PSA Bible Reading Challenge 2023-2024

We begin a new book of the Bible and it is, as the title suggests,  a continuation of the last book which we looked at.  II Kings continues to cover not so much the kings, which it definitely does, but the prophets who spoke to these kings.  So we have to start the first chapter with our friend Elijah who speaks to the kings who come after those that we saw in I Kings.

We already saw this map and included it earlier, but it is important to see the geography of  where we find ourselves so that when we read that Elijah was a Tishbite, we see where Tish is located and we can see how he traveled.  We can clearly see the two kingdoms, Judah and Israel, both who were supposed to be people of God, laid out in a north and south division.  We see the hostile nations surrounding the two kingdoms each with their own gods:  Edom, Moab, Ammon, Philistia etc. 

In this first chapter we see some physical characteristics of Elijah.  Look at vs.7-8 and who does that sound like?  “A hairy man with a leather belt around his waist.”  That is John the Baptist who is described in Mark 1:6 “Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey.”  Yeah, they sound pretty much identical.

The king of Israel, Ahaziah, had fallen and couldn’t get up.  He wanted to know if he was going to get better or not so he sent people to ask the priests of a foreign god, Baal-zebub (sound familiar?) if  he was going to get better.  Elijah stops them on the way and tells them to turn around.  They do, the king then sends 3 squadrons of soldiers to capture Elijah.  The first two who come are destroyed by fire and the third grovels and Elijah goes with him to the king.  

It is a simple chapter, once he goes to  the king he tells him he is going to die. He dies and his brother takes his place.  The moral of the story, don’t mess with the man from God, actually, don’t mess with God…He is a jealous  God.

The final chapter of I Kings brings us to the defeat of both the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom in a battle.  It  seems that consistently the northern kingdom does evil and the southern kingdom does what is right in the sight of the Lord.  I guess that makes sense since in the south we find Jerusalem and we find the temple.  There, you would think, is the desire and the pull to do what is God’s wish for the nation.

This chapter gives us the alliance between the north and the south as they look to take out the king of Aram.  The chapter begins with the statement that there had been peace between the north and Aram for years.  But the south asks for help in going against the king of Aram.  They agree and all of their prophets tell them that all will go well and that God was on their side.  Well, all of the prophets except for one.

The prophet was Micaiah, whom the northern king Ahab said he hated.  He complained because he said Micaiah was always saying not nice things about him.  Again, it seems like he is complaining and whining just like he was in the previous chapters.  Micaiah says that God is setting them up for failure by having the other prophets say that God was going to bring victory, while in fact God was setting a trap.  

No king likes what Micaiah has to say so they put him in prison until after the battle when he would be tried as a traitor.  The battle begins with the northern king disguising himself and the southern king going into battle as a king.  The soldiers of Aram target the one who looks like a king and Jehoshaphat runs away.  They realize he was not really that much to be afraid of, but in the process the northern king is wounded and killed.  

The chapter ends with the northern kingdom changing over its ruler and the southern kingdom continuing with Jehoshaphat who followed God’s commands and the northern king who did not.  Pretty common trend.  The north bad the south good.

Somehow Ahab gets away with…, well…, murder.  We find ourselves with King Ahab who sees a vineyard near his palace and thinks it would make a great private garden for himself.  He approaches the owner of the vineyard and asks if he would sell it or if he could give him another vineyard so that he could have the land for himself.  The man says no.  Ahab is sad, he seems actually like a child.  His wife, Jezebel, comes in and sees him upset and says: wait a minute, I thought you were the king of Israel.  As king you have absolute and total power and no one can tell you what they can and cannot do.  You, as the king, tell people what they are able to do.

Consistently we see that Ahab’s wife, Jezebel, is the driving force behind the bad decisions that Ahab makes.  It is Jezebel who threatens the life of Elijah in the earlier chapters.  It is Jezebel who tells Ahab to kill the person who would not sell the field and take it from them.  This story reminds me of King David who sinned against Bathsheba and sent her husband, Uriah, into a hopeless battle so that he would be killed.  It seems like a similar scenario.

After Ahab gets the land Elijah pays him a visit and tells him that he, his wife, his family will  die in the same way that the man who owned the vineyard died.  The Scripture tells us that there was no one as evil as Ahab in the history of Israel.  You would think that his future is before him, and not a positive future at that.  But instead that is not what happens.

Somehow Ahab  has a change of heart and his posture of confidence and defiance before the Lord changes to one of humility and sorrow.  He  puts  on sackcloth and God speaks to Elijah and says: give him a break.  All those bad things that I said would happen to him, well, let’s just push it off a generation.  That will happen to his children and not to him.  The chapter ends there.

