The Point of No Return
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome.
We’ve come to the end of Judah’s history, as it were, and we’re going to do a little bit of a retrospective today, partially in response to the likes of Richard Dawkins, who liked to look at the God of the Old Testament and say, “So mean, so hateful, so vindictive,” to which we say, “What? What story are you reading?”
We’re looking at the history of Judah and saying, “Oh my goodness, the Lord is so patient,” so let’s start at the beginning of the story, shall we? We’ll even skip ahead. We won’t even worry about the fall and the fruit and the garden. We’ll skip to the exodus. That gives us plenty of material.
We’ll see God didn’t give them enough freedom, is the problem. As one Marxist speaker said, “The problem is it was the apple.” Unjust distribution of goods, that was the problem.
It was some kind of formal dinner thing. There was this Marxist speaker and there was a bishop present in the audience, and the guy said, “Bishop, you people have always had trouble fixing the blame. Adam said it was the woman, the woman blamed the serpent, but I’m here to tell you it is the apple.”
Eliminate all the apples, yeah. And although yes, we planned to skip to the exodus, it may be well just to ponder here a second because I think this is where everything begins. Well, this is where everything begins because it’s where everything begins.
If we side with Adam and Eve at this point and say, “Yeah, why didn’t you share, God? It’s actually your fault because you’re obligated to share all your goods with us. You should not be withholding from us. You should not be setting boundaries. What’s ours is yours and what’s yours is ours. In fact, what’s yours is everybody’s.”
If we can’t see the problem there with such an attitude, then there’s really not much point in going further. How dare God condemn the entire human race because his servants, which is what they were, took a bite of fruit. We know it wasn’t an apple, but that’s what people call it.
I remember seeing an illustration or something arguing it was a pomegranate. That’s interesting.
Actually, my wife wrote a poem on that, asking the question, “Could you have been the fruit?”
Right here at the beginning, like Adam and Eve, like Satan in heaven, we have to reckon with who the God of the Bible claims to be. He claims to be original reality, underived, self-existent, eternal, sovereign, who into nothing – we usually say out of nothing, which is true, but also into nothing because there was no time or space – created something, a temporal spatial material universe by the word of his power. That means everything is his. He owns it. He controls it. He’s present in all of it.
This is what Satan didn’t want Adam and Eve to believe. “You shall not surely die.” Well, if God isn’t that, then maybe you can make the argument that God is just one power among many, as the universe in fact itself exists into eternal blah blah blah, and that the universe created whatever exists. Then we’re back into basic paganism. The gods rose out of chaos and all that.
This is why there are only two worldviews, either a belief in a sovereign God before whom all men must bow and to whom all men must submit, and who though he is gracious by definition, that grace is sovereign. That is, he decides who he will show grace to and who he will not, because it’s his grace to give or not. It’s not something we can compel from him. It’s not something he owes us. We’re the ones who sinned. We’re the ones who rebelled against him.
No, it’s not. They hate God, who they say doesn’t exist, so they can’t tolerate this. The original sin they must justify, and from there on out they can’t read the stories correctly because they already have it set in their hearts and minds that this God is a bully. He’s maybe an older more powerful thing in the universe than others, but there’s nothing that gives him any rights to do anything. He should play nice by our standards.
Which is funny because they’re so ready to deny God any rights, while demanding their own, right?
And the other presuppositional half of this is where do these rights come from? You say God is mean. By what standard? Because you just eliminated God from the universe as furnishing a standard for nice and right and loving and kind, so where is this standard coming from?
And even if you can find it written someplace in the heavens, why should we obey it? If it’s an impersonal thing out there someplace or in our minds or something society has created, what obligates me to submit to this? Why am I bad or why is God bad because I don’t let you have what you want? Even if I cut you in pieces, why is that bad if there is no God to say these things are bad?
And the answer is we’re God, so to speak. We get to be the ones who determine reality. It’s no mistake that there’s a rehabilitation effort for Satan in public perception that, “Oh, he’s actually a bringer of enlightenment.” That’s what Satanists basically claim. He’s a non-existent archetypal enlightening influence on humankind.
Even Good Omens treats the bureaucratic demons as basically bumbling buffoons, and then there’s Crowley, the one who – spoiler alert for those who haven’t read the book – gave them the apple, basically. He’s just this enlightened guy who loves the arts and his Bentley, and the earth is really not all that bad. I mean it’s a lot better than the end of all things. That’s not really Satan’s paradigm, to be a British man, although I suppose the Irish would answer differently.
I forget who wrote it, it may be Good Omens but was probably someplace else, “The prince of darkness is a gentleman.” No, he’s not! He doesn’t play by anybody’s rules but his own, as his demons have no doubt found out over the millennia.
Good observations, by the way Bryan, especially the Satanists and Lucifer as the angel of light, the enlightener. That’s basic to a lot of the 17th- and 18th-century cults and conspiracies and Mormonism.
Moving on, of course there’s the whole flood thing. There was that. But when God looked, he saw that every thought of the imaginations of their heart was only evil continually, and at that point he gave them 120 years to think it over and they did nothing with it.
