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2 Kings--God’s History Lesson

Chris Blake

CONNIE: Hello, I’m Connie Jeffery,

LONNIE: and I’m Lonnie Melashenko. Well, Connie, you’ve asked a couple of good questions. I believe it was the philosopher George Santayana who penned that famous phrase about “those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” but it wasn’t a new idea. In fact the concept is quite biblical.

CONNIE: I see you’ve got your Bible open already--you must have a text in mind.

LONNIE: I was thinking of 1 Corinthians 10:11. After reviewing some of the history recorded in the Old Testament, the apostle Paul explains the value of these history
lessons. Here it is: These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come (NIV).

CONNIE: In other words, Paul is saying that understanding what happened in history is essential as we plan how to live today.

LONNIE: Right. As we see prophecies being fulfilled, as we realize that the time of Jesus’ return is getting closer and closer, we shouldn’t get totally wrapped up in looking to the future. We need to keep our history books close to us, and learn from the experience of those who have gone before us.

CONNIE: Well that certainly fits with the theme of our program today. We’re continuing our journey through the Bible, book by book, and the book we’ll look at today--2 Kings--is a history book! We’re calling today’s program “God’s History Lesson.”

LONNIE: One of the things I sometimes hear from people who’ve read the stories in Kings is that God gets pretty “negative press” in some of the stories--He comes across as harsh or vindictive. People wonder, is it possible to find a God of love in these stories? Recently I came upon a book by Chris Blake called Searching for a God to Love. In it he shares some of his own struggles with these questions, and I got him on the phone recently to talk about how he resolved them.

LONNIE: Glad to have you joining us all the way from Nebraska, Chris.

CHRIS: Thank you Lonnie it’s good to be here.

LONNIE: Chris, God’s character kind of gets some bad press in the Old Testament. I have a friend who just sent an e-mail today, he’s kind of struggling with the death of his father, and the horrific parts of the pain of death and how he died. He said frankly I’m a Christian, but I’ve had terrible trauma thinking about the God and the picture of the Old Testament who seems to kind of enjoy creating trauma and dilemma. How do you relate to that?

CHRIS: Hmmm. Yeah I’ve had a similar problem. I didn’t grow up as a Christian, and one of the reasons I didn’t was because of a picture of God in the Old Testament that really turned me off. There are really four things that jump out at me that help me to fall in love with God even through the Old Testament. The first one was to recognize that the Bible is somewhat like a medical book, and when we look in it we can see all sorts of dreadful pictures, lip cancer, Copperhead bites, or Small Pox, and think what a revolting book, how could anyone benefit from this. But the value is that these pictures identify ailments so that they can point to a cure.

LONNIE: I like that Chris. It’s a great thought to look at this as the reasons things go wrong, and that God’s picture of His grace is sometimes tucked away there, but we miss it.

CHRIS: Yeah. He’s the healer, and much of what’s there in the Bible is descriptive not prescriptive. Not go and do like wise, but look at all the horror that took place. It’s also the case however; that God seems to be implicated in some of the scare tactics or the authorized massacres. And I had something happen to me with my sons that opened up a window for me at one time, and it took place at a park. My sons were five and two years old, and they were riding around their big wheels, those kind of low slung plastic Harley Davidson’s you know, and as they were riding around one time, I turned, and I was fixing a swing that was over the top bar. And then I heard my older son yell out my younger son’s name, Jeffery, and I turned and Jeffery, who is two years old, was peddling down the middle of the street. It was normally a very busy street, and I sprinted toward him wanting to wave off any cars. There were none, and when I caught up to Jeffery I pulled him out of the street, and then I remember jerking him up by a chubby arm and spanking him on his bottom, and a pretty heavy spank as I recall. I took very little comfort in the sniffling hug and the talk afterward. But I think that God is characterized sometimes as doing that. You know, if someone had snapped a photograph of me yanking and spanking my little boy in Old Testament language my behavior would be recorded, “And the father smote the son,” but we would miss all of the playground antics, and reading books, and the hugs, clothing, and feeding him, outside of the context of the moment we could reach an unwarranted conclusion. So it seems to me that sometimes we remember those things that there recorded as well, that are very unlike God in some ways.

LONNIE: In other words when we read about the hell and the torture. There’s a bigger picture there, and that could be as you described a hideous lie if you just take that alone.

