JOHN181 - Assyria Clearly Picked the Wrong Guy

Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And right now we are working on the Book of John. We're in the beginning of John chapter 4. But as we tend to do from time to time, we're on a little jaunt. We're on a little history side quest to try to figure out what the deal is with the tension between the Jews and the Samaritans at the time of Jesus, and really, in general, just the tension between the two across the millennia.

All right. So in John 4, we just get this one passing little itinerary line. Jesus is, he's been around Jerusalem and Judea, the southern part of the world that's in focus here in the life of Jesus. And John the Baptist has just thrown his vouch, all of his political weight and capital behind Jesus. And the religious leaders are like, oh, okay, we don't need to worry about John the Baptist so much anymore.

We need to worry about Jesus. He's baptizing too many people, he's getting too popular. Well, Jesus still had a bunch of stuff to do, so he decides not to hang around for all of that smoke. And he goes back to Galilee up north, where stuff's a little calmer. And in John 4, 4, it says, now he had to go through Samaria, just on his way, right?

Well, for you and me, it's like, oh, that's a geography note or whatever. Maybe we're like, oh, I've heard of the good Samaritan or Samaritan, maybe healthcare kind of stuff. But to the original audience, this would have popped the same way. I don't know, just picture two people groups you know who have a well-publicized blood feud and imagine saying both of their names in the same paragraph and what that would call to mind for you.

Well, in the same way, this passage in John 4.4 is loaded enough that we got to put our brains to a little history side quest here to figure out what the heck is going on and where all this tension came from. And it's a pretty interesting story. It dates all the way back to almost 900 BC. There's a little chunk of ground that we talked about a couple days ago that gets bought around, I think, 880-ish, is what we said.

And the person who sells that chunk of ground is who lends their name to the city of Samaria and the region of Samaria. It's bolt. It's kind of like you got a New York City and a New York state. So Samaria is a both a town and a region at different points in history. And Samaria eventually goes on to be the northern kingdom's capital.

So in biblical history, there's an era after the reign of Saul and then David and then Solomon. After that, the kingdom of the descendants of Abraham splits in two. There's a northern kingdom of Israel, there's a southern kingdom of Judah, and the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel, which is a pretty wicked kingdom.

They don't put any good kings on the throne. Prophets are always trying to correct them. I mean, they're a mess, but the capital of that kingdom is Samaria. However, the religious capital of the northern kingdom is Bethel. That's going to come into play in just a minute. Now, in the south, the southern kingdom's capital is Jerusalem, and the southern kingdom's religious capital is also Jerusalem.

But one of the things that's really interesting about this is that if you actually go and look at a map, and I'd encourage you to do so, just Google like map of the of Israel and Judah or something like that, it'll come right up. What you'll notice is that the border between these two estranged brother countries, the border between the two runs just north of Jerusalem.

So if you've ever learned American geography, like the states and capitals, Cheyenne, Wyoming is an anomaly. You got your two square states or Wyoming and Colorado, right? You look at a map of Colorado, Denver is pretty much in the middle. I think Colorado Springs is more right in the middle. But Denver, you know, it's easy for everybody to drive the same distance, right?

It's Denver's right in the middle of that rectangle. But then you go and look at the rectangle, the square state that is Wyoming, and Cheyenne is tucked way, way, way down in the teeny tiny little corner. And it's sort of anomalyc, right? That isn't normally where you want to put your capital. But that's how things worked out boundary-wise between Judah and Israel.

And so Jerusalem, the religious capital and the political capital, is just a stone's throw away from Bethel, the religious center of the northern kingdom of Israel. So there's conversation that goes back and forth between the two as all of this is unfolding. But the Southern Kingdom is able to put a few good kings on the throne.

The Southern Kingdom is able to listen to prophets here and there. And the Southern Kingdom experiences revivals, a rediscovery of the law and the covenant with God. The northern kingdom doesn't get any of that. And even though the northern kingdom is very powerful and prospers, it spirals with cultural ruin, with injustice, etc.

And those are the reasons that the Bible says it is ultimately handed over by God for judgment to the gigantic, powerful, wicked Assyrians. 2 Kings 17 tells the story of how the Assyrians show up. They defeat the northern kingdom of Israel. I mean, really, they conquered everything. It's wild that there's just one tiny little circle on the map of Assyria at its height, and it's Judah for, you know, the Bible says by the providence of God, Judah was not conquered by the Assyrians.

Crazy when you look at it on a map. Well, Israel, the northern kingdom, it gets whipped in 722, and the Assyrians proudly wipe them from history by sending them to all the corners of their empire. And then the Assyrians repopulate Israel by bringing in a bunch of pagan people who don't know anything about the stuff of God or the law of Moses or Abraham or any of that stuff.

And they resettle them in Israel. Well, then, of course, as we've discussed, immediately there's a plague of lions, and this starts eating these resettled people. And so the officials write back to the folks in charge of Assyria, and they're like, what do we do about the lions? And the conventional wisdom in Assyria is, well, there just must, it's a religious problem.

The god of their people must still haunt the place. And the people we resettled, they don't know anything about the god. We need to get them a priest of the former religion of the land who knows the regional god who is haunting this freshly conquered land, so that we can do just enough to pacify this legacy god and get rid of the lion swarm.

So the instruction from the Assyrians is just go get a priest. Now they're not going to know which priest to pick or who would do the best. And there's, I mean, let's just step back from this for a moment because this is a very, very, very, very important detail in understanding the whole history of the Bible and the world that Jesus steps into.

