40 Minutes In The Old Testament - 2 Kings 14:1-29 (Episode 338)

Episode Date: November 22, 2022

Amaziah is a middle of the road king who spares some enemies but kills many more. He makes an unwise challenge to Jehoahaz and ends up a prisoner. Kings come and go as the assignation rate increases. And Jeroboam II is a sinner like his namesake, but God is going to use him to save His people. Chad and Daniel discuss all of this. Have a listen! 1517 Podcast Network 1517 YouTube Donate

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you can go to 1517.org slash podcast and check out all of their podcasts that are living over there. And while you're over there, make sure you check out all the other things that are going on at 1517. There's a lot of stuff over there. Videos, articles, events, preaching helps, all kinds of stuff. Academies that you

can take for free. It's really a lot of stuff. If you haven't been over there, check it out and spend a little time on the website and I'm sure you're going to find some stuff that you'll get into. you. Chad, last week we lost Elisha. We had Elisha die on us, and then he dies, but another guy comes back to life. Don't know who that is, but I think that's the whole point. We talked about being buried with the Word of God and why everybody should want to have that happen to

them, because this results in resurrection. And we've wrapped up chapter 13. That's kind of where we left it yeah so uh we're gonna learn about the reign of a new guy today mr amaziah so we'll figure out what he did what he didn't do and uh how he kind of got uh well he got full of himself basically do you feel like you have you know you had elijah who got old got an apprentice died threw a mantle on a guy you know elijah and then you just had to transition that right into elijah elijah dies no such you know protege no such apprentice no such mantle sharing none of this stuff and there's and you know just if you're reading through this and talking through it that feels ominous to me elijah's gone and you're like who who's next and you don't know yeah in fact

the the one prophet that happens to be named he's coming up pretty soon is not exactly one that we associated with you know of elijah or elisha quality his name happens to be jonah yeah yeah so he's like the named prophet that we're going to encounter pretty soon i mean there were other prophets who were active about this time i'll mention that in just a little bit but yeah i mean you go from as far as named prophets elijah elisha jonah so yeah there's there's kind of a downhill trajectory uh that's indicated even by the mention of him and i don't and i don't feel the same as because we and we've talked about this there's you have sons of prophets and there's these these people going around doing prophetic things but that's different than sort of these like capital

the prophet of the lord type figures right and and you have that with moses you feel like you feel like samuel's that guy you feel like elijah's that guy elisha is that guy i don't think you feel like jonah's that guy no you definitely don't no you really don't i mean as far as in the historical books once you get once you have elisha dying there's just not there's nobody who rises up like in the historical narrative who is on his par you know you just you really do begin to see with his death the the death of the kingdoms everything it just kind of starts to unravel and you know there's not somehow you know right after elisha dies the kingdom explodes or something like that but you you can see it on the horizon it's coming yeah with his death comes the death

of the kingdoms it's carving out the way for all those angry minor prophets that we're going to get eventually and they're angry for a reason yeah they are all right so uh second year of joash the son of jehovah has king of israel so in the second year of the northern kingdom's king we have this guy named amaziah coming along who's the son of joash king of judah he starts his reign he's uh he's not very old he's 25 years old when he begins to reign and with apologies to any 25 year olds who are listening to the podcast right now, you know, it's probably not the ideal time to become a king.

Well, you got to be 35 to run for president for a reason. Yeah, yeah. You know, we've all been 25, at least most of us listening to this podcast, but 25 and, you know, there's still some growth and world experience and all those sorts of things that are necessary

if you're going to be, oh, I don't know, the leader of a nation. But that's where he's at. He's 25 years old. And he reigns 29 years in Jerusalem. We're given his mother's name, Jehoiada. And then we have, if you've been listening for a while, you know kind of the way this goes in the books of Kings.

