Fallen Kingdom

Good morning, church. I'm Jason. I'm one of the pastors here. I'd like to invite you to open your Bible now, if you've got one with you, or a scripture journal. We're still in that, in 2 Kings.

2 Kings in the Old Testament. Turn about a third of the way into your Bible and you'll find it. 2 Kings chapter 17. We are up to a point where today we're going to see a kingdom fall.

2 Kings 17 · chapter mention

2 Kings chapter 17. And I'm actually going to split up our reading today. I'll read the first six verses and we'll talk a little bit about that.

2 Kings 17 · chapter mention

And then we'll come back and take verses 7 through 23 today. So about half the chapter.

Hear these words. In the twelfth year of Ahaz, king of Judah, Hosea, the son of Elah, began to reign in Samaria over Israel, and he reigned nine years.

And he did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, yet not as the kings of Israel who were before him. Against him came up Shalmaneser, king of Assyria, and Hosea became his vassal and paid him tribute.

But the king of Assyria found treachery in Hosea, for he had sent messengers to so king of Egypt, and offered no tribute to the king of Assyria, as he had done year by year.

Therefore the king of Assyria shut him up and bound him in prison. Then the king of Assyria invaded all the land and came to Samaria, and for three years he besieged it.

In the ninth year of Hosea, the king of Assyria captured Samaria, and he carried off the Israelites away to Assyria, and placed them in Halah, and on the harbor, the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes.

We'll stop right there. Let me ask you to pray with me once more. Father, we come to your word today, again, trusting that you know what is best for us.

Lord, we have been looking at this ancient people, and Father, we have been recognizing that there but for your grace go we. We are not much different, and so Father, teach us today.

Shape us by your word. Father, we just thank you for where we are as a church family, especially for so many of the new lives that you have given to us, Lord.

We thank you especially for these young babies, these newborns, the children that you have given us. Father, we thank you for everyone that's new, whether young or old, Lord.

We are excited to be doing life together as your church, and we pray this in the name of Jesus, our Savior. Amen.

I am sure you're familiar with the concept of a headline. I tried to make one for you. Here's my best attempt at a headline. And as you know, a headline is different from a backstory, right?

Headline, backstory. In the old days, a headline would take, you know, half a page of the newspaper, big black ink. Today, it seems like everything is in bold and in black and in red, and it's across a web page, of course.

The headline puts it out there straight and simple, but we know that for every headline there is a backstory. And that is the story behind the how we got here.

The circumstances surrounding the big event in the headline. The history behind it. What you might call the story behind the story. Well, I want you to think about it in that way as we come to this chapter, 2 Kings 17, because you could picture this chapter a lot like this.

We've got in the first six verses, what we just read, the headline. The headline is fallen kingdom. Samaria falls to Assyria. And then what we have over the next 17 verses is really our backstory.

So headline first, let's just get right to it. Our headliner begins with the king of Israel, a king by the name of Hosea. And aside from this guy getting to his throne the way that almost every other predecessor recently has gotten there, which is by assassination,

we just read really the usual note that we read about every king of Israel, that they, quote, did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. It's pretty sad.

A pretty sad state of affairs in a kingdom when that's now the new normal for Israelite kings. They did evil. And yet our narrator interestingly adds, The sense that we're getting here is that this guy, Hosea, is not as bad.

He's not quite as wicked as the others. Of course, there's still the sins of Jeroboam going on all over the land. You've still got those golden calves being worshipped along with all manner of idolatry happening all over the land.

I mean, this is still the northern kingdom of Israel. But comparatively speaking, it's like our last king here is not even the worst of the worst.

Hosea is not actually as bad as some of his predecessors. However, we read in verse 3 of how the newest king of Assyria, Shalmaneser V, he comes to the throne and he right away comes against Hosea.

Hosea basically brings him to his knees as a vassal. And based on what we saw back in chapter 15, 2 Kings 15, we learned of how Shalmaneser's predecessor and actually his father, Tiglath-Pileser, he's already had a hand in putting Hosea on the throne.

In fact, Assyrian records actually have Tiglath-Pileser bragging about how he had really installed Hosea as a puppet king, which leads us to believe that he had something to do with the assassination.

But now, whether it's because Shalmaneser needs to make a show of force with the new king, you know, kind of show him that it might be a new king, but it's the same old policy with Assyria, for whatever reason, he comes up against Hosea, and he makes his presence felt by exacting tribute from him.

