The Loss of a Kingdom (Part A)

And this is the noxious fruit of idolatry, which is man making God instead of man understanding that God is the maker. Wrong God, wrong religion, wrong living, and just unnecessary suffering.

And I think that's one of the things that really bothered the historian is not only that they were against his God and the God of his people, but the amount of suffering that they brought into that could have just been so easily avoided. 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 2 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. And now here's Pastor Rick with his study called The Loss of a Kingdom in 2 Kings chapter 17. The Loss of a Kingdom, that's our topic appropriately. The historian, he's going to preach a sermon in the middle of this history because he is irked. And you can tell by his tone, it's just disgusted with the history. Why did it have to be this way?

Why are people like this? Well, we know it is sin, but it is never easy to just lie down and accept that. And you cannot become, you know, get a fatalistic approach to everything. Well, you know, what can you do? It's nothing more.

You cannot give up. This is spiritual. Briefly look at verse 7, 2 Kings 17. For so it was that the children of Israel had sinned against Yahweh their God, who had brought them up out of the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and they feared other gods.

So you can see, can you believe these people? They're all God did for them. This is what they do to him. They had evidence of his power, his glory, his presence, and they tossed it all away. And so they're going to lose their kingdom. The south will follow about 100 years later, but we look at verse 1.

In the 12th year of Ahaz king of Judah, Hoshea, the son of Elah, became king of Israel in Samaria, and he reigned nine years. Well, now the history shifts back. There's no chronology. Well, you can't get comfortable with the chronology in the kings.

He bounces all over. He's going to do it again, chapter 18, and here he is addressing the reigning king in the northern kingdom, known as Israel. Hoshea, this king in the north, their last king, who was king for almost a decade, he assassinated, or at least he conspired to have Pekah, his predecessor, assassinated. So he's not a good guy, but he's not as bad as some of the others.

He is the lesser of 19 evils, you could say. Each of the 19 kings in the north, they were against Yahweh. Verse 2, and he did evil in the sight of Yahweh, but not as the kings of Israel who were before him.

And so there it is. He was evil, that's clear, but he wasn't that bad compared to some of the other guys like Ahab, for example. And this is the noxious fruit of idolatry, which is man making God instead of man understanding that God is the maker. Wrong God, wrong religion, wrong living, and just unnecessary suffering. And I think that's one of the things that really bothered the historian, is not only that they were against his God and the God of his people, but the amount of suffering that they brought into, that could have just been so easily avoided.

So frustrating. It says here in verse 2, but not as the kings of Israel who were born before him. As I mentioned, there were 19 of them, and of the 19, I guess you could say, well, if I've got to have one of them, I'll take Hoshia.

He's not the sharpest knife in the draw, we'll see that in a little bit. Verse 3, Shalomenezer, king of Assyria, came up against him, and Hoshia became his vassal and paid him tribute money, verse 4. And the king of Assyria uncovered a conspiracy by Hoshia, for he had sent messengers to sow king of Egypt and brought 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. Well, God allowed the spies of Assyria to uncover this plan, and he probably took the tribute money as a down payment to the Egyptians to say, hey, can you bring your armies north and give me some protection from Assyria? Well, history knows of no pharaoh named Sow.

Sow? Anyway, it could be referring to the then capital city, and these cities, these places had dual names, sometimes even more. So it's a little difficult to track everything down. They do a great job of it, the archaeologists, and many of the archaeologists are not Christians, but they uncover artifacts that attest to facts. Anyway, Hoshia, did he think he's going to get away with this? That Assyria is going to say, hey, these guys were mobsters, just nations, and the armies fighting was like a big gang fight. That's true throughout history. Did he think he was going to get away with not making his extortion payment?

Of course not. Well, since the days of Abraham, when Abraham fled to Egypt to escape a famine, the going of the Jews to Egypt has created more problems than it has solved. Now Joseph was snatched away to Egypt because his brothers sold him, but the rulers of Israel were told not to do this. The Jewish kings only failed when they looked to Egypt for help, not only because God said don't do that, and they would look to other countries' kingdoms also, but because they weren't looking to Yahweh.

