2 Kings 1–3

0:00 Good morning again, everybody. Welcome to Third Avenue. Good to have you here with us. Good to be able to gather together as a church and sing and pray and now open up God's Word to one of the weirdest books in the entire Bible. Take a Bible if you have one, turn over to 2 Kings. That's where we're going to be for the next few weeks. The reason that we are taking so much time over the next few weeks to study this 2,800 year old book or so is because here at Third Avenue we believe that every one of the books, all 66 of them that are compiled in this book right here, the Bible, are in fact the written Word of God. We believe that when God gives life, He gives that life through His Word. We believe that it's important for us to study not just our favorite, most well known portions of the Bible, but all of it. And that God has things to teach us even in the strangest parts of it. And I do all of that preface work because what we're going to study today and for the next few weeks is really, really weird. I think that as we study it, it will become less

1:03 weird. But if you want the full experience of being weirded out by the Bible and then having at least some of the mysteries solved for you, it'll be a good idea over the next few weeks as we're studying this book and really any book of the Bible to just read it in advance. So sometime over the next week. In the back of your bulletin, you'll find a list of upcoming sermons and text. That'll tell you exactly what we're going to be preaching on over the next few weeks. You can read in advance, be weirded out by the places that weird people out in 2 Kings, and then I'll come along on Sunday and solve some of those problems for you. Others of them, I'm just going to have to throw up my hands and say, you know what, we don't know what that means, and that's going to happen even today. We are beginning a study this morning of the Old Testament book of Second Kings.

1:49 You can actually think of it as kind of picking up where we left off last spring, because last spring in 2022, we went through the book of First Kings, and now we're picking up in Second Kings for this spring. The reason that we're doing that is really because First and Second Kings are not really two different books. There's no hard break between the two. We're not even sure exactly why this one big book, which ought to be called just kings, got split into first and second kings in the first place. Best guess for why it got split, though, has something to do with the fact that ancient Israelites didn't write in books like we have.

2:24 This is called a codex, right? Every book that looks like this is called a codex where it's bound on one side and it's got these floppy pages in the middle. That's what that's called. The Israelites didn't have things like this. They wrote on scrolls, and it took a whole lot of paper to write on scrolls, And we think that 1 Kings was just such a long book that at some point when it was being written, they just had to get a new scroll or they'd have been walking around with one that's huge and they didn't want to do that. So they split it into two parts. At any rate, the whole thing, the whole book of Kings, 1 Kings, 2 Kings, is all clearly written by one person.

3:00 It's not two different people. It's not three or four different people. It's one person that wrote it. The writing style, the themes, the lessons it's trying to teach, it's all the same. from start to finish. In fact, you can think of 1 and 2 Kings as really the end of a single long story that's been running since all the way back at creation in Genesis chapter 1. So by the time you make it through Genesis, the creation, then the patriarchs of Israel in Genesis and Exodus, then the making of the nation of Israel in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, wandering around in the wilderness, the conquest of the land, the trying to hold the land, and the establishment of the kingship, and 1 and 2 Samuel, the reign of David through half of 2 Samuel.

3:42 By the time you get to 1 and 2 Kings, you have basically made your way through the entire story of the Old Testament. Now, I know there are books that come after 2 Kings, right? You've got, you know, 1 and 2 Chronicles after that, and then, you know, lots of different prophetic books, and the Psalms, and the Proverbs, and all the rest. So the Old Testament itself goes on after the end of 2 Kings. But the kicker is that the vast majority of those books that come after, you can actually slot them into the history of 2 Kings so that they fit in there.

4:16 So what I'm trying to tell you is that even though there's a bunch of Old Testament left, by the time we get to the end of this study of 2 Kings, if you've been with us, you know, for several years since when I preached Genesis and we've made our way through all of these books, you will have studied the entire story of the Old Testament. I mean, that's kind of it. Like the next thing that happens after the end of 2 Kings, historically speaking, is the arrival of Jesus. So this is the end of the story. In terms of just basic background of Kings, it's not too difficult.

4:47 We don't know exactly who wrote it. It doesn't say who wrote it. There's no claim of authorship in it. Some people have guessed that maybe the prophet Jeremiah wrote it. I just have no idea if that's true or not. Some people have said that Jeremiah even wrote every book from Joshua all the way through 2 Kings. Maybe. It's possible. There's no particular good evidence for that. There's no particular evidence against that, but it's possible. As far as the date of Kings, 2 Kings ends with the story of King Jehoiachin in Babylon 37 years after his captivity. So for those of you who care about the numbers, if Jehoiachin was captured in 597 BC, and we know that that's when he was in fact captured, then that would put the end of second kings at 560 bc which may be a little late for it to have been jeremiah who wrote it but maybe not at any rate for certain second kings the whole book of kings was finished sometime before or around 550 bc so that means about 550 years before

5:54 the birth of Jesus. So we're looking at this, you know, 2,500-year-old book that recounts events going back to 2,800 years old. At a very surface level, like if you just let your eyes roll over the book of Kings, the first thing you'll notice is that it is a book of history. It basically gives information about each one of Israel's kings, telling what they did and how long they reigned, but it's not just a book of history. And if you remember our study of 1 Kings, a year ago. That's one of the main things that I tried to drill into your mind is that kings is not just there to tell you historical facts about the kings. That's not what it's for.

