Life is not a series of chances; life is a series of choices.
We serve a God that is more than fair, and even more than just; He is unimaginably gracious. One of those graces is that even in his Omnipotent power he grants us options and the freedom to choose His Kingdom. But even when we make the wrong choices, He reigns omnipotent.
Sunday we will survey the kings. Some chose well, others chose woefully. To many, this section of Scripture is a closed book. It seems a confusing, mystifying mess of names we do not recognize, and events that seem ancient beyond relevance. But in these kings and in their kingdoms we find the Gracious King of kings reaching out to people like us.
There are two ways to live our lives: we can learn from the choices of others or we can take our chances and make uninformed choices that lead to blessings or bondage.
If you want to live freely and drink in life deeply, we must look back and learn from the choices of those who have made this journey before us. Let us choose to lean into a faith-filled life that comes from trusting the King of kings.
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Buddy Hoffman
Series: One Story: Digging Deeper
February 10, 2013
Fractured Kingdom: Overview of the Kings
1-2 Kings
If you’re here this morning and you don’t have a Bible with you, slip up your hand. We would love to put a Bible in your hand. You really are going to need it this morning, and we’re looking at a lot of Scripture this morning. If there are folks in the lobby, we have space in here, so we welcome you in. Don’t feel like you’re interrupting; just come on in.
We’ve had a busy weekend. We had a high school and middle school conference. Did they call it Passion and Purity? Is that what they called it? What’d they call that conference? Did they call it just Passion? It’d be a good idea to add purity to that. They used to call it LSD Weekend…Love, Sex, and Dating…but none of the schools would let them wear the tee shirts, so they moved away from the LSD and now it’s Pursuing Passion. Okay. We had a men’s retreat, and we had intimacy, but they’re not talking about that. Get it? You didn’t, did you? Anyway. We also had a wedding.
Pray for Athens. Athens makes me nervous. When you’re a pastor, and it’s not your very best sermon ever, people go, “Well, that wasn’t the best sermon I’ve ever heard him preach, but we’re going to go back next week. Give him another shot.” Midtown, they’re used to us, and here, they’re used to us, and Monroe, they’re used to us. But I could feel in the first couple of Athens gatherings, except for some of you who went up, and the few from Midtown… This is getting way, way back in my life, but it was kind of like you were on your first date, and it was like 300 kids who were looking at you like, “Do I like you or not?”
Fortunately, we have some of our kids who grew up here, and they’re up there. They still like us, and your kids are doing well. How many of you are Georgia people? You grew up or you supported the Georgia Bulldogs…Bulldog Nation? Any of you Bulldog Nation? Okay, now let me ask you a question. Which would be more important to you, that a really great kingdom church be planted in Athens or that the Bulldogs win a national championship?
Now then, if you have your Bibles, open them up to the book of 1 Kings, and I want you, in your Bibles, if you have Bibles, and you don’t have one of those electronic gizmos… You know, I want to do one more thing. There’s a family here… Where are they? Back here! They were missionaries in Afghanistan. I can say that, because you’re not there anymore.
How many of you remember when you raised all the money for iPods? Yep. Well, they got one, and they were part of that team over there that you… As a church, we loaded (God bless them) every sermon I had on there, and we talked to everybody else we could, Piper and everybody else who would donate sermons, and Hosanna! Music donated a ton of music, and we just loaded that baby full of music and songs. We didn’t know anything else we could do, so that was our best shot.
But they made me very sick and almost killed me, I want you to know. I ended up in the hospital with these people, but they prayed me out of it. You don’t want to go to the hospital in Pakistan, I promise you. Spring was with us. She came into the hospital room and she says, “Dad, I can’t stand the thought of watching you die.” I said, “Well then, you’re going to have to go outside.”
I’m kind of delaying this sermon because I’m nervous about it, because you see your handout sheet there? Okay, this is the first time (and I’ve been preaching since like 1976) ever in my life that I handed a spreadsheet out for a set of sermon notes. If you’re visiting here with us this morning, we don’t normally do this. I’ve really sweated this message, but what you have in your hand is a list of all the kings of Israel and Judah and the prophets who go with them and the order in which they are, because I really wanted to bring some order to this series we’re doing.