We have an assessment of his reign. So how good was he? How bad was he? Who was he like? Who was he not like? So here we have that he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, but with this qualification, yet not like David, his father. so there you go you you already know the rest of the story so he's gonna be a pretty good guy

you know you could you could probably guess i'm gonna read it in a second but you probably guess that he didn't get rid of some places right yeah that tends to be that's the that's the refrain that we keep hearing and uh he's not like david you know david again is the paragon of kings because he he well not because he was that wonderful of a guy all the time but of course because he, except for the occasion of Uriah the Hittite, he kept his focus on the one true God. Whenever I read this sort of stuff, I kind of think that this seems like a guy

who didn't increase idolatry. So this is a guy whose idolatry of the people did not increase under his reign. He wasn't trying to push idolatry or anything like that. and so uh he would be what my daughter would call mid mid uh which if my daughter says something it's mid it's like meh yeah it's not bad it's just mid yeah yeah that was yeah he's all right he's a mid yeah he's fine you know is he great no is he terrible no he just you know he's okay yeah so but not like david his father obviously so he did in all things as joash his father had

done and then verse four have we have the the big butt but the high places were not removed the people still sacrificed and made offerings on these bamut on these high places so same song seventh eighth ninth tenth verse uh that we're hearing about these high places this is where the people like to go for whatever reason, you know, maybe it's, um, there's probably like most every form of, uh, of badness, whether it's moral badness or, or theological badness, there's multiple reasons, you know, maybe, Hey, the high place was closer. Jerusalem is a long way off, but look, there's a high place right down the road. Why don't we just go there? Uh, maybe it was that, you know, maybe it was because, well, we like,

we like Yahweh a lot, but you know, I kind of got this thing for bail. I've been offering to one time and we had good crops that year, or I made an offering to Asherah one time and my wife got pregnant with our son. You know, whatever it might be, that's where they're going and that's what they're doing. It seems like it's possible there's a ton of idolatry out of ignorance at this point, too. So some onus is put on the king, and this is where the blame is usually put on, because these people aren't walking around with copies of the Bible on their shelves. Let me look and see what exactly are we supposed to be doing here. But that's not a thing. And so there's—at least it's possible, I think, that—you're talking about generational—so let's say there's a high place that your father and his father and his father all went to in the spring of the year to do whatever, say a prayer or whatever it is they were going to do there, and you do the same thing out of lack of instruction not to.

Is anyone telling the people not to do that? Like, that's the impression I get a lot of the time is, I don't even know if, like, your regular, you know, the populace even knows what they're doing is forbidden, or I don't know if they know this. Oh, I doubt it. I mean, you can draw a parallel to the pre-Reformation times and all the abuses that were in the church. People believe in all sorts of ridiculous things that weren't Christian whatsoever. But just out of ignorance? Just out of ignorance. I mean, they didn't know.

Yeah. I mean, this is, again, this is a long time after Second Kings, but in pre-Reformation times, it wasn't like people sat around their kitchen table at night reading from the King James Bible. Nobody had Bibles. All they knew of the scriptures were what they were taught in church. Just like all these people knew was whatever the local priest or Levite, if there was one close by, was teaching them. Yeah, it's not like every family didn't have a huge scroll. I got all the writings of Moses up in the cabinet there. Let me just pull them down, and we'll do our little family devotion.

That's not something that was going on. Books were not like books are now, man. People didn't have them. Rare and rich would be the person probably who had a scroll of one book of the Torah. Yeah. I mean, that is something that, on the surface, it should be pretty obvious, but sometimes obvious things are overlooked. We're so used to having the Bible everywhere,

books as well as now on our phones, that it's hard for us to imagine a world where no copies of the Scriptures were owned by hardly anybody except at the temple in Jerusalem. And this also just assumes that people could read it even if they had it. Yes, even if they had it. So we have to allow for a large degree

of just sins of ignorance going on here. and i think that's not an excuse but it's a very good reason and i think that's why the blame is always put on the king like why are we always talking about this king did this and he was all right but he didn't do this thing well why would it be really important for him to do that thing because i think there's a lot of people that don't know they're not supposed to be doing that thing and the and this this falls into the king to instruct them hey we're not doing that anymore and a good way to instruct them that we're not doing that anymore is like i don't know maybe just get rid of the opportunity yeah right yeah let's get rid of the high places

so uh that's that's still going on high places are still there people still sacrificing making offerings there uh verse five tells us that as soon as the royal power was firmly in amaziah's hand well he took care of the guys who had killed his dad so his his father was assassinated so he struck down those servants who had struck down the king his father you know again let's talk about motivation some earlier probably more than one motivation motivation here too he's probably wanting justice but if these guys took out his dad what's to stop them from also taking him out you know so he's protecting his own his own reign at the same time hey he read he read an eye for an eye and said can do yeah that's right and and he did but we're verse six we are told that uh it