But soon and very soon, things turn south. And by south, I mean literally south. Because Hosea gets this idea that it's a really great time to test the waters out there and see if any neighboring power might come to his rescue.

And so he proceeds to send messengers south to Saul, king of Egypt. We're not sure if that's the name of a place, or more likely a shortened name of a pharaoh, a king of Egypt.

And so what we see happening is a little double dealing, really. Really, see if we can't switch teams, as it were. And it does not pan out very well for Hosea, king of Israel, because somehow king Shalmaneser of Assyria gets word that this is happening,

and king Saul of Egypt does not deliver. And the next thing anybody knows, Hosea is no longer known as king Hosea, but as prisoner Hosea. Samaria, the great capital, or I should say once great capital of Samaria,

is besieged, and it's a fortified city, so it's going to take some time. And three years later, we read, the city does finally fall, and with it, the last holdout of this once mighty northern kingdom of Israel.

It's finished. Prominent Israelites are deported, carried off into exile, to the tune of about 27,000, and they are resettled in distant lands.

So that's the headline here. Fallen kingdom Samaria falls to Assyria. But as we move into verse 7, which is where we want to go now, I want you to hear the back story.

And for readers like us, if you've spent any time in kings, it's going to be a familiar back story. So pick up with me in verse 7 as we keep reading.

And this occurred. Why? And this occurred because the people of Israel had sinned against the Lord their God, who had brought them up out of the land of Egypt, from under the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt, and had feared other gods, and walked in the customs of the nations

whom the Lord drove out before the people of Israel, and in the customs of the kings of Israel's had practiced. And the people of Israel did secretly against the Lord their God things that were not right.

They built for themselves high places in all of their towns, from watchtower to fortified city. They set up for themselves pillars and ashram on every high hill and under every green tree.

And they made offerings on all the high places, as the nations did whom the Lord carried away before them. And they did wicked things, provoking the Lord to anger.

And they served idols, of which the Lord had said to them, you shall not do this. Yet the Lord warned Israel and Judah by every prophet and every seer saying, turn from your evil ways and keep my commandments and my statutes in accordance with all the law that I commanded your fathers

and that I sent to you by my servants, the prophets. But they would not listen, but were stubborn as their fathers had been, who did not believe in the Lord their God.

They despised his statutes and his covenant that he had made with their fathers and the warnings that he gave them. They went after false idols and became false.

And they followed the nations that were around them, concerning whom the Lord had commanded them that they should not do like them. And they abandoned all the commandments of the Lord their God and made for themselves metal images of two calves.

And they made an Asherah and worshipped all the host of heaven and served Baal. And they burned their sons and their daughters as offerings and used divination and omens and sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the Lord, provoking him to anger.

Therefore, the Lord was very angry with Israel and removed them out of his sight. None was left but the tribe of Judah only. Judah also did not keep the commandments of the Lord their God, but walked in the customs that Israel had introduced.

And the Lord rejected all the descendants of Israel and afflicted them and gave them into the hand of plunderers until he cast them out of his sight.

When he had torn Israel from the house of David, they made Jeroboam the son of Nebat king. And Jeroboam drove Israel from following the Lord and made them commit great sin.

The people of Israel walked in all the sins that Jeroboam did. They did not depart from them until the Lord removed Israel out of his sight as he had spoken by all his servants, the prophets.

So Israel was exiled from their own land until this day.

The key phrase in verse 7, And this occurred because... It's like our narrator is giving us a summary, isn't he? Almost to the point where he just kind of gets mixed up in it and just keeps listing out sins, giving us almost like a commentary

that should be lessons learned from their failure to keep God's covenant. But I want you to notice that it's the people. Verse 7 says, This occurred because the people of Israel had sinned against the Lord their God and walked in the customs of the nations.

It's not just their bad kings. It's not just their corrupted leaders and their compromised priesthood. It is very much the people.

And so these verses from 7 to 17, these two paragraphs really lay out the shameful record of Israel's idolatry becoming a people who very voluntarily walked in the ways of the nations, entered into the worship practices of the pagan peoples whom the Lord said, Don't do that.

Every form of idolatry they engaged in from golden calves at Bethel and Dan to Baals and Asherim everywhere, from the worship of the heavenly hosts, stars, divination, sorcery, even child sacrifice.

