kings of Israel had practiced and the people of Israel did secretly against the Lord, their God, things that were not right such as building the high places, the pillars and the ashram, making offerings on all the high places and they did wicked things provoking the Lord to anger. Verse 12, and they served idols of which the Lord had said to them, you shall not do this. Yet the Lord warned Israel and Judah by every prophet and every seer saying, pause right there, the Lord warned through the prophets, have you ever read the Bible in chronological order? You spend forever on this. because you have to go through all the prophets that are warning them. So you go through Jeremiah and you go through like all the minor prophets because God sent prophets to warn. The weight of reading the Bible in chronological order is almost too much to bear because, I don't know, I should have calculated it before I started talking, but probably like one-third of the Bible is all this because we have all the prophets and we have all this, you know. So God sent the prophets. Now where are we? He said, turn from your evil ways and keep my commands and my statutes in accordance with all the law that I commanded your fathers and that I sent to you by my servants, the prophets. But they would not listen. They were stubborn as their fathers had been, who did not believe in the Lord their God. They despised his statutes and his covenant that he made with their fathers and the warnings that he gave them. Verse 16, and they abandoned all the commandments of the Lord their God and made for themselves metal images of two calves and they made an asherah and worshiped all the hosts of heaven and served Baal. And they burned their sons and their daughters as offerings and used divination and omens and sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the Lord, provoking him to anger. And here comes our summary and conclusion. Verse 18, therefore the Lord was very angry with Israel and removed them out of his sight. None was left but the tribe of Judah only. And so as we read that, we should just pause. We should grieve. We should be sad. It's meant to sober us. If we're humble, it should cause us the one eye that we were reading this with to be thinking about our own actions. It should cause us to consider our own dealings with God. Who and what we serve. I love that word secret. What we do in secret. Whether we discard or embrace the godly counsel around us. Whether we discard or embrace God's way. Whether we are stubborn or whether we're humble. That's the eye that should look into our heart. Now with the eye that we're looking at history, we have some good things to come. But right now, it's just sadness and grief. And that's where we'll end this lesson. Father, we thank you for these history lessons and we thank you for the understanding that you give us, Lord. That you never, even though it might sound in this passage like you're crumpling them up and throwing them away, yet Lord, you are working in the background. And you have yet good things in store for your people. This is to discipline them. And Lord, it will be effective. We know that from our Bible. We know that they will discard the worship of idols after this. But Lord, there's a lot that we can process. We've drawn out a few things to apply to our own lives. And I pray, Lord, that you would help us. Just whatever you've spoken to us, Lord, help us to put those things into action. Whether it's about the power of influence or the dangers of being progressive and looking at the things and the ways of people who don't love you. Lord, pigeonholing people and not really thinking that they can change when we know that you think that they can. Lord, whatever it is that you're speaking to us, I pray that our hearts would be humble. We would hear from you and we would know you better from seeing what you have done with your people in history. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.