Preparation for Disaster - 2 Kings 18:1-7; 2 Chronicles

History is the outworking of God’s plan in history. This is one thing that sets apart those who hold to a biblical view of truth and a biblical view of history from everybody else, because we believe that the God who created the heavens and the earth and the seas and all that is in them, the God who called out Abraham and who established Israel as His own people, is the God who oversees history, who has a purpose for history, and even though things may seem random and chaotic and disconnected from our viewpoint, from His viewpoint they are not and He is clearly working all things together in terms of the outworking of His plan. Things are the way they are and God allows things to be the way they are for His purposes in history, and even though we don’t like to dwell and these things we do need to recognize that there are things that could happen and things that will happen eventually in history that are very terrible.

That was the same kind of message that Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel brought to the southern kingdom of Judah back in the ancient world, and it was a message that was largely ignored by the people who lived in Judah during that time because people don’t like to listen to the gloom and doom reports. They like to think optimistically and hopefully that there is a future and that whatever it is that they are doing in life is not going to lead to an ultimate collapse of everything that they know. But that potential certainly did come into reality for the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BC when they were destroyed and defeated by the Assyrians and later in the southern kingdom of Judah in 586 when the Babylonians finally overran them, destroying Jerusalem and the temple.

We live in a world that is just as unstable, maybe more so than what Judah faced during those times. We see the problems that we have in the Middle East. In this recent event, Israel’s blockade of Gaza, we see a cosying up of Turkey with Iran. Between Iran and Turkey is Syria, and Hezbolla is deeply entrenched in Syria and Lebanon. The potential is there for another Lebanon war and now they have more advanced missiles that can hit Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and this is extremely serious. Hamas down in Gaza is also getting more advanced weaponry. Anther area is the whole environmentalist movement. It is important as believers that we recognize the stewardship of human beings over the planet, but the biblical view of stewardship over the environment is very different from the pagan, pantheistic view that tends to dominate things. We often get a very distorted perspective from news media and we have a culture that can’t think objectively anymore because they have forgotten history. A nation that forgets its past and ignores the future is going to destroy itself in the present.

The same kind of thing is clear in the Old Testament. In 715 BC Hezekiah became the king. Think in terms of international geopolitics at that time. Over the last 30-40 years was the rise of the Neo-Assyrian empire and they had come to pretty much dominate the Middle East, the same areas we are talking about today. This was the threat that the southern kingdom of Judah was facing. The world at that time was against them just as the world today is for the most part against the state of Israel. But they had the same God that made the promise to Abraham that He would give them that land, the same God that still protects Israel and still watches over His people even though they are not all in the land and a nation in the same sense that they were in the ancient world. His promises are still the same. So how does Hezekiah the king prepare his people for what he saw was coming? Seven years before he had become king the Assyrians came down and wiped out the northern kingdom of Israel. Hezekiah had seen this and knew that even though Sargon II had died the threat of another invasion from Assyria was imminent. His job was to protect the nation, so how did he handle it? He knew that the ultimate causative issue in history, in nations, as well as in our individual lives is always a spiritual issue and is always based on that individual relationship with God.

We learn important principles as we begin this in terms of how we prepare for any disaster, whether it is a personal disaster or a national disaster. The first principle is that the key to any adversity is mental attitude. You have to be mentally tough. We live in a nation that is no longer mentally tough. The generation that fought in World War II became mentally tough in the depression. They learned how to face hardship and difficulty and to do without. We live in a nation that has produced a generation of wimps and pansies. We live in a world today where it is almost impossible to find Christians who have the spiritual guts to go on the mission field for more than two or three years because they can’t go to McDonald’s, can’t drive a BMW, and can’t have air conditioning. So our missionary force has been depleted drastically over the last thirty years as the generation from World War II has reached retirement age and come home from the filed. We don’t have a tough mental attitude anymore in our culture.