They didn't believe him. And this happened in the south also, but a lot in the north. Egypt is where the existence of Israel was threatened with extinction when the pharaohs ordered all the males newborns to be killed. The intention was to, it was genocide, to wipe out the race. And the Jewish people were to be mindful of this, not with a grudge, but to understand that that was not their home. This was a bondage that they were delivered from, their time in Egypt that is, to be in the promised land and not to go back.

God did not call them out so they can go back, and there have been attempts throughout their history. Egypt is a type of the world that enslaves the people of God. We learn lessons from these things. They're right there in the page, you know, this is, you know, what happened to them in Egypt is what happens to people today who claim God as their Lord and Savior, but then get too close to the world and then they become, enter into bondage, the bondage of the world.

The things of this world begin to take hold of them. Jesus gave a whole parable about the thorns, choking out, you know, those who don't understand what their role is in this life. They were not to look to that old life for help. Imagine you become a Christian and God saves you, delivers you from not only the sin, but the water hole where your past comrades would sin with you. And then you have a problem in your life, instead of going to God or waiting on God, you go back to that water hole, back to those old friends, those old companions and associates, and next thing you know, you're in bondage and you're not delivered. Deuteronomy 17, when the instructions were given to the kings of the Jews, Moses said, God speaking through him about the king, he shall not multiply horses for himself nor cause the people to return to Egypt to multiply horses, for Yahweh has said to you, you shall not return that way again.

They understood that, they just did not abide by it. Now Christ is the exception. Christ goes back to Egypt to escape Herod. He is the exception for several reasons. One, he is the sovereign deliverer. He can go wherever he wants. He gets what the executive privilege is to us. He has divine privilege. But if you say, well, that doesn't seem like he's identifying with us enough.

Well, maybe this will help. Christ summed up in his person all that Israel was called to be. Christ was threatened with death by Herod.

Well, so were the Jews when they were in Egypt. And he, of course, is delivered and Christ does, comes back. Out of Egypt, I will call my son, wrote Hosea in the 11th chapter in the first verse.

That prophecy is fulfilled in Christ. And so the Jewish people, their rulers, they weren't to look to Egypt as Hosea is doing here, but this is how they did things because God was in none of their thoughts, not the true God. It's kind of interesting in the old world, that ancient world, they really weren't atheists. Everybody believed in something, even if it was wrong, they believed in something.

I'm sure there were atheists around, but they weren't many and we don't read much about them. They were very spiritually minded, but that did not help them. And it says here in verse 4, and brought no tribute to the king of Assyria, and again, he had to have known Assyria wouldn't stand for this. His calculations were wrong. Therefore, the king of Assyria shut him up and bound him in prison.

See, it happened. He was imprisoned and we hear nothing more about him ever again. His fate is unknown. But the prophet Hosea, who ministered at this time in the northern kingdom, he tells us that he was killed. He says, Hosea 10.7, at least this is my understanding of it, For Samaria, that's the capital of the north, that Hosea is presently king, her king is cut off like a twig on the water.

Well, even if the cutoff there does not mean death, it does not mean a happy life. And so he's likely summoned up to Assyria and said, what's this with the money? Where is it as Ahaz was? But Ahaz, of course, comes back with his evil self and brings the blueprints for this pagan altar, whereas Hosea, he just doesn't come back.

Well, of course not. What's he going to say? Okay, go back and finish making plans with Egypt?

You're not going to let him go back. And so that's the end of Hosea, but we'll get recaps. Verse 5, Now the king of Assyria went throughout all the land and went up to Samaria and besieged it for three years. Well, as I've been commenting going through the kings, Amri chose Samaria because of its natural fortifications. But there was one problem. The spring would feed it, its water was a mile away. And that meant the enemy would lay a siege and stop up the spring and eventually you'd run out of water. Your cisterns would run dry and you would have to surrender or die of thirst. And that wasn't going to be usually an option.

