Historical Overview

Historical Overview

Here is another way of seeing the overview because I just think it is always helpful, when one deals with anything in the prophetical book area, to be sure you have got the historical context. These prophets are talking about what is happening. What has happened, what is happening now and what is going to happen. If you do not have a sense of history, you do not appreciate them. If you do not give a sense of history to those to whom you are preaching the prophetical books, they will not fully follow what is going on. Thus, I think that anybody who preaches or teaches or leads a Bible study on the prophets has to figure out how can they make the historical setting come alive. Often, that is for people whose least favorite subject in high school was history. That is a challenge. One of the things you might find is that people will say to you and you will love it, you will really enjoy this, they will say, “I always hated history but, when you preach, you make it so clear and so relevant I actually enjoy finding out.” That is a challenge but I encourage you to try for that challenge to see if you can do it.

I. The Divided Monarchy

Putting it in context we have what is called the divided monarchy.

A. A Civil War Never Resolved

That is not very new as a term to most of you but one way to think of it is a civil war never resolved. Here you have a situation where there just starts, right after Solomon’s death in 931, a rivalry. A lot of civil wars do get resolved but some do not. Here is one that never gets resolved. If you think about the American Civil War, it finally got resolved. It was painful and difficult, but look at the Korean War and the fact that there is still division, north from south Korea. That is a modern example that is parallel to the situation of Israel and Judah, the so-called divided monarchy. The nation is split permanently.

B. 40 Kings: 20 North and 20 South

It turns out, for our counting convenience, that there are forty kings during that time period, three kings of the United Monarchy, forty of the Divided and it turns out, for our further counting convenience, that there were twenty kings in the north and twenty in the south. That makes it a little bit easier to remember. The statistic that should bring to your mind is simply this, you should be able to say, “Wait a minute, the north existed only until 722 BC; 931 to 722, so that is the north. The south goes on for almost 140 years until 586, yet the same number of kings.” This tells you that in the north the average king reigned only around sixty percent as long as the average king in the south. What that really should say to you is that there is some kind of instability in the north. There is nothing about health that was a problem. It was not that life spans of people in Israel were shorter than those in Judah on average, nothing like that. Something else is accounting for it. That really is true. The north was a story, during that 210 year period, of rivalries, of usurpations, that fancy word for people being thrown out of kingship and somebody else put in their stead, many assassinations, about half a dozen assassinations. The big Jehu massacre that we already alluded to is another dramatic evidence of political instability in the north. So the north is a very rocky place, lots of rivalries, lots of infighting, lots of internal strife. The south, by contrast, has all twenty kings from one dynasty, David. The expression is used, “The kings who sit on the throne of David”. One finds that expression in a number of places. Even Jeremiah uses that expression a couple of times.

C. No Decent Northern Kings, 8 Decent Southern Kings

Furthermore, far more interesting, I think, for what you might want to use in your in preaching and teaching, is that none of those northern kings is good. Whereas, there are eight relatively decent southern kings. Six of them are rather decent; two of them are really fine, that is Hezekiah and Josiah. Percentage wise it is not great. Eight out of forty, just twenty percent, of the kings are called “good” by God. The expression, as you have read, “So and so came to power then and he did ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in the eyes of the Lord.” Of eighty percent, it is said, "did evil or bad in the eyes of the Lord." Only twenty percent He said good and six of those eight are modified by the statement that, “It was good except for,” only two out of forty, five percent, unqualifiedly good. That is sad and it explains a lot. When you are preaching through 1 and 2 Kings and you keep pointing out, “Well, here is another bad king,” there is a lot that that has to point to. If the ratio is so high that eighty percent of the kings are called evil, you know something has got to give. This is not going to go on forever. God is not going to say, “Oh, that’s fine, every fifth or sixth king is half decent; I’m happy.” That is not what God is going to say. You can see, even from those individual judgments on the kings, what must inevitably be coming, eventually, and that is, of course, that God will have to enforce the stipulations of his covenant. The curses of the covenant say, “You keep these stipulations or I enforce them and I punish you accordingly.” The curses are evermore obviously waiting as you go longer and longer in time through these books of 1 and 2 Kings.