6:34 It's for you to learn lessons based on how those kings reigned and especially how they responded to the word of God. So for each king, it renders a kind of judgment on him. It'll either say something like, you know, this king reigned in righteousness and he led the nation back from the brink of idolatry. Or it'll say something like, this king did what was evil in the eyes of the Lord, and he was buried off in the wilderness apart from his father's, right? It'll always kind of render a judgment on what they did and how they responded to God, which means that Kings is also an intensely theological book. It's not just historical, it's theological. It's teaching you things about God and things about yourself in relationship to God. So it begins with the unshakable premise like there's just no doubt about it that God created the world that he created and chose Israel to be his own nation he established the kingship in Israel it is his and therefore

7:36 the kings in the nation are beholden to God so as you read the book you realize that the most important thing that a king can do is not go to war or levy taxes or build cities or any of that kind of jazz in fact the author of kings will often just kind of you know push all of that off the table. He's like, as for all the other things that this guy did in cities and warfare and all the rest, you can go read about them in that other book, right? He'll often say that. The most important thing was not going to war building cities. The most important thing a king could do is worship and obey God. And the most destructive thing a king could do is lead the nation away from God to worship other false gods of the nations around them. In fact, really, because of that, The book of Kings could really just as well have been called Kings and Prophets, not just kings.

8:26 Because as much as it talks about the kings, it also talks about prophets who came and spoke to the kings. Two of them in particular. The first one is Elijah. We're going to kind of see the end of Elijah's career in the sermon today. The second one that comes on his heels is Elisha. Now, you've got to be careful not to get them confused. Elijah comes first, then Elisha comes next. And the reason there's so much emphasis on prophets, and those two in particular, is, again, because the point of the book is not just to recount the lives of the kings.

8:57 It's to show how those kings responded to the word of the Lord. How they responded to the word of the Lord in the law of Moses. Also, how they responded to the word of the Lord through the prophets, like Elijah and Elisha. So, if you were to sum up, if you were to kind of, if I were preaching, you know, kings as one sermon, and I had to give it a kind of main idea, the whole thing, summing up the theological message of the books, you might say that it is, hear the word of the Lord and obey it.

9:30 That's it. It's really that simple. Hear the word of the Lord and obey it. That's the main idea of the whole thing. And the point of the sermon today and the point of most sermons in 2 Kings is not going to be much different from that because that's the drumbeat that runs through the whole thing. Well, today we're going to be looking at the first three chapters of 2 Kings. So turn there. If you're using one of these Red Pew Bibles, it's on page 307. And we are, as I've said, really jumping right into the middle of the story. But that's okay because I just trust that you remember everything from the story from a year ago.

10:10 Well, maybe not. Let me give you a running start as to where we are. This will be very short, I promise, with not too many names in it. The first four chapters of 1 Kings are about the reign of Solomon. It's a golden age. Chapter 5, Solomon's kingdom falls apart. It splits into twos. Solomon's the great king. He reigns. He dies. His son takes over. And then it splits because his son is an idiot. right so Rehoboam Solomon's son manages to split the kingdom in half there's a civil war you've got the northern kingdom which retains the name Israel so in kings when you see Israel that's the northern kingdom not the whole thing you got two of them now right Israel's in the north the one in the south is called Judah because it's named after the biggest tribe that stayed with stayed with the south now here's the thing you got to remember the nation of Israel the northern kingdom actually is the one that rebelled against David's throne and line. So they're in trouble because all the promises that God made to the king of Israel were made to David, and it's the

11:11 southern kingdom that maintains the Davidic line. The northern kingdom gets its own dynasty, its own line, and that's why they have so much trouble through the whole thing because it's God's promises that are holding the southern kingdom and the southern dynasty in place, and those don't apply to the north. So that'll help you to understand a lot of what's going on in the book, even in some details today. Well, anyway, the book of Kings rolls on, and the way it works is that it just sort of flips back and forth between the north and the south. It'll tell you about a northern king, then a southern king, then a northern king, then a southern king, and it just kind of goes chronologically down through history, telling you about these kings and rendering a judgment on them until it comes down finally in the middle of the book of first kings to a man named ahab who takes the throne of the north if you remember from last time we were here ahab is one of the most revolting characters in the entire bible he's awful i told you last time about this one preacher who said said about about

12:11 him i heard him say this and i can't do it without doing his accent but he says in those dark days wicked ahab reigned in israel a wretched slimy croaking toad of a man who squatted up on the throne of his nation that's nasty but he deserved it and the only person who's sort of worse than him in the old testament is his awful wife Jezebel he took the throne immediately married this awful woman Jezebel who enticed him into a program of of not just worshiping other gods but trying to eradicate the worship of the one true God in the whole nation of Israel and replace the worship of the one true God with worship of a whole bunch of pagan fertility gods basically the best known of whom was called Baal B-A-A-L you may know him as Baal that's how we tend to say it in English the correct pronunciation is Baal. That was the main sort of God that Ahab wanted the nation to worship. At any rate,

13:19 in the middle, a little bit, two-thirds of the way through 1 Kings or so, at the beginning of 17, in the midst of all of this, in the midst of Ahab's program of eradicating the worship of Yahweh, another of the most famous characters in the Bible appears, and that's Elijah the prophet. And then starting in 17, running all the way through chapter 22 of the end of 1 Kings, The rest of the book is about Elijah the prophet's conflict with the wicked king Ahab and his wicked pagan wife Jezebel. And the thing ends in chapter 22 with Ahab's death and the accession of his son Ahaziah to the throne.