wasn't like he kind of went crazy he's like i'm gonna take out these people's whole family no he just took out those who uh were the the guilty party he did not put to death the children of the murderers according to what is written in the book of the torah of moses where the lord commanded this is from deuteronomy fathers shall not be put to death because of their children nor shall children be put to death because of their fathers but each one shall die for his own sin that's a it's kind of interesting inclusion here that, I mean, this is not a typical first and second Kings kind of thing to say a King did this according to what is written in the book of the law of Moses. That's pretty unusual for them to add that. So I'm wondering, you know,

maybe there was something going on that we are just simply not informed of. Like maybe there was a push, you know what the King needs to take out these people's entire family. And maybe he refuse to do that just speculating but it is unusual that this is added in this context uh i mean it's certainly a a mark in favor of amaziah good for him good for him for actually you know not going as far as he or others might have wanted him to and for actually doing what the torah torah says so well i'm sure this is part of what it means that he did what was right in the sight of the Lord. Apparently, he is somebody who is somewhat concerned

about what is right in the sight of the Lord, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So he's doing what we read in Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy 24, 16. I do like the way this follows up, though. It's like, listen, he's not like a crazy psycho man. He wasn't going to just go around killing people's families. However, he does straight down 10,000 Edomites. Yeah, I didn't notice that.

That is, I mean, darkly humorous. Lest you think this guy has no violence. Far be it for me to kill everybody, the sons of these murderers. No, no, I'm going to go kill 10,000 Edomites in the Valley of Salt instead. The Bible is darkly humorous sometimes. So that's what he does. And keep in mind, too, the Edomites are not just some kind of far-off, disassociated Gentile country. These are the cousins.

I don't know how you want to think of them, but these are the sons of Esau. This is Russia and Ukraine, dude. These are all people that are not distantly related. Yeah, so whenever you hear Edom, just say to yourself, Esau, Jacob and Esau. So these, they are, they are blood relatives, let's put it that way, nationally. So he did, he struck down 10,000 Edomites in the Valley of Salt, which I think most people say that's just the area directly south of the Salt Sea, as it's called in the Old Testament. We call it the Dead Sea today, but the Salt Sea. And he took a place called Sela, S-E-L-A, that's on the border of the Amorites territory.

took it by storm uh esv is getting a little creative there just literally means in in hebrew that he they he took it milhamah by war by hand-to-hand fighting basically but took it by storm and renamed it jock feel which is its name to this day and why is this important well it's important because uh when he did this he kind of got to thinking that he was uh he was it i mean he he was a pretty big deal if he was able to win this kind of victory against the edomites and to take sella by storm well then why not just turn around and retake control of the northern kingdom i think that's really what his goal was was going to be so he has this great victory and he kind of gets his uh kind of gets his bloodlust is the impression that i get you know well i if i could

take out 10,000 Edomites, there's nothing that's going to stop me. I'm the next Alexander the Great kind of mentality. So what does he do? He turns right around, and he sent some envoys up to the king of the north, Jehoash, the son of Jehoash, the son of Yehu. And he says this. Now, this on the surface kind of seems to be generic. Come, let us look one another in the face. Interesting. interesting image uh robert alter i've talked about his his translation slash commentary before uh he has come let us face each other down it's kind of like i don't i don't think this was a hey let's get together and have coffee and look at each other or like hey let's share a beer and talk face to face i think this was much more like uh uh let's have a face off you and i because i'm

pretty sure i can take you down yeah this feels a little bit more like uh i'll see you at noon uh out in the street and we'll walk 10 paces back to back and turn around and face each other yeah this is a scene from scene from the west so uh i i love i love the response of jehoash so these envoys come with a message of the king hey the king wants to have a face-off with you So Jehoash, he waxes all poetic here. He's going to tell a little fable, parable, whatever you want to call it. So he sends a word back to Amaziah, and he says this. A thistle on Lebanon sent to a cedar on Lebanon, saying,