If you have your Bible, look at this. This is 1 and 2 Kings. In the Hebrew Bible, originally this was one book. Okay? This was one book. Now if you take your Bible and you look over to 1 and 2 Chronicles, that right there was also one book. These two books cover exactly the same time period. They overlap, but they tell the story from different perspectives.
We’re doing this thing through the Bible in the episodes. We have a notebook you can use that has that line out, but here are the basic symbols. I’m hoping they’re in order. You see I’m holding them up so you can actually look at them in advance so that when I ask you, you can go, “Oh, you already showed that to me. I know the answer.”
See, this first section is what? Kingdom Foundations. Oh wow. You guys are so much better than the first service. There’s a symbol of it. What is it? It’s a tree, because it’s the garden. Remember this? This is Genesis 1-11, and it’s Kingdom Foundations. It’s how we got here, why we’re here, who we are, what is God like, what is the kingdom of God like, how things went horribly awry. See how I’m showing you this in advance so you will know?
This is Kingdom Families. Remember this? What’s the symbol there? The star, because what did God say to Abraham? “Go outside. Look up into the heavens. If you can count the stars, you will see how many your descendants there will be.”
Now in the section we’re going to look at this morning, God makes this promise to David that there will always be someone who will be of the royal family who can sit on the throne forever. You’re going to find, if you look at that sheet, there’s only one queen on there. She is Queen Athaliah. What number is she? She’s in like number seven. She’s bad. She is evil. She is bad. She is the daughter of Jezebel. Now how would you like to marry your son off to the daughter of Jezebel? I mean, Jezebel was a wicked woman. She was a wicked, wicked woman.
Athaliah tries to kill off all the descendants of David. There’s comes a point in which she thinks she has absolutely killed every descendent of David, but one of the priests hides one of the kids in the temple, and he stays there for seven years. Can you imagine that? Do you remember when we talked about God’s promise to David, God’s Oath to Earth? Can you believe that that promise God made came down to the existence of one single child?
So you have Kingdom Foundations, Kingdom Families. Then you have Kingdom Freedom. If you’re reading through this narratively, this is Exodus and Numbers. If you want to read through it narratively, you actually can skip Leviticus. Is that a blessing to anybody? I’m going to come back in one day and preach on Leviticus, and you’re going to like it.
Then there’s Kingdom Fighting. This is Joshua and Judges. I’m not going to go back there. I’m so tempted. We looked at the Famous Kings. Who are the famous kings? Saul, David, and Solomon. So Solomon starts off in 1 Kings. If you’ll remember, What Does a King Look Like? Solomon does exactly opposite everything the king is supposed to do. Now we’re in Fractured Kingdom.
Last week, we look at Who’s At Your Table? The symbol for that, by the way, is what? I knew you didn’t know. It’s the bull. Here’s where that symbol comes from. Look at chapter 12. There is a guy named Jeroboam. Jeroboam is the first king of the northern kingdom. I want you to look at this just for a minute. “Jeroboam then built up the city of Shechem in the hill country of Ephraim, and it became his capital. Later he went and built up the town of Peniel.” (1 Kings 12:25) Later, that nation’s capital is going to be Samaria. That’s going to be under King Ahab.
“Jeroboam thought to himself, ‘Unless I am careful, the kingdom will return to the dynasty of David. When these people go to Jerusalem to offer sacrifices at the Temple of the LORD, they will again give their allegiance to King Rehoboam of Judah. They will kill me and make him their king instead.’
So on the advice of his counselors…” (1 Kings 12:26-28) Now that’s actually where we were looking at last week. Who is at your table? Who is the CEO of Your Life, Incorporated? Who’s the King of Kings? Who sits at your table? Who gives you advice? I hope last week you went away with that little list and maybe wrote out some people. Some of you needed to fire some people who sit at your table. You need good counselors.