These were all the, quote unquote, abominable practices that God had clearly forbidden and warned against. I want you to hear it back in Deuteronomy.

Deuteronomy 18 verse 19, 18 verse 9, I'm sorry. When you come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not learn to follow the abominable practices of those nations.

Deuteronomy 18:19

But here they are, and they did it anyway. Right? And so our narrator goes on for these two full paragraphs, highlighting their sins. But you know what?

I think in the midst of reading all of this, and it's a lot, it's easy to lose sight of what I think is a pattern. A pattern of what you might call escalation.

Escalation of sin. I think what we see here are several stages of escalation, and if you'll let me, I'd like to draw out for you four stages.

Four stages. Here's the first one. First stage is this. Ungratefulness. Ungratefulness. I want you to understand that with the Israelite people, before they really did anything wrong, I mean, unless you count grumbling and complaining, which is wrong.

But before any of this idolatry got started, the people started down this path by being ungrateful. Look at verse 7 again. We're told of how the people sinned against the Lord their God, who had done what?

Brought them up out of the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt. That's a great story, right? A great story in the Bible.

The Exodus, the prince of Egypt, Moses, he rescues them. And yet the people were ungrateful. Here's a modern day for Israel, I should say, a contemporary prophet named Isaiah.

We have a book in the Bible that bears his name. Isaiah began his ministry in the waning days of this northern kingdom. And I want you to hear what he prophesied.

Isaiah chapter 1, verses 2 and 3. Hear, O heavens, give ear, O earth, for the Lord has spoken. Children have I reared and brought up, but they've rebelled against me.

Isaiah 1:2

The ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master's crib, but Israel does not know. My people do not understand. The Lord is talking about all that he had done to redeem his people, and they seem very, very ungrateful.

And for Israel, it wasn't just a perceived ungratefulness, it was a real ungratefulness. You know, sometimes people perceive that someone's ungrateful, and it's not even really true.

Their ungratefulness was real, and Israel's ungratefulness was not something new. As a matter of fact, for them it started pretty early. I could take you back to the book of Exodus, to chapter 14.

You say, well, that chapter 14, isn't that not long after the ten plagues of Egypt and the crossing of the Red Sea? Yeah, just a few verses later.

They had just crossed the Red Sea. You can see them, the Israelites. I mean, they've still got, like, the sand of the seabed on their sandals.

They've still got the words of Moses' song ringing in their ears, and already their ungrateful grumbling had begun. I want you to hear this in Exodus chapter 15, verse 24.

Exodus 15:24

And the people grumbled against Moses, saying, what are we going to drink? Next chapter, chapter 16, verse 2. The whole congregation grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness.

Next chapter, it's like a regular thing. Chapter 17, verse 3. But the people again got thirsty for water, and the people grumbled against Moses and said, why did you bring us up out of Egypt to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?

I don't know if you've ever taken a long trip with your family in a car. Do your kids ever get to that point where they're like, why have you done this to us?

I'm so thirsty. Do you want me to die in the back seat? I mean, it's not really all that different. Just the children are bigger, and there's a lot of them.

So that was centuries earlier, okay? I mean, that was like, you know, the 1400s BC. This is now 700 years later. And are the people of King Hosea's day here, the northern kingdom, are they any different?

No, they're not. I want you to understand this is the first stage of sin's escalation. This is where it starts out, in ungratefulness. And it really only sets the stage, pardon the pun, for the next stage, stage number two,

which is disobedience. Second stage is disobedience. Check out the very last phrase of verse seven again. Israel sinned, how? By fearing other gods.

Fearing other gods. If you've ever heard of this little decalogue, this little group of commandments called the Ten Commandments, what's the very first one?

Exodus 20, verse three. Here it is. You shall have no other gods before me. That was literally commandment number one. The most fundamental, most basic requirement.

You will be a monotheistic people, Yahweh says, who worship one God, me, the great I am, who rescued you. And then he added the second commandment, Deuteronomy chapter five, verses eight through nine.

You shall not, commandment number two, you shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that's on the earth below or that's in the water under the earth.

You shall not bow down to them or serve them.

And yet, what have the people done? verse nine says that they did secretly against the Lord their God things that were not right. Technically, a more literal translation of the Hebrew scholars says, scholars say that secretly is probably not the best word.

