Lesson 26 - II Kings 17 & 18

[Music] [Music] as we resumed our study of second Kings let's review a little bit we're in chapter 17 and at the time this was at the time when the Northern Kingdom called itself Israel and alternatively Ephraim this kingdom that was begun by Jeroboam after Solomon's death the northern kingdom has just come to an end to the south of Israel laid Judah which was still being ruled by the descendants of David now the northern kingdom is usually said to be the territory of ten tribes see the Jordan River here of ten tribes and that eventually gave way to the legend of course of the Ten Lost Tribes but in fact consisted of seven tribes plus about half the clans of minissha we get to the number ten when we add in some other Israelite tribes that lived on the east side of the Jordan River the tribes of GAD and Reuben and half of the clans are of monisha these two-and-a-half tribes is they're usually called we're not actually part of that northern kingdom but they did firmly ally and identify themselves with the northern kingdom thus even for nations of that era saw these trans jordanian Israelite tribes as being part of that northern kingdom and this explains why when Hosea the latest and what would prove to be that last and final king of Israel when he rebelled against his master Assyria king Shulman Esser of Assyria attacked Israel and responds well it was those two-and-a-half tribes on the east bank of the Jordan River that he attacked and conquered first so the northern kingdom was no more the ten tribes were sent to far-flung settlements in the vast Assyrian Empire in some years after some years had passed settlers from various other conquered nations were sent to the former Israelite territory to repopulate it this was the way that Assyria controlled their empire it broke down the social fabric of nations and kingdoms it had overrun by deporting the bulk of the indigenous population and then bringing in people from other lands it was a kind of geopolitical musical chairs and truth be told this system worked quite well in keeping the citizens of Assyria quiet and unable to fight back now Judah found itself unconquered but it was dependent upon the imperial power of Assyria this had been agreed to by King Ahaz of Judah in exchange for his retaining his throne the usual vassal arrangement whereby a cause was subservient to the king of Assyria and Judah was required to send regular shipments of tribute to Assyria in order to maintain that arrangement not only did this severely damaged Judah's economy but it brought great shame upon the Jews of Judah that they would be under the control of a heathen Authority so with that let's reread a portion of 2nd Kings 17 to establish a basis for today's lesson if you have a complete Jewish Bible please turn to page mm 422 422 we're gonna start reading at verse 20 for the king of asher of syria brought people from Bobble kuta a waha Mott and safar vyi and settled them in the cities of Shah Marone in place of the people of Israel they took possession of Samaria and lived in its cities when they first came to live there they did not fear out an eye therefore out and I sent Lyons among them which killed some of them so they went to the king of Ashur the nation's you carried away and settled in the cities of Samaria aren't familiar with the rules for worshipping the god of the land therefore he sent Lions among them and they are there killing them because they're not familiar with the rules for worshiping the god of the land in a response the king of Assyria gave this order take back one of the Kohanim one of the priests you brought from there have him go and live there and have him teach them the rules for worshiping the God of the land so one of the priests they had carried away captive from Samaria came and lived in Beit el and he taught them how they should fear out an eye nevertheless every nation made gods of their own put them in the temples on the high places which the Sumerians had made every nation in the cities where they lived thus the people from Babel made Sukkot band note those from Kuta made Nergal those from hermit made Ozma the team made nikka's and tar talked and the safar team burned up their children in the fire as they as sacrifices to a drama lack and anomaly the gods of the safar I mean so they feared Adonai while at the same time the appointed for themselves priests from among themselves to preside the high places and they would sacrifice for them in the temples on the high places they both fear dad and I and serve their own gods the customary manner among the nation from which they had been taken away to this day they continue to follow their former pagan customs they don't fear I tonight they don't follow the regulations and rulings Torah or mitzvot from which out and I order the descendants of Jacob to whom he gave the name Israel with whom Anne and I had made a covenant and charged them do not fear other gods or bow down to them serve them or sacrifice to them on the contrary or to fear out and I who brought you out of the land of Egypt with great power and outstretched arm worship him sacrificed to Him you took you are to observe forever the laws and rulings Torah and commandments which he wrote for you you are not to fear