In Jeremiah 18:18, there seems to be an indication of three ways God gave real guidance to the nation of Israel. One was the prophets. The prophets came and they spoke the word of the Lord as the Holy Spirit came on them. It was the prophets. One was the priests, and they taught the law of God. Another one was the counselors, and they gave wisdom from God. They gave them advice how the prophecy and how the law impacted this particular current situation.
He goes to his counselors. “…the king made two gold calves.” Literally, bulls. “He said to the people, ‘It is too much trouble for you to worship in Jerusalem. Look, Israel, these are the gods who brought you out of Egypt!'” (1 Kings 12:28) Those words echo Aaron when they bowed down before the bull, the golden calf in the desert.
“He placed these calf idols in Bethel and in Dan—at either end of his kingdom. But this became a great sin, for the people worshiped the idols, traveling as far north as Dan to worship the one there. Jeroboam also erected buildings at the pagan shrines and ordained priests from the common people—those who were not from the priestly tribe of Levi. And Jeroboam instituted a religious festival in Bethel…” (1 Kings 12:29-32)
It goes on down through here, and really what you find in the rest of these books, again and again it will say, “He went the way of Jeroboam. He went the way of Jeroboam.” What happens, and this is incredibly important for us to remember, is that we make decisions. That decision determines a direction, and that direction determines a destiny. That’s how the process works. We make a decision, but oftentimes we don’t consider the cost of those decisions. When we make a decision there’s a price that’s involved in making that decision, because it’s not just a decision; it’s a direction, and that direction will lead to a destiny.
Vince Dooley… Does everybody remember Vince? Coach Dooley. His wife was hilarious. She told this story one time. She said in one of the seasons that was going really good that Coach Dooley was deeply involved in the game film. He was just consumed with the season. It was coming up on her birthday, and she walked through the room, and he just kind of offhandedly said, “What do you want for your birthday?” She was so mad with him, she said, “A divorce.” She said he didn’t even look up. She said he just responded, “I wasn’t planning on spending that much.”
When we make decisions, there are consequences that come with those choices. I know it’s kind of hard because sometimes we think about choices and we think about the sovereignty of God. I mean, do we really have choices? Because God is ultimately sovereign. Let me just say this to you. If you don’t know this (this is incredibly important), a deep sense of God’s sovereignty, a deep confidence in God’s sovereignty is directly connected with man’s sanity.
If you think or you don’t think or you’re not able to rest in the fact that God is ultimately sovereign, I promise you, you will be filled with worry. You’ll be filled with fret. You’ll be filled with feeling like you have to do it all, you have to accomplish it all. One of the things that 1 Kings and Chronicles answers so very clearly is that God is sovereign even amidst the choices, and sometimes extremely bad choices, of mankind and ultimately God is going to accomplish what he says he will accomplish.
It does not mean he will rob us of our choices. It doesn’t mean he’s going to move us around like a pawn, and, “No, you’re doing that now. You’re doing this now.” He allows us in his omnipotence… Now some of you, and I consider myself… This is something that is unbelievably perplexing to me, but the nice thing about being a pastor and a preacher and not being like a professor and a theologian is my job is just to preach it. I don’t have to explain it.
I don’t know! Is anybody else here comfortable with every once in a while, “I don’t know”? I don’t have a clue! If I could understand God’s sovereignty, then I guess I would be God. I don’t know how he manages to intertwine all of those things even amidst really bad choices. Now if you’re looking at your sheet there, and I doubt any of you, except maybe some of you CPA guys out there, are actually enthralled with spreadsheets, but if you look at your sheet there, let me explain it to you just a little bit.
Up on the top corner there, Deuteronomy 28-30. If we have time, we’ll come back in and read that. That is where they’re about to go in the land. Moses calls them to gather, and he says, “Today you need to make a choice. You need to make choice whether you will follow God and be blessed or you will not follow God and not be blessed. Here are the consequences if you choose to follow God. You’re going to be blessed. You’re going to be blessed. You’re going to be blessed. Here are the consequences if you fail to make that choice. You’re going to live under the curse. You’re going to live in a cursed environment. You’re going to move outside God’s blessing.”
