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CONNIE How much do you know about your past? About your family’s past? Do you have “a star behind you to guide you?” Join us today as we consider the value of knowing your past.

Giving God’s trumpet a Certain Sound for more than 75 years, this is the Voice of Prophecy.

CONNIE AND LONNIE
Hello, I’m Connie Jeffery, and I’m Lonnie Melashenko.

LONNIE You know Connie, every week we introduce our program with that same phrase, “Giving God’s trumpet a Certain Sound for more than 75 years,” and it’s important to us. We know we have a solid history of proclaiming the gospel all over the world, but we’re also very much a forward-looking ministry.

CONNIE Yes, of course. Giving God’s trumpet a certain sound looks forward to the future—looks forward to the Second Coming of Jesus, and of course our theme music proclaims that as well.

LONNIE That’s right, the song “Lift up the Trumpet” has been associated with our broadcast almost from the very beginning. So it has a great deal of historic significance for us.

CONNIE And there’s a very real sense in which you can’t really have confidence for the future unless you have some understanding of the past.

LONNIE One of my favorite quotations that I’ve memorized and kept with me through the years is the one about “we have nothing to fear for the future except as we shall forget how God has led us in the past.” And that’s an idea that’s very prominent in the Bible as well. In the Old Testament, the Passover celebration and the Feast of Booths were intended to remind people of how God had led them in the past

CONNIE And the Ten Commandments start out with a reminder that God is the one who has delivered us from slavery.

LONNIE In the New Testament, of course the communion service is a reminder of Jesus’ sacrifice for us. And the apostle Paul reminds us in 2 Corinthians that the stories we find in the Bible aren’t just ordinary stories—they’re moral stories—designed to teach us about God and how to live in the last days of earth’s history.

CONNIE Stories have a powerful influence in our lives. I spoke recently with Ken Wade, who’s quite a story teller himself, about that.
Let’s listen in.

CONNIE: Ken, I know you and you are a great story teller, but you’ve been in the unique position of actually writing other peoples stories.

KEN: Yeah! That’s kind of an interesting thing to get asked to take other people’s lives and to maybe find a story in them or something like that…

CONNIE: You put them into a book form…

KEN: Right.

CONNIE: Recently you did one for Del Delker, who is very near and dear to the Voice of Prophecy, and you said that she had a whole bunch of stories strung together, and you wove it into a tapestry; a beautiful life story.

KEN: Well, we can do that with our lives. We have a bunch of stories and we can look at it and say, how does this all come together. I mean, I used to be a book editor and people would send me a whole bunch of stories of their life and say, “See what an interesting life this person had, wouldn’t that make for an interesting book”? And the answer is no!

CONNIE: Why?

KEN: Because there isn’t an over-arching story they found there. It’s just a bunch of stories and there’s nothing there to keep the person turning the page, to say what’s going to happen next. There has to be some sort of growth in the characters life, you have to see what the overall pattern is.

CONNIE: Do you agree that we all have a story, however mundane it may be, we all have a story if we search for it, right?

KEN: I think so and it’s a fascinating thing, to look back over your life or to look forward in your life to see what you want your story to be. I think stories have a much deeper impact on our lives than we could possibly realize.

CONNIE: In fact, you were telling me recently about a story that really impacted you as a young person. What was the name of a book?

KEN: Well it was a book of short stories or maybe it was from school, but it was called, By the Waters of Ancient Babylon, and it has always stuck with me because it’s a powerful short story. It was about a future that had been ruined by mankind’s bad decisions…

CONNIE: So what did that do to you later in life?

KEN: Well I think that all through life it’s made me conscious of the effects of decisions that people have and the way people make them in the world. I think that there are many, many stories like that. I think that one of the most fascinating things that you can do with a person is to sit down with them and say what stories do you remember from your childhood.