When we read Jesus’ summary of the time before the flood, some people read it the wrong way. They were eating, they were drinking, they were marrying, they were giving in marriage until the day the flood came, and a lot of people say, “Look, they were doing evil!”
Well, in the sense that they should have been seeking God and instead they were complacent, so if that’s what you mean, yeah. There’s nothing evil about eating and drinking and getting married. “Oh, but what were they drinking?” That’s beside the point. The point is life was going on and it shouldn’t have been. Life should have come to a halt and they all should have been prostrating themselves and begging God for mercy, and they just didn’t.
They didn’t know. They weren’t even aware, although Noah had been preaching. He had been on international news for 120 years and nobody repented. No one raised their eyes to God. No one called on his name. They passed into eternity beneath floods of waters after God had warned them.
When’s the last time we gave anybody 120 years warning before we said, “That’s enough. We’re done now,” not that they hadn’t had plenty of warning before because Adam had been alive for a very long time and had talked to a lot of people directly, many of whom were still alive, especially Methuselah, so there was a witness the whole time, and a particular witness on a ticking clock, and they didn’t care.
I don’t want to let that go without noting that some would say, “Why doesn’t God get rid of all evil on the earth? Why doesn’t he make everything perfect?” Well, he did that, and he saved Noah. This is not something that has never occurred to God, to eliminate the evil people in the world. He in fact did that.
Moving into the shadow of the flood, there’s the Tower of Babel thing, because that wasn’t all that bad. I mean yeah, not everyone could understand each other, but you know, there are worse judgements. God didn’t destroy humanity a second time, but in the darkness of that there was very little faith left until God came to this man named Abram in Ur of the Chaldees and called him to serve him.
Fast forward the history, although we could stay and talk about how wicked some of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren were. We can think of Ruben who commits incest with one of his father’s wives. We could talk about his father having multiple wives, about Simeon and Levi who massacre a city, Judah who has his own sexual problems, the younger brothers who sell Joseph into slavery…
Oh, there’s that, too. Why is it that Tamar always gets the blame? I think in this generation Tamar would actually play pretty well, because the other two seem to have been abusive after some form, and she’s pushed aside and fights her way back. I think a lot of feminists would probably regard Tamar, while fundamentalists stare at her in horror. How dare she? If you don’t know the story, you should find it.
One of my wife’s students asked her the other day – this would be a 6th grader – “Mrs. Uttinger, what stories are there in the Bible that no one knows?” Interestingly, she did not go to the Tamar story, I think because she actually tells it, but she went to the last few pages of Judges and about the Levite who cuts up his dead wife in pieces. “That’s not in the Bible, is it?” “Yeah, that’s in the Bible.”
I’m sure we did. Anybody listening to the podcast has heard it at least once, and if you’re all good faithful Bible readers you’ve read it many, many times, but there’s a lot of people who don’t know it’s there because it’s yucky.
Anyway, moving on past that family, we need to understand that that family was under particular Satanic attack because God had narrowed the channel of his covenant mercies, of his revealed grace, of the preservation of the Messianic line down to one family. Satan now has a very limited target. If he takes out one of these 12 guys, or all these 12 guys, it’s over – game, set, match. But they end up in Egypt because of God’s mercies. He does not destroy them all.
There’s a little bit of future consequences for some of their descendants, but by and large they come fairly unscathed until there arose in Egypt a Pharoah who know not Joseph and they are enslaved and made to build public works for the Egyptians. Then the Egyptians go further and try to kill all the baby boys.
Here God’s mercies pick up in a very evident way, because we’ve only gone through one book of the Bible. We’ve just completed Genesis and like two chapters of Exodus, and then God steps visibly into history in a very powerful way and levels the most powerful kingdom in the world. He takes away their king, their heir to the throne, their army, their chariots, all their slave labor, a good part of their tangible wealth, all their cattle, all their crops. Nobody can tell how many people died because of collateral damage because of all the plagues and the lack of drinking water for a week. They’ve got nothing left.
God brings his people out of that, and though they are stretched at times because the first three plagues do touch them, and yes they are abandoning the place they’ve lived as slaves – you can look at the whole social justice movement, and the exodus has become the paradigm, as it was for slaves in the antebellum South.
Thank you. Even the world seems to think that the idea of God coming and rescuing his people is good, however they may define that and whatever they think is going on, so this is where the story of Israel as a nation begins.
God brings them through the baptismal waters of the Red Sea, feeds them and takes care of them, gives them water out of stone in the wilderness, and eventually leads them to Mount Sinai and gives them his law, this vast amount of revelation of who he is and what his nature is and what he’s going to be doing – the ten commandments, the tabernacle, the priesthood.
But then there’s that thing with the golden calf, because in the middle of this God’s people, while they’re standing in the shadow of Sinai and there’s cloud and there’s tempest and there’s lightning and darkness and thunder and earthquake and fire, they actually become so used to this, so complacent, so hardened to miracle going on in their backyard, that after 40 days of Moses’ absence they turn and want some kind of visual representation, some kind of cell phone to God so that they’ll know what the next step is.