13:54 And that's where we pick it up. Now, we're going to read some of the first three chapters of 2 Kings. We're not going to do it now, though. What I'm going to do now is just tell you what's going on in these first three chapters. So just sort of headlines of what stories we're looking at here. So if you look at 2 Kings chapter 1, chapter 1 is really, it's kind of the final clash in Elijah's conflict with the house of Ahab. And that final clash happens not with Ahab now because he's dead, but it happens with his son Ahaziah.

14:24 And it tells the story of Ahaziah's death. But more and more interestingly, it's the story of Ahaziah trying to escape the sentence of death that God has handed down against him. He decides to do that in some interesting ways, and it does not work out well for him or his people at all. That's the story of chapter 1. Chapter 2 is the famous story of Elijah being taken up to heaven in the prophetic mantle, the office of a prophet, falling to his assistant, Elisha, the next guy. And then chapter 3, you've got this detailed story of God, in a really surprising way, intervening in a war, in a way that just shows how powerful his word really is.

15:05 So here's the main idea, the main idea of chapters 1 to 3 of 2 Kings. God's word always accomplishes what God desires. God's word always accomplishes what God desires. It never fails, but not always in the ways we expect. His word always accomplishes what God desires, but not always in the ways we expect. Here's the outline, just kind of following through each one of those three chapters. Chapter 1.1, God's inescapable word. Number two, God's enduring word.

15:36 And number three, God's uncontrollable word. So let's dive into the text and look at its details. Point number one, God's inescapable word. Just looking at all of chapter one. The story of 2 Kings really begins back at the very end, in the last few verses of 1 Kings. Which, again, is a good reminder that you shouldn't split it. It's one big book, and you should think of it in that way. So you've actually got the announcement of this guy Ahaziah's reign in the last few verses of 1 Kings.

16:06 And then the rest of what we know about him shows up at the beginning of 2 Kings. So instead of starting to read in 2 Kings 1.1, we're going to back up into 1 Kings and read all about Ahaziah. So look across the page to 1 Kings chapter 22, verse 51. That's where we're going to start reading. Ahaziah, the son of Ahab, began to reign over Israel in Samaria. in the 17th year of Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, that's the south, and he reigned two years over Israel, the north. He, Ahaziah, did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, and walked in the way of his father and in the way of his mother and in the way of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin.

16:44 He served Baal and worshipped him and provoked the Lord, the God of Israel, to anger in every way that his father had done. After the death of Ahab, Moab rebelled against Israel. Now Isaiah fell through the lattice in his upper chamber in Samaria and lay sick. So he sent messengers telling them, Go, inquire of Baalzebub, the god of Ekron, whether I shall recover from this sickness. The angel of the Lord said to Elijah, the Tishbite, Arise, go up to meet the messengers of the king of Samaria and say to them, Is it because there is no god in Israel that you are going to inquire of Baalzebub, the god of Ekron?

17:19 Now therefore, thus says the Lord, You shall not come down from the bed to which you have gone up, but you shall surely die. So Elijah went. The messengers returned to the king and he said to them, why have you returned? And they said to him, there came a man to meet us and said to us, go back to the king who sent you and say to him, thus says the Lord, is it because there is no God in Israel that you are sending to inquire of Baal's above, the God of Ikron? Therefore you shall not come down from the bed to which you have gone up, but you shall surely die. He said to them, what kind of man was he who came to meet you and told you these things? They answered him, he wore a garment of hair with a belt of leather around his waist.

17:50 And he said, it is Elijah, the Tishbite. Then the king sent to him a captain of 50 men with his 50. He went up to Elijah, who was sitting on the top of a hill, and said to him, O man of God, the king says, come down. But Elijah answered the captain of 50, If I am a man of God, let fire come down from heaven and consume you and your 50. Then fire came down from heaven and consumed him and his 50. The king sent to him another captain of 50 men with his 50, and he answered and said to him, O man of God, this is the king's order. Come down quickly.

18:22 But Elijah answered them, If I am a man of God, let fire come down from heaven and consume you and your fifty. And the fire of God came down from heaven and consumed him and his fifty. Again, the king sent the captain of a third fifty with his fifty, and the third captain of fifty went up and came and fell on his knees before Elijah and entreated him. O man of God, please let my life and the life of these fifty servants of yours be precious in your sight. Behold, fire came down from heaven and consumed the two former captains of fifty men with their fifties, But now let my life be precious in your sight.

18:54 Then the angel of the Lord said to Elijah, go down with him. Do not be afraid of him. So he arose and went down with him to the king and said to him, thus says the Lord, because you have sent messengers to inquire of Baal-zebub, the god of Ekron, is that because there's no god in Israel to inquire of his word? Therefore you shall not come down from the bed to which you have gone up, but you shall surely die. So he died according to the word of the Lord that Elijah had spoken. Jehoram became king in his place in the second year of Jehoram, the son of Jehoshaphat, king of Judah in the south, because Ahaziah had no son.

19:25 Now, the rest of the acts of Ahaziah that he did, are they not written in the book of the Chronicles of the kings of Israel? Now, that is not really what you're expecting, is it, when you start to read 2 Kings chapter 1, verse 1, because with the first sentence of chapter 1, you're expecting that it just says, after the death of Ahab, Moab rebelled against Israel, okay, it's politics and war and all the rest of it. So you're expecting a story about how the new king Ahaziah handled this rebellion of his vassal state Moab. But there's absolutely nothing about that at all.