This detail right here, you with me? Everything is about to hinge on whatever guy they happen to randomly pick, with no knowledge or discernment of what guy to pick, to be the single priest, the single voice who gets brought in to carry forward worship of the God of Abraham in what is left of this northern kingdom.

This is a genetic crisis. Basically, what Assyria has done is it has wiped out the genetic diversity from the religious gene pool of the north. All the discussion, all the different perspectives, no matter how flawed they might have been, are now gone. All of the tension from the different little subgroups within the religion and that happened and carrying things out at Bethel, it's all gone.

And now, with no knowledge or discernment, they're just gonna go pick a guy who has like the right little outfit or hat or whatever. Hey, Ted, who we deported. You have the little hat, right? What? Yeah, I guess I still have my little hat. And you were uh a priest or whatever of whatever the god was there in Samaria, Bethel, Israel.

Yeah, that was my job. Cool, you're in charge of all of it now. You're moving back. Get your family. I need you to teach all the new people we moved into your houses and stuff about your God just enough to get rid of a lion plague. You're go do it. Okay, all of a sudden, everything now hinges on that one guy.

So whatever he forgot, it's just out of that northern religion. It's not going to be carried forward now. All of his little opinions, okay, whether they're right or wrong, that's what's going to be carried forward. Anything he conveniently wants to leave out of the religion can now just be left out. He basically gets to be the new atom of the entire religious tradition of the Northern Kingdom.

Well, I mean, that's crazy. Well, let's just continue with my little analogy here. What happens when you strip all of the genetic diversity out of a breeding pool? I mean, bad things, right? You get the Habsburgs, you get their weird cash register jaw, and the noses don't work, and their faces turn weird, and they get hemophilia, and like they just die of stuff because you need genetic diversity in the gene pool.

I'm not saying that what we need is 10 billion different opinions about God in order for Christianity to work. What I am saying is in this specific situation, everything is purged except one poorly chosen guy, and that's what's going to carry forward whatever the religion in the North is going to be moving forward.

Okay, imagine a scenario here. Let me try to set up a parallel. Imagine the cruel Canadian Empire conquers the United States of America in the future, and they purge it. They deport all 330 million Americans to all corners of the world, or just about all of them, maybe a few, you know, uh hide out in their little shanties and thatched roof cottages and stuff.

But all the institutions get wiped out, all the religious institutions get wiped out, the government gets wiped out, all the people get deported. And then the Canadians go and grab a bunch of people from around their global empire and they move them back into the United States to start afresh. But not too long after that happens, there's a giant plague of grizzly bears.

The land has been quiet for a while. That's allowed the grizzly bears to take back over and return to their historic habitat range, and they just start eating all of these people who've been imported from all around the world. Well, the local officials report back to the Canadians we have a grizzly bear plague.

What do we do? And the Canadians are like, okay, the God of America must still haunt the land, the God of the evangelical Christians who once lived there. Therefore, we need to go find a priest of the evangelical Christians. And so they don't know, the Canadian kings or whatever, and they're like, just uh give us that one.

And they pick Joel Olstein. Now, for some of you, you're like, I don't know, okay, sure, that's some guy. For others of you, you're like, oh, wow, that's not who you'd want to pick. Well, why wouldn't you want Joel Olstein, right? Well, you because he's not representative of the larger whole at all. That guy's you know doing a very different thing than everybody else.

Well, tough. That's who they picked to be the priest to come in and get rid of the grizzly bear plague that the haunting god of the evangelical Christians has summoned upon Canada's new empire here in the Americas. So just imagine centuries go by. At what point would the remnant of the deported Americans in this hypothetical be like, yeah, the religion of America post-exile is totally reliable.

That's great. The answer is never, because it's a genetic issue, not like genetic biology, but like intellectually, there's a genetic issue here. You picked the wrong guy to be the representative of the religion, and he didn't represent it right. And so any remnant of quote-unquote Christianity in this hypothetical new America is gonna be all wrong.

It set it on a wrong track. It's gonna mingle with pagan religions and it's just gonna turn crazy. Even a thousand years later, people would remember these grievances and they would view the religion descended from this hypothetical scenario and the one hypothetical priest, the Canadian overlords brought back as being just flawed, illegitimate.

That isn't the thing. The real thread is over here. And could you blame them? I couldn't. Okay. Well, maybe you're at this point being like, yeah, but um Matt Whitman, how do you know it was a bad priest, who they brought in? Well, we looked at some of the evidence for that right here in 2 Kings. I mean, the the the priest wasn't very effective at the very least, because he didn't oppose the worship of other gods.

He didn't communicate the exclusivity of the God of Abraham, the exclusivity of his demand for exclusive worship. So there's stuff in the text that indicates that he wasn't good, but also I would just point to Jesus, who indicates that the Samaritans are wrong, that there is something wrong with this sort of hybrid religious tradition that emerges out of the lion plague and the conquest in the late 700s BC.

So for you and me, all of this stuff that we're talking about, you know, we got to work to go and figure this out. It's not off the top of our head knowledge as to who the Samaritans are and where they came from and what the problems are and the genesis of the problems and all of that. But to the original audience, I think this stuff was well known.

I think this feud wasn't just a random we don't like you racism feud. I think it was much, much more complex than just that. And it included a pretty screwed-up, well-known history that went back 700-ish years at the time of Jesus. And with each day that passes on this side quest, we get better to understanding the tensions more like the original audience.

The book of Amos, tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.

JOHN181 - Assyria Clearly Picked the Wrong Guy

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