other gods you are not to forget the Covenant I made with you no you must not fear other gods but must fear Adonai your God then he will rescue you from the power of all your enemies however they didn't listen they followed their old practices so these nations mixed fearing nations mixed fearing Adonai with serving their carved idols likewise their children and to this day their descendants do the same as their ancestors did now in verse 24 we get an abbreviated record of some of the people who are sent to Israel to repopulate it and we're going to see that rather than call the area of repopulation Israel or the northern kingdom the ancient editor this is key ancient editor of second Kings used the term Sumeria and while the city of Samaria had been the capital city of the Northern Kingdom of Israel since the exile of the ten tribes the term Samaria came to be used to describe a general region that expiry of the city that extended it came to be called general region that extended for many miles in all directions from the city of Samaria by Yeshua's day some 700 years later Sumeria was still a prominent name and it was even adopted by the Roman Empire as the name for one of the provinces of the former Holy Land which it now controlled and by the way just to confuse things a little bit somehow when Bible Translators translated to English the Hebrew term for the people who inhabited Samaria a key God added and the result was that the English Bible calls these people Samaritans instead of Sumerians thus in the famous Bible story of the Good Samaritan it really ought to be called the good Sumerian a Samaritan and the Sumerian then are the same thing their residents of Samaria you're with me now we need to note that there is a significant time lag between the end of verse 23 and the start of verse 24 in chapter 17 several years passed actually how many years is difficult to discern but probably around a decade now one must understand even though the accepted date of the conquering and the Exile of the Northern Kingdom is 722 or 723 BC that doesn't mean that all the Hebrews were expelled and sent to the Assyrian Empire at the same time they were sent away in groups over a period of several years so there wasn't a mass overnight exodus like when the Hebrews left Egypt rather it was like a balloon slowly deflating the Hebrew population decreased steadily and then at some point the Assyrian authorities decided it was time to start bringing in some colonists from other conquered territories to make good use of the former Israelite Kingdom by now King Salman Esser of Assyria who had conquered Israel was dead the new king was asar haedong and it was during a Tsar Hans administration that foreigners from Babylon and koota and neva and Hamas and safar volume were forcibly moved from their home nations to the territory of Samaria now briefly the name Babylon is referring to not to the city of Babylon but rather to the nation to the kingdom of Babylon Kuta was a tiny nation that lay about 15 miles northeast of the city of Babylon a vow was a city on the Euphrates River there was near a place called hvar Hamas is in Syria and Saif our theme is sapore now safar volume is a plural world word it means two cities or or twin cities and indeed sapore the southernmost city of Mesopotamia occupied both banks of the Euphrates River it was generally people from these places that were sent to occupy Samaria that and then from Hamas area of Syria but what we find in verse 25 is that naturally these people brought their gods and gods systems with them to Samaria as inflexible as Assyria was about deporting people from their homelands their policy was to be tolerant in allowing people to retain the worship of their own national gods the Assyrian religion was not forced upon them thus we're told they didn't fear Jehovah now this is a good place to pause and explain a phrase that we hear over and over especially in the Old Testament and that phrase is to fear one God or another in Hebrew the word is Yahweh Yahweh and while the English translation to the word fear is not wrong per se it has to be taken in the Old English sense not in the modern English sense that is to fear a king or a god meant to show respect and reverence thus and modern Christianese we rightly say that to fear a god generally means to worship that God observe that God's rules and regulations this is not about being scared of that God or walking around in terror of that God that said ancient Middle Eastern societies firmly believed in these gods and they were leery of them because everybody knew that a god or a goddess who took a dislike to you could cause you a lot of trouble and discomfort so when we are told that these new colonists in Samaria didn't fear the God of Israel it simply means they they didn't show respect to him by worshipping him as they did there many other gods but they did fully accept the universally held belief of that era that all nations and kingdoms had their own individual gods thus when Lions began attacking the new settlers of Samaria of course they saw this is an act of vengeance from the local deity a deity that they knew nothing about and in fact they were right it was Yehovah who allowed the growing lion population to attack the new folks and