CHRIS: Yeah. The hell, the eternal tortures, the never-ending torture was the big thing Lonnie that kept me from believing in God and becoming a Christian. I view it as the most horrible lie that’s ever been told, and part of the lie includes the idea that God would put Satan, as the chef in charge of the cooking, and this horrible torment, and with an incredibly strange twist that He would do it out of love. I have to say if that’s God, I cannot find love for that God, and I was like that for so many years.
LONNIE: Chris, sum up the other two points now in the last moment we have together.

CHRIS: Well, one point would involve how God is characterized sometimes for example; God has shown us hardening Pharao’s heart. Whereas the same sunshine can harden clay, but it will melt a butter pat, and it depends on the receiving substance. And the issue in the Old Testament is the sovereignty of God, and so God gets credit for all the glory, and all the gore as well, no matter what’s happening. I think the clearest picture of God though that we can get is found in Jesus on the cross, because there you can see that God has not abandoned us, and that God cares for us no matter what.

LONNIE: Beautiful. Chris Blake, thank you so much for joining us today.

CONNIE: The cross does bring things into focus. There we see that sin does lead to tragedy, to death. But we also see that God has chosen to bear all of the negatives Himself.

And that’s the message of our first song today, “Love Was When.”

MUSIC

CONNIE: That was our own Del Delker singing “Love Was When,” What happened at Calvary answers a lot of hard questions about things that have happened in our world’s history.

LONNIE: That certainly is true, Connie. There are a lot of history lessons taught in the Bible, but that song captures most important one: It was when God came and joined us here on our planet that we learned the most about His love for us.

CONNIE: You spoke with Chris Blake about his own personal search for a loving God, and he shares what he’s learned in his own spiritual journey in his book Searching for a God to Love.

LONNIE: It’s a great book, published in 1999, and it’s full of illustrations and stories that help to make the love of God real. And you know, Connie, I wish everyone in our listening audience had a copy of Chris’s book.

CONNIE: Well, why don’t we just send them one.

LONNIE: It would be neat if we could, but of course our ministry is funded entirely by people’s donations, so here’s what we’d like to do. We’ll send a copy of Chris’s book to anyone who includes a donation with their request this week. Now, keep in mind that the price of the book if you were to go to a bookstore and ask for it would be about $12.00--so we hope you’ll make your donation at least that large, and if you can, throw in a little extra to help keep our broadcasts going out and our Bible school running and our evangelistic team in the field.

CONNIE: If you’d like your own copy of Searching for a God to Love, you can call our toll-free number anytime, that’s 1-800-872-0055, to request Searching for a God to Love. Do be sure to have a credit card ready when calling, because we do request that you make a donation of $12 or more when requesting the book.

LONNIE: And of course we’ll share an address you can mail requests and donations to a bit later in the program.

CONNIE: Well, Lonnie, we’re making good progress in our journey through the Bible. We’re into some pretty deep history now, as we look at the book of 2 Kings. It's an interesting book, isn’t it?

LONNIE: Yes, it’s full of stories about the prophet Elisha, and it covers about 300 years of history. It’s full of triumphs, tragedies, and a few troubling questions.

CONNIE: Share with us your message, “2 Kings: God’s History Lesson.”

2 Kings--God’s History Lesson

Second Kings covers a lot of history. Let me sum it up by telling you the stories of two little boys.
The first story is told near the beginning of the book, in chapter 4, the second is found near the end of the book. Since we don’t know the first boy’s name, I’ll call him Elisha’s double-miracle boy.
Since there were no Hilton Hotels or even Motel 6’s in Elisha’s time, the prophet of God, was always glad when someone offered him a place to spend the night as he traveled.
One family in the little village of Shunem even built a new room onto their house for Elisha to stay in.
The family had no children and--after many years of marriage--no hope that any would be coming along.
But Elisha had a little talk with God about that, and soon the woman of the house had a bouncing baby boy on her knee.
That was miracle number one.

Miracle number two came a few years later. One morning the boy came down with a bad headache. By noon he had stopped breathing.
When Elisha heard about it, he hurried straight to her house and miraculously raised the boy from the dead!