It's really that they covered over. Covered over or overlaid things that were not right. Most scholars agree that this is probably a reference to those illegitimate objects of worship that they covered over with gold.

They overlaid like the two golden calves. And by the way, that great sin, which if you haven't heard the echoes of it in the passage, going all the way back to the first king of the split kingdom, Jeroboam I, when he overlaid those two golden calves, that wasn't even the first time in Israel's history where they had

a golden calf. Anybody remember Aaron at the foot of Mount Sinai? direct disobedience. And it didn't stop there. But the Lord not only warned against the high places and overlaid idols, he also warned

against the worship practices of the Canaanite people. The very people, the wicked people that he was going to drive out of the land. God even used words like vomited the land, vomited the Canaanites out.

Here's an extended passage from the book of Leviticus, Leviticus 18. I want you to hear these words. Leviticus 18 verse 24, God says, do not, talking to his people, do not make yourselves unclean by any of these, for by all these, by all these practices, the nations I'm driving out before you

Leviticus 18:24

have become unclean, and the land has become unclean, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. But you shall keep my statutes and my rules, and do none of these abominations, for the people of the land who were before you did all of these

abominations, so that the land became unclean, lest the land vomit you out when it makes you unclean, as it vomited out the nation that was before you.

God's pretty clear.

But what did the Israelites decide to do? verse 10. They set up for themselves pillars and ashram on every hill and under every green tree, and they made offerings on all the high places as the nations did, whom the Lord had carried away before them, and they did wicked things, provoking the Lord

to anger, and they served idols of which the Lord had said to them, you shall not do this. I don't know about any of you parents, our kids are getting older, but when they were younger and we would say to one of our children, don't do this.

I remember a couple of the real basic things, it was like, don't eat candy at will, right? We were always one of those homes that had candy, some of you are smarter than us, you just don't keep it in the house.

We had candy in the house, a place that we kept it, and it was a rule. The candy's there, just because it's there doesn't mean you can go eat it.

Do not do this, you have to ask for permission. I remember another time it was like we had one of our children that had this pattern of waking up in the middle of the night and they would go downstairs and turn on the TV, like a seven year old.

You don't turn on the TV at 3 a.m.

Don't do this. And if they did, it was a sin of disobedience. And here in fallen Israel, it's there, it's at that stage, it's at the second stage of escalation, disobedience.

And here of course is where God graciously intervenes with his many prophets. I mean a bulk of our Old Testament consists in the writings of these prophets from the ministries of Elijah and Elisha, who were sent to the northern kingdom by the way, to Amos, to Hosea, to now

Isaiah.

God intervened with his prophets and he warned Israel time and time again. Take a look at verse 13. Yet the Lord warned Israel and Judah by every prophet and every seer, saying, turn from your evil ways and keep my commandments and my statutes.

I sent you prophet after prophet, but to no avail, sin was still escalating and it was now escalating to this third stage and the third stage is this.

It's called stubbornness. Stubbornness. Lots of different terms for stubbornness. Intractability, obduracy, pig-headedness is a nice technical term.

You know, you say pig-headedness, people know what you mean. In ancient Israel, you know which one they liked best? Which term? They liked stiff-necked.

Stiff-neckedness. That's a term scripture likes best because it's a pretty good analogy for people who live in an agrarian society with a lot of animals around.

Animals that you needed to do the plowing in the fields, animals that you needed to pull the carts of everything that was heavy, animals that you sometimes rode.

And if you have a stiff-necked animal, that's not a good thing because guess what? It's like a steering wheel with a club on it or something, locked up.

A stiff-necked animal is going to lead you into trouble. And so the Lord warned his people and he warned them some more and he warned them again, allowing the northern kingdom to just keep descending into that chaotic run of all these bad kings in rapid succession, each one

knocking off their predecessor and he even allowed the kingdom to be reduced. If we remember the territory is shrinking, it's gotten down to the point where it's pretty pitiful.

It's the city of Samaria and maybe like a few suburbs, just kind of a little nation state in the middle of everything with all the rest of the promised land now under foreign control.

So they're pretty humbled, right?

Pretty ready to listen, right? The leaders of Israel, the people of Israel are ready to listen to the gracious warnings and pleadings God's sending to them through his prophets, right?