while we're talking about lions let me point out that at one time indeed the entire region of Canaan was lion territory Lions were always a problem for the Israelites however is the Hebrew population grew and settled in villages and cities the lion habitat was encroached upon lions were hunted and killed when so the lion population was greatly controlled and diminished but since the Exile of those 10 tribes the lion population became less threatened by its only real predator humans and so the number of lions went through an explosive growth period well the settlers figured that the problem was they weren't worshipping the God of the land of Samaria and that was because they didn't know how they didn't know anything about Yehovah so SR fedone king of Assyria agreed to return one of the exiled Hebrew priests to Samaria so that he could teach the people how to worship this unknown God now notice how verse 28 explains that this Hebrew priest went to live in Beit el Beth El Beit el was one of the two cult cities of the religion of the northern kingdom is established by King Jeroboam in the late 90s BC the other cult site being in the northern city of Dan what we need to grasp is that although this priest was a Hebrew he was not a Levite priest rather this was one of the priests of the Golden Calf cult recall that King Jeroboam had two golden calf images built and then he declared that these were images of Jehovah God of Israel so since more than two centuries had passed since the people of the Northern Kingdom had begun worshiping these golden calves as the gods of Israel it was assumed by all the surrounding foreign nations that this was the legitimate religion of the Hebrews it's not unlike how many people around the world in our day who are Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu see Catholicism and the Pope as a representative of all Christianity so while on the surface I don't know it seems like a pretty good thing that a Hebrew priest would be given the mission of teaching the new foreign colonists of Samaria about the God of Israel in fact what he taught them was the apostate religion of Jeroboam the golden calf and the result is what one might expect since the Golden Calf image was used as a supposedly legitimate Idol of Jehovah the foreign settlers worshiped it as well as all the images of their own gods they brought with them and there's no evidence that the Hebrew priest of Beit el discouraged them from doing that since that was essentially the way the system had worked for the ten northern tribes anyway so the settlers reused the high places that the people of the northern tribes had built and they worshiped their various gods there we're told that the Babylonians made Sukkot Begnaud now while some Bibles imply that Sukkot they note is a God in fact there's no ancient evidence of a God of that name further in Hebrew that phrase means something like booths of the daughters many reliable archaeologists and Assyria lodgest think that what this is indicating isn't the name of a god but rather that structures called coat they note were built to house the idol of a god or a goddess and the best guess is that since it was a God worshiped by daughters females the God was likely a stressed the goddess of fertility the settlers from Kuta made Nergal this was the Babylonian god of the plague lord of the underworld land of the dead so it was a religion in honor of a death cult the Syrians from Hamas made Ozma and the ancient rabbis say that this was a God represented by a male goat the people from Allah worshiped Neha's and talked nika's was the form of a dog thar talked the form of a donkey but the worst of all was the deity of the people from safar vayam who sacrificed their children as burnt offerings to gods they called a drama left Namah lack well verse 32 and 33 explains that they appointed priests from among themselves to do their sacrificing for them at these many high places and at the same time they worshipped Jehovah God of Israel the editor of second Kings explains in verse 34 that still in his time the colonists behaved this way they do the rituals that the Hebrew priests of the Golden Calf cult taught them but they don't follow the ways of the Torah or of God's commandments now that sounds a little bit confusing if not contradictory until one understands the history of the Sumerians so from here forward to the end of the chapter we get statements from the Lord admonishing these people for not following his laws and commandments and for them worshipping other gods instead of worship worshiping him and him alone he reminds them they were under the Covenant God made with them and that covenant prohibited them from worshiping other gods now here's the thing I thought the people who were doing all of this mixed up worship were Gentile settlers forcibly brought to Samaria by Assyria's King why would God say that these people had been his covenant people and now they weren't a baying his covenant the answer is there was a remaining remnant of the ten tribes still living in Samaria and they readily mixed themselves with these foreign colonists these Israelites became racially ethnically and spiritually mixed with these foreign Gentiles we know that even in Jesus day many Sumerians insisted that they