This is Truth Network Podcast. This is Cross-Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through the Book of 1 Kings.
Please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross-Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. But for now, let's join Pastor Rick in the Book of 1 Kings chapter 16 as he begins his message, Forfeited Blessings. The hands of the kings, actually not only the kings, but mainly the kings in this chapter, they're bloody with defiance and also somewhat calloused from clinging to those idols that they had fashioned for themselves, will end up with the northern kingdom being dispersed throughout the Gentile world and gone, but the southern kingdom will be taken to Babylon over a hundred years after. There, addressing those captives in Babylon, Ezekiel says they despised, God speaking through him, my judgments, and did not walk in my statues, but profaned my Sabbaths, for their heart went after their idols. And that's what it all comes down to, the first commandment, you shall have no other gods in my presence, in my sight, and God sees everywhere, they're not to exist. And their defiance against God brought forth death, and it was their own fault. In some of these cases, their own deaths. All these kings in the north were appalling, and the throne of the chosen people, which was to be occupied by righteous men, instead had men that were to pray both naturally and spiritually in character.
Many of them came into power by conspiracy and murder. You would think we were reading about the Roman Caesars, and what it ends up being in this chapter is murderer was slain by murderer. So we look now at verse one, then the word of Yahweh came to Jehu, the son of Hanani, against Baasha, saying, now before we get into the word of the prophet, I was asked, why do I read Yahweh when we come across the word Lord? Well, in most Bibles, well, usually the two options. When the covenant name of God is used by the prophets, the Jews felt it was too sacred to write the whole name out, so they retained the four letters only of that name.
And they thought by doing this, this was a righteous act, and what they did is they lost the pronunciation. And so historians are not sure whether the pronunciation of the covenant name of God given to his people is Yahweh or Jehovah. It's more likely Yahweh, not Jehovah. Like when we say Hallelujah, that Yah part is marking the covenant name of God. So in our Old Testaments and New Testament, when you come across that covenant name, those remaining letters, it's either italicized or in all caps. And that makes the distinction between Adonai, the Jewish word for Lord, versus Yahweh, that name of God given to his people, you shall call me or shall know me by the name of Yahweh. So I hope that's why when we come there, I purposely say Yahweh, because that's who it is talking about, and the name is supposed to be significant to the believer, because the name is loaded with meaning. Essentially it means God will save, and he has saved through Jesus Christ. Well, here in verse 1, this prophet Jehu, not to be confused with the coming king by the same name, and it will be said of that king that he drove his chariot like Jehu.
Well, this is not the same one. This is a prophet Jehu, we're told right out in verse 12. His father was likely Hanani, the prophet, who confronted King Asa, who in the south right now, King Asa is king, and the father confronted him. We picked that up in 2 Chronicles 16, verse 7, and at that time Hananiya, the seer, who was the father of this Jehu, more than likely, Asa, king of Judah, and said to him, because you have relied on the king of Syria and have not relied on Yahweh your God, therefore the army of the king of Syria has escaped from you.
Well, those words got him abused and put in jail. King Asa at that point did not tolerate it, but this is a man that, this Jehu is a man whose father was a prophet, and both of them dealt with kings. Jehu will also confront the son of Asa, that son's name is Jehoshaphat, and we'll get to that in chapter 19. It's profound. He says, you know, what are you buddies with those who hate Yahweh?
I mean, he just really lays it on him. 2 Chronicles 20, verse 34, now the rest of the acts of Jehoshaphat, first and last, indeed, they are written in the book of Jehu, the son of Hanani, which is mentioned in the book of the kings of Israel. And so here is a man that also wrote a history about these kings, was a prophet to them, and someone to look forward to seeing when you get to heaven. It says here in verse 1, against Baasha, well, God sent his prophets to intercept and to encourage and to rebuke the kings. They were of a higher rank than the kings when it came to spiritual matters.
Many of them, of course, paid for that. Verse 2, inasmuch as I lifted you out of the dust, and this is now God's message through Jehu to King Baasha, and made you ruler over my people Israel, and you have walked in the way of Jeroboam and have made my people Israel sin to provoke me to anger with their sins. So the prophet reminds the king of his lowly beginnings, sort of like Hannah's song, you know, he takes the beggar off the dung hill. He was a nobody, the prophet is saying, that was allowed a chance to be somebody. God was blessing him when he called him or allowed him, God allowed him to become king. And there was an opportunity there, even though the way he became king was foul. But he will forfeit the blessings, and you have walked in the way of Jeroboam and have made my people Israel sin to provoke me to anger with their sins.