I don’t want to attribute to Richard Dawkins sins that he has not committed, but the attitude that he portrays would be the one that says, “Well, you know, God showed up on the mountain with thunder and lightning, but what has he done for me lately?”
“Well, two years ago you were slaves and now you’re not. So you’ve been 40 days without a direct spokesman and you’re just kind of antsy and restless, and that justifies somehow this orgy with this thing of gold.” There are the 3,000 that the Levites slay and others that fall by plague, and then God makes them grind up the golden calf, put it in the water and drink it. So that’s really mean and God is not treating these people with the proper dignity and honor they deserve, right?
Have we made the connection between the jealousy ceremony and the grinding up of the golden calf and having them drink it?
Everything is in Numbers. Numbers gets way under-sold. There’s so much cool stuff in Numbers.
So God lays out what to do if a husband suspects his wife of being unfaithful. He is to bring her to the tabernacle, to the priests, and they are to take oaths saying, “I’ve been faithful. If not, may God smite me,” and they are to take the dust of the floor of the tabernacle and drink it. And if the wife has indeed been unfaithful, it becomes a curse and she will never bear children again, I think. Is that in the text or is that theoretical?
It’s implied because – the Bible is a little bit tactful – her thighs (hint hint) will rot. It probably means nothing good will come of there again.
Yeah, a practical curse. But if not, she’s totally fine and she’ll bear children. So you can see in this punishment that Moses on behalf of God exacts of his people, that the image here is of spiritual unfaithfulness. Israel was covenanted to be the Lord’s in the way that marriage is a picture of. She was to be God’s bride, and she played the whore with this golden calf. So this punishment could have been a curse or it could have been fine.
Except that they already had. That sets up more of the context or helps define the context. This is not God striking out blindly at some random people because they didn’t quite get right the niceties of worship. This was his own bride who he had just bought by the blood of the Passover lamb, and from his enemies he had recently released them by great power and signs and terrors and wonders.
He brought them here to make the marriage formal. In fact, Moses is on his way down with the marriage contract, the ten commandments, and in the face of that they go after…
This is I think something to think about in our generation. They don’t go after another deity as we would think of that. That is they did not say, “Well, maybe it’s not Jehovah. Maybe it’s Allah.”
Or even Satan. One, they went after an animal, a calf, and two, it wasn’t even a real calf. It was a thing. They devoted their covenant love and gratefulness and passion toward the image, a thing, of an animal. This is bestiality and worse. Many times I have called idolatry spiritual pornography. They did that and committed bestiality and adultery and unfaithfulness by turning away from God, all at once. Maybe that helps those who are having trouble with this one.
The sins they committed, if we saw them in a husband toward a wife – unfaithfulness, bestiality, pornography – we would say, “Yes, divorce is legitimate and in fact not enough. There ought to be civil penalties here.”
Not everyone believes in those. We get outraged at the guy, but we’re questioning whether the civil government should do anything, but in the Old Testament at least there were civil penalties for these kinds of things. A man could not simply abuse his wife and then walk away with a divorce settlement. God, being not like us at all, being the transcendent Creator, has every right to dispose of us as not only his bride but his property.
So we’re back to the beginning. Do we believe that’s who God is or not? If we don’t, well then okay. Try to get away with it and see what God may or may not be able to do to you. But if we believe this, the arguments should cease and we should bow in reverence before a Holy God who does not destroy his bride. Despite the suggestions of the jealousy ceremony, he does not render her sterile. She continues to have seed after this. In fact, God continues to use the Day of Atonement ceremony and the sin offerings to deal with this. Again, these are not mere things. These are pictures that are pointing forward to Jesus.
Something else that Dawkins and his friends do not understand is none of this is arbitrary. None of this is, “Well, God was having a good day so he forgave them, but here God was having a bad day so he didn’t.”
You have to look into the purpose of these things as they point to Christ, and for that we really do need the revelation of the New Testament. It’s implicit in the Old, but not until we get to the New Testament and begin reading backward do we fully understand how much these things were not simply God being arbitrary and having good days and bad days, but this was a settled purpose of God in terms of the redemption that he would accomplish in time and history.
We finally got to the exodus. Would someone like to talk us through the judges?
Oh boy. Really, I could talk through one generation and then you would just need to copy/paste. There’s a generation that’s faithful. They are chastened by God by having foreign powers oppress them in some sense. Normally it’s the Philistines. And this makes them remember all the sudden that they have a God who has delivered them, and they repent. God raises up a judge. The judge takes out the individual who is oppressing them – the leader or the nation as a whole – and they return to worshiping the Lord.
The reason it keeps repeating so many times is that they don’t bring in the continuity of the covenant. They don’t pass it on to their children in a faithful way, as a whole. There’s always a remnant, of course, but that basically keeps happening.