The key to a strong mental attitude is not just being mentally tough, pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps; they key to a really solid, tough mental attitude is always spiritual; that is at the core. That spirituality is related to a right relationship to God. If we have a relativistic view of spirituality, a view of spirituality based on modern psycho-babble, having a good self-image, making sure that self is all squared away and it is all self-centered, then we can’t operate in an environment where there is a real crisis. We have to be able to look at reality objectively when we are in a crisis, we have to be able to analyze things, and we only get that if we have an objective basis for looking at life, looking at life from God’s perspective. So relationship with God based in the spiritual truth of the Scriptures is the only thing that is going to give us the core strength to have a tough mental attitude. We have to be dependent upon God and learn to understand reality and creation as God revealed it, which means the Scripture has to be at the focal point. This is exactly what God revealed to Moses in Deuteronomy: that He had given His Word to Israel and they were to bind it on their foreheads and on their hands, they were to teach it to their children; and all that is to indicate that this is supposed to be the highest priority in their life and they have to think in terms of God’s revelation. If we don’t think in terms of God’s revelation because we’ve lost that objectivity we are just making it up as we go along. Because if there is a God and He is the creator of the heavens and the earth and the seas and all that is in them then He communicates to His creatures that which they need to know in order to properly understand His creation. So revelation, understanding of the Scripture, has to be at the center of our thinking.

The divine revelation that God gave to Israel in the Old Testament was very clear: Obey me and do exactly as I say and I will bless you, you will prosper, and I will protect you from your enemies; but if you disobey me, if you go after other gods and you ignore me, then there will be famine, disease, wars and defeats, and of you continue in your disobedience I will take you out of this land that I gave you. But it was not going to be permanent because He promised them a time when He would return them to the land. Again and again in the Old Testament there is that focus that Israel would indeed in the future disobey God, reject God, and God would indeed remove them from the land, and He did. But if they would return back to Him—once again the issue isn’t technology, social policy, the issue is right relationship with God—He would restore them to the land. Hezekiah understood that.

Hezekiah started his administration by cleaning up the temple, not just in terms of the fact that it was a physical mess with all of the spiritual trash left over from the pagan rule of his idolatrous father Ahaz, they had to cleanse it ritually by the various sacrifices described in the Leviticus, and they had to also consecrate the priesthood again so that there would be a correctly cleansed, sanctified priesthood that would be in charge of the worship of the nation and their relationship to God. So the lesson we learn is that before the nation could be prepared to handle the coming crisis in 701 they had to get their relationship with God straight. That meant cleansing the temple and restoring it to the focal point of the worship of the nation. They cleansed the temple but they didn’t stop there. The true cleansing led to other steps of action, which meant they had to go out and get rid of all of the idols that had been created in the high places, even to the point of removing this one particular relic they had from the time of the exodus, the bronze serpent that Moses had made. That had itself become an object of worship. All of this was destroyed by Hezekiah.

But it is not just enough to get everything straightened out in terms of the temple and set apart (Application: just enough to get right with God in terms of salvation), there has to be the ongoing walk with God in terms of observance of His Word; it doesn’t just end with salvation. Hezekiah recognized that the next step was bringing the nation to a point of observance of the Passover. It had been a number of years since they had observed the Passover. Because they had a limited number of priests that had been consecrated, and because didn’t have all of the priests for the sacrifices of the lambs at the Passover, they had to postpone the Passover a month. Normally the Passover was to be observed on the 14^th day of the first month of the ritual calendar, which would be the month of Nisan, roughly related to our March or April. But within the Mosaic law there was also a provision for those that were not properly cleansed or able to observe Passover during the proper time. They could postpone it, according to Numbers 9:9-12, and observe it on the second month of the year. This is the provision that Hezekiah invokes in 2 Chronicles chapter thirty. So there is the movement from preparation for worship—the cleansing of the temple, cleansing of the priesthood—to the ongoing relationship to God. Passover represented that because the Passover and Yom Kippur are two of the most spiritually significant feast times for Israel. It is Passover that looked back to the redemption of the nation, their freedom from slavery in Egypt, but is also anticipated a future spiritual redemption for the world and the redemption from the slavery to sin. The central feature of the Passover was the lamb which was sacrificed on the altar to depict the fact that sin had to be dealt with through a death.