Up here, where you see Judah and Israel, what you find is that this now in Israel’s history, it becomes a tale of two nations. Do any of you remember that book in literature? In eighth grade, you had to read Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Anybody else suffer through that? Actually, the only thing I remember about it is how it opens. It’s phenomenal.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period…”
Now then, that describes the kingdoms exactly. Some of the stories in the Kings are absolutely breathtaking. Do you know why? Because in this slot here, Judah, you might just write the number two. There are two tribes. There are just two. It is Judah and it is Benjamin, and they are a small little tribe, and they have a small little piece of ground. They don’t have a big army, and they really have not a lot going for them. The word Judah, by the way, means praise. David is from Judah, and Jesus is the Lion of the tribe of Judah. This is one of the things that is going on here.
The other nation now is called Israel. That’s one of the reasons it gets really confusing when you start reading through the Prophets, because it says, “O Judah, O Israel, O Jacob.” Now here’s what you need to know. Just jot that down next to Israel. There are several synonyms in the Prophets for Israel. One of them is Jacob. One of them is Israel. House of Jacob, Samaria, and Ephraim. Those are the synonyms you find for them. I know we’re tempted to kind of lean back and go, “Why can’t you just consistently interpret it all the same way?”
Well, it’s the same reason that when we talk about the United States, we don’t use the same phrase every time. Sometimes, we’ll refer to good Ol’ Uncle Sam. Sometimes, we’ll say America, which you do know there are other people in America besides the USA. There’s Canada. There’s Mexico. There’s Central America. There’s South America, but we are all Americans. We think everything is right here. But we call it America. We call it the USA. We call it our great land or whatever we want to call it.
Here is the reality that there are kings, and if you look down through there, there are 19 kings who lead the nation of Israel. I started to try to break this out into good kings and bad kings, but here’s the easy thing about Israel, the northern part. They’re all bad. Every single one of them is bad. One of them is the worst. It’s Ahab. Ahab is the worst of the worst of the worst.
Let me turn over there. Look at this. Look at chapter 16. “Ahab son of Omri began to rule over Israel in the thirty-eighth year of King Asa’s reign in Judah.” Do you see how they parallel? Asa is king in Judah. Omri is the king, but Ahab is his son, and he takes over. “He reigned in Samaria…” That’s another name for the nation. “…twenty-two years. But Ahab son of Omri did what was evil in the LORD’s sight, even more than any of the kings before him.
And as though it were not enough to follow the example of Jeroboam…” That’s the direction. That’s the example. That’s the way he went. Notice what he does. “…he married Jezebel, the daughter of King Ethbaal of the Sidonians…” (1 Kings 16:29-31) Now if you’ve ever been to Lebanon or if you’ve ever looked down the coast of Lebanon, there’s a little city there called Sidon.
If you’ve been around Grace for awhile, there’s a guy who just spoke here. He’s a good friend of mine. His name is Gary Witherall. He was actually a worker, a missionary, in Sidon, and his wife Bonnie was shot in Sidon by an al Qaeda operative. She was just working with pregnant mothers. I didn’t really want to go there because it gets me off track.
But Sidon was an unbelievably wicked place. I remember driving through Sidon with Gary one day, and he pulls off the side of the road. It’s not even like a big, historically-developed place. We walked down through this grassy pathway, and out into the opening is this big palace, the ruins of this palace. Down in the back of there, literally, is the throne of the king of the Sidonians. They not only had wrong worship; they sacrificed babies in this place. There were temple prostitutes, both male and female. The perversion that went on there and the oppression that went on there is not describable in mixed company or in public at all.
Ahab, it wasn’t enough that he was just as wicked as Jeroboam. He marries up with Jezebel. “…and he began to bow down in worship of Baal. First Ahab built a temple and an altar for Baal in Samaria.” (1 Kings 16:31-32) If you go with us to Israel in June, we’ll stop actually in a café, and you can walk up and you can see the ruins of Samaria that are there. You can look over into the Jezreel Valley and see Naboth’s vineyard down in the Jezreel Valley.