D. Increasing Apostasy

There is also, as you can figure, increasing apostasy. Manasseh, who has the longest reign, who is rather near the end, he is near the six hundreds, is one of the worst of all. But you can go right down to the time of King Zedekiah, the very last king of them all, the king that reigned over Judah from 598 BC to around 587. He did make a run for it and did get captured before the city of Jerusalem finally fell in 586. A very affective king in many ways, very influential. What Ezekiel describes as going on in the Jerusalem temple during the days of Zedekiah is absolute, total, full-blown idolatry, this is in the Jerusalem temple, and syncretism, that is the melding of all kinds of beliefs polytheism, any number of gods and goddesses worshipped, and also pantheism, everything is a god and is alive and has divinity. So people are worshipping insects as Ezekiel describes it in Ezekiel 7, 8, and 9; they are worshipping lizards; they are worshipping birds; they are worshipping everything and it is a sad sight. It is really sad.

E. Rise of Classical Prophecy

This is also the time period of the rise of classical prophecy, 760 to 460 BC. Lots of changes, dynamic and massive changes, from one empire to another. It will start with the Assyrian Empire and eventually the Babylonian; as we will see, it will then become the Persian Empire. Grand changes that affect little Palestine and the little, tiny portion of that where God’s people are located. The prophets are there to explain this, to say it is coming because, to relate it to the covenant and also to relate it to what is coming in the future. “However,” says almost every prophet, “don’t think that this massive destruction that you are about to encounter, because God is unleashing his covenant curses upon you, is in fact the end of God’s plan. God is an evangelist; God is a redeemer; God has got a future, so He will, from a little remnant left over after all this destruction, raise for Himself a people really that fulfill the promises to Abraham, that his people will be like the stars in the sky or like the grains of sand on the seashore. There is classical prophecy saying misery, in the short run, but wonderful, glorious, redemptive blessing in the long run. Those are being preached by every prophet; every prophet is preaching some doom and some blessing at the same time. Isaiah, whom we will look at tonight briefly, we never look at them as much time as we would like, will certainly manifest those contrasts, the doom and also the joy, that woe and the weal.

F. Heterodox South and North

The south is heterodox; the north is automatically heterodox. How so? The north, first of all, is never lead by a king who fits the Davidic covenant. You know, that Davidic covenant from 2 Samuel, which says, “'My purpose,' says the Lord,' is to have a descendent of David always over my people.'” Ultimately, of course, it is a messianic promise, not just a Davidic. The Davidic covenant, by its nature, is also a messianic covenant. How can the northern kings do that? None of them is a descendent of David. That is strike one. Strike two, they do not worship at the Jerusalem temple. Deuteronomy 12 says, “The whole nation must worship at the place where I cause my name to dwell,” and they just will not do that. That is strike two. Strike three is that they worship Thea idols. Jeroboam I, the immediate successor to Solomon in the north, right after Solomon’s death, does something that even Solomon, who was introducing idolatry into the nation, did not go so far as to do. He creates golden young bulls, they are called golden calves, as idols and sets them up in the north, one in Dan and one in Bethel. They are worshipped at these two northern shrines or worship centers as a counter cult. So actually idolatry is into practice. So you have heterodox kingship, heterodox worship center (location, system), and you have heterodox worship, in the most obvious sense, idolatry. That is three strikes and, therefore, it just cannot be that any northern king be called good, nor can the north, in general, be called good.

G. One Single Orthodox Prophet

And, this special note, imagine that, at one time, that is, the time of Elijah, only one single orthodox prophet is preaching the Word of God. In a whole nation of hundreds of thousands of people, we do not know the exact, total number, there are many speculations, but in that whole place, one person holding forth the Word of God and at various times people are trying to hunt him down and kill him. That is really a very sad, low point. That is tough, but that is what we are dealing with. Some of the themes that we have talked about, I am sure you can exploit very effectively in your own preaching and teaching.

II. What Are the High Places?

The question relates to the statement that is made of six of the eight good kings. “So and so did good in the eyes of the Lord, nevertheless, did not remove the high places from Judah." “High place” is a funny term. It translates a single Hebrew word, not two words, but a single Hebrew word, bamah. bamah basically means “a shoulder”. Now those of you who know mountain language, we talk about the shoulders of mountains, so they are high hills. I would translate these “shrines,” that is, improper worship shrines, idolatrous shrines. What you had, in ancient Israel, was this—all the true and believing and orthodox worshippers would come to Jerusalem and would offer the sacrifices there in the Jerusalem temple; it is the only legitimate place you could do it; you could not have a sacrifice anywhere else. But the Baal worshippers and the Ashara worshippers and so on had a system whereby you could worship almost any place. There were thousands of these little high places, bamoth, shrines and they normally were located on a hill, though we do not know everyone of them was; it just seems like that was standard. They would usually be under a tree, partly, that is because both Jeremiah and Deuteronomy say that the bamoth, are “on every high hill and under every green tree”. They are very common. You want to be in the shade; in Palestine it is bright and you want to be in the shade.

