Pathology of a Nation's Collapse
This last week I had surgery
in my left wrist for carpal tunnel problems. There have been ongoing problems
with numbness and tingling in my left arm and doing some activities my whole arm
would just go to sleep and become extremely numb to where I couldn’t even move
it, and that’s from my shoulder blade down to the tip of my fingers. If I would
talk on the phone and have my elbow bent in ten seconds I couldn’t even move my
arm. In the last couple of days I have been on the phone several times for
35-minutes to an hour and holding the phone to my ear with no problems
whatsoever. That tells me two things: #1 the doctor correctly diagnosed the
problem, and #2, the doctor correctly diagnosed the solution.
There is a principle there.
It is not just enough to correctly diagnose the problem. There are all kinds of
people from all kinds of worldviews and perspectives who can look at any number
of situations and correctly diagnose a problem in a way that agrees with you.
But it is foolish to think that if they can correctly diagnose the problem
means that their solution is correct. That is particularly important at this
time of the election and political cycle because there are all manner of people
out there who can correctly analyze the problem in a way that resonates and
vibrates in your soul, but their solution stinks. Their solution is worse, and
in many cases their solution just leads to further problems and increased
governmental tyranny. At the root of every issue in life is one’s view of God.
At the root of your choice is your view of God. I can take a person’s view of
God and if they are serious and consistent can pretty much tell you what their
values are in a number of different areas and what they are going to do in a
number of areas.
One of the greatest problems
we have in this nation is an inability to think critically and to be able to
critically evaluate the issues of life—whether we are talking about, for
example, living our life on a day by day basis as a believer in terms of
serving an employer in a manner that honors and glorifies the Lord (our
ultimate Employer)—and whatever the area may be when it comes, especially to
politics because this affects our whole society. This is fundamentally a part
of our spiritual life, and as believers we are commanded to do all things to
the glory of God and that includes in the voting booth. There are a lot of
people today who get very, very uncomfortable with pastors who talk about
anything that relates to politics, but it is the job of the pastor to not only
teach the Word but also to show how the Word applies to the issues of the day,
the issues that most significantly affect our lives—whether that has to do with
marriage, family, child-raising, education, or broader issues such as economic
theory or politics. We believe that the God who created the heavens, the earth
and the seas and all that is in them, includes those immaterial laws related to
ethics, to moral absolutes, to economic laws, to societal laws which we refer
to as the divine institutions; and that God in His omniscience left nothing
out, and His Word which claims to teach us how to think about everything
doesn’t leave out politics. Some people want some little pet area that they can
surgically slice out of the Scriptures and say that this is an area that is
neutral that God hasn’t addressed. God has addressed everything! We have to
come to an understanding of just how the Word of God addresses the issues of
our lives and the issues of the day.
That is a setup for what we
are going to be studying for all of the rest of 2 Kings. Starting with the
chapter we are in now, 2 Kings 20, where we see two episodes—Hezekiah’s
sickness in terms of the sin unto death and his return back to God where God
relieved him of that punishment, and the second which relates to the Babylonian
envoys who come to Jerusalem where Hezekiah takes them into the temple and
shows off all of his wealth, operating on arrogance, building himself up,
totally apart from humility to the Lord. We might ask the question: why are
these two events given in chapter twenty when both occur prior to the events of
chapter nineteen which describes the deliverance of
What we see in this chapter
is really the definition of the basic problem that
But arrogance is one of those
words that often becomes a little too familiar to us and we become a little too
comfortable with it. Arrogance is sort of the mirror twin of the other aspect
or component in Satan’s thinking. Arrogance glorifies self; arrogance is
focused on the individual, on me, on what I want, all about my agenda, what
makes me happy. Arrogance is all about avoiding personal responsibility toward
God and making me, the individual, the ultimate definer, the ultimate
determiner for the issues in life. But when we operate on arrogance we always
run into a little problem, a little conflict, and that is that God says
something that isn’t exactly what we want to hear. That immediately generates
something called antagonism. So arrogance and antagonism are these mirror
twins—arrogance towards God, arrogance in relation to self and antagonism in
relationship to God. Whenever we are operating in arrogance we are also
operating in terms of antagonism toward God. We may camouflage it, dress it up,
suppress it in unrighteousness, but the more we suppress it and stuff it down
in the garbage can of our soul and some body comes along and just mentions,
e.g. like asking an evolutionist, Is it possible that evolution is wrong? Their
anger goes from 1 to 10: Why do you want to bring God into this? That is the
real issue: they don’t want to be personally accountable to God; they want to
run life their own way. So whenever we tweak our arrogance and the fact that we
have stuffed all this stuff down into the garbage can of our soul by
suppressing truth in unrighteousness, whenever we are challenged by truth and
something starts to bubble up from the bottom of the garbage can of our soul,
then we just go ballistic because we have worked so hard to stuff that stuff in
the garbage can and put the lid on it. And it just comes back, and so we see
this again and again and again because it is still God’s world, God is still in
charge, and the truth as He has defined it is still the truth of reality.
