JOHN184 - While the Arrow in the North Was Pointing South, the Arrow in the South Was Pointing North

0:15 Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And I was in an earthquake two times. Did you know that about me? I don't think we've ever talked about my earthquakes. One of them was in Colorado when I was in middle school. I think that's right. The room shook a tiny bit. There was a little pop.

0:30 And we didn't really know what happened. And then the next day the teacher was like, that was an earthquake, the great earthquake of Colorado. You don't really have those in Colorado, so it wasn't much. And then another time I was in Costa Rica and it was a much bigger pop and stuff jiggled around more.

0:42 But even then I didn't get it. I didn't really have a context for what was happening. And I looked it up, and sure enough, it was an earthquake. I don't remember what the rating was, but it was, you know, it was meaningful. But I think the reason I didn't recognize it as an earthquake was because all the things I've learned about how to identify an earthquake from years of watching cartoons, none of those things occurred.

1:02 There wasn't a little lightning bolt-shaped crack that just opened up in the ground and then expanded into a great big black lightning bolt-shaped chasm, and then cars and buildings start falling in and people start screaming and running. Like women hold their babies tighter and stuff. None of that happened.

1:17 Everybody just kind of seemed lightly amused. And then that was that. But I tell you what, even though that's apparently not usually how earthquakes are, it does not mean that what I learned about earthquakes from cartoons is not useful. No, it is useful because it's a very helpful metaphor for understanding how relational fallout happens.

1:35 It just starts as a little crack and then it opens up into something really big that starts swallowing up all the metaphorical, beautiful elements of the relationship. This happens in relationships between individuals. It also happens in relationships between people groups like the Jews and the Samaritans, which is what we've been working on lately and what we're continuing to work on.

1:55 And our quest to understand that blood feud, that historic tension. We've been looking at Amos for the last couple of days. And what we've discovered, what we found, is a really good sense of the spiritual condition of the people in the northern kingdom right before they got wiped out by the Assyrians.

2:16 We've got a better sense of what the state of the priesthood in the northern kingdom was like. And it was it was ratty. Well, a little bit after the events of Amos, the Assyrians need to go and find a priest, any priest from the recently conquered land of Israel to provide religious guidance. And so after having looked at what they had to choose from, it is no wonder that whoever, whatever priest they went and picked out, well, he wasn't well equipped to set the tone in the entire trajectory for the whole history of the people group moving forward who would emerge from this era of Assyrian conquest.

2:58 And sure enough, it does not go well, not just in that generation, but moving forward. The Samaritan thing is a corruption of the true things of God. In fairness, it was corrupt long before the Assyrians did all the stuff that they did and took people from Syria and Babylon and mashed them together and brought in one lousy priest and kind of did a little religious mashup with some things of the God of Abraham and some things of other stuff.

3:27 It had been corrupt for ages. You and I just looked at Amos the prophet. He wasn't speaking about corruption that would happen in the future. He was speaking of corruption that had already been well established for centuries. This was broken before there were Samaritans, is the point. The brokenness started with the people of God living in corruption and rejecting the things of God.

3:51 And then it metastasized into something even worse when God just gave them over to it. Here, get conquered. Here, this bastardized, depreciated version of the religion. Yeah, that's what you'll get. It'll be a parody of the real thing. This is not me being mean to the Samaritan tradition from 2,500 years ago.

4:12 This is me repeating the judgment of the text. The Jews are not perfect. Jesus speaks to that stuff certainly as well. I mean, they're massively wrong, but the line of the things that is true, the through line of redemption, is running through the southern kingdom and the line of kings descended from David that will lead to Jesus.

4:33 The northern kingdom is just a wash. It's wrecked. And the fact that the Samaritans continue to linger around as a minority right next door to the Jewish people. On the one hand, like I don't know, maybe it's just good old-fashioned racism. I don't like your dumb face. I don't like how you are. But maybe I'm sure that was some of it.

4:52 I think that kind of worked different back then, but I'm sure they just didn't like their neighbors very much. But also the Samaritans continuing to exist with this corrupted version of things is a reminder of so much of what's gone wrong. A living, walking, breathing, cultural reminder of what had gone wrong in the past, of how the Jewish people ended up themselves in the situation they ended up in later.

5:22 The Jewish people remember that it was only another 140 years before they got conquered by Nebuchadnezzar. So emotionally, I think what we're getting with this bad blood that we encounter in the New Testament between the Samaritans and the Jews is kind of that old double mess thing that can happen in our own hearts and brains, which is that weird mix, the strange bedfellows of self-loathing and pride that so often go together.

5:47 Well, one detail worth noting since we're in this zip code biblically, something really good is happening in the southern kingdom at the same time that something horrible is happening in the northern kingdom. Down south, one of the best kings ever is ruling, a man named Hezekiah. He's got a long reign, he gets things mostly right.

6:09 The Assyrians come knocking at his door as well, but God spares the southern kingdom under the leadership of Hezekiah at the exact same time that he allows the Assyrians to destroy the northern kingdom. Well, part and parcel with all of that, we read a whole bunch about it in 2 Chronicles 29 through 31, is that Hezekiah leads this massive revival of the stuff of God nationwide.

6:35 And either right before the collapse of the northern kingdom, or even before the dust had settled, maybe right after the Assyrians came to town, Hezekiah goes so far as to send out emissaries and say, We're doing Passover again. We're doing the whole religion again, we're doing everything again. Everybody's invited, even from Israel.