19:56 It just says Moab rebelled. And then the story just moves immediately to this absurd situation where King Ahaziah the Great has fallen out of his window in his palace. And he's hurt himself so badly that he's worried about his life and he's about to die. Well, the rest of the story moves pretty quickly from there. King Ahaziah, laying on his bed, is worried about his chances of survival, so he sends a messenger to inquire of this pagan god, Beelzebub, there.

20:27 Now, that's interesting because Beelzebub is not actually the name of the god. The actual name of the god, we know from other sources, is Baalzebul, which means the Lord, the Exalted One. Baal means Lord, so it's the Lord, the Exalted One, Zebul. But the author of Kings, if you remember, has quite a wit. And so occasionally he'll take the names of foreign gods and corrupt them. He'll change them. And so he does that here. He changes it from the Lord, the exalted, to the Lord of the flies.

21:03 He's making fun of him. He does that pretty often. It's just a reminder that this guy's got a wit, and we're going to see it show up throughout the writing of this book. Anyway, an angel comes and tells Elijah, the prophet, what's going on. Elijah intercepts the man. He rebukes Ahaziah for inquiring of a false pagan god instead of the living God of Israel. Don't you have a god, Ahaziah, that you could talk to and ask about this, but you send to Baalzebub? You know, what are you doing? So he rebukes him, basically tells him he's going to die. You look at verses 7 and 8. Ahaziah is not happy about this at all.

21:35 He asks his people, who is this? He figures out that it's Elijah. It's his father's old, you know, burr in the saddle, the old enemy. And then what happens next is just kind of shocking. Because three different times, King Ahaziah sends a small little army of 50 men with their commander to arrest Elijah. And the first two times he does that, fire comes down out of heaven and kills them all. Now, word, of course, would have gotten back to Samaria, back to the capital, back to the king.

22:08 And obviously back to the third guy who was sent to go talk to Elijah. I mean, you can just imagine this guy's like sitting in his home or whatever. And he's like, man, did you hear about those two people who went to Elijah? And they got burned to a crisp. I mean, that is just not good. And he hears, hey, the king wants you to go talk to Elijah. And the guy's like, oh, I don't know about that. So he goes and he basically says to Elijah, look, I know that I am about a centimeter away from getting scorched here.

22:42 So please have mercy on me. And he lives. The angel tells Elijah to go back with him to Ahaziah. He confirms God's word yet again that Ahaziah is going to die. And Ahaziah dies just like God said he would. Okay, so what are we supposed to do exactly with a story like this? Well, let's just start by dealing with the obvious problem here. And that is that God scorches 102 people just for going to see Elijah.

23:16 Why does that happen? It seems pretty brutal to us. I mean, really? They come up to Elijah. They tell him, hey, the king has said you need to come down. And just like that, it's like, and they're gone? That's how it works? Well, yeah, it is. And the reason is because this coming of the 50 men three times to Elijah is not just an isolated incident. What it is is another battle in a war that's actually been going on for decades between God through Elijah and the wicked, corrupted house of Ahab.

23:53 I mean, you think back to 1 Kings. For chapter after chapter in 1 Kings, all Ahab did was again and again and again try to subvert and escape and overturn and destroy the word of God in Israel. And Elijah was the one who stood against him in that and created a war between God through Elijah and Ahab, the wicked king. Well, now his son, Ahab's son Ahaziah, is doing the very same thing. He's trying to carry on the war and use his own authority to subvert and overturn the word of God.

24:26 And you can see the conflict here by comparing verse 6 to what the soldiers say in verses 9 and 11. And in verse 6, you've got the word of God. Thus says the Lord. In 9, this is Ahaziah's move in the chess game, the king says. And then in verse 11, again, this is the king's order. You see the point there? The Lord may have said this, but the king says different.

24:58 Who's going to win? Obviously, the Lord wins. Anymore, if you think about it, this chapter is really kind of Ahaziah's Mount Carmel moment. Remember what happened in 1 Kings 18 in front of Ahab's eyes, the great confrontation between Elijah and the prophets of Baal? What happens there? The fire from heaven comes down and consumes the altar and the sacrifice that Elijah had set up. And it's a warning from God that judgment is going to fall on those who don't worship me.

25:30 Well, the same thing is happening here, only it's not just a warning anymore. That fire on Mount Carmel was the fire of judgment. And the fire here was also the fire of judgment. See, for all Ahaziah's desire to escape God's word, to shut it up, to stop it, the fire of judgment falls anyway. In the end, he dies just as God promised. Look, I think there's some important lessons in this chapter for you and me.

26:02 And one of those is that no matter what you do, No matter how hard you run, no matter how hard you try, you will never, ever be able to escape God's Word. You just won't. So what do I mean by that? That you won't ever be able to escape God's Word? Well, I mean, this is a pretty big crowd here today. And I imagine that there are some people here today who, for whatever set of reasons, just never expected to be here. Maybe you're even somebody who's never heard a Christian sermon before.

26:33 And maybe you never expected to be hearing a Christian sermon here today. But you found yourself here anyway. And now you're listening to this sermon patiently. But you've got basically every intention of forgetting it as quickly as possible once it's over. Let's go get lunch. Let's go listen to some football. But here's the problem with that strategy. The problem with that strategy is that you've heard it now. You've heard the word of God. now. It's been read to you. It's been explained to you. Now it's being applied to you.