What we see in 2 Chronicles is the emphasis on the consecration of the nation through Passover. 2 Chronicles 30:3 ^NASB “since they could not celebrate it at that time, because the priests had not consecrated themselves in sufficient numbers, nor had the people been gathered to Jerusalem. [4] Thus the thing was right in the sight of the king and all the assembly. [5] So they established a decree to circulate a proclamation throughout all Israel from Beersheba even to Dan, that they should come to celebrate the Passover to the LORD God of Israel at Jerusalem. For they had not celebrated {it} in great numbers as it was prescribed. [6] The couriers went throughout all Israel and Judah with the letters from the hand of the king and his princes, even according to the command of the king, saying, ‘O sons of Israel, return to the LORD God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, that He may return to those of you who escaped {and} are left from the hand of the kings of Assyria.’” “To return” is a key phrase there. This is the Hebrew word shub which is the same word that we find repeated again and again in the Old Testament related to Israel turning back to God in spiritual relationship. This was part of Solomon’s prayer in 2 Chronicles 7:14 ^NASB “and My people who are called by My name humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn [shub] from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” That is the precondition. This goes back to Deuteronomy 30:1-3.

Hezekiah is going back to that and is saying, You need to come back to Jerusalem, celebrate the Passover and turn back to God. But those in the north who were still mired in their apostasy and rejection of God stayed there and continued to reap the negative consequences of their bad spiritual decisions for several generations. 2 Chronicles 30:8 ^NASB “Now do not stiffen your neck like your fathers, but yield to the LORD and enter His sanctuary which He has consecrated forever, and serve the LORD your God, that His burning anger may turn away from you.” This is turning away the judgment of God upon the nation. [9] “For if you return to the LORD, your brothers and your sons {will find} compassion before those who led them captive and will return to this land. For the LORD your God is gracious and compassionate, and will not turn {His} face away from you if you return to Him.” Notice it is not just a matter of getting the temple cleansed, a matter of salvation, of getting in fellowship; it is a matter of serving the Lord—ongoing obedience. The emphasis is on spiritual growth, spiritual advance, and staying in right relationship with God.

Then it wasn’t just that they celebrated the Passover, they cleansed the land from all of the idols. 2 Chronicles 30:14 ^NASB “They arose and removed the altars which {were} in Jerusalem; they also removed all the incense altars and cast {them} into the brook Kidron.” This means they had an action plan and they went out and made changes in their culture and their lives. [15] … And the priests and Levites were ashamed of themselves, and consecrated themselves and brought burnt offerings to the house of the LORD.”

2 Chronicles 30:18 ^NASB “For a multitude of the people, {even} many from Ephraim and Manasseh, Issachar and Zebulun, had not purified themselves, yet they ate the Passover otherwise than prescribed. For Hezekiah prayed for them, saying, ‘May the good LORD pardon…’” Hezekiah stands as a mediator for them and prays to God for them that they will be cleansed, and here we have “atonement,” the Hebrew word kaphar which often has the idea of cleansing from sin and that there is a satisfaction of the righteousness of God because of the ritual that we see in the Old Testament. [19] “everyone who prepares his heart to seek God, the LORD God of his fathers, though not according to the purification {rules} of the sanctuary.” So there is ongoing obedience to God. What is the consequence of that? It changes their mentality. There is joy and rejoicing now in the land because they are right with God.

This shows the restoration of the nation spiritually, it brings us up to the point in 2 Kings 18:8 where they are now prepared for the Assyrian invasion. To handle that they first had to handle the spiritual orientation of their souls.

Illustrations