When people come face to face
with reality, especially when it gives them a bloody nose, their reaction is
anger and their reaction is hostility. That is ultimately why we see the
contentiousness that has developed over the past twenty years in the political
sphere. It is because, as it has been called, a culture war but it is more
profound than that. It is a spiritual conflict because there are those who are
aligned in their thinking with the truth and reality as it is, and there are
those who aren’t; and those who aren’t are consistently suppressing the truth.
As our culture has been on a pagan trajectory for the last 125-150 years what
happens is that those who are promoting the pagan agenda in many different
shapes and forms have thought that they have had victory within their grasp.
Then what happens is you get a 911 and you get a president who is willing to go
to war, and all of a sudden they think they are losing everything and they
press the political panic button. Then there is a ricochet off to the other
side and they are not always correct either because we have to remember that
evil is always multi-faceted. There can be evil on the left and there can be
evil on the right and often what we see is just a battle between two
manifestations of evil. Evil in terms of the sin nature can manifest itself in
antinomianism as well as in terms of legalism. Antinomianism is against law.
These are the ones who just want to do everything without any regulations,
without any kind of restrictions, and just not have any accountability
whatsoever and do just whatever they want to do. They are the free spirits that
don’t want any kind of regulation on their soul (I’m talking ethically).
Then there are those who want
to regulate everything ethically, such as the Pharisees, and those are the
religious legalists. They are both manifestations of evil. It is not one is
right and the other is wrong; they are both wrong. We can see the same manifestations
in political parties, so just because there are issues that one party or one
individual who is in one party agrees with or another it doesn’t mean that that
party is always right. There are many in both parties and most in some parties
that are just so far out of bounds that we can’t give them any credibility
whatsoever. But just because somebody is a member of one party that generally
we think is right doesn’t mean they always are. The ultimate criteria for us is
not party affiliation, it is the Word of God. And the Word of God tells us and
defines for us what right and wrong is all about and what the real issues in
life are. This is what we learn from a passage such as this.
In the last part of this
chapter, beginning in verse twelve we have the episode where Merodach-baladan,
the son of the king of Babylon—and we know from that indication when this
occurs: about the time Sennacherib begins to come into Judah and is not really
focused on Jerusalem but it dealing with
the Philistines and Phoenicians and some of those areas—sends letters and a
present to Hezekiah because he heard that Hezekiah had been sick. The episode
from vv. 12-21 is tied to the fact that he heard what happened in vv. 1-11, so
one of the reasons we need to know about his sickness is that we know that is
the occasion for Merodach-baladan sending
these envoys to
In verse 13 NASB “Hezekiah
listened to them, and showed them all his treasure house, the silver and the
gold and the spices and the precious oil and the house of his armor and all
that was found in his treasuries. There was nothing in his house nor in all his
dominion that Hezekiah did not show them.” That tells us this is before he has
to pay this big tribute to Sennacherib; he still has money in the bank.