27:09 I mean, you can do like Ahaziah. You know, you can do like he did and spend the rest of your life trying to make that not be the case. But I promise you that if you go on rejecting God, and you manage, let's just say you manage to never hear another sermon in your life. I promise you that when you stand before God on the last day, the question that will be asked of you will be something like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but you heard that sermon back at the very beginning of 2023. Do you remember that guy talking to you about the word of God and about Jesus?

27:41 You heard it. Friend, don't let that happen. Listen, if you feel God this morning pulling on your heart, don't run away from that. Don't shut the door on that. That's exactly what Ahaziah did. Elijah sent word of the word of God to Ahaziah, and he tried to shut it down. And I promise you, if you try to shut it down, you're going to have exactly as much success as he did, which is none. And if you feel God pulling on your heart, if you feel his spirit, if you feel his word, even this morning in the preaching of the sermon penetrating your heart, do the opposite of Ahaziah.

28:25 Listen. Come to Jesus in faith and repentance and find salvation and not judgment. Look, I'm talking to non-Christians there, obviously. But I also don't want to make it sound like trying to escape God's word is always so blatant either. I mean, if you're a Christian, listen to me. you know that it is possible right to come to church week after week to sing the songs at the top of your lungs to take notes on the sermon for crying out loud and yet still be running this kind of covert mental operation in the back of your mind to get away from the word of god you know that right we do it all the time we say amen and we nod and we give the evangelical mmm to the parts of the sermon

29:26 that we like we get together with our friends at lunch or at home group and we talk about this point of the sermon that really ministered to me or we talk about ask this really insightful exegetical question about the text and we talk and talk and talk and talk but that part of the sermon that really challenged my sin that part of the sermon that pointed out my bitterness that part of the sermon that stepped on my toes we don't bring that up in home group we don't put that in the notes brothers and sisters that is just as much Ahaziah-like escapism as rejecting the word of God entirely be careful that you do not do that listen to the whole word of God even the parts of it that are uncomfortable to you Our correct posture before the Word of God is humble submission.

30:19 It's to bow our hearts, even if necessary, to bend our hearts down if we have to. To listen to God's whole Word and obey it. God's Word is inescapable. Here's the second point, the enduring Word of God. The enduring Word of God. If you take a look at the end of chapter 1, like just the last few verses of chapter 1, and then flip over and look at the last few verses of chapter 3, You see that the story really could have moved directly from chapter 1 into chapter 3 without missing a beat. I mean, Ahaziah dies, his son Jehoram takes his place, and chapter 3 then carries on.

30:54 But right in the middle of that story is chapter 2, which is just kind of stuck into the story, almost like a parenthesis. But it's way more than a parenthesis because it's telling the story of how Elijah was taken up to heaven and the prophetic office then fell to Elisha. Look with me at chapter 2, verse 1. Now, when the Lord was about to take Elijah up to heaven by a whirlwind, Elijah and Elisha were on their way from Gilgal. Elijah said to Elisha, Please stay here, for the Lord has sent me as far as Bethel. But Elisha said, As the Lord lives, and as you yourself live, I will not leave you.

31:28 So they went down to Bethel. And the sons of the prophets, who were in Bethel, came out to Elisha and said to him, Do you know that today the Lord will take away your master from over you? And he said, Yes, I know it. Keep quiet. Elijah said to him, Elisha, please stay here, for the Lord has sent me on to Jericho. But he said, as the Lord lives and as you yourself live, I will not leave you. So they came to Jericho. The sons of the prophets who were at Jericho drew near to Elisha and said to him, Do you know that today the Lord will take away your master from over you? And he answered, Yes, I know it. Keep quiet. Then Elijah said to him, Please stay here, for the Lord has sent me to the Jordan.

32:01 But he said, As the Lord lives and as you yourself live, I will not leave you. So the two of them went on. Fifty men of the sons of the prophets also went and stood at some distance from them as they both were standing by the Jordan. Then Elijah took his cloak and rolled it up and struck the water. The water was parted to the one side and to the other until the two of them could go over on dry ground. When they crossed, Elijah said to Elisha, ask what I shall do for you before I am taken from you. And Elisha said, please let there be a double portion of your spirit on me. And he said, you've asked a hard thing, yet if you see me as I am being taken from you, it shall be so for you.

32:33 But if you don't see me, it shall not be so. And as they still went on and talked, behold, chariots of fire and horses of fire separated the two of them. And Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven. And Elisha saw it and cried, My father, my father, the chariots of Israel and its horsemen. And he saw him no more. And he took hold of his own clothes and tore them in two pieces. And he took up the cloak of Elijah that had fallen from him and went back and stood on the bank of the Jordan. And he took the cloak of Elijah that had fallen from him and struck the water, saying, Where is the Lord, the God of Elijah? And when he had struck the water, the water was parted to the one side and to the other, and Elisha went over.

33:10 Now, when the sons of the prophets who were at Jericho saw him opposite them, they said, The spirit of Elijah rests on Elisha. They came to meet him and bowed to the ground before him. They said to him, Behold, now there are with your servants fifty strong men. Please let them go and seek your master. It may be that the spirit of the Lord has caught him up, cast him upon some mountain or into some valley. He said, You shall not send. But when they urged him till he was ashamed, he said, Send. They sent therefore fifty men, and for three days they sought him, but did not find him. They came back to him while he was staying at Jericho, and he said to them, Did I not say to you, Do not go?