were Israelites despite their aberrant religious beliefs and worship practices this is why we are told in the New Testament that the sumerians the Samaritans were despised by the Jews and the Galileans too for that matter the Sumerians were a mixed breed dating back to the exact time we're talking about in 2nd Kings 17 this is when it all started but what galled the Galileans and the Judean stew the point of hatred was that these Sumerians claimed to be the legitimate Hebrews and that the perverted religion they practice was the real and legitimate Hebrew religion as the opposed to the one that was practiced at Jerusalem in the Holy Temple now I would like to hold this up as a good however not precise illustration of where the ecclesia of Christ has arrived in the 21st century AD the bulk of Christianity as did the Sumerians completely denies the tour of God denies that Israel is God's covenant people denies that God's laws and commandments are relevant to us further there is an implied if not outright defined Church doctrine that says that the God of the Old Testament of the Hebrews is a fundamentally different God than the god of the New Testament and of the Gentiles we have as did the Sumerians abandon God's observances his appointed times such as Sabbath such as the seven biblical feasts and we created new ones that were born of pagan cults and practices it's common for laymen and church authorities to admit that while it is historically undeniable that things like bunnies and fir trees were the core of heathen worship rituals nowhere present in the biblical worship and in fact we're expressly prohibited by the law of Moses that by incorporating those same things and our modern worship and observance observances we've cleanse them we've Christianized them in the name of Jesus that is what the Hebrews of jeroboams Golden Calf cult claimed that is what the Sumerians claimed and God judged them terribly for it wake up Church wake up we're in great danger and we can't be in God's will when we follow those same ways for no other reason than we like them because those customs have become embedded in our society and in our family to say they are harmless or they're just for fun or that because God is love he understands you know that might satisfy our desire to rationalize the truth and therefore not have to face a change but the Lord despises those things there's going to be a price to pay Christian or not if your holy was willing to exile his own chosen people caused them to suffer greatly for their apostasy why would we think that we're going to get a pass for behaving essentially the same way let's move on to second Kings 18 second Kings 18 page 4:23 if you have a complete Jewish Bible it was in the third year of Hoshea the son of a la king of Israel that his qiao the son of Ahaz king of Judah began his reign he was 25 years old when he began his reign and he ruled for 29 years in yerushalaim his mother's name was a V the daughter of Zecharia he did what was right from anodised perspective following the example of everything David his ancestor had done he removed the high places he smashed the standing zones cut down the Asherah broken pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made because in those days the people of Israel were making offerings to it calling it nahusha tun he put his trust in Adonai the God of Israel after him there was no one like him amongst all the kings of Judah nor had there been among those before him for he clung to ad and I he did not leave off following him but he obeyed his commandments which ad and I had given to Moses so ad and I was with him and whenever he went out to battle he did well he rebelled against the king of asher and he refused to be his vassal he drove the philistines back to gaza and he laid waste to their territory from the watchtower to the fortified city it was in the fourth year of king his qiao Hezekiah which was the seventh year of Hoshea a son of a la king of Israel that Shulman s ur king of Usher advanced against Sumerian laid siege to it at the end of three years they captured it that is Samaria was captured in the sixth year of Hezekiah which was the ninth year of Hosea king of Israel the king of Assyria carried Israel away captive to Assyria and settled them in Halle in hobb war on the goes on River in the cities of the Medes this happened because they did not heed the voice of Adonai their God they violated his covenant everything that Moses the servant of ad and I had ordered them to do they would neither hear it nor do it and in the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah Sennacherib king of Assyria advanced against all the fortified cities of Judah and he captured them his key al king of Judah sent this message to the king of asher at Lakeisha i've done wrong if you will go away from me I'll pay you whatever penalty you impose upon me the king of Ashur imposed on his cow a penalty of 10 tons of silver and a ton of gold Hezekiah gave him all the silver that could be found in the house of adenine and the Treasuries of the royal palace it was at that time that Hezekiah stripped the gold from the doors of the sanctuary of Adonai from the door posts which Hezekiah king of Judah himself had overlaid and gave it to the king of