Preview of
coming attractions: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah and Hosea and Amos are all writing
at approximately the same time: from 700 down to 586 BC. And they castigate the Israelites for
their self-absorption and their refusal to do justice to those in
society—biblical justice as defined by the law. What we find is that the
theologically and politically liberal crowd, which loves to talk about social
justice, goes to these passages to try to justify their position, that the
government should be supporting people, that is should be providing a welfare
system, should be taking care of the widows, the orphans and all these other
things. But the trouble is that is not what the text says.
The text
isn’t a condemnation of the government of
When the government comes in
and steals the money from you under some program of pseudo compassion to take
care of everyone what they do is they limit your ability to fulfill God’s
mandate that we are to take care of those in our periphery. Now we don’t have
the resources because they are being squandered on some government socialist
program in
Hezekiah has gone into
self-absorption here so Isaiah is going to bring out the revelatory sledge
hammer and wake him up. So he comes to him and starts asking questions, always
a good way to get to the truth. The divine
critique. 2 Kings 20:14 NASB “Then Isaiah the prophet came to King
Hezekiah and said to him, ‘What did these men say, and from where have they
come to you?’ And Hezekiah said, ‘They have come from a far country, from
2 Kings
2 Kings
20:19 NASB “Then Hezekiah said to Isaiah, ‘The word of the LORD which you have spoken is good’… There is
humility here, he has just been confronted with the truth of God’s Word and he
responds appropriately in terms of humility and accepting God’s Word; he
doesn’t react in anger or bitterness. Hezekiah was a true spiritual giant and
leader but he also had as many true spiritual giants do some great
flaws—because we are all sinners. ‘…For he thought, ‘Is it not so, if there
will be peace and truth in my days?’” See, that little arrogance comes up—as
long as this doesn’t happen when I am alive I guess we can get away with it.
Just put the consequences off for a couple of dozen years, let the next
generation pay for our trillion-dollar debt. As long as I don’t have to do it
as long as I am in office, that’s great. Haven’t we heard that before? How
modern Hezekiah is!
2 Kings
20:20 NASB “Now the rest of the acts of Hezekiah and all his might,
and how he made the pool and the conduit and brought water into the city, are
they not written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah? [21] So
Hezekiah slept with his fathers, and Manasseh his son became king in his
place.” That is when we hear the heavy things start to play as we introduce the
most evil king in the history of the southern
Ahaz goes
back to the sins of Ahab and Jezebel in the northern kingdom. He is going to
introduce the worst of the worst religions in all of the history of humanity,
the fertility religions of Baal and the Asherah, and the human sacrifice of the
worship of Chemosh where there was an infant sacrifice, where parents would
bring their babies to be immolated (burned alive) in the arms of this idol
where there was an extremely hot fire in order to placate the god and somehow
get blessing. In other words, in order to trade with the gods for prosperity,
for money, for wealth and their security they would sacrifice their children.
2 Kings 16:2
NASB “Ahaz {was} twenty years old when he became king, and he
reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem; and he did not do what was right in the
sight of the LORD his God, as
his father David {had done.} [3] But he walked in the way of the kings of
But as Bible
believers, as those who believe that there really is a personal, infinite God
who created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them we believe there
are implications of that reality that extend to every area of our life, and
that that has been revealed to us by that God in His Word. So that when
somebody makes a choice for another god, even though they have the freedom to
do so, that choice isn’t as simple as just choosing chocolate ice cream instead
of vanilla ice cream. It brings with it an entire host of beliefs and ideas and
values that are a hundred per cent antagonistic to the God of Abraham Isaac and
Jacob and all that He has revealed to us. Those values that they hold, even
though at some point they may appear to be similar or the same or
complimentary—after all the most pagan priest of Baal is going to look at an
oak tree and say that’s an oak tree, and you can agree with him, but that
doesn’t mean that the oak tree is the same as your view of the oak tree. Just
because somebody can identify a problem doesn’t mean they have the correct
solution. Even though you may stand up and cheer at the way they define the
problem it doesn’t mean that you want to have anything to do with their
solution, because their solution is going to come out of their whole worldview.