33:42 Now the men of the city said to Elisha, Behold, the situation of this city is pleasant, as my Lord sees, but the water is bad, and the land is unfruitful. So he said, Bring me a new bowl, put salt in it. So they brought it to him, and then he went to the spring of water and threw salt in it, and said, Thus says the Lord, I have healed this water. From now on, neither death nor miscarriage shall come from it. And so the water has been healed to this day. according to the word that Elisha spoke. He went up from there to Bethel, and while he was going up on the way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, Go up, you bald head! Go up, you bald head!

34:14 And he turned around, and when he saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord. And two she-bears came out of the woods and tore 42 of the boys. From there, he went on to Mount Carmel, and from there, he returned to Samaria. Okay, then. Obviously, some things to talk about there. the boy's getting mauled by the bears we'll get to those, we'll talk about them but I don't want you in looking at the details to miss the main thing this chapter is doing this chapter is showing you in no uncertain terms that just because Elijah is no longer on the scene that does not mean that God's word is no longer on the scene got it?

34:53 that's the whole point of Elisha after Elijah's gone, he's got his cloak right, he walks up to the waters of the Jordan River and he cries out where is Yahweh the God of Elijah and then he slams the cloak of Elijah down in the water and what happens exactly the same thing that happened when Elijah did that the answer from heaven to his question where is Yahweh is a resounding right here he hasn't gone anywhere In fact, the whole sort of organization The whole geographical organization Of the chapter is telling you this So you can look at it later But basically what happens is that Geographically the movement in the chapter Shows first Elijah leaving the promised land And he does it by a particular route It's Bethel, Jericho, Jordan River, out The second half of the chapter Moves in the opposite direction

35:53 back into the promised land as Elisha goes from outside to the Jordan, to Jericho, to Bethel, right, and then on into the land. So what that's doing, what's supposed to happen in your mind as a reader is that as Elijah is making his way out of the promised land across the river, you're supposed to be thinking, Elijah's leaving, is the word of God leaving with him? And then you're supposed to go, nope, the word of God is now coming back in with Elisha on the same route just in reverse. God's word isn't going anywhere. It never does, and it never will. Heaven and earth may pass away, God says, but my word will never pass away. Okay, the details. First of all, look at verses 1 to 12. We read it. Just look at it. Look specifically at verses 2 and 4 and 6.

36:47 Why here is Elijah trying so hard to ditch Elisha? Three different times he says, please stay here, I am going on ahead. Why does he do that? Interesting question, gets even more interesting and maybe even a little disturbing when you realize that back in 1 Kings 19, God had told Elijah in no uncertain terms that this guy right here, Elisha, was going to be his successor. And somehow everybody, all these prophets seem to know in this story because they keep coming up to Elisha and irritating him and saying, today's the day, you know, that you're going to take over from Elijah.

37:26 Everyone knows that. But Elijah seems to be doing everything he can to shake Elisha off. Why? Well, there's, I think, no real puzzle to it. The answer is that we already know that Elijah isn't a superhero. Several times throughout his life, he seems to not particularly like what God has said to him. I mean, he knows that God said it, but he doesn't necessarily like it.

37:57 And so he pouts sometimes, and he runs sometimes, and he says he wants to end his own life at one point. And here it even seems like he's doing his best to disobey God by not passing on his prophetic office at all. He doesn't say why. Maybe he doesn't want to give it up at all. Maybe he doesn't think he's done yet. Maybe he doesn't want somebody else come in with a double portion of his spirit in order to outshine his legacy. I mean, you notice when Elisha asks for that, Elijah is not like, oh, absolutely, you're going to be greater than me. He's like, I don't know, that's a hard thing.

38:30 But he definitely isn't this flawless, spiritual superhero that we often want characters in the Bible to be. And friends, it's worth keeping that in mind. It's worth keeping that in mind about the Bible. No one is a flawless spiritual superhero in the Bible except Jesus. And you'll do yourself a favor if you remember that nobody other than Jesus, Bible or not, is some spiritual superhero. Friends, we are a celebrity-entranced culture.

39:07 I'm not sure that's unique to us as 21st century Americans. It just seems to be the case that human beings are just dazzled by other human beings. That happens to us. We basically want to worship somebody, and we're going to figure out how to do that. The troubling thing is that that's really no different for us as Christians. I mean, we might take some pride in and talk about how we, we Christians, don't do that silly worship of Hollywood celebrities. But friends, we as evangelicals manufacture our own celebrities by the hundreds.

39:43 And we worship them just as much as anybody worships the starlet in Hollywood. But this text right here, in showing you even Elijah's flaws, the great prophet is warning you not to do that. Your faith, your trust, your sense of stability and spiritual well-being belongs in one man and one man only. The flawless Lord Jesus Christ. Never be carried away by anybody else.

40:16 The story doesn't really tell us much about Elijah's departure. It's very enigmatic. It just says there in verse 11 that chariots and horses of fire came between him and Elisha. And this whirlwind picked him up, took him to heaven. Similar thing only happens to one other guy in the Old Testament, Enoch in Genesis, where it's just said flatly that God took him. I mean, we don't know what that means in Genesis. We don't really even know what it means here. We don't know the significance of Elijah being taken up in a whirlwind. Did he die? I mean, was it more like an ascension, sort of like Jesus?

40:49 Was he just glorified bodily like Jesus was? We don't know. All we know really is that God honored him somehow by rescuing him from having to experience death. The rest of the chapter, verse 12 all the way to the end, tells the story of Elisha kind of coming into his own as Elijah's successor. He splits the Jordan River just like Elijah did. Then he proves to the other prophets that he knows what he's doing. You know, you should have listened to me because I know what's going on here and you guys don't. Then he brings this supernatural blessing to the city of Jericho by purifying their water.