CONNIE: Right and in fact I told you earlier the one that I remember is my father and his conversion story. I remember hearing him tell it in sermons, tell it over and over and it was his personal testimony that really touched people’s hearts. So that story has stuck with me my whole life, so I thought wow, will I ever have a story as meaningful as that. Sometimes we try to measure up to other people’s stories, when really we have our own unique story.

KEN: But look at what that story has done in your own life. It’s gotten into your physique so to speak and its probably effected decisions that you’ve made.

CONNIE: I think that it has, because when he talks about the night that he shook his fist at God and it was very dramatic and I remember as a child thinking I don’t want to do that. Yet God turned that whole night around and used him and look what he did to help bring other people to Jesus Christ…

KEN: He became a powerful evangelist and a television evangelist even, and he impacted millions of peoples lives no doubt with that one story.

CONNIE: Right! With his conversion story. It’s Interesting and I told somebody this quote earlier, tell me a fact and I’ll learn, tell me a truth and I’ll believe, tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever. Stories get into our hearts and change us.

KEN: They become part of us. We live our stories, we live the stories that we’ve heard and believe.

CONNIE: That’s right!

KEN: You know in Jesus’ life, he told a lot of stories.

CONNIE: He did that to illustrate truths, didn’t He?

KEN: Yeah, and I think that in our program today, we’re very much dealing with a book of stories. It’s called Chronicles! What kind of a boring idea, but you hear Chronicles of Narnia and I guess that’s not boring…

CONNIE: Chronicles is a history, telling the stories through history.

KEN: But here you have a book where somebody has systematically sat down and said, what is the story of Israel and what does it mean. You see, in Kings and Samuel you have stories, but in Chronicles you have somebody sitting down and doing what we were talking about before, actually taking those short stories as it were, and looking at them and saying, what does this mean?

CONNIE: And what is the conclusion that we can draw from that?

KEN: Well Ezra, the scribe, was looking at this and saying, what can we learn from the things that we did wrong in the past, and he is telling the stories as well as the things that were done right, and if we will then take and abide by these stories, they will become a part of us and they will guide us in our lives.

CONNIE: That’s true. In fact, they effect how we live, they effect how we treat others, even how we worship, you know?

KEN: Absolutely!

CONNIE: What we believe about the overall story is the story of Jesus and I know that here at the Voice of Prophecy, that’s the story that we tell. It’s simple and our stories don’t have to be complicated. Our stories can be simple.

KEN: Absolutely! And it’s great to learn about what stories can do for us and teach us.

*MUSIC 1: “Then I Met the Master”, Melashenko Four, from The Four of Us CD, Track 2 (#) TIME: 3:06

CONNIE Amen! Beautiful! And there’s a great testimony in that song—a testimony to how God can change lives. Lonnie, that music comes from a brand new CD, doesn’t it?

LONNIE Yes, indeed it does. It’s by a group we call the Melashenko Four. It’s my brother Joedy’s brainchild, really. You know he and I have sung together a lot through the years, and have produced a couple of duet CDs. And our wives have sung with us quite a bit too, in public settings. So why not produce a CD with just the four of us?

CONNIE I really enjoyed that song, and I’m sure the CD is a great addition to our Voice of Prophecy music library.

LONNIE I’ve got a copy for you, too, Connie.

CONNIE Thank you Lonnie. I’ll listen to it in my car on the way home tonight! I’m sure our listeners can get a copy too.

LONNIE As always, we have information on our web page about the CDs we play on the broadcast, and this particular one will be available in our online bookstore as well.

CONNIE Which is located at vop.com.

LONNIE Along with a treasure trove of other resources that we place online—including the Discover Bible lessons, transcripts and streaming audio of our broadcasts, podcasts, and well—so much more. Folks just need to stop by vop.com to see it all.

CONNIE Please do stop by and see us at vop.com anytime, from anywhere in the world. But right now let’s turn our attention to Pastor Lonnie’s message for today, Chronicles--History Revisited.

Chronicles—History Revisited
How do you know who you are? How do you know what your place is in the world? Maybe you’ve read the book The Bourne Identity—which tells the story of a man with no story. No back-story that is—at least not that he can remember.