asher from la quiche this king of asher sent tartan Rob Sarris and Rob Chuck a to King Hezekiah in Yerushalayim with a large army they advanced and they came to Jerusalem and upon arrival they came and positioned themselves by the aqueduct aqueduct from the upper pool which is by the road to the launders field they summoned the king but those answering the call were Elia came the son of Hilkiah who was in charge of all the household shave na the general secretary and yo ah the son of a soft the Foreign Minister Roth Chaka addressed them tell Hezekiah here's what the Great King the king of Assyria says what makes you so confident do you think that mere spoken words can constitute strategy and strength for battle in whom then are you trusting when you rebel against me like this now look relying on Egypt is like using a broken stick as a staff when you lean on it it punctures your hand that's what Pharaoh king of Egypt is like for anyone who puts his trust in him but if you tell me we trust in that and I our God then isn't he the one whose high places and altars Hezekiah has removed telling Judah and Jerusalem you must worship before this altar in Jerusalem all right then make a wager with my lord the king of Asher I will give you two thousand horses if you can even find enough riders for the how then can you repulse even one of my Master's lowest-ranked on me army officers yet you're relying on Egypt for chariots and writers do you think I've come up to this place to destroy it without a denies approval I don't I said to me attack this land and destroy it heli Hakeem the son of Hilkiah shebna and yock said to rob shaka please speak to your servants in aramaic since we understand it don't speak with us in hebrew while the people on the wall are listening but rahkshi k answered them did my master sent me to deliver my message just to your master and yourselves didn't he send me to address the men sitting on the wall who like you are going to soon be eating their own dung and drinking their own urine then Rob's Shiki stood up and speaking loudly in Hebrew said hear what this great King the king of Ashur says this is what the King says don't let Hezekiah deceive you he won't be able to save you from the power of the king of Assyria don't let Hezekiah make you trust in AD and I by saying ad and I will surely save us this city will not be given over to the king of Assyria don't listen to Hezekiah for this is what the king of Assyria says make peace with me surrender to me then every one of you can eat from his vine and fig tree and drink the water in his own cistern until I come and take you away to a land like your own a lot of land with grain and wine a land with bread and vineyards a land with olive trees and honey so that you can live and not die don't listen to Hezekiah he's only deluding you when he says a denial save us has any God of any nation ever saved his land from the power of the king of Assyria where are the gods of himavan Arpad where's the gods of the safari in Henan eva did they save Sumeria from my power where is the god of any country that has saved his country from my power so that ad and I might be able to save Jerusalem from my power but the people kept still and didn't answer him so much as a word for the Kings order was don't answer him then le Hakeem the son of Hilkiah who is in charge of the household shape nah the general secretary and Nowak the son of a soft the Foreign Minister went to Hezekiah with their clothes torn and reported to him what rob Chacon said now the past several chapters have alternated between focusing on the northern kingdom and on then on the southern kingdom that moralist comes to an end with chapter 18 because the northern kingdom has succumbed to his apostasy and unfaithfulness ands been exiled to Assyria all that remains of the Hebrews living in the promised land now is Judah but they are living there on borrowed time they are under the thumb of the king of Assyria as a vassal state the chapter opens by explaining that Judah had just crowned a new king hezekiah son of Ahaz and as the usual means of synchronizing the reigns between the king of israel and the kings of judah were told that his qiao began his reign over judah in the third year that Hosea was king of Israel now he's KL means strength of God and it is a most appropriate name for this reformer Hezekiah quickly proved to be the antithesis of his father a cause 25 years old when he took the throne Hezekiah proved to be a righteous King and would do all he could to right the wrongs of his apostate predecessor he ruled for 29 years now Hezekiah was a throwback from the recent long line of wicked kings and he compares favorably with his ancestor David what made David so great in God's eyes was certainly not a lack of sinful behavior rather it was his determination to resist idolatry David did not permit idol worship in his kingdom nor did he worship other gods himself his Qiao was cut from the same mold he was not perfect and he would succumb to some of his fears but he resisted worshiping other gods and he did not tolerate it in his kingdom I think it's difficult to find a more striking contrast between a son and his father the between Hezekiah and Hoth recall that haha' was a blasphemous King that openly denied