A little altar would be there and maybe just a single priest. You might come with your goat kid and your family and you would march up there and there would be this priest and he would be just sitting there and you say we would like to offer something and this priest was someone who could then say the proper incantations so that the little idol there of Baal or Ashara or somebody would supposedly notice you doing this. The priest would then take your animal, kill it, butcher it, and prepare it and would cook it. Every priest was a butcher, by the way; you could not be a priest without knowing how to butcher. It would not take him long to butcher it and prepare it and cook it and then he would serve it to you and a portion would be reserved for him. The theory was that some of the rest of it then was just burnt up on the altar and its smoke would be inhaled by the gods, so the term smell or inhale is actually employed.

That is what a high place was. It was a pagan worship shrine on a small scale, of which there were many all over the place, as opposed to the Jerusalem temple. So, when a king did not get rid of those, the king may have himself been worshipping the true God but he was tacitly allowing the worship of idols. He may have done well in general, but there is a qualification—he did not go after what was not good and suppress it as he should have.

III. Syro-Ephraimite War--2 Kings 16

Here is something that comes right before the little chunk of material in 2 Kings that you were to read tonight. It is background that is quite important. It really helps understand a very significant thing, so I have taken the trouble to outline it. It is described for us in 2 Kings 16 but it also has reference, see where it says background, to Isaiah 8:23 - 9:6, that is where we get a special prophecy about Naphtali and Zebulun, I will explain in a minute.

A. Tiglath Pileser's Conquests in Syria-Palestine

Tiglath-Pileser, this king that I mentioned, made a number of conquests in Syria-Palestine, and this is not the first year. So, by 735 BC, he had for several years been getting heavy tribute, tax, and toll. For the first couple of years everybody gives all their money and they can sort of survive. After a while you are melting down all your jewelry and the government collectors are going around saying, “Look, we are all going to be killed if we don’t give this guy money.” Usually they did not impose light taxes, they were heavy, heavy, tribute, tax, and toll, and people were just being impoverished, Judah and Israel and so on; they hated it, all the nations around there.

B. Anti-Assyrian Alliance

Rezin, the king of Syria and Pekah, the king of Israel, decided to form an alliance. They went around to every king of all the nations, Moab, Edom, Philistine and so on, and they said, “We’re putting together an alliance; we are all going to join our armies.” You know how the Assyrians do it; they attack one country at a time, conquer it and attack another one and that is how they win and it is easy for them to do that. That is a strategy that many nations have used. Hitler did it in Europe in World War II, first Austria, then Czechoslovakia, then Poland, then Belgium, then France, and so on. You knock off all possible opposition and then you go after the bigger ones like Russia and so on.

C. Ahaz Refuses to Join Alliance

They proposed to Ahaz, the king of Judah, to join them because they said if we are all united together we can put together a pretty big fighting force and it will be a lot of work for the Assyrians to marshal the troops to beat us. But Ahaz said, “No, I won’t join.” Why wouldn’t he join? Isaiah the prophet was preaching, “Don’t join. 'You trust in Me,' says the Lord, 'don’t you ever trust in military alliances. They’ll look good; they’ll look like the thing to do. I know you are suffering but you trust Me.'” He listened that time; he did not always listen to Isaiah but he did that time and he said, “Nuts, I won’t join.” That is a loose translation.

D. Syria and Israel Attack Judah

Now you are Israel and Syria, what are you going to do? You cannot easily go to war with this guy, who will not join you, right in the heart of the whole alliance because Judah is in the middle of it all. If you think of where the nations are located, Judah is right in the middle. So they say, “Let us attack Judah, that’s what we will do first. Our combined armies will attack Judah; we will defeat them; we will depose King Ahaz and we’ll place on the throne a king of our choosing.” It is all there in 2 Kings 16. They did that.