Loss of memory is a fairly common theme in books and movies. We’re intrigued by what it would be like to be alive, but with no memory of our past.

Would I behave differently if I couldn’t remember the day I married my dear wife Jeannie? Most of us have known people who’ve had to go through the heart-wrenching experience of watching a loved one’s memories fade.

Did you see the movie The Notebook or perhaps read the book? I don’t know of anyone whose heart isn’t moved to tears at a story like that, of two people very much in love, but only one can remember the life, the joys, the sorrows, the living they shared as husband and wife.

Our past is very important to us—very important to understanding who we are—where we came from, why we’re here. And it’s also very important as we consider what course to pursue in the future. So understanding the past is essential to answering life’s greatest questions:

• Who am I?
• Where did I come from?
• Why am I here?
• Where am I going?
•
And the Old Testament books of 1 and 2 Chronicles were written to help God’s people find answers to those questions.

These books were written much later than most of the Old Testament, and they bring a precious commodity called hindsight to bear upon the great questions of life.

The books were probably written by the scribe Ezra, or some contemporary of his. It’s generally accepted that whoever wrote the Chronicles also wrote the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. And since history in the book of Nehemiah goes down to the second half of the 5th century BC—about the year 430 BC—so that’s probably about when it was written.

The books of Samuel and Kings, which cover some of the same history as Chronicles, were no doubt written much earlier.

Chronicles covers the same territory as these earlier books, but with deeper insights into the story behind the story. That is, more insights into what was going on and why the things that had happened had happened. You know how it is, after something bad has happened, we’re very prone to second guessing—to going back over the events leading up to the car accident, for instance, and saying “If only I’d gone to the supermarket before the cleaners instead of after, this never would have happened.”

And while that kind of second guessing may be futile, there is a time and place for reviewing our activities to try to figure out what we did wrong that got us into such a pickle. An alcoholic waking up on the sidewalk with a splitting headache should probably take some time to review what he or she did wrong that led to the latest binge. If you have a bad stomach ache, you probably ought to think back over what you ate at your last meal to see if there’s some food you ought to avoid in the future.

And that, essentially, is what the books of Chronicles do, only on a much grander scale.
They go back over the whole history of Israel, from the very beginning, and examine what went right and what went wrong, and what has brought them to their current situation.

And what is that current situation?

Israel is in dire straits. Their capital city, Jerusalem, has been in ruins for 150 years. The temple has been rebuilt, but the only way they’ve been able to get anyone to live in the city is to compel one person in ten to leave the farm and move to town.

And Ezra the scribe, seeing how bad things are, sits down to ponder: What has brought us to this state of affairs?

He gets out the annals, the stories from the past, and he begins to do a little analysis on them. And soon he sees a pattern emerging. It’s what he’s suspected all along, but now it comes clear as he goes back to the original sources. There’s been a definite pattern of dark and light spots in Israel’s history. And when the people have had faith in God and have walked with Him, God has blessed them. But there have been all too many interludes of rebellion. And the result has been disaster.

Chronicles reads like a litany of lessons from history. The first nine chapters are devoted to establishing Israel’s place in the world—there’s a genealogical list tracing the royal line all the way from he first man and woman, Adam and Eve, up through David and Solomon and their descendants who sat on the throne of Judah, right up to the time when Babylon came and destroyed Jerusalem. People today tend to skim pretty quickly through the nine chapters of “begats,” and rightly so, but in the days when the book was written, these lists were important for establishing a person’s birthright and place in the community.

Then there’s the story of Saul, Israel’s first king—actually just the story of how he died, and an explanation of why things went so badly for him: “So Saul died for his unfaithfulness which he had committed against the LORD, because he did not keep the word of the LORD, and also because he consulted a medium for guidance. But he did not inquire of the LORD” (1 Chronicles 10:13-14, NKJV).