What a precious story of God’s love and concern for a mother and her little child. But it’s more than that. It’s a story with an important lesson: Where the word of God is, where the power of God is, there is life, there is blessing.
Our next story, which happens about 200 years later, makes the same point--but with a bit of fine-tuning.
Prince Josiah, our second little boy, is just eight years old when we first meet him. His father is the king of Judah, but all is not well in the kingdom. Not by a long ways.
Josiah’s father and grandfather were unfaithful kings. Instead of trusting in Judah’s God, they built altars to foreign gods--even gods of their enemies the Assyrians--right in the Lord’s temple.
Then one day when Prince Josiah was just eight years old, shocking news sped through the streets of Jerusalem. The king had been assassinated by his servants, right in his own palace!
Chaos reigned in the capital city, but when the dust finally settled, the assassins had been captured and executed, and the people of the land took the little boy Josiah and put him on his father’s throne.
Josiah turned out to be just the opposite of his father and grandfather. He’d no doubt heard stories about his great-grandfather, King Hezekiah, who had been faithful to the Lord and had seen God work miracles in his life many times--even delivering his people from the army of the Assyrians.
So Josiah resolved to be like great-grandpa Hezekiah. He put his faith in Judah’s God, not in the gods of Assyria.
As soon as he was old enough, he went all through the country, tearing down altars and temples of foreign gods. He led his people in great religious celebrations--especially the Passover feast, reminding them of their God and His power to deliver them from bondage to their enemies.
2 Kings 23:25 tells us “No king before him had turned to the LORD as he did, with all his heart and soul and strength.” (NEB).

And God rewarded Josiah for his faithfulness. The country prospered under his rule, and had true freedom for the first time in nearly a century. For thirty wonderful years, none of their old enemies were able to lay a finger on them or oppress them in any way.

And from that you might conclude that the message of 2 Kings is plain and simple: Obey God and be blessed, disobey God and suffer.
But life’s never that simple, and the Bible doesn’t take a simplistic view of life. It “tells it like it is.”
And the honest truth is Good King Josiah’s life took a tragic twist at the end.
Just four verses after telling us that Josiah served the Lord more faithfully than any other king, 2 Kings reveals what happened in the 31st year of his reign:
While Josiah was king, Pharaoh Neco king of Egypt went up to the Euphrates River to help the king of Assyria. King Josiah marched out to meet him in battle, but Neco faced him and killed him at Megiddo (2 Kings 23:29, NIV).

It was a tragic end to the king’s life, and soon after, the kingdom fell under the yoke of the Egyptians and later the Babylonians. It was never free from foreign domination again for more than 400 years.
Why? we ask. Why didn’t God continue to protect and bless his faithful king?
Well, it would take a major history lesson to ferret out all the answers, and we don’t have time for that today. But we can sum it up this way: Josiah’s reform--as good as it was--was too little and too late.
Too little, because by and large it only reformed the outward behavior of the people. There was no heart change. Even during these seemingly good years, the prophet Jeremiah was heard to complain that (and I’m quoting from Jeremiah 25)
This people has a defiant and rebellious heart; they have revolted and departed. . . . 'For among My people are found wicked men; they lie in wait as one who sets snares; they set a trap; they catch men. As a cage is full of birds, so their houses are full of deceit. . . . Yes, they surpass the deeds of the wicked; they do not plead the cause, the cause of the fatherless; . . . the right of the needy they do not defend.
(Jer 5:23-28, NKJV)

Jeremiah sadly assessed what was really going on, even during Josiah’s great reform movement. Religion remained superficial. It was something you did on the Sabbath, or on the great feast days. But it didn’t change the way people lived on any given Tuesday or Thursday. It didn’t change how they treated each other, or what they did to orphans.
God was, and is, always interested in true heart reform, and unfortunately He had to allow tragedy to overtake His chosen people in order that they would learn that lesson.
But out of times of great tragedy came great promise as well. For it was during the times covered in 2 Kings that prophets such as Isaiah and Micah penned their messages that rang down through the centuries with a note of hope for the future:
Isaiah proclaimed

"Comfort, yes, comfort My people!" Says your God. "Speak comfort to Jerusalem, and cry out to her, that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned (Isaiah 40:1-4, NKJ).

And Micah gave the hope concrete form in the promise of a coming Savior:
"But you, Bethlehem in Ephrathah , small as you are to be among Judah’s clans, out of you shall come forth a governor for Israel, one whose roots are far back in the past, in days gone by. . . . He shall appear and be their shepherd in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the LORD his God” (Micah 5:2, 4, NEB).

As Josiah’s contemporary, Jeremiah put it:

For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” (Jer. 29:11, NIV)
And that is the great lesson we learn from God’s History Book: He has blessed us in the past, and He has blessings for us in the future as well. Things may not go just as we’d wish every day. Tragedy may stalk our path, but God’s plans for our future are for good, as we walk with Him in true heart repentance, and hold onto His hand.