“Then he set up an Asherah pole. He did more to provoke the anger of the LORD, the God of Israel, than any of the other kings of Israel before him.” (1 Kings 16:33) Now then, here’s what’s interesting here. Drop down to chapter 17. Look at this. “Now Elijah…” Elijah’s name means My God is Yahweh. He goes to Ahab and he says, “As surely as the LORD, the God of Israel, lives—the God I serve—there will be no dew or rain during the next few years until I give the word!” (1 Kings 17:1)
It’s really interesting, he tells him to go and hide himself by this brook, which is further north, up into the range of Jezebel’s area. Then he tells him to even go up further, and he’s up there hiding under the very thumb of where Jezebel’s territory is. But here’s what I want to say, and I want you to absorb this a bit, because 1 Kings, 2 Kings, this book of Kings, is written to answer a question. The question that it’s written to answer…Is God fair?
Have you ever had something really terrible happen to someone or you look at the way the world is going and you just go, “Is God fair?” Because do you know how this book is going to end up? Look at the last chapter. Look at chapter 25. “So on January 15, during the ninth year of Zedekiah’s reign…” (2 Kings 25:1) That’s that last king over on that first column, the twentieth king of Judah.
If you look back to chapter 17, that’s where Samaria falls to Assyria. If you look, there’s a period of time lapse that the northern kingdom collapses and Assyria is wicked beyond imagination. They are more wicked than even the Sidonians. They have literally made a name for themselves by their brutal practices at war. They would stack up just like pyramids of skulls to demonstrate how powerful they were. They would impale people on poles alive.
In chapter 25, you see the end of Judah’s reign. “…King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon led his entire army against Jerusalem. They surrounded the city and built siege ramps against its walls. Jerusalem was kept under siege until the eleventh year of King Zedekiah’s reign.” (2 Kings 25:1-2) Now what you find is this same story is told at the end of 2 Chronicles. It is also told in Jeremiah 52.
“By July 18 in the eleventh year of Zedekiah’s reign, the famine in the city had become very severe, and the last of the food was entirely gone. Then a section of the city wall was broken down, and all the soldiers fled. Since the city was surrounded by the Babylonians, they waited for nightfall. Then they slipped through the gate between the two walls behind the king’s garden and headed toward the Jordan Valley.
But the Babylonian troops chased the king and caught him on the plains of Jericho, for his men had all deserted him and scattered. They took him to the king of Babylon at Riblah, where they pronounced judgment upon Zedekiah. They made Zedekiah watch as they slaughtered his sons. Then they gouged out Zedekiah’s eyes, bound him in bronze chains, and led him away to Babylon.” (1 Kings 25:3-7)
Is this fair? Is God fair? After all, they had the temple. They had the worship. They had everything that was there. What you find in 1 Kings, and the question that Chronicles asks is…Is there any hope? If you look down the right side of that sheet, about the middle, you’ll see the prophet Hosea. Hosea is the prophet to Israel, to Jacob. If you don’t know what that book is written to, it’s like listening in on half a telephone conversation. You really can’t figure it out, because what God says to Hosea is, “I want you to go marry an unfaithful woman.”
He does, and he has children. His wife again leaves him. He says, “I want to go find her and buy her back out of slavery.” He does, and she’s unfaithful again. Here’s what the book of Hosea is about. Even in this northern Israel where there is such wickedness, God still loves them. God still loves them. He writes in Hosea, “O Israel, how can I let you go? How can I abandon you? I love you. How can I do that?”
To the nation of Judah, read sometime Isaiah 5. In that Isaiah 5, God literally writes a love song to Judah and says, “You were a vineyard to me. I planted you. I watered you. I hedged you in. I kept the animals away from you. I cultivated you. What I really wanted was just good wine, but what I got out of you was just bitterness.”