Verse 14, but they would not listen, but were stubborn, as their fathers had been, who did not believe in the Lord their God. Would not listen.

They were stubborn. born.

And by the time you reach this stage in the escalation of sin with a stiff neck and a proverbial hard heart, you know, it's not long before you're about to enter into the fourth stage of sin's escalation.

Fourth stage is defiance. Defiance. I don't know how else to describe the little paragraph of sins that we read from verses 15 to 17. They despised his statutes and his covenant that he made with their fathers and the warnings that he gave them.

They despised them. They went after, you could substitute the word, chased after false idols and became false. And they followed the nations that were around them, concerning whom the Lord had commanded them that they should not be like them.

That sounds like defiance. Chasing after false idols, empty idols. And just as empty as their idols were, the people themselves, the text says, became empty and false.

Scholar Dale Ralph Davis says that a sad transformation takes place in these worshippers for we become what we worship. We become what we worship and don't we?

And verses 16 and 17 go on to show that defiance in full force. Because it moves beyond the original two golden calves to all the Asherah all over the land to the point where Israel is worshipping all the host of heaven, astral deities, the stars, early forms

of astrology, divination, omens. So basically they're into witchcraft and sorcery now. All while God had explicitly forbidden this in the law.

Deuteronomy chapter 4 verse 19. Again, 700 years before, God says, and beware people, beware, lest you raise your eyes up to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away and bow down to them and serve them.

Deuteronomy 4:19

They even burn their sons and daughters as offerings, child sacrifice. You know, it's one thing to bow yourself down to an idol and it's quite another to offer up your helpless baby to one.

And yet, this is where the people of the northern kingdom are at. And again, in this stage, I want you to look at the verbs, the sheer verbs used in this paragraph, starting in verse 14.

If you want to underline them, you can. They would not listen. They despised his statutes and covenants. They went after, chased after foreign idols.

They abandoned, they made, and they made, and they served, and they burned their children to idols. Our narrator doesn't mince words. He comes to the end of verse 17 when he speaks of how these defiant people had literally sold themselves

to do evil in the sight of the Lord. Sold themselves as if into a slavery of sorts, a slavery in sin and wickedness. And talk about irony of all ironies.

Talk about a defiant sin with a high hand against the redeeming God Yahweh. But we ask ourselves, to whom and where did they try to sell themselves most recently?

Back up to the beginning of our chapter, back up to verse 4. Who did King Hosea try to double deal with? Who was that? Wasn't it a certain king of Egypt?

Yeah, this same ungrateful, disobedient, stubborn people have now taken the last step into total defiance by literally trying to resell themselves to the very nation that once held their chains, Egypt.

The Lord redeemed his people out of Egypt. And look at this, the people seem literally hell-bent on selling themselves right back in. And thus, with the last straw like this, we come to the statement, the sobering statement in verse 18.

Check it out, verse 18. Therefore the Lord was very angry with Israel and removed them from his sight. None was left but the tribe of Judah only.

And in as much as verse 19 goes on to predict what we know to be true, what we're going to see, what we're going to see coming for southern Judah, how they too are going to follow the same pattern and they won't stop and they will walk in the customs that Israel had introduced.

We get to verse 20 and we recognize that it includes every Israelite northern or southern kingdom and the Lord rejected verse 20 all the descendants of Israel and afflicted them and gave them into the hand of plunderers until he had cast them out of his sight.

The God who had rescued them and redeemed them, the God who had provided for them, he'd been patient with them through their grumbling in the wilderness, through that crazy period of the judges, through their desire for a king of their own like all the other nations had, even through

a split kingdom and a rapid succession of bad leaders who defiantly marched toward idolatry and he sent them prophets, prophet after prophet to warn them, to call them back and he waited for them and he called again and he waited

some more and now here in the year 722 BC after more than 700 years of divine patience, he will remove, he will reject, he will cast them out of his sight.

Verse 23, our last verse for today, summarizes it well. Until the Lord removed Israel from his sight, as he had spoken by all his servants the prophets, so Israel was exiled from their own land to Assyria until this day.

So we've heard the headline, kingdom, fallen kingdom, Samaria falls to Assyria, and now we've heard the back story too, haven't we? The why and what led to it, I suppose the only thing left is for people like you and I, for believers to ask ourselves, why is

this recorded? Is there anything here for us? And I would suggest to you that there are some observations for us to make from this. And this morning, in this first half of the chapter, I'd like to offer you a series of observations.

