Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Are You Wearing a Mask? | Historical Books | 2 Kings 16:10-17:5

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

What mask do you wear? Are you trying to mimic the world around you? Are you hiding? In today's episode, Jeff shares how 2 Kings 16:10-17:5 encourages us to see our real sin and, in turn, our real Savior. If you're listening on Spotify, tell us about yourself and where you're listening from! Read the Bible with us in 2025! This year, we’re exploring the Historical Books—Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel, and 1 & 2 Kings. Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: 2 Kings 16:10-17:5

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Jeff Parrott. Today and today only, millions of people will get away with activities that could get the average adult arrested under different circumstances. Children, and maybe some overzealous adolescents, will conceal their true identities and conjole their neighbors into parting with sweet treats late into the evening. Halloween has become a culturally sanctioned day where concealment and pretending aren't just allowed, they're rewarded. The masquerade is a manifest game of make-believe. Of course, it's one thing to pretend like you're someone else to get something from others

one night of the year. We can call that fun. But it's entirely different thing when you pretend like you're someone else to get something from others every day of your life. We call that deceptive, dishonest, and devious. That kind of masquerade is make-believe, rooted, and manipulation. It'd be tempting to imagine that the manipulative masquerade is something that we're distanced from, giving us the freedom to judge other people for partaking in it. But if we're honest, most of us have to confront an uncomfortable truth. If life is like a masquerade ball, many of us are in the middle of the party, taking it all

in behind the cover of some kind of mask. Maybe it's the mask of being the funniest, liveliest person in the room, while under the mask, you're lonely and sad. Maybe it's the mask of having the most assured and confident personality, but under that mask, you feel insufficient. and afraid. Or perhaps it's the mask of varsity religious participation. It looks like you have it all together. But underneath that mask, you're struggling with secret sin and running from shame. Not unlike Halloween night, many of us wear these masks because we're trying to get something from others. We don our masks to feel like enough, to feel safe, to feel connected. If life is a masquerade ball, what kind of mask have you been wearing lately?

Are there ways that you've been playing make-believe with other people? With God? With yourself? Now, this doesn't mean that we're all proactively all the time intentionally deceiving people left and right. But it does mean that we have room to grow in living as fully integrated, holistically consistent people before God and before others. Our text in Second Kings today exposes part of Ahaz's masquerade as the king of Israel. His actions in this passage help us recognize our own tendencies toward deception,

and they also give us a window into what it could look like to grow and following the way of Jesus with our whole selves. As we approach God's word together, let's pause and ask, for His grace to move in and through our time. Heavenly Father, thank you for the gift of life and breath in this day, and thank you for your word. We bring before you every part of our experiences, our joys and our sorrows, our anxiety and our excitement,

our calendars and our contingencies. Meet us in this space. Jesus help us abide in you as we engage with your truth. And Holy Spirit, we ask you to move in and through this time in Second Kings. As we read your living word, may it read us and restore us to new life with you. In Jesus' name, amen. In the passage right before this, the Judean king Ahaz worked with the king of Assyria to defeat his opponents in the nations of Israel and Syria. Only Ahaz wasn't simply working with the king of Assyria.

He submitted to him, giving away his allegiance and trust. When we pick up our passage today, Ahaz meets up with his new boss, leaving with an innovative thought. Let's read verses 10 through 11 to set the scene. Then King Ahaz went to Damascus to meet Tiglath Palacer, King of Assyria. He saw an altar in Damascus. and sent to Uriah, the priest, a sketch of the altar with detailed plans for its construction. So Uriah the priest built an altar in accordance with all the plans that King Ahaz had sent from Damascus

and finished it before King Ahaz returned. All right, let's survey the scene so far. When Ahaz goes to meet with his new overlord in Damascus, he is so impressed by the pagan altar that's there that he instructs, a priest to make a copy of that altar and put it in Jerusalem. Ahaz continues his trend of being like the nations around him. Now let's just pause and appreciate this fact that this is one of the constant struggles for God's people in the historical books, to want to be like the nations in every respect.

But it's not just that Ahaz wants to copy the nations. he wants to keep playing the part of the king of Israel all along the way. We read this in verse 12. When the king came back from Damascus and saw the altar, he approached it and presented offerings on it. Now it's interesting to look at this passage and see how it mirrors some of the actions of Solomon after he dedicated the temple back in 1st Kings chapter 8. Ahas wants to believe that he can play the role of a good king. facilitating worship to Yahweh. All the while, he's manipulating the setting to fit the framework of

the world around him from this copied altar from Damascus. If Ahaz is mirroring some of the actions of Solomon here, the reflection is seen through a mirror that's been shattered. Ahaz is just playing make-believe, pretending like the deception will go unnoticed. It's like the king of Israel is leading the people of God and one big masquerade. Now, perhaps there's a little bit of a metaphorical interplay between what Ahaz is doing in the worship of God's people and what Ahaz has done to his own identity as king. In copying and pasting the pagan altar

into his form of worship, he's left with a kind of worship that's not real. In copying and pasting, the way the nations around him rule, he's not living like the real king of God's people. In fact, the more Ahaz tries to mimic the world around him, the less real he becomes. This masquerade is base mimicry, and it's severing the connection he was made to have with himself, with the people of God, and with God himself.

If deception disconnects us from God, then one of the elements that works to reunite us is reality, the opposite of deception, reality. We have to take off the mask and leave the masquerade. We have to face the truth that we desperately need a love and a grace that we can't earn from other people. We can only receive it as a gift, so we don't need the mask anymore. Hundreds of years ago, the priest and theologian Johann von Staupitz shared this piece of wisdom with a young man under his care. He said, you wish to be a painted sinner and have a painted Christ as your Savior. Now, Stoutbitts is calling out the human tendency to minimize and cover up our sin.

We want to be painted sinners, not real flesh and blood sinners, not in our real lives. We don't want to confront that reality. This is just another way of describing the masquerade. According to Stoutes, as long as we have a fake, watered down, massacred, view of our sin will end up with a painted Christ, a version of Jesus that's not powerful, that's not necessary, that's not real. A deluded view of sin leads to a deluded view of Jesus. Stoutepitz goes on to say this to the young man under his care. You must get used to the fact that Christ is a real Savior and that you are a real sinner. God does not

play games or indulge and make believe. It was no joke that he sent his son and gave him up for us. I love that. God does not play games or indulge and make believe. God does not go along with the masquerade. The gospel involves God graciously taking off the mask, taking us out of the masquerade, and taking us into his loving care. And that wisdom from stoutes, it made an impact. It made an impact on the young man he spoke to. The young man's name was Martin Luther. And Luther would go on to share that wisdom with others as a powerful reminder of how the gospel frees us into reality before God, one another, and ourselves. So on this Reformation Day, may we remember the real Jesus, who's a real Savior, who meets real sinners like you and me, and remakes us by the power of His grace.

because of Jesus, we can stop playing make-believe and start believing our maker. Heavenly Father, we confess the ways that we wear masks we were never meant to wear, to try to earn things we were never meant to work for. Jesus help us see our real need for you, and therefore see the real you, the Savior who loves us, died for us, rose again that we might live in your victory. Holy Spirit, would you graciously make us the kind of people who, over time, take off the masks, leave the masquerade, and enter into the movement of your kingdom together? We pray this because of your grace, for your glory, in your story.

In Jesus' name, amen.