Effectively, he ditched the only true God for these make believe gods. He provoked God by doing this as humans do, may we not provoke the Lord Jesus Christ. In verse 3, surely I will take away the posterity of Baasha and the posterity of his house.
I will make your house like the house of Jeroboam, the son of Nabat. Well, it gets down to this, your children, the prophet says, are unfit to live. This is a judgment and it is God's prerogative to judge whether he waits until someone dies or he does execute judgment in his life. In this life, that comes with being God. He can do this and he does do this and certainly more in the Old Testament. Here's a big difference between the Old and the New Testament. You hear me say, it's harder to live the Christian life than the Old Testament righteous Jewish life.
And you say, how? You know, we just had these righteous laws. Well, look at Stephen. If you were living in the days of David and they started throwing stones at you for preaching truth, you could grab one of those stones and throw it back at them.
You could fight. But Christ says, Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.
That's what Stephen did. This standard of Christ-like love, it is a higher calling. So there are great distinctions between the two. We don't get to the New Testament without the Old. We don't do away with the Old. We just understand the Old Testament through the eyes of the New Testament and not the other way around.
When you do it the other way around, you get into big trouble, you become legalistic, self-righteous, judgmental, and you tend to like sodium monoglutamate more than other people. All right. This is goofy, but it could happen. Anyway, back to the seriousness of what's before us. This judgment is on the wicked house of Baasha.
They were all in this. God makes it clear again to the prophet Ezekiel, the sons don't pay for the father's deeds. The wicked pay for their wickedness.
And so we have to make sure we don't lose sight of that. This is the same disgraceful judgment that God pronounced on Jeroboam who had also forfeited the blessings of God because he chose to cling to his idols. This was supposed, this prophecy, I will take away the posterity of Baasha and then he'll intensify it when he says, you know, the dogs will eat the flesh and the birds when he gets into that.
This is supposed to serve as incentive to stop it with the idols. While the prophet is preaching this to Baasha, he could have done like others have done even in the Old Testament and repent, admit his sin. But it was ignored. The prophet's words were not important to this man. In verse 4, continuing the foretelling of what's coming, the dog shall eat whoever belongs to Baasha and dies in the city and the birds of the air shall eat whoever dies in the field.
Well, whenever there's gore like this, you don't forget it, do you? This is a grotesque, a grotesque ending to Satan's idol brokers and that's what they were. They had become idol brokers for Satan. They had the power to influence the people for good or for evil and they chose evil and the Lord is calling them out on it.
And he is saying here none would care to give their corpse a decent burial. None would dig a ditch for them or pile stones over them. None would also be able to accuse God of ignoring their evil and their ignoble end. So God acted to prevent the drift of the nation because of the influence of the kings by sending his prophets, predicting what would happen so that when it happened, the people could say, okay, God called this, he's the true God because these little figurines of ours, they don't say anything. These little idols are just useless.
We'll come back to that word idol as we move forward through this. The people persisted in their sin and they got what they deserved as the house of Baasha got what it deserved. Hoping that the people would realize that God is serious and he is trustworthy and true. Well, it just will be repeated when we get to verse 34 where we have a man from Bethel just bold-faced defying God's prophecy, defying what Joshua said about Jericho and then paying for it.
Hopefully this makes the believer stronger. So looking at this, they bear their own guilt. God is not guilty for withholding blessings. He doesn't owe us blessings. It is in his nature to want to bless those who come to him.
He does not owe us protections. And in fact, with the church, the believers oftentimes he withdraws the protections because he's got a bigger mission. Again, I point to Stephen. The beginning of the great Apostle Paul, that's what he was, a great servant of God. The beginning of that man's conversion was with Stephen's death. When Saul heard the sermon of Stephen, he couldn't get it out of his head. That's why we read in Acts chapter 8, and Saul still breathing threats of violence wreaked havoc on the church. He was so burned that he could not silence the argument of this man. This sacrifice of Stephen brought about the conversion, not only the conversion of Paul, but also the gallantry of Paul. Because Paul never forgot it.
Years later, he's still writing about it. I was a blasphemer. I persecuted the church and God did not hold it against me because I did it in ignorance. These things, everything's meaningful in Scripture. And God again, withholding the blessings from the evil, does not make God evil. But wicked people will charge him with that nonetheless. God did not lift a finger to interfere with the consequences.