E. Judah Appeals to Assyria

Now, you are King Ahaz, these guys are attacking you and you are scared because they do come with a big army against you. They are attacking you because you will not fight against the king of Assyria. Who do you appeal to for help? The king of Assyria. So what he did, he sent envoys to say, “Hey, help! They are attacking me because I won’t join them in attacking you.” This was not what I say a counsel, this time. When you are attacked in war, sometimes you do not listen to the prophets as well as you would otherwise. This time he does not listen and that is unfortunate. The Assyrians did come; they rushed troops right in. The coalition had never been fully formed. Originally it was to have all the Edomites and everybody; that all fell apart when these guys decided to knock off the Judeans and so on, so everybody else was out of it.

F. Israel Attacked by Assyria and Judah

The Assyrians came and they attacked Syria and Israel and they annexed all of Syria and virtually all of Israel. They left a little bit of the tribal territory of Ephraim and then Judah counterattacked. Again, not commendable. This is condemned, for example, in Hosea 5:5-8. Hosea condemns that counterattack. Ahaz is not clean in everything here. They did go right up and captured all of Benjamin and even a little chunk of southern Ephraim as far as the city of Bethel. This produced a bigger Judah. They took the southern part and then the northern part was reduced by capture.

G. Israel Reduced to "Rump State"

Israel ended up what is being what is sometimes called in history a “remainder state” or a “rump state”. The amount of territory may be eight or nine percent of what they previously had held. This is only from 732 on; just ten years later the Assyrians came and finished off even that; just took all of it, reducing Judah’s population and control just down to Judah itself; they took the rest. This is very sad. No matter how unjustified they were in wanting to attack Judah and all of that, it is still a very sad, sad thing because it is the loss of ten northern tribes to the Assyrians. They are no longer an independent people. These are God’s people; they are His chosen people and He has really abandoned them. He has done what the covenant says, “I will turn My face from you,” and He has done it. “I will give you to your enemies, and you will go after them in one direction and flee from them in seven,” and they did. All of those covenant curses have come about.

IV. Isaiah 9

It is in this context that a very famous prophecy from Isaiah is delivered. What I have tried to do, by talking a lot about history, is show you how the history forms the background for the prophetic. Look with me at Isaiah 9. I will not read everything that is here, but I will read some key portions. He says in Isaiah 9:1; this is Isaiah preaching right after that Syro-Ephraimite, in which the north has been destroyed virtually, and only a little bit of it left, and he says this, “Nevertheless, there will be no more gloom for those who were in distress. In the past he humbled the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali,” he has done this because that is part of the north, “but in the future he will honor Galilee of the Gentiles…” and so on.

Without going into all the details the questions was rightly asked, how come Naphtali and Zebulun are singled out. He could have said, “Well, it is a sad situation now, they are in captivity for Asher and Dan,” or he could have said, “For Manasseh and Gad.” He could have named a lot of tribes. For some reason he picks Zebulun and Naphtali. Very interesting, until you begin to check and see where exactly Zebulun and Naphtali are. Did any big good things come, bright lights shining, so that "the people walking in darkness see a great light," and wonderful things happen and there is joy? Then this is all accomplished by a child that is born, you know, the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God and so on. He is the one who will reign on David’s throne forever. The zeal of the Lord will accomplish this. Well, this is all this Messianic stuff, and it starts with the relationship to Zebulun and Naphtali.

Here is what you will find if you will just check out a map in the back of your Bible, typically, if it happens to have the tribal districts. You will see that Nazareth, where Jesus was born, was smack dab in the middle of the tribal territory of Zebulun. And you will see that the western edge of the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus did most of His preaching, now He is all over the place but mostly the western side of the Sea of Galilee, is in the tribal district of Naphtali. Jesus goes a lot of places; we all know that. He preaches all over the towns and villages of Samaria and Judea and so on. We do not mean that He just confined Himself to those places, but most of the detailed stories about Him suggest that most of his time, in spite of all those teaching forays, was spent there, was, in fact, right in Zebulun and Naphtali. Here is this messianic prophecy choosing those two relatively obscure tribal territories and saying, “That’s where the action will be,” seven hundred and some years before it actually occurs. But sure enough, that is where the one who is the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace, shows up. That is the answer, as succinctly as I can give it. That is why it is so important.

V. Emphases in Chronicles

Let me jump to Chronicles for a minute. As you know, there are a lot of parallels between Chronicles and Samuel and Kings. You can read many of the same stories almost identically. However, there are also some very special emphases of the chronicler. Even though Chronicles is written around 520 or 530 BC, Chronicles is a book that is looking at the past with much of the same coverage as you have in Samuel and Kings but with some special emphases.