I have four, four observations. And the first one is really straightforward, really simple, because it's based on what we've just seen. Observation number one is to take note take note of the escalating stages of sin.

Those escalating stages of sin from ungratefulness to disobedience to stubbornness to defiance. Take note because sin is not something to trifle with or play with.

ask yourself, do you struggle with the heart of ingratitude? Are you ungrateful for what the Lord has given you? Ungrateful for what life has given you?

Do you feel that you are owed more? Are you dissatisfied?

Or maybe for you it's a stage of disobedience, how you're living your life right now. you're kind of doing things your way. On your own path, you like it that way, you don't want anybody else telling you anything different.

Sometimes it's a stage of stubbornness that we're in, where we hear warnings and we don't want to hear them, we don't want to heed warnings, we make excuses, we argue, we resist the truth.

Don't let it get to the last stage, defiance. Because that's when your heart gets so hard that you do whatever you please in spite of God's word and you don't care.

Our first observation this morning is to simply take note and be aware because the escalating stages of sin are real. Here's a second observation, number two, number two, beware of idols and rival saviors.

beware of idols and rival saviors. Let me explain what I mean. It's easy to think that we don't worship idols today. We don't struggle with that because I don't have a decoration, a carved stone, a piece of metal in my

house that I worship. Several years ago we took a trip to the Smoky Mountains and we brought back this carved bear and we set it on our fireplace.

I have to date not experienced the temptation to pray to it. There's always tomorrow but to date not been tempted to pray to the little bear, little smiley bear.

But you know honestly idols can be anything in our lives that we make supreme. Stay with me. that piece of aluminum alloy in your purse or your pocket.

I guess it's not carved but it is fashioned. An activity or a hobby or a sport that is too important and too dominating in your life. For some of us it could be the dollars that we earn, money,

the educational goals you may have. Remember anything can become an idol, even good things, if we are supremely devoted to it. If it takes the place that the Lord should have in our lives.

And we ask ourselves why did Israel turn to idols? Was it just fun? Just because they wanted to be happy? Peer pressure from the nations around them?

Well maybe a little bit. But it was because they were looking to these things, these idols, as a way to blessing. They participated in the fertility cult because the pagan nation said that's how you have a big family.

That's how your crops grow. That's how you eat. It's your security. It's for your family. They simply saw what the other people around them were doing, what they were worshipping as supreme, and they absorbed their same goals and their same practices.

A month or two ago, it was a Sunday, it was Lord's Day, it was in the afternoon, and I went to a place where I have never seen so many people on a Sunday, and it wasn't a church building.

It was a field house. And boy, oh boy, were people devoted to what was going on there. All kinds of sacrifices to be there.

And more than just idols, there are also rival saviors. I want you to think about this. King Hosea, his name. I didn't know this, but I learned that Hosea is a variation, I should have known, a variation of the name Joshua.

Hosea, Joshua, both of those versions of the name mean the same thing. God saves. That's what Joshua means, God saves. Hosea, God saves. How ironic when we remember that Joshua, the first one, was their leader when they came into the promised

land, wasn't he, in the book of Joshua. And now it seems we have another Joshua who is essentially doing things that lead to their removal from it.

A false Joshua, a false savior. Sometimes we can have Joshua's in our lives that are false saviors that actually lead us right back into slavery, right out of God's place of blessing.

So beware of idols and rival saviors. And remember that there is only one true Joshua. Because when we get to the New Testament, the Greek version of the Joshua name is now Yeshua, Jesus.

He is the one true savior. And only he will lead us out of the bondage of sin and into our promised rest someday.

Third observation. Number three. heed the Lord's warnings and calls for repentance. Heed the Lord's warnings and calls to repentance. I want you to think about all those prophets bringing messages,

bringing what was his word, calling the people back to the covenant, right? Calling them back to God's ways. And we just read how the Lord did this through multiple prophets.

Verse 13. By every prophet, every seer called for his people to turn, to repent, which literally means to turn from your sin. But those warnings were despised.

Verse 15. They were stubborn. They wouldn't listen. You know, the New Testament, the Apostle Paul reflects on this. He reflects on ancient Israelite history.