Again, that is his right. Had the king been obedient and not gone the way of the idolater, God would have intervened. God would have blessed.
He wanted to do this to the people. And thus the title, Forfeited Blessings. This is why, because of this turning the back on God and shaking the puny fist in his face, as though we're going to punish God by pretending he's not God, which is the life of the atheist.
Again, I say this so that you can maybe repeat it if you have not thought of it. If you come in touch with an atheist, tell him right now, I don't believe you. I know you believe in God. You just don't like. You don't like what you know about God.
And I can help you with that or not. And these are just bare facts, but I don't buy it for a second. I don't believe that God exists. I don't believe you're that stupid.
The fool has said in his heart, there is no God, the Bible says. The way I'm putting it to you is my take on it. Verse 5, Now the rest of the acts of Baasha and what he did and his might, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel? Yeah, big deal. The kings built their kingdoms to gain fame, like the Egyptian pharaohs. And that's what historians are saying, yeah, he did like kings, you know, he built up cities, he did civil things. But when he died, that's not what God remembered.
And that's what it comes down to. You can't point, well, I was a success as a king, look at what I built. Herod the Great, you know, he's the one that restored the Jewish temple, or you could say, enhanced the temple of Zerubbabel, these great building projects that Herod was known for. The man was a monster, he was a butcher, he was a murderer, just insane, satanic. So again, big deal as a king, you had these construction projects, that's not what's going to matter.
Because they were all swept away anyway. Verse 6, So Baasha rested with his fathers and was buried in Terzah. Then Elah, his son, reigned in his place.
Of course, rested is a euphemism, because he ain't resting. He was an evil man, and for 24 years he reigned in the northern kingdom. Now remember, the prophecy of Jehu was not on Baasha himself, it was on his offspring, his house, his posterity. And Elah belongs to that group now, and he's now the king. He's a bad king, and he would be murdered for his throne by Zimri, who would then become king for a week. And then Zimri would be murdered, well he would actually kill himself, we'll get to that in this chapter. But his father, Baasha, murdered Nadab, who was the king, son of Jeroboam.
So there's this murderer, murdering, murderer, and they have no problem, their conscience is not disturbed by any of this. Verse 7, and also the word of Yahweh came by the prophet Jehu the son of Hanani against Baasha and his house because of all the evil that he did in the sight of Yahweh in provoking him to anger with the work of his hands in being like the house of Jeroboam and because he killed them. Well, the chroniclers, or the historians, led by the Holy Spirit, they didn't itemize all the dirt that this guy did or these other wicked kings, they give us some of it, but suffice it to say that they provoked God continuously.
There was much more evil that they committed than is recorded. But again, Jehu the prophet gets the call and is sent to the king in being like the house of Jeroboam. He says here in verse 7, and because he killed them, i.e. Nadab, so he's saying your dad followed the sins of Jeroboam, the first king of the north, he was a murderer, and you have a wicked house here. You're idolaters and you're murderers because of it.
If you were following me, you wouldn't be murdering like this. Verse 8, Elah reigned in Israel in the 26th year of Asa king of Judah. Elah the son of Baasha became king over Israel and reigned two years in Terzah. And they're not two full years incidentally, but this statement in dating the reign of the kings in the north by the reign of the kings in the south is significant because they're going to find out there's going to be a civil war coming in the north and it's going to last for four years. But we're not told it lasts for four years until we compare the dates of the reign of Asa and that's how we'll get to that conclusion. And the Bible is filled with these little things.
You just pass over them until you start, you know, really pour a lot of time into it and have questions. But it's all over the Bible. It's such a deep book.
It will go as deep as you want to go and you'll never come close to the bottom. Verse 9, Now his servant Zimri, commander of half his chariots, conspired against him as he was in Terzah, drinking himself drunk in the house of Arza, steward of his house in Terzah. Okay, well, we can follow that. He's a major general, a two-star general probably, equivalent today. And that's kind of important because you got these power plays coming on and a two-star general really is not a big player on a political level.