A. The Temple

One is the temple. When you read Chronicles, anything that the chronicler can say about the temple, he will. It is very interesting, a lot of history in the temple, a lot more chapters about Solomon’s role in building the temple, a lot more emphasis on the temple and its furnishings. Why? Because the chronicler is writing at a time when the returned Jews, after the exile, are desperately trying to get the temple rebuilt. The work of the chronicler is partly to encourage them to do that very thing. So the chronicler is a pro-temple writer looking back and saying, “Just remember, the temple was a very, very important thing,” and it is. This is not some inappropriate bias; this is a very important emphasis. There is nothing more important than worship. The first, most basic responsibility of any believer is to worship.

B. The South

Then his emphasis is southern. Why? Because when he is writing, sometime around 530, 520 BC, the only Israel there is, is Judah; it is a southern area. The north is completely different and just a province in the Persian Empire.

C. The Monarchy

He has a tremendous interest in the monarchy, David especially, but also Solomon. Anything David did that was good, the chronicler wants you to know. Anything Solomon did that was good, he wants you to know it. He does even soft-pedal a little bit of what they did that was bad; he kind of minimizes it. Is this because he is changing history? No, it is because he is being selective for a purpose. They all knew, these post-exilic Jews, that God knows how to punish sin. That was real clear to them because they have just come out of a horrid seventy-year period of terrible trial and exile. They did not have any mystery in their minds about that. What they needed was encouragement, to say what was good from the past and how can that inform us, how can it serve as a model for us, how can it guide as we try to rebuild the ruins of Jerusalem, the ruins of the temple, etc. here in this time.

D. Theocracy

He also emphasizes a lot about theocracy. What is theocracy? It is the rule of God. So the chronicler pays a lot of attention to God’s superintending power. The people he writes to need to hear that; I would say, so do we. A lot of these themes in Chronicles are fabulous for a modern-day audience, too. They are not just appropriate to 520 BC; there are many parallels between them and us.

E. The Priesthood

Also the priesthood, because the chronicler is trying to get people properly, once again, to worship, to honor God. The priests are the helpers. This is the clergy. If they do it right, they will really help people fulfill God’s covenant worship responsibilities.

F. Proper Worship

Proper worship in all of its details. If Kings does not mention how it all worked, the chronicler will say, “And there were this many Levites helping and this many doorkeepers and this many things and the offerings were brought in this manner.” From his sources, he gets all the detail he can to encourage people in the right way it is to be done.

G. Lineages

Lineages are important to the chronicler. Therefore, you have “The Chronicles,” lots and lots and lots of genealogy, because these are people who need to be able to realize that they are back in touch with the great tradition. They are God’s people; it is continuing. He has not destroyed His people utterly; he has decimated them, but there is a remnant and they are the remnant. They ought to feel connected and attached and feel that they are at a key junctural point in the whole progress of His dealing with His people.

H. Reconstitute Around Temple

If you are going to do that, you have got to reconstitute them around the temple. You do not just have people; you have worshipping people.

I. Judean Restoration

The Judean restoration flows from all of that. If the nation can be rebuilt, if people can get organized and arm again and have a healthy economic and political style, this will only encourage their sense of faithfulness to God and loyalty to Him and will show that He is rebuilding His people.

J. Faith and Hope of God's Reward

Finally, ultimately, Chronicles really is good at encouraging faith and hope that God will reward those who do His will. It is a big theme in Chronicles. Of course, who would not want Christians to know that? If you are leading a youth group, you want that youth group to have faith and hope that God will reward those who do His will. If you are preaching to a congregation, teaching a class, leading a Bible study, it is the kind of thing you want people to know. Chronicles is good for that. It is a very positive book in its special emphases. We do not spend a lot time in this class on Chronicles. It is not because we do not like Chronicles; it is a question of efficiency. We are covering a lot of material fast, as you know, and therefore we slight Chronicles in one sense, because it does cover the same territory that Samuel and Kings does, but this was an attempt to try to lay before you some of the special emphases that are very valuable. You do not need to slight Chronicles. Do not say, “We did not do much with it in Bible Survey in seminary so it must not be that important.” No, a series just on Chronicles I think you will find will be rich for people if you do preaching series. You can preach for half a year from a book like this and have people feel it was very helpful and useful, a lot of great themes.