the sovereignty of Yehovah now perhaps the most defining of the several moments of apostasy that AHA's committed is recorded in Isaiah 7 let's go there now for a refresher turn your Bibles just shortly over to Isaiah chapter 7 just a few pages over if you have a complete Jewish Bible we're going going to go to page 446 446 we're just going to read seven or eight verses starting at verse 3 then odd and I said to Yeshua Isaiah go out now to meet a cause you and your son sharra shoo at the end of the aqueduct from the upper pool on the road to launderers field and say to him take care to stay calm and be unafraid don't be demoralized by these two smoldering stumps of firewood by the blazing anger of ret scene and Iram the son of Ramallah or because of ROM Ephraim and the son of Amalia have been plotting against you thinking we will invade Judah tear it apart divided among ourselves and appoint the son of Tavel as king there because this is what adonai says it won't occur it won't happen because the head of Iram is dama sack and the head of the dam ASEC Damascus his Rhett seen in 65 years Ephraim Israel will be broken and it will cease to be a people the head of Ephraim is Samaria the head of Samaria is the son of Ramallah without firm faith you will not be firmly established I don't know spoke again to a cause and he said ask Adonai your God to give you a sign ask it anywhere from the depths of shield to the heights above but a cause answered I won't ask I won't test that at night the situation was that King Ahaz and Judah were under threat of attack from Syria and the Northern Kingdom of Israel who unbelievably were allies at this time and together they were fully capable of doing what they said they do tear Judah apart and divided between themselves AHA was trying to decide what to do and he had determined that he would go to Assyria for help but the Lord sent the prophet Isaiah to King a cause with a message of mercy and deliverance the Lord Himself would intervene he would stop the evil alliance from succeeding in their plans to destroy Judah and depose a hoss but when God wanted in an acknowledgment from a cause that he would choose the path of relying on Yehovah for the salvation of Judah a cause flatly refused as is stated in Isaiah 7 verses 10 and 11 ad and I spoke again to a cause and he said ask Adonai to give you a sign ask it anywhere from the depths of shield to the heights above in other words anything anything ask for any sign and a cause answered I won't I won't ask but King Ahaz had a stark choice sitting before him submit to odd and I and be saved by the power and the Word of God or submit to heathen Assyria and be subjugated 2nd Kings 16 records that his choice was an irrational refusal to accept God's offer of mercy and instead he went to an enemy for help [Applause] second King 16 7 and 8 says this then a hast sent messengers to Ty glass pilots or king of Assyria with this message I am your servant in your son come up save me from the king of a ram and the king of Israel who were attacking me a cause took the silver and gold that was in the house of Adonai and then the treasures of the royal palace and he said it as a present the king of Assyria the result was that Assyria attacked a rather accepted a houses offer of putting Judah under a serious control in Assyria indeed attack rather Assyria indeed attacked Syria on Judas behalf and that stopped the attack on Judah in his tracks but the consequences for Judah for rejecting God and for creating this unholy alliance well especially on a spiritual level it was catastrophic but now several years later in his mercy God has raised up a good King for Judah his qiao and as we read in 2nd kings 18:4 that in addition to removing all of the high places around Judah where improper worship was taking place he also had all the pagan religious pillars all the Asherah trees cut down but then we hear that he also destroyed the ancient pole with the bronze serpent on it that moses had constructed 600 years earlier out in the world why would Hezekiah destroy such a sacred object to these Israelites one that the Lord Himself ordered constructed to counteract a plague of snake bites first it's surprising to learn that some of those wandering Israelites had apparently carried that pole around with them long after its purpose was finished second is that what is even more surprising they had given the pole a name nahusha ton and they had begun praying to it begun worshipping it as an idol however it is equally clear that they didn't worship as a worship it as an alternative God but rather they worshiped it as an object holy to the God of Israel is that all that's so wrong what would a great object lesson we have here the Bible lists many objects that both Christians and Jews have taken well beyond their intent and purpose and status st. Christopher's metals statues of Mary and Jesus print perhaps even Calvary's cross it just goes to show that because God creates an object for a purpose or a common object winds up getting used for a divine purpose that does not render the object itself divine nor does it indicate that the object has inherent an independent power of its own the pole with the brazen serpent was intended by Jehovah for a one-time only use but many