Four-star has a little bit more power than a two-star and it's going to come down to that because Zimri is going to face Omri, who is going to be a four-star. Well, I mean, if you're not military minded, you're like, oh, it's boring. But it is part of the story. Ecclesiastes 10, That king wrote this, Blessed are you, O land, when your king is the son of nobles and your princes feast at the proper time for strength and not for drunkenness. Well, the reason why I'm quoting Ecclesiastes 10, 17 is because here we're told that Zimri is drinking himself drunk. You could tell the historian is disgusted with this guy. This is no way for a king to behave and he's just telling it like it is. Of course, this was, what else did he do? How did he behave when he was drunk?
Well, this is what decadence is about. Verse 10, And Zimri went in and struck him and killed him in the 27th year of Asa, king of Judah, and reigned in his place. Well, Zimri is killing Elah. Elah is Beyasha's son and his posterity is not going to survive. And Zimri comes in and he kills him.
He says, oh, that was easy enough. But again, this is going to last seven days. The shortest reign of all the kings. The shortest reign is this one, this Zimri. His name, Zimri, becomes almost proverbial. Jezebel, that Sidonian witch, she will insult the other Jehu, the king Jehu, before he becomes king.
As, you know, are you, you know, Zimri, the killer of your master? And she would get that in 2 Kings 19. So here, she knew this much of the Jewish history. She was the anti-Yahweh of her day. At the bottom there, again, in verse 10, in the 27th year of Asa, Asa was king for 41 years.
He was the one that died with the bad feet. And that's what happened. Verse 11, Then it came to pass, when he began to reign, now this is Zimri, as soon as he was seated on his throne, that he killed all the household of Baasha, he did not leave him one male, neither of his slaves, nor of his friends.
And so a purge. Now, this would have made Stalin proud. But this is fulfillment of what the prophet said. God didn't do this.
He didn't stop it either. Again, the right of God. They forfeited the blessings and the protection. But he supposed that by eliminating any heir to Baasha's throne, that he's taking by murder, that he would be challenged free.
He was wrong. Verse 12, Thus Zimri destroyed all the house of Baasha, according to the word of Yahweh, which he spoke against Baasha by Jehu the prophet. Verse 13, For all the sins of Baasha and the sins of Elah, his son, by which they had sinned, and by which they had made Israel sin, in provoking Yahweh, God of Israel, to anger with their idols. And it's restraint on the part of the historian who was writing this.
So how do you really feel about these idolaters that have ruined everything for the nation? Well, we all know about being provoked. None of us like being provoked. We even use it as an excuse to send something. Oh, well, they provoked me. Well, that's not the defense. That won't stand with God.
So in certain circumstances it will, but not all. But anyhow, coming back to this, they provoked God. That is a reoccurring theme here. The Hebrew word here at the bottom of verse 13, the last word of verse 13, the word idol, here it is habel in the Hebrew, which is significant because it means vapor, emptiness, vanity, nothing. So he's saying in provoking Yahweh, God of Israel, to anger with their vapor, with nothing.
It is the identical Hebrew word used again in Ecclesiastes chapter 1. Each time we use vanities. Vanity of vanity, says the preacher.
Vanity of vanity is all his vanity. Five times he's using habel, that Hebrew word. It's all just vapor. And so the Jewish people, and Jeremiah uses it a lot, no less than eight times, in reference to idols.
They say this stuff is junk. It's nothing. That's what Paul said to the Corinthians. What is an idol? It's nothing.
This doesn't even count, except against you. And I like how these prophets handled these idols. You know, we mentioned some with the disparaging words, there are other words they use, very descriptive of them, and here is yet another. So we read this and we say, well okay, they were idols, but I think their word is more descriptive of what actually is taking place.
So the word is not a figurine, it goes beyond that. Anyway, they were following the vapor gods, you could say. Kind of interesting today, every time now you see a vapor shop, you can have that connection.
Anyway, this is the official reason for the fall of the Northern Kingdom. Thanks for joining us for today's teaching on Cross-Reference Radio. This is the daily radio ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia.
We trust that what you've heard today in the book of 1 Kings has had a lasting imprint on your life. If you'd like to listen to more teachings from this series or share it with someone you know, please visit crossreferenceradio.com. We encourage you to subscribe to our podcast too, so you'll never miss another edition. Just visit crossreferenceradio.com and follow the links under radio. Again, that's crossreferenceradio.com. Our time with you today is about up, but we hope you'll tune in next time to continue studying the word of God. Join us again as Pastor Rick covers more in the book of 1 Kings on Cross-Reference Radio.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-05-15 08:58:56 / 2023-05-15 09:08:47 / 10