6:57 All of you come down, worship with us at the true temple of God. Let's do the things of God as it's written down in the book of the law and get that right and move forward together again. There is a legitimate, oft-overlooked, oft-forgotten moment where the king, the spiritual and political leader of the north, makes this gigantic ovation to all of the descendants of Abraham, be they northern kingdomers or southern kingdomers, to come back together under the authority of the law of God and worship him properly on his own terms.

7:33 And Hezekiah puts his money where his mouth is on this. He puts his reputation where his mouth is on this. He sends out representatives to destroy all the pagan worship stuff in the southern kingdom of Judah. So in the north, they can't get enough of pagan worship and ignoring God. In the south, during the same time, they can't get enough of getting rid of all the pagan stuff and worshiping God on his own terms.

7:58 Hezekiah sends out people to destroy the sacred stones and the high places and the Asherah poles. And get this Hezekiah in the south, at the time that the Assyrians were coming to destroy the north, had so much clarity and nuance in his understanding of the worship of God that he was even able to discern a really bizarre perversion of worship that was occurring.

8:24 You remember the snake that Jesus referenced in John 3 that Moses made and raised up in the desert? Well, of all things, the people of Israel still had that, and they'd made a little shrine to it, and they were worshiping the snake. And Hezekiah's like, Yeah, that's idolatry. That's gotta go. Now, surely there were some who were like, oh, you know, but that's something God used powerfully in the past.

8:47 It's not worship, it's veneration. I'm sure people were pushing back on that, but Hezekiah would have no part in it. And the text treats it as though he was doing the right thing to destroy that. It says he broke into pieces the bronze snake Moses had made for up to that time. The Israelites had been burning incense to it.

9:07 I mean, that's all they're doing. They're just burning incense. It's not like they're doing uh sacrifices to it or anything, but the Bible still says, and Hezekiah still rightly judged, no, that is too much. The very next verse says, Hezekiah trusted in the Lord, the God of Israel. There was no one like him among all the kings of Judah, either before him or after him.

9:28 He held fast to the Lord and did not cease to follow him. He kept the commandments the Lord had given Moses, and the Lord was with him. He was successful in whatever he undertook. He rebelled against the king of Assyria and did not serve him. From watchtower to fortified city, he defeated the Philistines as far as Gaza in his territory.

9:46 It's amazing that the right orientation of the heart and toward worship and toward idolatry transformed the fortunes of Hezekiah's kingdom, of his people. It looks pretty explicit. I mean, especially if you read forward in 2 Kings and the stuff where Assyria comes to town. It's very explicit. Hezekiah getting it right on that stuff translated into God blessing his people per the terms of the covenant made with Moses way back in the day.

10:16 But then Assyria does show up on the same campaign that they engaged in to go and defeat the northern kingdom, and they they parlay with Hezekiah. And it's amazing to look at the manipulative, religiously tinged language that the Assyrian emissaries present to Hezekiah that sounds, frankly, a lot like the twisted-up religious language that Amaziah, the high priest of the northern kingdom of Israel, was throwing around.

10:48 The emissary from Assyria shows up and warns Hezekiah, he says, This is what the great king, the king of Assyria says. On what are you basing this confidence of yours not to bow down to us and not to just open your gates? You say that you have strategy and military strength, but you speak only with empty words.

11:03 On whom are you depending that you rebel against me? Look now, you are depending on Egypt, that splintered reed of a staff, which pierces a man's hand and wounds him if he leans on it. Nice imagery. I gotta give the Assyrians credit here. It's good writing. Such is Pharaoh, king of Egypt, to all who depend on him.

11:19 And interestingly, it's there are times in the Bible where God kind of says the same thing. The Assyrian emissary goes on. And if you say to me, We are depending on the Lord our God, wait, isn't he the one whose high places and altars Hezekiah removed? Saying to Judah and Jerusalem, You must worship before this altar in Jerusalem.

11:40 Come now, make a bargain with my master, the king of Assyria. I'll give you two thousand horses if you can put riders on them. How can you repulse one officer of the least of my master's officials, even though you're depending on Egypt for chariots and horsemen? Furthermore, have I come to attack and destroy this place without word from the Lord?

12:02 The Lord himself told me to march against this country and destroy it. Whoa! Hezekiah, this young king, is just getting blitzed with religious language and false prophecy, false prophecy claims from the God of Abraham, the God of Hezekiah himself. Look at the way this guy, like Satan, twisted things around.

12:26 Hey, everybody of Jerusalem, you really think God is gonna come and save you? Your king took down all of his high places. It demonstrates such a fascinating ignorance on the part of the Assyrians. Well, Hezekiah holds fast, and then an absolute rock star of the Old Testament just walks into the room, none other than Isaiah himself.

12:49 Yeah, the Isaiah, the one whose book is jock full of all the stuff about the Messiah and Emmanuel and born of a virgin, like all of that business is from this prophet. He shows up and affirms that Hezekiah is on the right track. And tomorrow we're gonna look at what this enormously influential Old Testament character, this prophet Isaiah, says to Hezekiah and how that affects the unfolding of all of history and the entire trajectory of the Jewish people and the relationship between the Jews and the Samaritans, secondarily.

13:26 I mean, Isaiah showed up. It's gonna be a huge deal. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.