You can look at that and say, “Well, God just keeps oppressing them every generation. Isn’t he supposed to be loving? Wouldn’t it be more effective to love them back to him?” and the answer is pretty much no, because he’s been loving them this whole time and they left him for the false gods anyway. This is very much a tough love circumstance that is happening, and he always provides deliverance as well.
Then that brings us to the days of Saul and Samuel, particularly of David and Solomon. Emily, it falls to you. How was God merciful to them? Although it’s easy to look and see, “Wow, that was kind of mean of God, wasn’t it?”
He was mean in that he gave them what they wanted. They look around. They’ve been through this time of the judges, and they look at all the other nations and say, “Gee, they’re better off than we are. God has been better to them than to us because we don’t have an earthly king. So God, give us a king like the nations, because clearly we should be like them,” which seems to run contrary to the entire lesson of the book of Judges, but I digress.
So God says, “All right, but before I give you what you asked for, I am going to warn you. This king will exact burdensome taxes. He’s going to take more of your money than I do. He’s going to take your sons and draft them into the military and make them his servants. He’s going to take your daughters and make them his servants. He’s going to take all your stuff and it’s not going to be great,” and they say, “Yup, we know. Give us a king,” and he does. He’s like, “Okay, here’s what you want,” and Saul is actually useful for a time. I think that is in itself a mercy, that he is a competent war leader and wins some battles for Israel.
However, they picked the guy who looked the best, not the one who was most faithful to God, and he becomes a bad king. He defies God and leads Israel astray with his own personal idolatry and witchcraft. And instead of wiping out the whole country because their king has representatively led them into witchcraft, God says, “It’s okay. I’m going to raise up a new king,” and he brings up David, who was perfect in every way, right? Wrong. Spoilers – even David was not Jesus.
I think that’s a pretty typical example of God’s mercy in saying, “You had Saul. You tried that. That was on your own. I’m going to raise up something better, especially from where you least expect it.”
[laughing] Jumping off what you just said, God picked someone for them and he picked the best person he could, the man after his own heart, this young shepherd boy David, but before we’re done David is going to first of all commit bigamy exponentialized. He’s going to commit adultery. He’s going to order a hit on one of his own most faithful guys – murder.
He’s going to not involve himself in his family, and let his kids grow up wild until they’re raping and killing each other. He’s going to demand a census to see how many people he has, which brings down God’s judgement in a very wrathful way. And this is the man after God’s own heart?
Well, this is what God had to choose from and this was the best – and yet God continues to use him. He makes a covenant and swears to him that his throne will endure forever. He will have a son who will reign forever, and that none of this is conditioned upon anything David has done or failed to do. This is God’s free grant of mercy. Now, he does warn there will be chastisements along the way, and David himself has to lose four sons for full restitution for his crime against Bathsheba and Uriah, and yet God still does not abandon Israel.
Along comes Solomon. We thought David was bad with however many wives he had – a dozen or so, I think. Solomon piles it up to 1,000, and in the end he’s marrying a wife a week. So the gross disregard for women, the abusive attitude, the coldness of, “Well, I’ve had my week with you. Go into the harem and find something useful to do. I’ll probably never see you again. Have a nice life,” all of that which nonetheless ended up with him sacrificing probably just as a matter of State, but it doesn’t matter – offering false worship to false gods.
We say that like it should be less of a bad thing because he’s king and it’s a formality. That actually makes it worse.
But God used him to write three books of the Bible, and he did this. It’s not like God is going after the worst possible people. He is covenanting with people who generally have great advantages – not always. We don’t know much about where Noah was, except that he stood in the Messianic line. With Abraham we’re told in Joshua that his fathers were idolators, and Jewish tradition says that Abraham’s father was even an idol maker. So we go down through here, and if we’re looking for the perfect guy we’re not going to find him, nor did God.
God comes to someone that he has prepared with life experience and sometimes with training within the covenant, sometimes not, and in sovereign grace picks this person and says, “Hey, you’re coming with me. I’m going to use you,” which is what he said to Eve. “I’ll put enmity between thee and the woman,” he says to the serpent. “I’m taking the woman off your side and putting her on mine.” This is sovereign grace and this is what we’re seeing all the time.
“Well, God’s standards are impossible. No one can live up to them!” Yes, you are correct. Thank you for pointing that out, and yet that has not stopped God from showing mercy.
Yes. So after Solomon sins, the kingdom is divided and from there we can quickly trace the apostasy of Israel and of Judah – Israel first of all. The mark of the division between the northern and southern kingdoms is that the north immediately adopts the worship of golden calves again and all that.
And they reject David’s line. They reject the promise of God to bring the eternal king.
Yeah, they’ve got a better idea. They’re going to go back to the old-time religion before David, even before Moses, thus the golden calf thing. And they use Bethel and Shechem, which were key in God’s relationships with the patriarchs, but not what God had been up to lately. So they’re going off on their own tangent.
It is practical idolatry. It’s violation of the second commandment, and thus of the first, and yet they endure for hundreds of years. God sends them prophets, messengers, and lawyers of the covenants to say, “This is what you’ve been doing wrong. You need to repent,” and Israel rejects the prophets.