Here's what he says in 1 Corinthians 10, verse 6. He says that these things took place as examples for us. He's talking to believers. That we might not desire evil as they did.

1 Corinthians 10:6

A few verses later, verse 11. Now these things happened to them, he's talking about judgment, as an example. But they were written down for our instruction on whom the end of the ages has come.

You see, for people like us today, our stakes are no longer the borders of a promised land, right? We're not trying to get over to the Middle East and take a plot of land for our family.

We're not trying to defend a walled city like a Samaria or a Jerusalem. It's not life and peace and prosperity in some territory or some earthly land.

For us, there are much more cosmic and eternal implications at stake. I think the writer to the Hebrews says it best. Here's what Hebrews chapter 12 verse 25 says.

Hebrews 12:25

The writer says, See that you do not refuse him who is speaking. For if they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, how much less will we escape if we reject him who warns from heaven?

They, you. They, the writer's talking about the ancient Israelites, but the you that he's writing to is people like you and me. We have been warned from heaven.

Yes, the gospel is a message of hope and peace and life, but it's also a warning to accept the one who's come from heaven and receive the forgiveness that we need from him.

Every person needs to do this. Come to Christ and receive him in repentance and faith because this fourth and final observation is true. And here it is, number four, the last one.

realize that God will eventually remove the wicked from his presence. He will.

Not everybody makes it. It's a broad road.

Realize that the sins of this world and the sinners who are in it will face the just and righteous anger of God. Scripture describes his anger as a holy wrath.

We can't understand it. Don't try to put your own human assessment on it. Oh, it seems bad to get angry. That's because you only know and I only know human anger.

It's flawed. God's is not. It's holy. And when we read things like the Lord was very angry with Israel, God is not sinning. And he did what?

He removed them out of his sight. Inasmuch as the Lord rejected his covenant people because of their disobedience, because they did not depart from their sins, he removed them out of his sight.

He exiled them. He exiled them.

And there is salvation in Jesus. That's why we're here. Amen. Jesus has come. But I want you to understand the New Testament is very clear and Jesus himself is very clear that he will eventually remove all the wicked from his presence.

He's talking about all the wickedness, not the sins that are covered by those who have run to him. He's talking about those who have rejected him.

him. He will say things like, I never knew you. Depart from me. Matthew chapter 7 verse 23, and then I will declare to them, this is Jesus speaking, I never knew you.

Matthew 7:23

Depart from me, you workers of lawlessness. Hell is real. A place of eternal darkness and separation from God, a place of punishment for the wicked who are not in Christ.

Jesus spoke frequently about hell. And yeah, he used a lot of metaphors to describe it, but that does not mean that hell is only a metaphor.

It's real. And we need to realize, as illustrated for us here in these dealings with the fallen kingdom in 2nd Kings 17, we need to realize that the Lord, Jesus himself, will eventually remove the wicked from his presence,

which is why we need to come to him and trust in the true Joshua and submit our lives to this true Savior who was willing to take our place, who died the death we all deserve and paid the price for our

sins, who met all of God's perfect standards that we could never meet. God bless you.

I'm going to ask if the team would come up now and prepare to lead us in the last song. And as they come, let me ask you if you would stand with me and let's pray.

Let's seek the Lord.

Lord, we begin this morning by thanking you for a way.

Lord, you sent ultimately in the last days not just another prophet, not even just a John the Baptist who is none greater on earth than John the Baptist, as you yourself said, but you sent yourself.

God the Father sent his Son.

In these last days, as you say in Hebrews 1, you have spoken to us through your Son, through whom you created everything. And you made him a little lower than the angels.

You gave him our status, human status, Lord. And he lived that perfect life we couldn't live. And he kept your covenant that we broke so that we could have life in him.

So today we lift up that name. We cling to that name, Jesus. We fall at the feet of our Savior and we plead with others around us, know him, submit to him, turn to him.

Because there is salvation in no one else. So Jesus, we're praying for anyone here this morning who's not taking this step, Lord. We don't come to submission by osmosis, Lord, or in such gradual steps that we don't even realize it.

No, we must be conscious of what we do. You call for a willing response. And so, Lord, we come. And we thank you for what you've done, Jesus.

We thank you for your perfect sacrifice. We thank you for your spirit who lives and moves and draws hearts to repent and to love and to yield.

And we pray this in the name of your son, in Jesus' name. Amen.