This is Spoken Gospel.
We’re dedicated to seeing Jesus in all of scripture.
In each episode, we see what’s happening in a Biblical text
and how it sheds light on Jesus and his gospel.
Let’s jump in.
The first 60 years of Israel’s history took 13 chapters to explore.
But, the next 60 take three.
The narrative speeds up as Israel’s history repeats itself over and over.
A king rises, rules, sins, and dies. Over and over and over again. Live. Sin. Die. Repeat.
The author repetitively and monotonously lists king after similarly named king
engaging in similar wars with similar judgments:
“He did evil in the eyes of the Lord, following the ways of his father”.
Even the details our author shares are extremely limited.
The political intrigue of Solomon’s days and the exciting battles of David’s reign are long gone.
And they are replaced with short, detail-thin summaries and a reminder to look up more information in the history books.
And the effect is numbing.
If you’ve read Kings before, you’ve probably felt desensitized. But don’t feel guilty for that—you’re
supposed to feel that way. Israel’s idolatry and disobedience are increasingly violent, repetitive, and so boring.
The only bright spot is King Asa in Judah.
He undoes some of the sins of his parents, although he fails to regain Israel’s former glory or fidelity.
But his godliness is overshadowed by Omri and his son Ahab.
Omri did more evil than all the kings before him, and Ahab made even his father’s evil look trivial.
Ahab marries Jezebel, a foreign queen, and together they formally
institute the worship of Baal in the land of the Lord.
The worship of Baal frequently involved human sacrifice, which Ahab freely permits.
He even allows a subordinate to sacrifice his two sons in order to rebuild Jericho, the Canaanite city Joshua destroyed.
Ahab undoes the life and vitality God brought through Joshua. And he rebuilds the immorality Israel has destroyed before, dooming Israel to more of the same.
[music]
We don’t need three chapters to explain what happens throughout the rest of history.
We live. We die. We sin.
New gods, new names, new cultures.
But it’s always the same pattern on repeat. We live. We sin. We die.
The god Baal (no less than our own culture) promised that sexual experimentation in his temple
would mean fertility, happiness, and prosperity.
And humans have yet to learn that bowing to Baal always leads
to the same repeated patterns of barrenness, loss, and destitution.
Things like joyless sex, loveless marriages, and broken families are millenniums-old repetitions of the same boring idolatry.
The only way to break free from the monotony of our idolatry is to worship the living God.
Like Asa brought life back to Israel, when we worship the living God,
we reverse the repetitiveness of death and decay and make space for creativity, life, and vitality.
The name of that living God that we worship is Jesus.
In the wilderness, Satan offered Jesus a kingdom of wealth and power if he would just kneel.
But Jesus refused to bow to the promises of the impotent Satan and instead only followed the God of Life.
Just as Asa refused to bow to the promises of a false God, Jesus ends the monotony of death and idolatry. He innovates eternal life for people condemned to death.
He makes sinners into new creations.
Like Joshua, we become vigorous and vital warriors of life in a world ruined by death.
In Jesus it’s no longer the cycle of live, sin, die, repeat.
It’s now life dead to sin, eternal vitality, and never-ending exploration of the creativity, life, and vigor of the living God.
So, I pray that the Holy Spirit will open your eyes to see God as better than idols.
And may you see Jesus as the living God who frees us from the monotony of death and decay.