Sometimes God intervenes and protects Israel from foreign nations even when they have been unfaithful – sometimes even in the middle of their unfaithfulness. We know Ahab, who introduces Baal worship, which is even worse because it often involved child sacrifice and other scandalous and wicked things., and yet there’s a point where God comes to Ahab.
He doesn’t send Elijah, because Ahab and Elijah were not on speaking terms at the time, but sends a random prophet and says, “Yeah, the Syrians? They’re bragging that their gods are better than mine, that I don’t control the hills, so you’re going to win again and you’re going to win again, just because you’re my people and my name is on the line here, so shut up and let me save you.”
And yet in the process it does do good to Israel, if they will receive it as such. But Ahab immediately rejects the favor and makes a league with the Syrians, and God is not pleased.
The thing to stress here is the 260 years, is what my notes say, from the time of David and Solomon where God keeps saying, “This is it. You’re going to die,” but it doesn’t come. It doesn’t come in this generation or the next or the next or the next or the next.
This is kind of what we want to hold up to Richard Dawkins and others who think that God is mean and cruel. Please understand that when the judgements came, centuries had passed. Multiple multiple generations had passed. Warnings from the prophets had passed. Miracles had passed. God had intervened and rescued his people time and again.
So the question becomes how much warning is enough warning to satisfy you? And why should what satisfies you matter?
The second part is really relevant. Who are you and why do you get to call time on this one?
There’s a thing that happens to airline pilots as they set out on a trip across the Atlantic. The navigator will take his charts, or did in the age before computers, and would look at where they’re flying, and would do the calculations and would put down a point and circle it and label it PNR – point of no return.
Where is the point of no return? That’s the point where for an airliner you might as well go on, because it would take as much fuel to get back as to get there.
You can look at Israel or you could look at America and say where’s the point of no return? When does God’s mercy run out? It’s easy to look superficially at the Old Testament, not add up the chronology, not figure out the generations that have passed, not count all the little Bible stories that no one knows, and say, “Well, that went real fast, and it’s all in one book. God warned them a couple times and then destruction came. That point of no return came really early.”
No, it was hundreds of years and dozens of generations. There was no point particularly for Israel, except maybe really close to the end, where God says, “This is it. It’s over.” Judah had a little more warning. We’ll talk about Judah here in just a second, but time went on.
A lot of us, if it had been ourselves who were offended, would have cut it off way before then. The moment they turned to Baal worship, that’s just too much. “We’re done here. You’re sacrificing your children? No, that’s over the top.”
And that’s even justice, right? When God says what to do in the case of adultery, basically the wronged spouse has the right to prosecute to death, and that’s justice. That God doesn’t do that is more merciful than he demands us to be.
Exactly. Part of the argument here is, “You don’t know our side. You have not heard our brief. You have not heard our arguments. You’ve just taken a superficial glance and seen that God sometimes punishes sinners, and you can’t handle that. That’s not what the Bible says. It’s not like that at all. You look for the mercy, but you haven’t read it, so you don’t know it.”
We’re arguing in the air here. We’re not talking about real Christianity. We’re talking about your – even superficial barely does justice – your imagined concept of what Christianity ought to be.
There’s a quote somewhere about that, not specifically in relation to arguing against Christianity, but it says, “90% of social media is someone making up a guy and then getting angry about what he believes.”
The southern kingdom had its ups and downs. There were times when it fell into idolatry and God would generally chasten them and rebuke them, let a foreign power come in and take their stuff for a little while, but they weren’t as bad as the north really, kind of, usually, until maybe perhaps Athaliah came to the throne, but that was because the north and south intermarried and things happened.
But once we come out of that we think, “Alright, we’re never going to let that happen again, right? The boy who was raised in secret in the temple because his step-grandmother went psycho in her pursuit of Baal, he’s going to understand how important faithfulness to God is, right?”
And as long as his foster father the priest was alive he did great, but when Jehoiada died and the princes came and said, “We’ve been really good long enough. Why don’t we go have some fun and worship some other gods?” Joash went right along with them, even to murdering and martyring his foster father’s son, Zechariah, who they slew between the temple and the altar.
And yet God did not destroy Judah. God did not abandon. God said, “Look, I just rescued the whole promise of salvation by the life of a small boy who was rescued by a princess and hid in the temple for seven years, and I gave him back to you as a king and he’s done wonderful things, and this is the thanks I get? More idolatry? More covenant unfaithfulness? More spiritual adultery?” Why wasn’t he done with them then?
I’ve unfortunately been in the position of knowing a lot of stories of failed marriages that end in divorce, and very few of them are of this character. Sometimes a wife will tolerate a husband who is sinful, given to pornography, even abusive, but it’s because she’s trapped or she has misplaced notions of what being in love means, or misplaced notions of what covenant faithfulness means. I’ve never heard a woman say, “Well, I know that God’s going to change this guy. I have divine revelation, so I’m going to wait this out because better things are coming. God is promising.”