What you find is that even in that abandonment, when we turn our back on God, God keeps pursuing us. I’m thankful for a God who does that. I’m thankful for a God who doesn’t just look at us and give us what we deserve. I think it was Bona who said, when they asked him, “Do you believe in karma?” he said, “No, I’m holding out for grace.” Amen?
What we find in this passage is in these stories, and I’m going to try to wrap this up a little bit, but we were created for story. You know that, don’t you? You can walk up and give propositional truth to somebody. You can say, “God loves you,” and it’s hard to figure out what that means, because God actually tells stories about this.
When you get over in the New Testament, in John 4, Jesus, who is the new David, who is the Son of David, who is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, he looks around at his disciples and he said, “I need to go to Samaria.” Do you know what the disciples said? “We don’t do Samaria. Sorry about that. Their food makes us sick. They’re polluted people up there. We don’t even talk to them, and we don’t mess with them.” Do you know what Jesus said? “If you’re going to follow me, you will.”
So they went in to Samaria, this place they had never been before in their lives…where Ahab reigned, where Jezebel reigned. They knew all these stories. We don’t. We don’t read these stories. They aren’t part of our DNA. The very fact they’re walking on this ground that is off limits, that’s like, “Why are we even here? They hate us and we hate them.”
Jesus goes over and sits down by a well with this woman who was not only a Samaritan, she was an outcast of the Samaritans. The disciples have been sent out to try to find something to eat. I don’t know if you’ve ever been like on a short-term mission trip and were trying to find something you thought wouldn’t put you in the hospital. I have. I mean, you’re just looking around, looking at mystery meat, and thinking, “I could probably eat that.” By the way, it was the kabobs in Kabul, I think, that killed me. On Chicken Street. They were very tasty, but then they started eating me.
The disciples go on out and they try to find something to eat. They come back in and they say to Jesus, “Did you find something to eat?” Remember what he said? “I have food you don’t know anything about. You don’t understand.” They’re all kind of mumbling to themselves, “Why is he even talking to that woman?” Do you know why? Because God loves Samaria. God loves Samaria.
When Jesus tells that story in Luke 15, we think about it like us. Oh, he’s talking about us. But he was talking to the religious Jews, and they were upset because Jesus was talking to the wrong people. He liked the wrong people. “Why would you eat with those people?” Jesus tells them stories about the Good Samaritan. “Those two don’t go together. The good children of Jezebel? No! They aren’t good people. There’s nothing good about them.”
He says, “Let me tell you this story. This shepherd had 100 sheep and one of them left, and he went after that one, and when he found it, he put it on his shoulders and he sang to it all the way home.” Do you know what that’s about? That’s about the heart of a shepherd. He loved the sheep…loved the sheep. He knew the name of the sheep. He knew the name of that little lamb, and he couldn’t stand the thought of that little lamb out there helpless. He didn’t wait for the lamb to come to him. He went after the lamb.
Then he says, “There was a woman. She has some coins and she loses one. She searches the whole house over and she sweeps and she gets a light. She looks everywhere till she finds it. Then she throws a block party.” Now let me tell you something. That party probably cost her more than that coin was worth. Do you know what it says? There was some sentimental value to that coin that wasn’t just in its weight.
Then he tells the story about the son. He says, “This guy has two sons and one of them says, ‘Dad, just give me everything that’s coming to me.'” Then he went off and spent it on parties and prostitutes. But do you know what? Dad couldn’t stand it. He stood and watched at the end of the road, and when that son came to the end of himself, Dad goes running to the son.
What does the elder brother do? He stands there and he sulks. Do you know what he does? He cheats himself out of a party. Listen. When you go to a party, everybody eats. Parties are good for everybody. They’re not good for just the person who threw the party or the person the party is for. Everybody gets to be there! Everybody gets to eat. But the elder son finds himself out there.
I find that oftentimes the problem is not that those out there we pray for their heart to be changed, but before their heart can be changed, God has to change our hearts. Do we really love lost people? Do we really love those people who really in our minds just deserve judgment? Because if our attitude is, “Yeah, God loves people like us, but those people deserve the judgment,” I have news for you. Just like in Israel, the best prophets, Elijah and Elisha, they’re up there talking to Ahab. They’re up there and they’re in the middle of the mess.
