PSA Bible Reading Challenge 2023-2024

We go from really, really good to really, really bad.  Remember the name Manasseh because he set Judah back a number of years.  He ruled for 55 years so imagine the damage that he was able to do over that long period of time.  He is considered  the worst of all the Judean kings.  He followed the abominable practices of all the pagan kings that were surrounding the nation of Judah.  In the temple itself he built up high poles and he created spaces where you could worship foreign gods, in the temple.  Can you think of anything worse?  Maybe if you look at vs.6 where we see that he sacrificed his son to the fire.  Yeah, that is just as bad, if not worse.

Manasseh was as bad as you could get.  God said that because of Manasseh He would bring such evil upon the nation that it would cause the people of God to have  their ears tingle with the news.  I’m guessing that if you are someone who has the condition of tingling ears then bad things are lined up for you.  He says that he will not maintain even a remnant of the people in Jerusalem but  they will all be carted off.  What happened at the end of last chapter was  that Hezekiah was a great host and showed the visitors of Babylon what his house looked like.  One day they will inhabit his house and when that happens then all of those in Jerusalem will be deported out.

Amon succeeds his father Manasseh.  But there is a conspiracy and he is killed.  Then the conspirators are killed and the people of the land put Amon’s son in office, Josiah, who was 8 years old.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

So I think Hezekiah is probably one of my favorite kings of the people of Israel.  I want to start at the end of this chapter.  Every time that I take a group of people to Israel I make sure that people have the opportunity to walk through Hezekiah’s tunnel so that they can experience what he did and the incredible feat that it was to bring water into the city of Jerusalem.  It is a wet tunnel and you have have to walk most of it hunched over with water up past your knees, but it is well worth it.  It is a tunnel that runs outside of the city walls and runs into the city and served as the source of water for Israel especially when it was under siege.  We read in vs.20 about how he brought the water into the city through a conduit.  Kind of surreal to think that this conduit is still present and that you can walk through it to this day.

The beginning of the chapter is also powerful because we read about the faithfulness of Hezekiah even when he was sick to the point of death.  Isaiah, his prophet, came to him and warned him to put his house in order because he was about to die.  So, this is where we get that idea that when you come to the end of your life you have to put your house in order.  This was commanded to the king of Judah by the prophet Isaiah.  

But he prays to God and God spares him for another 15 years.  Much of the change in mind had to do with the righteousness of Hezekiah and how he had been faithful to God all of his life.  Then we get the harbinger of bad things to come, which don’t really bother or concern Hezekiah because,as Scripture says: “Why not, if there will be peace and security in my days?”  Who cares what happens to my kids as long as I’m happy and prosperous.  Sounds like our approach to climate change…

Remember when we said that Judah was faithful in their king Hezekiah?  Well, this chapter introduces us to another person who is a bit of a legend in his own right.  We find the prophet Isaiah, yes the same prophet Isaiah that we have in our Scripture, who is in the court of Hezekiah.  Hezekiah, understandably, is wanting to know what the future is going to be like with the Assyrian army camped outside the gates of Jerusalem.  In the first set of verses we find Isaiah reassuring Hezekiah that the Lord will prevail and Jerusalem will not fall.

A note comes in the mail and it is again the king of Assyrian mocking Hezekiah and his people and reminding them of the power of Assyria and the history of the conquests of the nation of Assyria.  He also reminds Hezekiah what happened to the kings that went against him, nothing good.  So, Hezekiah once again is afraid and is unsure of what to do because of this new threat which probably feels to him like the last one before the Assyrian army would begin its siege.

It is very telling when we see what the king does next.  He goes into the temple, into the house of the Lord, and prays to God for guidance and direction.  We find him praying to God in a humble and honest way.  He considers the threat of the king of Assyria as a threat against God.  God responds and says that Jerusalem will not be overtaken, and in fact the king of Assyria himself will die in due time.  

What happens next can only be described as a miracle at the hands of God.  What we read in vs.35 is that an angel of the Lord appears and just begins to land haymakers and kills in a single evening 185,000 enemy soldiers.  Not bad for a single evening.  The king of Assyria leaves the battlefield outside of Jerusalem and finds himself at home, where he is promptly killed by his kids.  Good times.

We finally find a reverse in the trend of terrible kings.  We finally find a king, Hezekiah, who was completely different, in a good way as opposed to Hoshea from the north was completely different in a bad way.  Notice that there is no conditionality when he is described.  He did what was right in the sight of the Lord and worshiped God as David did.  So when the writer goes all the way back to David, then you know that the king is one that is to be praised and emulated.  He tore down all of the high places which hadn’t been done for centuries.  There had been kings in the south who were faithful to the Lord, but always allowed one or two of the foreign divinities to hang around.  Not so for Hezekiah.  He obeyed the commandments and reinstituted a people who were going to be faithful to God because their king was faithful to God.