Anyway, this is what happens. Syria had already taken other cities and villages. They had wiped out the tribes on the east side of the Jordan River. Chronicles details that a little bit more.

We get a little bit of it in Kings. And now Syria is going to possess everything except Judah. When they take Samaria, the capital, they take everything. All of that territory that was to the north for the ten tribes. Verse 6, In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria took Samaria and carried Israel away to Assyria and placed them in Hala by the harbor, the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes. Some of this is Persia. Some of this is modern day Iraq.

Persia would be Iran today. They're just so frustrating for the historian to write about his people being conquered because of their idolatry. That is the smoking gun, as I read from verse 7 at the beginning. The king, Hoshea, he's absent, no king.

That hurts a lot. And in glorious finish, to a people called to be God's people, to be governed by God, ruled by God, unlike any nation ever, and this half of the kingdom, in the sense of a united kingdom, this half is gone forever. Now that does not mean that tribal members are swept away and lost forever. Individuals, yes, but many of them fled to Judah. When Paul comes along, almost 800 years later, he says, I'm of the tribe of Benjamin. Although they did maintain their records and their identity as individuals of tribes, that would all be lost, of course, over a period of time, the loss of the temple, the Romans just dealing with the Jewish uprisings until finally there's no record for the Jews to be able to say what tribe they are from.

But God will revive that. There I am told, Assyrian inscriptions that declare that at the capture of Samaria, they led away 27,290 people as slaves. Well, not only slaves.

Let me correct that. Some of them would likely end up slaves, but they would plant them in another land. So it's like taking people out of one country, all of them, and just sticking them in another country, and the people from that country where you place them, bringing them over and mixing all these different peoples up, and by this, they would drastically reduce uprisings. You just created this mix that was very convenient for the ruling classes in Assyria in this case. Again, not the first deportation because the tribes to the east were already gone.

This is the final for the northern kingdom. It says it carried Israel away to Assyria, modern Iraq, Mosul, that area of Iraq, some 400 miles away, and this is going to be recapped in chapter 18, so you'll get it again, and we'll be a test on it with math equations. Judah, the fall of Judah will not come until chapter 25 and will be just as painful. So the land known by God as the land flowing with milk and honey was then flowing with idolatry and heathenism at its worst.

You know, just to go out and have a good time in sin and debauchery, that's one thing, but to then murder the unborn in the process is a whole other thing, and this is what was happening, we're going to get to some of that, we'll get more of it. Chapter 23 will hit it harder, but it was now flowing with conquerors and foreigners because they turned their back on truth, and they worshiped the gods of their imagination. Gods of people with a depraved mind turned loose, a depraved imagination. At the offering of Noah when he exited the ark, he built an altar to the Lord, he made a sacrifice, and the Lord said, that's a sweet smelling aroma, to find somebody who is worshiping me and no other. And then God makes a comment that he's not going to wipe out the planet again like that because of man. And he says, the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth.

Some youth have a little bit more evil than some of the others you've noticed, right? But this is sermon material to unbelievers of, you know, what happened to a kingdom, the loss of a kingdom, whether it is a kingdom of multitudes, a household, or an individual, it should not go down this way. Samaria's fall and deportation, 722 years thereabout before the coming of Christ, the end of the north, resettling the people in other lands and people from other lands back and forth, as I mentioned, unlike Judah, Israel as a kingdom will never be restored. It will be over. We have a consolidated Israel now.

They don't know who they are as far as tribes go. That will be resolved. Messiah will again. He will revive the Jewish kingdom and he will be the king, of course, and ruler of the earth. There is no report of deportees returning to Israel from the north of the northern tribes, as there is with Judah. With Judah, we have the book of Ezra and Nehemiah, for example, and there the captives are returned or return to Judah, and these are significant differences.

There will again not be another northern kingdom. Verse 7, for so it was that the children of Israel had sinned against Yahweh their God, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt, and they feared other gods. So again, this is spiritual. This is the spiritual world negatively impacting the physical world, and it's the same thing, the same cause that brought Adam and Eve down.