So we have to understand a lot of things and have to evaluate a lot of issues
whenever it comes to the voting booth. It means we have to be knowledgeable, we
have to study, we have to read, we have to watch the right news, listen to
various different t pundits; we have to study, think, get out of our little
shells of comfort and prosperity. Because we are not living in a world like we lived in for the last forty
or fifty years of our lives where we could afford to complacently go about the
issues of our lives and just go into the voting booth and say this guy looks
good, this guy looks good, I’ve heard his name before. We can’t do that; too
many people have been doing it, or they haven’t voted because they don’t think
it matters.
I think that
we are in the third most significant time in the history of this nation. The
first was at the time of the American war for independence, the second was
during the time of the war of northern aggression, and the third is now and
that the very life and future of the history of this Constitutional recovery is
at stake. And there are a lot of people on both sides of the aisle who are
using Constitutional verbiage. Just because they use language you like doesn’t
mean it; go look at their voting record, look at their belief systems. Learn
about this because if the wrong people get elected you won’t have the freedoms
much longer. Just because they talk a lot about freedom, just because people
talk the talk, it doesn’t mean they really believe that; and at election time
everybody wants to sound like a patriotic Constitutionalist, but that doesn’t
mean that they are. Maxine: “Voting is like choosing your favorite mosquito out
of a swarm.”
A lot of
times the choices we make are not choices between good and bad, sometimes it is
between bad or worse. We just have to be careful. How do we make these
decisions? As a believer you have five basic criteria. It basically comes down
to understanding the divine institutions. Divine institution is a term that has
been used by Christians to speak of certain absolute social structures, and in
Scripture these social structures take precedent over economic structures. Today
we are all concerned about the economy and jobs and these kinds of things but
when we study the Mosaic law what God says is that our belief, our theology, is
more determinative of the health of the economy of a nation than our
understanding of sound economic policy. We have been so secularized we think
that understanding causative issues in history and causative issues in
economics and in politics ultimately boils down to what can be measured in the
laboratory of life or history. That is a lie, because what God says in the
Mosaic law to Israel is, If you disobey me and you go after other gods then I
am going to bring these judgments on you and you are going to lose jobs, your
crops will not come to fertility, you are going to lose money, I am going to defeat
you militarily. It doesn’t matter ultimately how much technology we have, how
much money we have, how much education we have; if we are divorced from the
truth then God says that will destroy all these other things. So the ultimate
issue is always going to be God.
The divine
institutions come out of our understanding of Scripture and they apply to
everybody, every nation, believer and unbeliever, Christian, Moslem, whatever.
If we honor these institutions there will be a measure of stability and success
in a nation because this is how God structures human beings and society. So
these are absolute social structures established by God, embedded within the
social structure of the human race, and thus these are for all the human race
and they are unbreakable realities. Modern paganism rejects them at their core
and looks at these institutions as simply pragmatic byproducts of man’s
psycho-social evolution and their cultural conventions. So we can change our
definition of marriage, we can change our emphasis on human responsibility.
Then we are not individually responsible to an external creator God, we are
just responsible for one another, sins aren’t individual acts that violate the
character of God but they are social mistakes that hurt humanity. That is what
sin is and everybody is basically good instead of what the Scripture says, that
it is basically evil.
The first
three divine institutions are individual responsibility, and we are responsible
to God. Each institution has an authority. The authority of the first divine
institution is God. We are all accountable to God for everything in life. We
are accountable to what God’s commands are to us and part of that includes
labor and responsibility. Adam was put in the garden to work the garden before
sin ever cast its shadow on the garden. He had responsibility, he labored but
not in a toilsome way. Toil gets added to it as a result of sin, but before
that he had things to do. God assigned him tasks and this is the whole basis
for understanding free market economic theory. It’s personal responsibility and
accountability for what you do, and you get out of what you produce what then
benefits you and builds wealth in your life.