But the threat of Assyria was real.  They had invaded the north and taken the people of Israel away into captivity.  So now you only have one kingdom, the south, because the north had been taken away and really no longer existed as an entity.  Now Assyria sets its sights to the south and begins by taking over all of the fortified cities of Judah, the south.  That really only left Jerusalem as the last remaining city in which the people of God were congregated.  

We find ourselves in a pretty tense moment with the minions of the Assyrians speaking to the minions of Judah telling them that they need to give up.   They not only address the rulers but also those hanging on the walls watching it all play out.  Interestingly the representatives from Judah ask the Assyrians not to speak Hebrew because they didn’t want their people to hear and understand.  But the Assyrians must have been learned Hebrew because they were able to speak it and so began only to address the people next. 

A scene of mockery ensues and there now seems to be a stand-off with the people of Jerusalem stuck in the city with nowhere to go and the Assyrians outside of the city gates.  What happens next will determine the future of the people of God.  

And now the final shoe has fallen.  We see a new ruler in the north who was unlike any other ruler that the north had.  He became a vassal to Assyria but even went behind their back with Egypt, so he was imprisoned by the king of Assyria as a result.  Israel is then carried away by Assyria, all of its people.  But that wasn’t the end of it.  Assyria then resettled other people in the land that was once occupied by Israel.  You have a whole listing of the people from foreign lands who resettled with their gods.  You have a whole run-down from vs.7-18 where you see the stubbornness of the people of Israel and so as a result God turns His back on them. 

We read in vs.19 that Judah also did not obey God and turned their back on the Lord and began to follow what Israel was doing.  But we don’t get the degree of punishment, probably because you don’t get the degree of abject debauchery, against Judah which you find against north.  Starting in vs.24 and following you see the absolute gutting of Israel.  

Notice the story of the lions eating the people who had settled and the rulers deciding that it was because the God of Israel was unhappy.  So they bring back one of the prophets of Israel from captivity, we don’t know as of yet who it is, to teach the foreign folks how the God of Israel expected people to worship Him.  Surprisingly, some of the them begin to  worship Him as they are told.  

Now all of a sudden you have this transition to a worship of God with a whole bunch of other deities.  Remember Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well?  Remember  the Samaritans were always considered a bit of a mixed religious breed?  This is where it all began when Assyria took out all the Isrealites and brought in foreign nations.  So when the Israelites come back in later on you will see that these foreign nations are still residing in the land in which they had found themselves.  We find this statement in a couple of places: “to this day…”  So even today, at least in the Scripture, these kinds of realities remain.

We move from the last of the kings of Israel to the worst of the King of Judah, or the south.  We find ourselves in the reign of Ahaz who was the weakest and the worst king in the history of the south.  All of the other kings we read did what was pleasing in the sight of the Lord, at least in the south, but Ahaz instead we read: “He did not do what was right in the sight of the Lord.”  In fact, he is compared to the kings of the north and it is stated that he walked in their ways.  He was so bad that he was willing to offer his son as a sacrifice to foreign gods in order to protect himself.  Look at vs.3 and we see that example as well as the example of him offering up the people of God to foreign gods and idols.  

As a result of his weakness the people of Israel and the people of Aram decide to attack him and he reaches out for help to the king of Assyria.  With the help of the Assyrians they are able to kill the king of Aram and take the people of Israel and Aram into captivity.  Ahaz is thrilled to the point of telling his priest, who should be leading the people to a worship of Almighty God,  to build an altar to the gods of the Assyrians.  He does, and does a great job of replicating the same kind of gods that the Assyrian king would want and be glad to see.  

What basically happens is that king Ahaz cannibalizes the temple and uses important materials which the Lord said should be in there, in order to please a foreign king and god.  It is not going to work out well for either the north or the south after this chapter.  You can just tell.

Here we find ourselves in a time period where the north and the south are surrounded by enemy powers as they try to work out their relationship with each other.  This map above is going to be pretty crucial in understanding the geography and the relationships between the nations which creates unique geo-political situations.

We find that in the south there is the long reign of king Azariah who was in power for 52 years in Jerusalem.  This means a couple of things.  It means that there was consistency and strength in the south for a long period of time.  It also had an impact on the north because there was not stability but rather a whole number of rulers who came and went in a short period of time.  This would have weakened Israel and created a situation where a form of chaos ruled the day.  