When the Lord established Israel as a nation, He forbade them to consult mediums: “ ‘The person who turns to mediums and familiar spirits, to prostitute himself with them, I will set My face against that person and cut him off from his people’ ” (Lev. 20:6, NKJV).

Looking back 600 years later, Ezra can see the beginnings of a pattern in what happened to Saul. It was when he went against a specific command of the Lord, that God abandoned him into the hands of the Philistines.

King David, on the other hand, was a man after God’s own heart, and 1 Chronicles 14 tells what happened when the Philistines attacked him. David repeatedly consulted the Lord for guidance, and as verses 16 and 17 report, “David did as God commanded him, and they drove back the army of the Philistines from Gibeon as far as Gezer. Then the fame of David went out into all lands, and the LORD brought the fear of him upon all nations” (NKJV).

Notice the strong contrast between these two stories. Same Israelite army. Same enemy. Same battlefield. Totally opposite results. And what made the difference? Saul consulted a spiritualist medium for counsel, but David consulted the Lord.

After the reign of David’s son Solomon, the kingdom of Israel split between the northern tribes, who took the name of Israel, and the southern tribes, who became the kingdom of Judah. These brother nations often fought with each other, and 2 Chronicles 13:15-18 draws a contrast between the two kingdoms’ way of going about the business of war. “Then the men of Judah gave a shout; and as the men of Judah shouted, it happened that God struck Jeroboam and all Israel before Abijah and Judah. And the children of Israel fled before Judah, and God delivered them into their hand. . . . Thus the children of Israel were subdued at that time; and the children of Judah prevailed, because they relied on the LORD God of their fathers” (2 Chronicles 13:15-18, NKJV).

You don’t have to read the entire history of Israel as recorded in the books of Chronicles to get the point. But it does make interesting reading. Over and over again the same lesson has to be learned. God has called His special people, given them a land to dwell in, and promised them blessings if they’ll be faithful to Him. And over and over again the people turn to other gods and encounter disasters as a result.

God, you see, had a special purpose in mind for Israel. He established them on the land, at a place that would always be a great crossroads of civilization. He wanted the light of His glory to shine forth in the faces of His people to enlighten the whole world.

Moses reminded his people of this just before they entered the Promised Land, as we read in Deuteronomy 4:5-9.

“ ‘Surely I have taught you statutes and judgments, just as the LORD my God commanded me, that you should act according to them in the land which you go to possess. Therefore be careful to observe them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples who will hear all these statutes, and say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.” . . .
“ ‘Only take heed to yourself, and diligently keep yourself, lest you forget the things your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life. And teach them to your children and your grandchildren’ ” (NKJV).

Teach these things to your children, Moses said. Remind them of how God led you out of captivity and gave you righteous laws, and how He promised to be with you and bless you if you would be faithful to Him.

That’s what Chronicles is all about. It’s a reminder of what might have been in the past. And it looks forward to the future, pleading with God’s people not to continue to go astray. In the end, it reminds them, “Judah was carried away captive to Babylon because of their unfaithfulness” (1 Chronicles 9:1, NKJV).

And Ezra, walking the deserted streets of Jerusalem, wanted desperately to save His people from making the same mistake twice.

Chronicles is his attempt—and God’s attempt—to call His people to faithfulness. And it’s a good book for us to read today as well, to remind us of the importance of staying in tune with God instead of wandering off after other influences.

Why not resolve to take some time right now to go back and review that history lesson—you have my permission to skip over the genealogies in 1 Chronicles chapters 1-9. But you’ll find the stories in the rest of the books compelling. Let these ancient stories, these ancient words of God, draw you closer to your God in the kind of deep, committed, faithful relationship He wants with you.

*MUSIC 2: “Ancient Words”, Christian Edition, from Midnight Cry CD, Track 4 (#)

And now as we close,
May the Amazing grace of the Master, Jesus Christ,
The extravagant love of God,
The intimate friendship of the Holy Spirit,
Be with all of you.
Amen.