Give your daughter to my son for a wife. and a wild beast of Lebanon passed by and trampled down the thistle. I mean, it's such a crazy mixture of metaphors from one thing. I mean, you got thorns and you got a thistle,

you got a big tree, you got a cedar, and you got this marriage proposal and then you got a wild beast thrown in trampling down the thistle. I mean, you get the message, okay? the message is this the thistle is amaziah the southern king the cedar is the northern king it's you know it's jehoash so he's comparing he's the northern king is saying listen i'm the cedar here

dude you're nothing but a thistle then you get the marriage proposal thrown in which again doesn't really it's it's a strange mixture of metaphors but i guess it's basically his way of saying you're trying to get the upper hand here. You're trying to make yourself appear as if you're the superior. Well, here's what's going to happen to you. There's going to be a wild beast from Lebanon that's going to come by

and they're going to trample down you, the thistle. So you get the general point, but it is kind of an odd little riddle that he proposes. Yeah, he goes, he's like going, trying to go full Solomon here, but like isn't quite as good at it.

Yeah. the c plus maybe b minus that imitating solomon with regard to to telling parables and riddles so that's the riddle part but then he's uh then he's going to speak more uh forthrightly after that he says uh you have indeed i'm not going to argue with you you have indeed struck down edom you know good job there buddy but here's what happened your heart has lifted you up so you won this great victory. And now you got the big head. Now he does speak with kind of a Solomonic wisdom here. He says, be content with your glory and stay at home. For why should you provoke trouble so that you fall, you and Judah with you? It's pretty ominous and bold warning

on the part of the king of the north. It's like, you know what? Why don't you just be content with the victory that you won because if you come up to my territory you're going to find out that we're not like the edamites yeah yeah this is this is a good line i mean uh you can uh say hey man take take the win just uh be content with the win yeah yeah yeah you uh you stepped into the ring you took down somebody your own size good for you yeah that's that's that's great uh but don't be step into the ring with someone who's about 100 pounds heavier than you because you're going to regret that day. And as we'll find out in just a second, he indeed did regret that. That was the worst decision that he ever made. Verse 11, but Amaziah would not listen. Shock there.

So Joash, king of Israel, went up, he and Amaziah, king of Judah, and well, they got what the southern king wanted they had a face-off they faced one another at battle at uh bet shemesh that's literally house of the sun if that seems familiar to you that's because that bet shemesh was where remember when the philistines uh captured the ark back in first samuel and then took it to the house of dag and all the terrible things happened to them because they had had uh taken the ark into exile and was pretty humorous stuff you know god was giving them hemorrhoids and all that kind of stuff well when they sent it back they sent it back to this place bet shemesh it's about 20 miles uh 20 miles west of jerusalem so that's where they go into battle and no surprise

here judah was defeated by israel and every man fled to his home and jehoash king of israel captured amaziah king of judah the son of jehoash son of ahaziah at bet shemesh and came to jerusalem and he uh broke down the wall of jerusalem for 400 cubits so 600 feet from the ephraim gate to the corner gate and as if that was all not bad enough he also seized all the gold and silver and all the vessels that were in the house of the lord and in the treasuries of the king's house and also hostages and then he went back to samaria this sounds like just like following through on uh on your warning like it didn't have to happen but now that has happened i gotta i tell you i gotta live up to what i said would happen if you

did this because i said not just you but like all of judah so i'm gonna have to i'm gonna have to plunder yeah it was a i mean it was a terrible terrible loss for the southern kingdom i mean And it was bad enough, of course, that they were defeated on the battlefield. But this was much worse than that. The guy, the king, heads south and he tears down. I mean, to tear down the wall wasn't just kind of a, you know, I'm going to make you, I'm going to give you a black eye. To tear down the wall basically means now you are defenseless. In other words, if we want to come back, we can easily come back and do some more harm to you.