What ends up happening is that because there is so much chaos, Assyria is able to conquer the north and take the people of Israel into captivity.  This is a crucial moment in the history of Israel.  The deportation and the captivity of the people of Israel in this time period is legendary, and it is a reminder that the people of the north did not follow the way of the Lord.  This led to chaos.

In contrast we see the stability of the south, which also housed the temple, which allowed the people to live in their own houses, which was a big deal.  Each of the southern rulers did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, but not 100%.  They still had the high places.  But in the north we read repeatedly that the rulers did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.  

We end this chapter with pretty much the last of the kings of Israel (the north).  It is a sad chapter in the life of the people of God.

We find for the first time, I think, a battle between the north and the south.  So we see that there rises up a king in the south, Amaziah, who was very powerful and was successful in battle.  He did not choose to pay off his enemies, but rather to defeat them in battle.  We read in vs.3 that “he did what was right in the sight of the Lord, yet not like his ancestor David.”  That means that the people still worshiped the Lord, it was Jerusalem after all, but the high places remained.  This type of syncretistic worship seems to be permitted, not approved, but permitted by the Lord.  

We find the battle between the north and the south set up by a major victory of the south against the Edomites.  Amaziah killed 10,000 Edomites and was feeling pretty good about himself.  He asks the king of Israel, Jehoash (or Joash, they are the same person, we only differentiate between north and south), if they could have a meeting face to face.  The king of Israel told him he was feeling too big for his britches and that he should cool it and no, he did not want to meet him face to face.  Well, Amaziah was not going to take no for an answer so he goes up to see him anyway and war is waged as a result.  

Israel wins and takes over some land that used to be Judah’s, the south.  Amaziah is killed by another conspiracy, that seems to be the MO in the south.  Succession comes as a result of conspiracy.  His son, Azariah, takes over.  We find the same taking place in the north.  Joash of the north dies and his son, Jeroboam, takes over.  He dies after 41 years of ruling as a king, and then he is succeeded by his son Zechariah.  No conspiracy, just death.

This chapter is somewhat confusing because you have both Joash and Jehoash in both the north and the south and at times in this chapter their names flip-flop.  Commentators agree that there is not a consistent chronology that is deployed in this chapter.  The people and the dates and the battles and the foreign leaders bounce around quite a bit.  But then we get the death of Elisha.

Remember, he was a prophet to the north so it is the Joash of the north who was bitterly grieving the potential passing of his prophet.  He calls him “My father”.  He gives the king of Israel a sign of what was to come with a sign of arrows.  They served as a sign that they would destroy Aram a number of times at his hand.  Then Elisha dies and we do not see anyone who takes over for him, at least as of yet.  We find another miracle of Elisha, even when he is dead.  After he was buried another person was thrown into his grave, a person who had died, and as soon as his body touched the bones of Elisha he sprang to life.  Not Elisha, mind you, but the person who was dead came back to life.  A bit random, but here is another time that Elisha has the power, even when he died, to do the miraculous.  

I find it fascinating that in vs.5 the term used is “savior” to describe someone who liberates Israel from an oppressive power.  As a result of the presence of this savior they were able to live back in their homes like the old times.

We find ourselves once again looking at the reign of a king of Judah, so the south, where Jerusalem was located, and this time it is Joash, or in some translations, Jehoash.  He ruled for 40 years and Scripture tells us that “Joash did what was right in the sight of the Lord all his days.”  Then we get a story about the finances of the temple.  The whole chapter, pretty much, is about the finances of the temple.

First Pres has a fund to which each year we budget a certain amount which could be called a rainy day fund.  It has a technical term but I forget what it is, but I think everyone understands when I call it a rainy day fund.  When something big breaks or there have to be repairs that are important then we have a certain amount of funds set aside that we hope will cover those repairs.

The king commands the priests that any monies that they receive which come into the house of the Lord, that would be the temple, “let them repair the house wherever any need of repairs is discovered.”  That’s a great plan but as time passed the priests were collecting the money but no repairs were being done.  It doesn’t seem like anything untoward was being done, it just seems like there was an administrative shortfall in someone taking charge and telling people how to get the work done.  The king commands that they stop collecting money but just use the money that was already collected to repair the temple and the work begins as a result.

We find the king is also one who likes to avoid conflict and would prefer to pay off his enemies than to fighting them.  It works, the king of Aram withdrew from Jerusalem after he had been paid off.  There is nothing wrong with that.  We find that at the end of his time a conspiracy arose and he was killed by his own servants.  Forty years of reigning was a pretty long time.