But the big question of the Kings is the question…Is God fair? The answer is he is way, way, way more than fair. He’s gracious. He’s really gracious. He just keeps giving us chance after chance after chance after chance. But there’s another message in there we need to take into consideration. It’s that our choices impact more than us. The blessings of the children lie in the obedience of the parents…what we deliver to the next generation, that spiritual legacy.
Let me just encourage you fathers and mothers. If you can’t tell these stories, you don’t know these stories, and these are the stories God gave us to disciple our children. Learn the stories. Let the stories shape who you are. I’m like three minutes over, but I’m not feeling very convicted. Do you want to see a really cool story? Look at 2 Kings 6. This is just one of the stories in here.
Look at verse 11. “The king of Aram became very upset over this. He called his officers together and demanded, ‘Which of you is the traitor?'” (2 Kings 6:11) Because what’s happening here is that every time they are going to attack Israel, Elisha goes over and says, “They’re going to attack over there. You ought to be ready for that.” The king goes, “How do you know?” He says, “God told me.” So then they rearrange their forces. The king of Aram goes, “Who in here is the traitor?”
Verse 12 says, “‘It’s not us, my lord the king,’ one of the officers replied. ‘Elisha, the prophet in Israel, tells the king of Israel even the words you speak in the privacy of your bedroom!’ ‘Go and find out where he is,’ the king commanded, ‘so I can send troops to seize him.’ And the report came back: ‘Elisha is at Dothan.’
So one night the king of Aram sent a great army with many chariots and horses to surround the city. When the servant of the man of God got up early the next morning and went outside, there were troops, horses, and chariots everywhere. ‘Oh, sir, what will we do now?’ the young man cried to Elisha.
‘Don’t be afraid!’ Elisha told him. ‘For there are more on our side than on theirs!’ Then Elisha prayed, ‘O LORD, open his eyes and let him see!’ The LORD opened the young man’s eyes, and when he looked up, he saw that the hillside around Elisha was filled with horses and chariots of fire.” (2 Kings 6:12-17) Now let me ask you something. Which one of those would scare you more? Huh? If you saw all the enemies and then you saw all the angels, who are extraterrestrial alien armies? But look what happens here.
“As the Aramean army advanced toward him, Elisha prayed, ‘O LORD, please make them blind.’ So the LORD struck them with blindness as Elisha had asked. Then Elisha went out and told them, ‘You have come the wrong way! This isn’t the right city! Follow me, and I will take you to the man you are looking for.'” Can you imagine all these blind soldiers?
“And he led them to the city of Samaria. As soon as they had entered Samaria, Elisha prayed, ‘O LORD, now open their eyes and let them see.’ So the LORD opened their eyes, and they discovered that they were in the middle of Samaria. When the king of Israel saw them, he shouted to Elisha, ‘My father, should I kill them? Should I kill them?'”
Look at verse 22. “‘Of course not!’ Elisha replied. ‘Do we kill prisoners of war? Give them food and drink and send them home again to their master.'” (2 Kings 6:18-22) Does anybody think this applies to anything we do? How do we treat our enemies when we have them down? Do you think this message at all resonates? “Of course we’re not going to kill them. We’re not them, and we’re not going to be them.” Let’s pray.
Lord, thank you for you. Lord, we ask you that you will give us your heart. Lord, we ask you that we will hear your words that your prophets say, that your Holy Spirit springs up within our hearts. Lord, we pray we will hear your law, that we will listen to the principles, but not only listen to the principles but we will experience your power, because we are people of your covenant and we are people of your kingdom, and you are fair and you are just and you keep your promises even when we don’t.
Lord, we pray this morning in the next few minutes that we will interact with you, we will listen to what you’re saying in our hearts about our kids, about our personal lives, about our nation, about our cities. In your name we pray, amen.