because your wall is destroyed 600 feet of your wall is destroyed so you are not an impregnable fortress anymore you're something that army could march right into with no problem whatsoever and to top everything off i mean all that was terrible enough but uh the king is a hostage now there's a there's a bit of ambiguity here because we are told uh in just a just a couple more verses that amaziah was buried back in jerusalem but one thing that we're not told is that he was ever released from his captivity so you read the commentators and they'll you know go different different routes on that some people say that he was kept you know a pow for a while and then amaziah was finally released and allowed to go back to to jerusalem and reign from there

others say no he was kept in samaria it's basically just a political hostage all the years that he continued to to live and then when he died he was returned to jerusalem and allowed to to be buried there either way you go about it he uh he doesn't exercise any more power because now basically the southern kingdom is under the control of the northern kingdom kind of like a you know it's part part of this broader israel part of this broader northern kingdom of which now the southern kingdom is sort of a province we we might say so uh yeah hard lesson to learn but amaziah uh his pride was his was his downfall verse 15 says now the rest of the acts of jehoash that's the northern king that he did and his might and how he fought with amaziah king of judah are they not written

in the book of the chronicles of the kings of israel and jehoash slept with his fathers and was buried in samaria with the kings of israel and jeroboam that is jeroboam the second his son reigned in his place so we have the death and we have the death notice of the northern king but Now we're going to return to Amaziah and hear a couple more things about him. So Amaziah, the son of Joash, king of Judah, lived, notice the verb that's used here. It doesn't say he reigned 15 years. It says he lived 15 years after the death of Joash, the son of Joash. So was he actually trapped in Samaria?

Was he actually living or reigning in Jerusalem? Like I said, it's ambiguous. And the rest of the deeds of Amaziah, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of judah and verse 19 they made a conspiracy against him in jerusalem and he fed to lachish but they sent after him to lachish and put him to death there so i guess they did they did allow him to come back uh but uh he didn't last long yeah it's it's it's interesting uh every time i hear this is the is this not written in the book of the chronicles of the of course you know you have first and second chronicles but i've read

first and second chronicles and it's not they're not that big of books and i always i always feel like do we not have all of chronicles this is what's going on here because yeah was it edited down we have like a the digest version of like all the deeds like i mean i don't feel like there's that much more information in these books yeah yeah i probably that is the case i mean there would have been a lot it's just like in any any government today you have a lot of recordings i mean yeah you had professional scribes back then who were keeping track of all kinds of the records so probably what we have in first second chronicles is what you might think of as the digest digest version of what we've been hearing about all these all these times the book of the chronicles of the

kings of judah so uh here we have the southern king who uh is he fled to lachish they sent after him put him to death there so he suffers the same fate as his dad he is he's assassinated and they brought him on horses and he was buried in jerusalem with his fathers in the city of david and all the people of judah took azariah who was well his dad started when he was 25 this this guy is 16 took azariah who was 16 years old and made him king instead of his father amaziah he built a lot and restored it to Judah after the king slept with his, with his fathers. So, uh, this Azariah is, uh, probably better known by his, his alternate name Uzziah. So if you, if you do read Chronicles, you're going to hear a lot more about, uh, Uzziah slash Azariah there. We're going to

hear more about him in just a second, but keep in mind, these guys are the same, different name, same person azariah uzziah so he's he starts out at 16 years old and uh takes over after his after his dad is assassinated did i tell you the further you get into into first and second kings the less desirable being named king looks oh absolutely yeah i mean you're first of all you're inheriting a mess almost every time and uh the uh the assassination rate is just like keeps ticking up like i mean it's like there's it just seems like hey would you like to have a short life uh be king like you know losing a battle and get killed or taken into exile or you're gonna get assassinated by other people or driven out and not be on the run like this job

just seems like a job that you don't want yeah like if you're if you happen to be the son of the king and you got a bunch of brothers be like no no no let's uh let my older brother be king i'll be content to just kind of do my thing over here yeah no thanks uh to kingship would that would yeah i would have to be uh threatened into that position i would certainly not have any aspiration to to sit on the throne all right so uh now we get to hear about our our a second jeroboam if we're plenty about the first let's see how the second turns out in the 15th year of Amaziah, the son of Joash, king of Judah, Jeroboam, the son of Joash, king of Israel, began to reign in Samaria. And he's got a long reign, 41 years. As we'll see as we get to the

rest of the kings, the reigns of the northern kings will drop precipitously after him. I mean, some of these guys only reign for a few months because of the assassination rate accelerates after this time. So this guy has a long reign, 41 years. And he did, no surprise, he did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. I say no surprise, but it's also, keep that in mind,

because as we'll see in just a second, this guy did what was evil in God's sight, but he also did a lot of stuff for the kingdom. And God even used him, despite the fact that he was evil, to do some things for the Northern Kingdom. So that's a pronouncement upon him. But there's plenty of kind of you don't have this straight correspondence between, OK, this guy did evil and a lot of evil things happen to him.