We don’t got that. There’s no such thing for anybody, and most sane women who do not feel trapped either by poor theology or because they don’t know what to do next will leave, will walk away. They’ll shake off the dust of their feet behind them as they go, and rightly so. And yes, we’re going to have to do an episode on divorce someday, because God in the end will divorce Israel. But it takes a long time and he’s the one in charge.
He's the victim only in the sense that he’s the one sinned against, but he’s in sovereign control and he could bring judgement at any time. This is committing adultery against the king, who has all the information he needs and all the power he needs and all the law on his side, and yet he keeps showing mercy.
It’s a very, very long time – 125 years that Judah is given past Israel’s destruction. We have the great revival under Hezekiah, but then things begin to go wrong. Hezekiah has a son named Manasseh and he is the worst king that Judah ever has. He rebuilds the pagan altar from the past. He reintroduces Baal worship. He practices ritual magic and witchcraft. He consults with a demon. He sends his children to the fires in the Valley of Ben Hinnom. He sets up an Asherah idol in the temple, the very face of God. He sheds innocent blood very much until he filled Jerusalem from one end to the other, blood that God said he would not pardon, and scripture says he did wickedly above all that the Amorites did. He excelled the pagans in his wickedness.
At that point God finally says, “This is it. It’s over. I will forsake the remnant of mine inheritance, deliver them into the hand of their enemies, and they shall become a prey and a spoil to all their enemies.” That’s from 2 Kings 24. And yet God stayed his hand.
God says, “This is the point of no return, but that doesn’t mean we’re ditching in the ocean right now. The ship is going to keep flying, but know there is an end now. It’s not going to be this back and forth stuff. You’re on your way down. It’s just a question of how long.” Manasseh is succeeded by his son Amon, who reigns a short time and then picks up where Manasseh left off.
Now a footnote about Manasseh. He’s so bad that even the overlord Assyrians can’t stand him. They take him captive and throw him in prison in Babylon, and there Manasseh repents for real. He actually has a near-deathbed conversion. At his late old age he comes back to God for real and he’s reinstalled on his throne under God’s mercies and he tries to undo all the wickedness he’s done, but there’s not enough time. There’s too much of it and he dies. His son goes right back to his idolatries, but he doesn’t live very long and then Josiah comes to the throne.
Anybody who is familiar with the Old Testament history is going to have heard of Josiah. The Reformers love Josiah. Here’s the king who takes reform in hand with passion and a whole heart. They like to compare Edward VI to Josiah, the young boy king who changes everything, and you read what he did.
From his youth he begins to seek the Lord. He breaks down idols and false altars. He desecrates the bones of the priests, cleans the temple, and repairs it. In the process, some of his guys discover the temple copy of the law, the original document from which all copies should have been made apparently. Someone apparently had hidden it when the bad kings were on the throne, lest they find it and destroy it.
Having read it aloud he says, “Wow, we are in a lot of trouble!” So he renews the covenant, reads the book before the people, and makes them all swear that they’re going to seek God. Notice – he makes them swear. He intensifies and extends his reforms, cleanses the temple, destroys all the abominations, and gets rid of the sodomite prostitutes that were serving there.
Isn’t this also when the Feast of Booths is reinstituted? Or is that somebody else?
Yeah, that’s after the captivity. The Feast of Tabernacles gets highlighted left and right, both in the historical books and in Zechariah’s prophecy.
Passover. He holds the greatest Passover. Hezekiah’s Passover was pretty wow, but they had had to hold it on the wrong day, a month later, the month for the people who weren’t ready for the first one, because they weren’t ready.
Josiah does it all right and it’s the grandest Passover ever. He goes beyond Jerusalem. He finally gets rid of the golden shrine calf in Bethel and carries his reforms out into what was left of Israel. He destroys the Valley of Hinnom and makes it a garbage dump, and thus a symbol of hell eventually.
Whether you’re reading Kings or Chronicles, it goes on for a couple chapters and you think, “Wow, this guy was where it was at! He really loved the Lord. He really was passionate. He wanted first of all to serve God, but he also wanted to save his people from their wickedness, all commendable.”
Yeah, isn’t God gracious in raising up this young man? He is, but we read at the end –
Notwithstanding, the Lord turned not from the fierceness of his great wrath wherewith his anger was kindled against Judah. [2 Kings 23:26]
Manasseh’s reign proved to be the point of no return, and yet people will look and say, “What’s wrong with Josiah’s reforms?” See, that’s it – they were Josiah’s reforms. People went along. Josiah carried them along through his faith, charisma, passion, and his force of will. He made it work and no one dared stand up to him, but when he died prematurely at Megiddo (Armageddon) because he didn’t listen to God at one key point, things began to slide immediately. Megiddo (Armageddon) became the beginning of the end, the beginning of the downward spiral in Judah. We go through a handful of kings real fast and then the Babylonians come.
It’s like Israel is this rubber band that’s this one way, and then every time there’s a reform it gets stretched out of place and it has to be stretched. What happens as soon as that’s over is it goes back to the way it was, which is what God is judging it for.