Hebrews decided that the results were so stunning it must have some kind of a magical power within it and the pole upon which hung that healing serpent was a divine image or even itself it was trimmed intrinsically divine so they kept it generation after generation after generation and they worshiped before it practically every Christian commentator compares Christ's cross with the pole where the serpent homeland in fact Messiah Yeshua did it to everyone who was saved on account of Jesus probably knows John 3:16 for God so loved the world that He gave His only and unique son so that everyone who trusts in him may have eternal life instead of being utterly destroyed however what issue was said in conjunction with that statement just two verses earlier ought to be seared in our minds in the two previous verses he said just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert so must the Son of Man be lifted up so that everyone who trusts in him may have eternal life see Jesus Christ made his own comparison between the bronze serpent and its wooden pole and the word wooden pole that he would have to be lifted up upon the cross of crucifixion and he certainly didn't do it in a negative fashion but I wonder what will he say when he returns and he points out the device of his execution has become the chief symbol of our faith in Him and both worked the docks and evangelical Christianity what must he think as he finds people praying at the foot of the pole the cross or using them in exorcisms or wearing them around our necks is ornaments or Goodluck charms or jewel encrusted status symbols I'm not saying hey these things necessarily amounts to worshiping the Cross but I've been to some congregations that openly do openly the story of Hezekiah righteously and appropriately destroying that pole in a bronze serpent was not because the Israelites kept it as a remembrance of what happened in the wilderness that's fine it was because over time the pole in that bronze serpent became important objects of worship this needs to be a flashing yellow light of caution for modern believers because it is an excruciating ly short and dangerous leap from possessing and admiring and looking upon an endearing object that reminds us of our faith and our trust in God to using it as the object of our faith when that line becomes blurred the Lord has a name for it he calls it idolatry will continue chapter 18 next time father god there's so much more we need to know about you but what's most important is that you loved us enough to save us and that you knew the only way you could save us was to send yourself to do it and you did it in the form of Yeshua HaMashiach and he died on a cross for us but father that cross ought not be our object of worship it's the one who hung there that we need to worship and especially his father so we worship you Father we love these Bibles that are your word but we ought not worship them either we thank you for having a nice warm in the winter and cool in the summer secure place with lots of things that are in it to remind us of our faith in you but not worship any of them nor make them all that important in our lives father God we love you we worship you we honor you only you are truly holy holy you are intrinsically holy all else that can be called holy is because you call it holy and you imbue us with holiness there is no other way so father as we leave this place for those who have been declared holy because of art faith and trust in you and your son Yeshua let that light of your holiness shine in the darkness let us always remember that as people come to us because they see that light to be humble and explain quickly that light is not us that light is you we're just a carrier father I pray again now that soon your people of Israel would raise their hands and say of Yeshua he who comes in the name of the Lord that they might be saved but father save them any way from their enemies at this point be a fierce warrior God for them at this time that smashes their enemies and protects your people father we love your people we're part of your people and they are in great danger be with the Lord love them even more cleanse them right where they are just like you did for us father as we head out today and as we have a Thanksgiving to celebrate soon let us remember father that this Thanksgiving is a Thanksgiving to you it's a Thanksgiving to You Father for the abundance that you have given us in this nation and how sad I am father that so many would have us pull away and say we're not a Christian nation we're a secular nation but father in my heart were not and I know from history we're not and I will not accept that father we were created by you with a purpose but what happens when we shun that purpose father we become like any other nation and our purpose is gone father restore that purpose among us that we may serve you and serve you well blessed be your holy name all God's people said [Music] [Music] [Music] yes you issue mission you

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Keywords: II Kings, Old Testament, Seed of Abraham, Torah Class, Tom Bradford, Bible Study

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Length: 51min 16sec (3076 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2019