It doesn't work that way. This guy did evil inside of the Lord, but at the same time, God used him to do good for for the nation. Yeah. And for him, we're going to get a list of things that he does. And part of this is that he also has the time to do it because he does get 40 something years. Right. So he does what's evil in the sight of the Lord. And that's the other thing is that you could do like all kinds of awesome things, like all kinds of like great things, like develop the best tax code that's ever been thought of and reinforce your borders and do all this stuff. And yeah, you have a banging economy, whatever you got, right? You can do all this stuff.

But this line, did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, is only talking about idolatry. i mean that is like because i mean it says uh he did was evil in the sight of the lord he did not depart from all the sins of jeroboam the son of nebuchadnezzar like what is that like we've done i know this is a big broken record stuff i know it's redundant but he might have done like no other evil things and it still would have said that he did what was evil in the sight of the lord as long as the sins of the first jeroboam remained and he was walking in them doesn't matter what the rest of the stuff he did was yeah i mean this guy could have been like the what a lot of people would have held up as the the paragon of morality you know he was just you know faithful

to his wife and didn't steal and blah blah blah all that kind of stuff that you think of as a good upright moral person none of that mattered he still did evil in the sight of the lord because he didn't apart from the sins of his namesake, from the sins of Jeroboam. That is to say he didn't apart from idolatry. So what did he do? Well, he was a pretty big deal because it says he restored the border of Israel from Lebohamah as far as the Sea of the Arabah. So kind of keep that in mind. That's verse 25. And then down in verse 28, we're told that he restored Damascus and Hamath, the Judah in Israel. Now, all this restoration, all this border expansion,

if you compare that with the extent of the kingdom under Solomon, it's basically the same. So this guy, Jeroboam II, he restores the empire that Solomon had. I mean, yeah, there's no other northern kingdom that comes close to this. It's an amazing accomplishment. month and of course like you said if you have 41 years to reign you have a lot of time to to accomplish these things well this stuff goes this stuff goes uh hand in hand so he's got 41 years to do it but also why does he have 41 years to do it probably because he's doing things that people

like and no one's trying to kill him right so yeah so like he's he's probably fairly like he's got a he's got a he's got a probably a decent approval rating so this gives him time to do things right yeah that's how this goes and bear in mind too that at this time uh well this time has basically been this way throughout human history what is the benefit of a of conquering other territories well it's financial yeah yeah i mean you you conquer another territory and you don't return home empty-handed you return home with the wealth of whoever you conquered and probably if they were doing things like usually happen when you have a conquest or They're taking a lot of people captive, and they're selling them into slavery.

This is what people did. That's what the Romans did. That's how you got rich. And so this would have made an impact on the economy as well. So he restored the border of Israel from these places to these places. Now, here we have our Jonah reference. According to the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, which he spoke by his servant Jonah, the son of Amittai, the prophet who was from Gath, Hefer.

This is the only outside of the book of Jonah. This is the only reference that we have in the Old Testament to Jonah. And it's an interesting side of Jonah that we don't see, at least not see explicit in the book. That's his story. Because as Victor Hamilton noted when he was talking about this, He says, uh, I had to write the quote down. I thought it was pretty good. God needs no fish to get Jonah behind the mission of Jeroboam.

The second, that is a pretty, pretty good line. In other words, Jonah, I mean, he's, he's all on board. You want to expand the borders of Israel? You bet. That sounds great. Let's do it. I'm going to pre I'm going to preach that according to the word of the Lord. We're going to, we're going to do this.