Yeah. Jeremiah, who lived during the time of Josiah and mourned his death, will write in chapter 3 verse 10 of his book –
…Judah hath not turned unto me with her whole heart, but feignedly, saith the LORD.
We lie down in our shame, and our confusion covereth us: for we have sinned against the LORD our God, we and our fathers, from our youth even unto this day, and have not obeyed the voice of the LORD our God.
Jeremiah looks back and he really sees no serious interruption of Judah’s faithlessness. “From our youth till now we have sinned,” and he doesn’t really recognize any break in that pattern. And yet God has been faithful, God has been gracious, God has been merciful, God has not destroyed them, and even now as we come to the end of all things, so it seems, God is going to take a remnant into captivity and he’s going to bring them back.
The story is not over. Judah is going to lose her temple and her autonomy, her political independence, and some of the outward props. The ark of the covenant will be gone and the tables of stone and the Shekinah glory as we come to the restoration era, and yet God still sends prophets. He still maintains the promise of Messiah. They still have his word. In fact, he will very quickly finish up the Old Testament with its full revelation of Christ for that time.
And yet even standing here at the death of Josiah, if you could be there and mourn Josiah’s death you could say, “Surely this is the end.” Yes, in a couple generations. The ground does not open and swallow them all. The fire does not fall from heaven. There will still be several monarchs, in quick succession to be sure. We’ll go through at least one of Josiah’s, then we’ll default to his uncles, because one of his own sons is so wicked that that’s not happening.
We’re almost there, but we’re almost there. God is still being gracious. He’s still withholding judgement. And during this last little bit he sends them Jeremiah, one of the longest prophetic books in scripture, full of crying and weeping for the sins of God’s people. God is not sitting there gleefully waiting to drop a lightning bolt. Through his prophet he mourns their sins and what’s about to happen.
We haven’t covered the material yet to come with the restoration era. That’s next, I suppose, on our agenda after we go through the captivity, but I think we’re at a point now where we can look back as we’ve done and say, “And you think God wasn’t merciful?”
I think what these people are saying is God has a standard, he enforces it, and we resent that. “No one should be able to tell me what to do, and no one should certainly be able to hold me accountable in any significant way, because I’m a pretty good person and I think my own judgements about myself, my autonomous self-judgements, are accurate enough. I may get some of the fine points wrong, but you know, close enough is close enough. And who is your God that he should say these mean things about me? What a bully.”
That’s kind of what Adam and Eve said in Paradise, and what Satan said before he fell. You’re not understanding who God is. And this is not a matter of intellectual ignorance, although that plays into it. This is a matter of unbelief, of contempt for the God who is.
They say there is no God, and yet they hate him passionately. “How dare he exist. How dare he tell me what to do,” and yet God continues to be gracious because he gave Richard Dawkins life and breath and all kinds of good things, the ability to publish books and have lecture tours where he could slap God in the face, as it were. I don’t know, is Dawkins dead yet? I think he’s still alive.
Shall we wrap up with some recommendations? I’ll recommend something, Singing in the Rain – not the act of going out into the weather and opening your heart with song, but the movie Singing in the Rain, although if you want to go out in the weather and sing that’s probably good for your soul, too. That’s the sick day movie in our house. We watch Singing in the Rain.
We did some time ago, not super recently, thankfully. I think that was Gretchen’s first musical. Oh, no, she did watch a couple of Disney musicals with Uncle Joseph and Aunt Talitha.
Yes, Beauty and the Beast, and The Little Mermaid. She really liked Belle in the big yellow dress, but I think Singing in the Rain was the first movie she watched at home. We don’t watch a lot of TV with her. We watch a lot of TV, just when she goes to bed.
I had one thing that popped in mind and it left, but a new thing has replaced it so I’ll go with that one. I recommend, in the tradition now on this podcast of recommending movies, Fantastic Mr. Fox.
That is probably my Emily’s favorite movie. It’s that movie and it’s Knives Out, and they kind of edge each other. Knives Out is like right here, which I take a lot of pride in because I introduced that movie to her. But Fantastic Mr. Fox is her “Autumn has begun. Let’s watch this movie.” We watched it last year during our honeymoon as well. It’s like, “Autumn is here. We have a week off. Let’s watch it.”
Recommendation: Fantastic Mr. FoxMy cousin used to read the book to me when I was very small. We would have our family reunion and we’d all go camping, and I think it was in autumn in those days. It later switched to spring, but my cousin Anna would read Fantastic Mr. Fox to me, so when the movie came out I was like, “Yes, it’s that book!” and it was worth it.
Sometimes you love a book and then it’s a movie and you’re like, “No, this is not at all the right experience,” but Wes Anderson did something good there.
He did. My Emily quoted one of my favorite quotes. There’s three characters – Mr. Fox’s son, whose name escapes me…
Kristofferson. And then there’s a third character that’s Ash’s lab partner. The lab partner is female and she’s really infatuated…
Ash likes her, but she has a crush on Kristofferson because he’s popular and charismatic and athletic and all that. So there’s a point where it’s like, “You’re supposed to be my lab partner.”