The second
divine institution is marriage; the authority is husband. When the authority
becomes the wife or marriage breaks down due to the ease of divorce laws, or
because it is redefined as marriage between same sex partners, this will have
devastating consequences in the culture. Then the family. We have seen the
black family just decimated by welfare over the last fifty years. Marxism
within the black community as a result of the thinking of the NAACP has devastated the black community and
the black family, because the divine institution of the family got redefined by
the federal government in terms of the welfare system and how that was applied.
That is a doctoral dissertation in and of itself. Most people have no idea
about that, and because they don’t have knowledge the nation has gone through
the horrible consequences. Somewhere Hosea said: “When there is no knowledge
the people perish.”
The next two divine institutions are government and
nation—individual national identity. These represent two different groups of
institutions. The first three were all established before the fall, before
there was sin. They are designed to promote productivity and to advance
civilization. If we don’t honor those three we cannot see productivity, we
cannot see economic expansion, we cannot see civilization secure. But then
after the fall we have to restrain sin. Evil was rampant before the flood of
Noah, so after the flood of Noah there were two institutions established. The
first was human government. The institution isn’t inherently evil but its
practice becomes so because it is practiced by fallen human beings, so
government has to be limited as much as possible. The fifth divine institution
was set up some 2-300 years after the flood at the
What happens when government grows beyond its stated size it
begins to assault the first three divine institutions. Because either you are
going to be individually accountable for your life and your decisions to God or
you are going to be accountable for them to the government. When the government
is outside of the Biblical bounds it is in competition with God and has a
messianic complex. The federal government under the progressive political
philosophy since the late 19th century has had a messiah complex:
the government can solve the problem. This is a core belief that is in contrast
with a constitutional belief that government must be limited. This is why when
we get into debates with people over specific political issues that may come up
there are more fundamental issues that are involved. Limited government versus
unlimited presumes and presupposes total depravity and the evil of man, or not.
That is where the discussion needs to be. The discussion is not over individual
or specific issues. We need to debate those but the only reason they come up
and become sources of such heated argumentation is because there are more
profound issues at stake.
Political/national or individual actions: three cases in point
right now in which we recognize we have a problem. And nobody debates this
problem. It goes back to the opening illustration: most people can identify a
problem. One problem we are facing in the city right now is the problem of
drainage. Another example at national level is the debate over the improvement
of health care health care costs. We have a serious problem with rising health
care costs in this country; that is the problem. Everybody can agree to that,
it is the solution to that where the debate lies, not in identifying the
problem. Another issue is global warming. We can all agree there is hard data
that there is warming that is occurring and we can agree that there are cycles,
fluctuations of earth’s temperature. The issue is what causes it and what the
solution to that is. That is where the debate lies. But what happens is that
those who are very sophisticated in their debating techniques like to shift it
to just identifying the problem and staying away from the real root issues that
caused the debate and disagreement over the solutions.
Whenever we propose one solution or another, e.g. proposition #1:
relating to the creation of the dedicated funding source to enhance, improve
and renew drainage systems and streets. I think we can all agree that that is a
good thing—to have a better drainage system and to renew the one that we have.
The proposition is: “Shall the city charter of the city of
In the case of this proposition there are many people who will
read it and say, Isn’t that nice, we are going to solve the flood problem; we
are going to have better streets; let’s just give away our freedom. This is a
serious issue; this is tyranny in action, a direct assault on First Amendment
rights which is the establishment of freedom for worship and religious
expression. This will limit a church. In fact, it is limiting education. It is
horrible, poorly-written legislation, almost as bad as the healthcare
legislation
The problem isn’t the solution, that some things need to be fixed,
it is that when they start writing the solutions there are so many loopholes
and so many things that are left unstated or open-ended that you can drive
truckloads of Gestapo troops through to enslave the population. So this kind of
thing has to stop, whether it is talking about something like a local ordinance
or healthcare or global warming.