God remains faithful to His people even when His people are not faithful to him.  So it is with king Ahab.  Ahab was never faithful to God, and now he is faced with sure destruction at the hands of a king who has allied himself with 30 other kings.  But God has other plans.  A prophet of Israel told Ahab that he would conquer and destroy the king who had plotted against him and threatened to come and take over his riches and his wives and children.  So they go into battle with a plan that was put forward by God and they win the battle.

The prophet tells the king to finish off the kings who had retreated.  The prophet warns Ahab that in the spring the king will gather his forces again and then it could spell trouble.  Ahab lets him go.  The spring comes and the enemy kings gather their forces again, but this time they had made made fun of God saying that He can only help His people if they fight from the mountains.  So they assembled on the plains and God still sent the people of Israel into battle and they won.

But Ahab again spared the enemy king because the king promised that he would restore the fortunes of Ahab and be an obedient servant to him.  Ahab buys it, but the prophet of the Lord was not happy.  He meets Ahab on the road and warns him that because he did not take care of the other king in a way that God wanted him to, that is kill him, then this king would one day take him and his family as his own.

Needless to say this chapter ends with King Ahab a bit upset because of this message, he was actually “resentful and sullen”.  We always think we know best even when it is fairly clear that our best is not in the best interest of the Lord or of His people.

This is also a pretty dense chapter, a lot takes place here.  Ahab does get home before the rain and tells his wife, Jezebel,  all that happened.  Jezebel is furious and puts an even larger bounty on Elijah’s head saying that by tomorrow he will have the same fate as the prophets that he had killed after his God won the battle of the gods.  This terrified Elijah, which is surprising to me because you would think that when your God just brought fire down from heaven that maybe a threat from a queen would be no big deal.  Well, not so much.  He was terrified and he ran away into the wilderness.  

God provides food and water for him and then he spends 40 days and nights in the mount of God.  Does that sound familiar?  Remember Exodus 34:28 where Moses spent 40 days and nights with God and came back down with the 10 Commandments?  Remember the 40 days and nights that it rained upon the earth while Noah was in the ark?  Remember the 40 days and nights that Jesus was in the wilderness while being tempted by the devil?  None of that happens by chance.  And each of those times a new normal is instituted which changed the course of human history.  This is another one of those times.

We also find in this Scripture the still small  voice which speaks to Elijah and gives him the plan forward: you are to anoint two new kings, one for the north and one for the south, and you are to anoint a prophet to take your place.  The whole prophet anointing a king is not that unusual, but a prophet anointing another prophet to take his place is highly unusual.  But that is what happens.  We are now introduced to Elijah’s successor, Elisha.  But before he takes on the mantle he stays home with mom and dad for one last meal.  You would think that is a bit of an inauspicious start, but he ends up pretty well in the end.

This is one of the most dramatic stories in the entire Old Testament.  You have to know it by now, and if you don’t, you have to learn it.  The chapter begins innocently enough as we learned in the previous chapter that there was going to be a drought until the Lord tells Elijah that there is no longer a drought.  The king is helpless in this situation because God is only speaking through Elijah.  The king is worshiping Baal even though he is supposed to be in charge of the people of Israel.  But there is one person in Ahab’s court who is still faithful to the Lord, and that is Obadiah.  His name means literally: “servant of the Lord”.  I think if I were born in another life I would love to have that as a name.

Obadiah is given the task to go find grass to feed the horses and on his way he meets with Elijah.  Elijah commands him to tell the king that he found him.  But Obadiah is terrified because he knows if he goes back and tells the king and Elijah disappears then the king will kill him.  Why?  Let’s just say that Elijah has had a bounty on his head which was not insignificant, placed there by the king.  But Elijah promises him that he wasn’t going anywhere.

Now the fun begins, as does the drama.  The king comes and Elijah tells the king to bring all the Israelites and all of the prophets of Baal to Mt. Carmel.  I’ve been there, it is really, really impressive.  What is somewhat surprising to me is that the King actually does what Elijah asks him to do.  Elijah challenges the prophets to a religious duel where each side gets to prove that their god is the most powerful.  The prophets of Baal go first and ask fire to come down from heaven to consume a bull  and wood sacrifice.  Nothing happens and Elijah mocks them and trash talks them.

When it is Elijah’s turn he does the same, he asks for fire to come down from heaven, but not before he inundates the bull and the wood with water just to show how powerful God really is.  Almost like with the game being tied and you have two free throws to win the game and you shoot them with your eyes closed.  Yeah, exactly like that.  The shots go in, God brings down fire, Elijah commands that all the priests of Baal be slaughtered and they are.  He then tells Ahab that the rain is going to start coming down, he better get home so he doesn’t get wet and yelled at by his wife Jezebel. 