He's, he's not like running off to Egypt because he doesn't want to, to preach for the expansion of the northern canvas borders no no he's it's just it's just when it comes time to preach uh forgiveness and repentance and the forgiveness of sins to ninevites that he's like nah yeah and also good well i'll bet i'll bet if god had told jonah go over and say to jeroboam to go invade nineveh he'd been like i can get that i can get behind this oh yeah man he would have been a hawk no no doubt about it uh so keep in mind so i i don't want to be too unfair toward Jonah, because of course we're not told everything that he said to Jeroboam, but two of his contemporaries were Hosea and Amos, right? These, these fiery minor prophets that you mentioned

earlier, Dan, and, uh, those guys, well, they weren't, they weren't going around saying, you know, rah, rah for Jeroboam II. They were, read their, read their sermons. They're preaching against the idolatry they're they're condemning the the golden cabs uh they're not cheerleaders for for jeroboam ii quite the opposite so you do have an interesting possible contrast here i mean jonah is is there's nothing is said and of course we can't say too much about the silence it's there but nothing is said about jonah condemning what jeroboam ii was doing was with regard to the evil but certainly Amos and Hosea did so

anyway some of that angry minor prophet stuff dude that's why they're upset everyone's walking in the sins of Jeroboam and they're not happy about it yeah and the minor prophets do talk a lot about

the wealth that's pouring into the nation right because you have a lot of the abuse of the poor and widows and orphans so this was a time where you have an increase in wealth, and then also an increase of the ill-treatment of those who are

the poor, the poor of the land. I think this line in verse 26 is important because it says, "...for the Lord saw that the affliction of Israel was very bitter." So he sees the affliction of his people. And because, you go down to verse 27,

"...because he had said he would not blot out the name of Israel under heaven, he saved them by the hand of Jeroboam." So God sees the affliction of his people, and uses this guy. Yeah, yeah. This guy who, as we read in verse 24, did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.

Yeah, so it breaks any kind of rigid, kind of pharisaical perceptions that we might have. Like, if you do good, then good things will happen to you. If you do evil, then evil things will happen to you. Well, that's kind of the whole three friends of Job approach to reality. Things just don't work out that way. god uses evil people to do good things and sometimes you know good people bad things

happen to them it's it's you don't have this kind of very uh clear connection between events at times god is god is not bound by our perceptions of how things should work so can you use a a jeroboam to save israel did a good for israel yeah of course of course he can that's exactly exactly what he does but it is worth pointing out that the reason these good things were happening is because god saw the affliction of his people and they weren't destroyed because god had said so this is his his word he promised that he wouldn't blot out the name of israel from under heaven and therefore i love the subject too he saved them who did god God saved him, but he did so by the hand of Jeroboam, the son of Joash.

So who's the Savior? Well, God is the Savior. Who's the one who is showing compassion? Well, God is showing compassion. And he just happens to use as his tool, as his hand, Jeroboam, the son of Joash. Yeah, this could easily read, God saw the affliction of his people and remembered that he would not blot out the name of Israel. and he said, give me that Jeroboam guy, let me do some work. Yeah, that's precisely what's going on here.

So I love the fact that every time that you have something like this happening, some good happening to Israel, it's not because they've deserved it, not because you have a great king, but it all goes back to the heart of God and to the word of God. Then we wrap up here. This is the end of chapter 14. The rest of the acts of Jeroboam and all he did and his might and how he fought and how he restored Damascus and Amath to Judah in Israel.

Again, you can go to the library, check out the book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel. You can read all about it there. And then we get to the death notice of Jeroboam. He slept with his fathers, the kings of Israel, and Zechariah, his son, reigned in his place. So another chapter full of, you got some northern kings, you got some southern kings,

you have a brother fighting brother, basically. Southern Kings saying, yeah, I'm going to go take on my, my Northern, Northern rival. And that, that did not go so well. And what, I mean, all of these, all of these chapters, all these episodes that we've been covering, you basically see the same sort of pattern, you know, it's just this downward spiral, which increases in speed more and more and more. And so we're in the next episode, we're going to cover chapter 15, chapter 17, well, really chapter 16 and 17, but chapter 17 is the death of the northern kingdom we're that close so what we're going to see happen in the next couple episodes is that downward spiral for the northern kingdom will end it will come to its

end and it will be by the hand of the assyrians but we've seen a move in this direction for for a long time we're almost at at that point all right well that sounds awesome it's very sounds It's like something you don't want to miss. And so we will head further in that direction next week, Chad. I'll see you then. All right. See you then.