It's not listening to God, and we listen and we say, yeah, well, there are things in my life I just can't seem to get the victory on, but I love the Lord and I want to obey him, and God takes that very seriously, because put two people together, one struggling wants to obey, and another one struggling, not because they want to obey, because they just want control of their lives. Well, one is the thief on the cross that didn't want Messiah. They didn't want to repent, and the other is the thief on the cross, the outlaw on the cross that entered into paradise that day. Anyway, now the historian is going to start commentary based on the Torah. He breaks out of his Bible and he's just going to hammer this, because he knows future generations of his people are going to be reading these things, and he's doing his part to spiritually counter the evil spirits. So let's take a few Old Testament verses. Leviticus 18, Do not defile yourselves with any of these things, for by all these things the nations are defiled, which I am casting out before you. So God said, we told the Jew, don't get too high-minded about yourselves, that you're better than these people, but he says, I'm throwing them out because their evil cannot continue, and I'm using you to do it, but if you start doing this, I'm going to throw you out, and this is what we're seeing, prophecy fulfilled.

There's a lot of prophecy, New Testament some too, already fulfilled, and there's a lot more to come. Deuteronomy 7, Nor shall you bring an abomination into your house, lest you be doomed to destruction like it. But you shall utterly detest it, and utterly abhor it, for it is an accursed thing.

Don't go bringing in some voodoo mask, and hanging it up on your wall as decoration. You got to say, I take this seriously, and you know, we are called to these standards, and it's hard sometimes. Well, I have more here from Deuteronomy, but I would love to read it. Deuteronomy 8, 19 and 20, but I'm going to move on, unless we run out of time. It continues here in verse 7, And they feared other gods. Now this is the fourth time in this section of Scripture that we're going to read this.

Well, this is one of four, the first of four. This is not the fear of repentance and reverence, not righteously so. This is the fear of acknowledgement of a man-made respect. This is the fear of, well, we'll worship Yahweh too.

We'll just throw him in with all the other potted idols. That's what this is. There's no deference in this. This is an insult. So, and the context is stark with this.

This is no debating. The words here, they feared other gods. Well, they said, well look, in the land of Israel, lions are going to show up and start eating people, because that's what lions do. I'm not lying. Anyway, that was pretty good. You'll use it later.

I know you will. This fear is, well, the lions are killing people. We need to find out what god is over this locale, this territory. See, that's the kind of fear. This is superstition. Christians are not to respect concocted gods.

Not to give an inch. It's the god of Enoch, the god of Abraham, the god of Peter and John and Paul, and there is no other. And we have to be very clear about this. Ecumenicism claims, ecumenicism and Christianity claim to be Christians, and they do this very thing. Oh, everybody's god is fine. We can all pray together. We're all going to the same place, the universality of God. You know, he's everybody's father.

No, he is not. Jesus said right to their face, you are of your father, the devil. How can they then be the universal god? Because they don't care what the Bible says.

They just need it to do some stuff like call the place they gather a church. And they have robes on, expensive robes too. And people just gobble this chunk up. Whatever happened to the emergent church? Is it still emerging? I mean, but this is another, the practice is still going on.

But all of a sudden it's gone. What are those poor people going to do? And so the frustration in the righteous, Paul says, and I burn with indignation. He said, I hate what evil gets away with.

And how can you not? You know, we talk about, you know, did God love Hitler? Well, in this sense, he did. He loved everyone enough to die for them, to give them the opportunity to come into heaven. That is love.

No, God has no other motivation to die, to send his son to die for people than love. Thanks for joining us for today's edition 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 2 Kings has been something to remember. If you'd like to listen to more teachings from this series, go to crossreferenceradio.com. Once more, that's crossreferenceradio.com. We encourage you to subscribe to our podcast too, so you'll never miss another edition. Just go to your favorite podcast app to subscribe. Our time is about up, but we hope you'll tune in again next time as we continue on in the book of 2 Kings. We look forward to that time with you, so make a note in your calendar to join Pastor Rick as he teaches from the Bible right here on Cross-Reference Radio.