That’s where we find ourselves.  The power of God is revealed and you would think the story is over, God wins, Elijah wins, and the people and rulers of Israel turn to worship God again.  Not so fast…

We find ourselves introduced in this chapter to Elijah, one of the most well known prophets of God.  You can see above where the map where he undertook his ministry.  It all took place in the north, so that means it all took place under the watchful eye of the kings of the north, including Ahab.  He is from the place called Tishbe which is right to the east of the Jordan.  We find him opening his ministry by speaking against Ahab in vs.1 warning him that there will be no rain or dew until Elijah says so.  Which basically means until God tells Elijah.

As a result he goes and settles just south of his home town in a little wadi, which basically means a small stream.  But since there was a drought, as he predicted, that stream dried up and he was without water.  The word of God sends him to a town to live with a widow and her boy.  I hope you noticed in vs.13 that  Elijah encourages her to take a chance and serve him first and then she and her boy would be served throughout the whole time of the drought.  She believes him and serves him for a long time and so the water and the oil do not run out, which is a miracle, by the way.  She took the risk of using up her last ingredients, and she was paid back by being provided for throughout the drought.

But then her boy is sick and basically dies.  She yells at the prophet wondering where God was in the midst of all of this.  How soon she forgot her words from vs.12 that she was going home to die before she met the prophet.  Elijah takes the boy up to the room, yells at God by saying: “have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I am staying?”  And then he adds: “Let this child’s life come into him again.”  

The miracle takes place, the boy rises from the dead, and it isn’t until that happens that the widow states: “Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.”  It took the raising of her son, not the daily provision which was in and of itself a miracle, which made the difference.

I pray that we are able to see the hand of God at work in our life before God has to actually work specific miracles that blow us away.  I pray that we are able to see the hand of God even in the ordinary every day things in life.  

Here we see an advantage in having a single king for 41 years who provides stability and consistency while the neighbor up north is falling apart.  The southern Kingdom, under the kingship of Asa, seemed to be plodding along with the king following the will of God. But the north saw ruler after ruler with even there being a period of time where there were three kingdoms.  One in the south ruled by Asa and then two in the north ruled by military figures.  That finally got sorted out but at the cost of many lives which were lost.

We find ourselves being led up to the reign of Ahaz which takes place after this long mess of rulers and people killing each other and vying for a spot.  Ahaz is a really, really important figure because he introduces us to Elijah who is a prophet in the northern kingdom, you know, where all this mess took place.  We see that Ahaz, the king of the north, marries Jezebel who led her husband, the king of the north which is actually called Israel, while the south is called Judah, to worship Baal.  This is a serious, serious offense.  In fact, Ahaz is described in vs.30 as one who “did evil in the sight of the Lord more than all who were before him.”  That is no light thing.  

The next chapter we see the battle between God and Baal as set up by Elijah vs. Ahaz and Jezebel.  In this age without sports we are about to see a pretty intense competition and some trash talking taking place.  Wait for it…

Now we begin what some could describe as a bit of a tedious accounting of the acts of the kings that followed Rehoboam and Jeroboam.  Remember, with Solomon, who was the father of Rehoboam, there was only one kingdom.  But once he died then that all changed.  One kingdom became two.  Now we see a series of successors who come along.  They are all unfaithful as we would expect them to be.

All of them except Asa who was faithful to God.  He removed the queen mother because she worshiped idols.  He, according to vs.11: “did what was right in the sight of the Lord.”  He got rid of the male temple prostitutes.  Doesn’t say anything about the female prostitutes associated with the temple, however.  He got rid of the idols.  He brought into the temple things of value after they had been stripped.  

Asa was also diplomatic in reaching out to the neighboring countries who had made alliances with the northern kingdom, again the enemy of the south, where Asa ruled.  Notice that Asa ruled for 41 years.  That’s pretty impressive.  I would call it the pax asana.  

We find before us in this chapter pretty much the complete destruction of Israel as the nation that we once knew it.  We find the passing of a generation with the death of both Rehoboam and of Jeroboam.  Their sons take over for them which brings us a couple of generations past Solomon.  So there were people still living who remembered the glory days, but now were living in this chaotic time.  

Look at vs. 25 and following where we see that the king of Egypt, whom we would call Pharaoh, invaded Jerusalem and the surrounding lands and took away all the treasures of the house of the Lord.  Is this when the ark of the covenant is taken?  Does this mean that it is now in Egypt?  Most scholars think it is taken by the Philistines.  But if you consider the Raiders of the Lost Ark a scholarly movie then you would have heard his name mentioned.