The real issue we are expected to ignore is: is it legal, and is
it right to do this? That implies some subterranean issues: how do we know what
right or wrong is? Now we are getting into some real heavy discussions. That is
why some people in this country end up on one side of the aisle and other
people on the other side of the aisle and the same people consistently end up
on the same sides of the aisle over different issues. It is because of these
two categories: How do you know right or wrong and what is your understanding
of ultimate reality? This is where the debate is; this is why we have these
culture wars. It is because you have people operating on a worldview that
doesn’t take into account any of the divine institutions.
The battle takes place here on epistemology and basically on the
ultimate issue of God. So we have to think these things through. These are all
logically-related categories and you start with God and you are going to end up
trying to understand how you should act and move on particular issues like
this.
In Israel Hezekiah changed everything. He shifted back to God who
created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them, and cleaned
everything up, but he didn’t really change the hearts of the people. The
problem in this country is not that we have elected officials that dominate
Congress and that are in the Whitehouse, but that we have a nation of people
who elected them. The problem is with the people is that they elected these
leaders. We get what we deserve because we have a culture that has denied the
truth in terms of Biblical Christianity. For the last 50-70 years we have been
operating on pagan ideas of God and pagan ideas of how we know truth, and thus
we get pagan ethics and pagan political decisions. We can change out everybody
in
Deuteronomy
4:5, 6 NASB “See, I have taught you statutes and judgments just as
the LORD my God
commanded me, that you should do thus in the land where you are entering to
possess it. So keep and do {them,} for that is your wisdom and your
understanding in the sight of the peoples who will hear all these statutes and
say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’”
The
principle was that if
We have to
have an absolute, external value system otherwise it just comes down to my
personal opinion against yours, and that leads to conflict. [Words indistinct]
of the Supreme Court in the late nineteenth century said that the Christian
concept of right and wrong—and that would be the Judeo-Christian concept
because all of this is really grounded in the Hebrew Scriptures of the Old
Testament—or right and justice motivates every rule of equity. It is the guide
by which we dissolve domestic frictions and the rule by which all legal
controversies are settled. Of course they don’t believe that anymore and that’s
why we have this cultural friction today.
But is there
hope? Yes, there is always hope. Scripture says, Jeremiah 17:7 NASB
“Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD And whose trust is the LORD. [8] For he will be like a tree planted by the water, That
extends its roots by a stream And will not fear when the heat comes; But its leaves
will be green, And it will not be anxious in a year of drought Nor cease to
yield fruit….[13] O LORD, the
hope of
When we go
back and look at what we have been studying in Kings there was Ahaz who was
evil, but there was hope because Hezekiah came to turn the people back to the
Lord—superficially because it didn’t take root in their hearts. Then there was
Manasseh. Now we have to decide. Are we living in a time of Ahaz where there is
going to be a real change and real hope? But even though the administration
changes as it did between Ahaz and Hezekiah, unless there is a heart change of
the people, if there is a superficial change then all we are going to do is go
back, like Peter says, to a dog returning to his vomit; we are just going to go
back and have Manasseh and it will be even worse.
Our only
hope is the Lord, even if we go through horrible circumstances. So many of us
are just like the culture around us. We are so tied to our personal prosperity
and comfort and security. We just want to live our lives and not be involved
with all of this garbage. We think that if it is all going to fall apart that
God somehow lost control. God never lost control. Look at Daniel, look at
Shadrach, Meshcach and Abed-nego; they all got transported as captives back to
Lamentations
He is the
only hope, and He is the only one who is going to provide any measure of
stability. Without Him it doesn’t matter what happens at the next election, but
with Him it does; it can make a difference. We dare not put our hope in man.
Our hope is in Jesus Christ; it is not in a political solution.