41:22 Then he has a couple of bears maul a bunch of kids while they make fun of him for being bald. I mean, it's just the stuff that prophets do. Right? No. So what's up with that? Well, here's the lesson, kids. Y'all listening? Never, ever make fun of your pastor for the way that he looks. When I was in fifth grade, some kid named Jeremy told me that I was very funny looking, and I, you know, I don't know what's happened to him in the years since.

42:01 no that's not it actually this is one of those places that seems really weird but once you understand the details it gets less weird and in fact it's it's making a point if you understand the details this story is just in fact the final piece clicking into place that shows that Elisha now is picking up the war against idolatry that Elijah had been fighting for decades and it's saying that Elisha has all the authority and power to do that warfare that Elijah had he can bless people like he did in Jericho with purifying the waters and he can call down covenant judgments on idolaters too when they stand against the Lord. That's what's going on. How do we know that? Well there are basically four things that you need to factor in based on the details of the little story about the bears. First, here are the four things you got to think about. Bethel is famously a capital of Baal idolatry this was the place where Jeroboam the king of Israel

43:01 decided that he had to pull the people away from worshipping Yahweh in Jerusalem and create his own temple and the way he did it was that he built a golden calf and stuck it in a temple that he built in the city of Bethel so it's a famous capital of idolatry that's the first thing you've got to have in mind number two Second thing you've got to keep in mind is that these probably weren't children. I just think the ESV gets the translation, it's too specific. They shouldn't have been so specific in saying small boys.

43:34 Because the Hebrew words underneath small boys actually have a big range of meaning. And could actually just mean young adult men who were servants. Young adult men who were servants. Okay, well servants of what? Well, it doesn't say, but if you connect it with the fact that Bethel had its own temple and had its own cult of worship, and you think about the fact that that word servants was used of the priests in the temple in Jerusalem, you start to come to just as likely an explanation that these are young men who were serving as priests of some kind in the temple of the golden calf who hear about the prophet of God coming past Bethel, and they all come out in order to mock him for being a worshiper of Yahweh.

44:26 Third thing, some people have wondered if baldness was a sort of sign of a prophet of Yahweh. We just don't know, and there's no evidence of that. It might have been, or they may have just been mocking Elisha for being a bald man. We don't know, but that's not a sort of, you know, closer argument. Fourth thing that you've got to keep in mind, the appearance of bears here is not as random as it seems. It's not like it could have just used alligators or something. It's a fulfillment of Leviticus 26, 22, when God is enumerating the curses that will come if the Israelites break his covenant.

45:05 One of them is, I will let loose the wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your young men. So like one commentator said, these are not just any bears, these are covenant bears. This is covenant judgment on the wicked city of Bethel. Okay, so what's the point of all that? Details aside, all of that aside, the point, the grand point of this whole chapter is that Even though Elijah is off the scene now, the word of God endures.

45:38 Even though the great prophet, even though the great leader is off the scene, the word of God endures. Friends, that's worth considering, it's worth thinking about, it's worth driving down into your heart. Leaders of God's people come and go all the time. The history of the Christian church is 2,000 years of leaders coming and going, rising and falling, living and dying, but Jesus always being on the throne. The one constant through it all is God's word. That's what never changes.

46:10 I love how one pastor wrote about this passing of the torch from Elijah to Elisha. Here's what he says. Realizing this point that the word of God endures should prevent us from idolizing certain servants of God. The prophets likely wondered, what are we going to do now that Elijah is no longer with us? But if we think like that, we must instead look not for Elijah, but for the God of Elijah to be with us.

46:42 Our help is in the name of the Lord, not in the charisma of his servants. God's leaders change, but God's power persists. Perhaps, sometimes God removes his most illustrious servants so that we will not make idols of them. As though they are the only conduits of God's help. Perhaps God deliberately displays his might through lesser instruments. So that we will not be transfixed on the pizzazz of God's servants.

47:13 But on the strength of God's arm. Amen. Here's point number three. Last few minutes today. I want you to, point number three, God's uncontrollable word. So you remember back in verse 1, like right at the very beginning, chapter 1, verse 1, you got this mention that Moab had rebelled against Israel just before we moved on to the story of Ahaziah falling out his window. Well, chapter 3 picks that story up again. We're not going to read it, but here's the gist. This king of Moab named Misha, Misha the king, rebels.

47:48 And the new king of Israel, Jehoram, decides to go to war against him to try to get his vassal kingdom back. So he enlists Jehoshaphat, who's the king of the southern kingdom of Judah, to help him do it. Well, they pull this plan together of how they're going to, you know, march down and then across the Jordan and then attack from the south, which Moab would never have expected. They march out into the desert in order to invade Moab, and they promptly run out of water. Well, Jehoram, this wicked king of the north, for whatever reason, stuck with his army in the desert with no water, only decides that it's not his own pagan gods who have caused this problem and to whom he would have made sacrifices before he marched out no they're not the ones who have caused the problem he decides all of a sudden it's Yahweh the Lord who has caused this problem so Jehoshaphat this fellow who's probably held on to his faith in Yahweh more he says asks if there's a prophet of Yahweh that they can ask about the situation well somebody says yeah the prophet Elisha is here and they call him in basically Elisha says yes of course God can solve this water problem for you