I don’t know, I’ve always been presented it without context. It’s always, “Oh, it’s my favorite…” People either seem to love it or hate it, and I always come in on the end of the conversation, so this is the first really good “You need to see this” recommendation I’ve ever heard, so I’ll have to seriously consider this maybe over Thanksgiving or over Christmas.
I feel like it occupies a similar space in children’s movies, although it’s not really a children’s movie – it could pass as a children’s movie – as Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? occupies in regular movies. They’re in the same mental drawer for me. I don’t know why.
That makes sense. To my film nerd discredit, I actually have not seen Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? yet.
That’s really weird to me. They have a surprisingly diverse filmography as far as theme goes.
Yeah, and it’s weird because I haven’t seen a lot of the Coen brothers, but every one of theirs that I’ve seen is in my top 10 movies, like True Grit and Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? I forget what other ones they’ve done, but I’ve loved every one – Hail, Caesar.
The book is very good. It’s nihilistic because it’s Cormac McCarthy as an author, so it’s kind of like there’s not really a line where they verbatim say, “There’s no country for old men here,” and roll credits, but it’s very much that there are no more good men. There’s no more righteous hero cowboy types. Everyone is morally corrupt. Everyone is evil in some sense.
It’s very Romans 1 actually, now that you say it that way, but very interesting.
Something in me wants to follow up your movie recommendations with It’s a Wonderful Life, which I really do love and most people hate.
For me it’s a mood. I have to be in the right mood; otherwise, it’s really terrible.
I have mixed feelings, because on the one hand I think it’s a great story. There’s another hand where it’s like I have seen this movie probably an average of twice a year for most of my childhood, twice every season that is. And then there’s a third hand that grows out of my chest that is like, “And it was used at your old church for sermon illustrations, an entire It’s a Wonderful Life-theme sermon,” and that has a weird connotation in my head.
You see I said I would kind of like to, and part of me does. It lacks the gospel. I mean you could read it in-between the lines if you try real hard, but there’s no blood of Christ, and it’s about being a good man. But the theme that any man is wealthy who has friends, for a Christian there’s a great deal of truth in that, and that God uses us in ways we will never see nor understand perhaps till judgement day.
It’s also a good thing to consider. It’s easy to look at your life and say, “What have I done? What have I done for God lately? What have I done of lasting impact?” Sometimes we find we don’t even measure up to Jimmy Stewart’s standards. At least the character did a lot to help people in practical ways, to get their houses, have their homes.
The end where he gets some small sense of what he’s really done is kind of tear jerking, but it does lack the gospel, and having that be a Christmas movie is kind of like putting your other favorite Christmas movie as Die Hard.
[laughing] Did you post this on our website at one point, the little meme of “Let’s get this straight. Die Hard was officially declared a Christmas movie at the Council of Nicaea.”
But leaving those two semi-recommendations behind, I’m going to recommend having a forest, a garden in your house. I’m looking over here at all the plants that my wife and girls are nurturing, and I kind of just take them for granted and visually don’t even see them, but they’re right here to the left of my computer and there are a lot of them. I grew up in a home where there were plants, and even as a little kid I was given a sweet potato plant to take care of.
And along with this goes having pets. That’s actually what I had thought about earlier. We’re told from the beginning to have dominion over the lesser creation, and Adam was a gardener, but he was also told to look after the animals. It is part of human nature of what God made us for to live in gardens and to have pets.
It’s one thing if you can’t make it work where you are, but to have the heart attitude that says, “Oh, plants are just weeds, and animals are just nuisances,” work on that. That’s not the way God designed things, so a little bit of practice here may prepare you better for eternity.
My wife was pointing out just yesterday that it’s a Gnostic heresy to say that there will be no animals in heaven. God made animals, and part of who we are is defined in terms of taking care of them. And God made us gardeners, and we should expect that that will continue. So getting some practice in now is not only good for the immediate environment of your home, but it’s also good spiritual training.
There’s a really timeless senior convocation speech that was given at Hillsdale before I was even there. Dr. Justin Jackson delivered it. He speaks on The Little Prince and he tells the story of his little daughter who had a goldfish that died. The little girl goes, “So my goldfish that I was taking care of – it’s dead. Daddy, will the cat die?” and he goes, “Yeah.”
He says there’s something about humanity that we want a goldfish to take care of, to feed and to clean the water. Anyway, it ties into The Little Prince and it’s really beautiful. You can find it on YouTube. Sorry, that was a tangent, but very much supporting what you said about pets.
In the same sense, my wife and I refer to our garden out back with the adjective Edenic, because it is, at least during summer. Now it’s mostly dead, but during the summer it’s this very lush spot with big green leaves. We just brought in our harvest of butternut squash and we got like 10 of them. It’s going to be a great winter for soups, that’s all I can say.
Awesome. Thank you, guys, so much for this conversation. It’s nice to run through the entire history of sinfulness…
And grace! That’s the flip side, that Jesus is so gracious to us and we can be so thankful.
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