48:51 but that is small potatoes he's also going to give you victory over the Moabites and so that's what happens and at some length the Bible tells the story about how the water shows up the Moabites see the water it has a kind of red cast on it maybe from the sun maybe from the dirt we don't know but they think it's blood on the ground they think that the armies of Israel have destroyed themselves and there's blood on the ground so they march in with their guard down and they get absolutely routed and the Israelites do exactly what Elijah said they were going to do right up until the very end this story ends on an exceedingly strange note the king of Moab, Misha sacrifices his son and then if you look at verse 27 he took his eldest son who was to reign in his place and offered him for a burnt offering on the wall and then this, and there came great wrath against Israel and Israel withdrew from him

49:51 and returned to their own land. What is that? I mean, now sometimes when I do that to you and leave you hanging, there's this brilliant answer that comes. Not today, friends. We have no idea what's going on with this. I've looked at commentator after commentator. Nobody knows. There's a lot of guesses, but none of them make much sense. I mean, it can't, so let's just go through some things that it can't be. It can't be that this king sacrifices his son on the wall of the city, and then the pagan god who would have been Chemosh in that region, and then Chemosh attacks the nation of Israel and beats them.

50:32 It can't be that. Why? Because Chemosh doesn't exist. That's not what happened. it can't be Yahweh's wrath, right? It's not like the king sacrificed his son and then, you know, Yahweh in heaven is like, oh, yeah, you're right. And, you know, nails his own people. That's not it. Some people have suggested that maybe it was the wrath of the Moabite soldiers that came on Israel. You know, they see what their king has been driven to and they just, they fight with more fury now because of it. Other people have pointed out that it may be that this is wrath not against Israel, but wrath within Israel.

51:14 That's possible, linguistically. That works with the range of the words underneath. And what it would be saying is that maybe the Israelites themselves were so disgusted by what had happened that they just walked away. Whatever, it's over. We don't know. I don't particularly like any of those solutions, and I don't have a better one. But the point seems to be that things didn't work out exactly as we expected them to work out when we first started reading this chapter.

51:46 I mean, when Elisha's called in to talk to those kings, he tells them in verses 18 and 19 some things that are going to happen. And basically, what we do is that we read the words that Elisha says, and we interpret that and we assume it to mean total victory over the Moabites. So we're surprised at the end when the last city is left standing. But here's the thing, here's the thing, and it's a good lesson for how to read your Bible, how to be careful reading your Bible. The thing is, everything Elisha said in 18 and 19 to those kings did in fact happen. Everything happened. Total victory didn't happen. But that's because you and I imported the idea of total victory in ourselves.

52:33 God never promised it. It's a dangerous thing to do when you're reading the Bible. When you read the Word of God, be careful that you read the Word of God and you don't import your own assumptions and presuppositions into it. It is so easy to do that. We just assume that this or that thing must be true, and then we read the words of the Bible, and we force the Bible to conform to that pre-existing idea. But no, you've got to be careful to see exactly what the Bible says and build your life on that. Because the thing you're assuming must be true may not be true after all.

53:12 Read carefully. Okay, one more thing. I want you to look at verses 13 and 14. Elisha, he's brought in to the two kings there. Elisha said to the king of the north, this is the really bad guy, says to the king of Israel, what have I to do with you? Go to the prophets of your father and to the prophets of your mother. But the king of Israel said to him, no, it is Yahweh who's called these three kings, me, this guy, and this other guy, to give them into the hand of Moab.

53:45 And Elisha said, as the Lord of hosts lives before whom I stand, Were it not that I have regard for Jehoshaphat, the king of Judah, I would neither look at you nor see you. Okay, what does that mean? Theologically, what's going on there? Jehoram, the king of Israel, as Elisha makes clear, deserves nothing. He deserves no blessing from God. He deserves no water. He deserves no victory.

54:16 Because he's following, more or less, in the footsteps of his wicked parents, Ahab and Jezebel. And yet, in this story, God ends up doing good things for him anyway. Why? Why? Because Jehoshaphat, the son of David, is standing there next to him. Friends, the same thing is true of you. That's a shadow of the gospel. It may be a fuzzy shadow, but it's a shadow of the gospel. Because if you're a Christian, if you're a believer, if you're a human being, this is true, you deserve nothing from God.

54:54 You deserve no blessing. You deserve no life. You deserve no salvation from hell. You deserve no forgiveness of sins or redemption from death. You deserve nothing from God. And the only way, the only way you're going to get blessing from God is if you stand next to the son of David. Jesus. That's the gospel. That is the gospel. You and I deserve nothing but hell. We deserve nothing but to be cast out of God's presence. And the only reason we're saved is because the son of David, Jesus, the king of kings and lord of lords, the king of Israel, has in his mercy decided to stand next to us with all our junk.

55:38 And God says, if it weren't for him, if it weren't for Jesus, I would neither see you nor know you. But because of him, because of what he did for you, you're mine, you're mine. And all the blessings of eternity are yours. What a beautiful gospel. What a beautiful Savior. Let's pray. Our Lord Jesus, we thank you and praise you today. that You, the Son of David, the King of Israel, the King of the universe, have in Your mercy and compassion looked down and saved us.

56:15 You have stood beside us in all of our mess, in all of our sin, in all of our unrighteousness. You've not turned us away. You've not pushed us away. You've stood next to us. And You've pled Your blood before Your Father for our salvation. Lord, we pray that You would help us to remember these things and glory in them and exult in them. To the glory of God the Father and the glory of His Son, Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray, amen.