Explore the heart-rending stories of Israel’s final kings in this episode, guided by the voices of prophets like Elijah and Hosea, who witnessed the kingdom’s moral and spiritual collapse. From the reign of Pekah and the conspiracies that led to his downfall, to Ahaz’s controversial rule and dealings with Assyria, this episode uncovers the complex interplay of politics, religion, and power that defined the end times of this ancient kingdom.
00:00:02 Introduction and Overview of the Last Kings of Israel
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
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Reading through the stories of the last of the kings of the house of Israel, I always get a feeling of ineffable sadness. That nation had been served by two of the greatest prophets who ever lived. Elijah, the archetype of all prophets. Elisha, who had a double portion of the spirit of Elijah. There were only two more significant prophets that showed up during the entire history of the house of Israel. The first was Amos, who actually wrote during the last years of Jeroboam II. And Hosea wrote as the age of violence descended upon Israel. After Hosea, God just seems to have written Israel off. And I guess you kind of have to expect that. It comes a point of time when you send prophets, they don’t listen. You send prophets, they don’t listen. They drop deeper and deeper into decay, into sex and violence. And finally, they are just beyond redemption. There is no significant prophet who speaks during the last 40 years of the kingdom. And so in the days of Pekah, the king of Israel, which is around 216 years after the beginning of the house of Israel as a separate kingdom, Tiglath-Pileser, the king of Assyria, came and took several cities plus Gilead and Galilee, all the land of Naphtali, and carried all those people away captive to Assyria. Good-sized part of the kingdom now is just gone. And Hoshea, the son of Elah, made a conspiracy against Pekah and smote him and slew him and reigned in his stead. Four of the last five kings leading up to this were assassinated by their successors. The kingdom is just dominated by sex and violence. We’re now down to 730 B.C., after 245 years of the house of Israel as a separate kingdom. And the rest of the acts of Pekah and all that he did, behold, they are written in the book of Chronicles of the kings of Israel. And we’re reading in 2 Kings 15. In the second year of Pekah, the son of Remaliah, king of Israel, began Jotham, the son of Uzziah, king of Judah, to reign. He was twenty-five years old when he began his reign, and he reigned for sixteen years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Jerusha, a daughter of Zadok. He did what was right overall in the sight of the Lord. He did according to all that his father Uzziah had done. However, the high places were not removed. The people sacrificed and burnt incense still in the high places. He built the higher gate of the house of the Lord. Now, I’ve said it before, just let me remind you that when it talks about the high places, it’s not just talking about a mountaintop shrine somewhere where people went up and burned some incense and bowed a couple of times to a pagan god and went home. These were centers of cultic worship where sacrifices were made, where meals were eaten, and where temple cult prostitutes served the people who came there. They were sinners of sexual idolatry and oftentimes involved children who had been sold into this slavery, as opposed to adult women who made a conscious religious choice to do it. In those days the Lord began to send against Judah, even Rezan the king of Syria, and Pekah the son of Remaliah. Okay, now we have got a confederacy going on between Syria, headquartered in Damascus, and the northern house of Israel, headquartered in Samaria. It’s about this time that the prophet Isaiah is working in Israel, that is, in Judah. You’ll find a lot more of the story that goes along with this in the seventh chapter of Isaiah, and it’s worth a read in connection with this. But for now, we’ll go on with this. We have, by the way, a complete series on tape. of Isaiah. They are not radio programs. I have simply read them and commented on them as I went. We’ll tell you in a few minutes how you can get a copy, or at least a sample copy, of that series. So Jotham slept with his fathers and was buried with his fathers in the city of David, and Ahaz his son reigned in his stead. Now we have come 233 years since the house of Israel was established as a second kingdom. We’re also in 2 Kings chapter 16. In the 17th year of Pekah, the son of Remaliah, Ahaz, the son of Jotham, the king of Judah, began to reign. 20 years old was Ahaz when he began to reign. He reigned 16 years in Jerusalem, but he did not do what was right in the sight of the Lord, of his God, like David, his father. Well, now, this is an interesting thing all by itself, and people sometimes ask about this, say, what? Did what was right like David did? Because people can go back, almost anyone who’s read their Bible can go back and recount some very stupid, egregiously sinful things that David did. What do you mean, do what’s right like David? But the answer lies in the fact that with all of David’s sins, he never in all of his life worshipped another god. never honored another god, never had any god except Jehovah, and remained faithful all of his life, weaknesses, warts, and all. And that is a huge thing in God’s sight, that a person remains faithful to him, worships no other. It goes on to say that our boy Ahaz walked in the way of the kings of Israel. O brother, what he did was turn and do the things that these people up there did. Not only that, he made his son to pass through the fire according to the abominations of the heathen whom the Lord cast out from before the children of Israel. We’ll come back into this question of causing children to pass through the fire a little later. But Ahaz went on, he sacrificed and burned incense in the high places, on the hills, under every green tree, and probably took advantage of the temple prostitutes that were there while he was doing it. Then Rezan the king of Syria, Pekah son of Remaliah the king of Israel, came up to Jerusalem to war, and they laid siege to Ahaz and the city, but they could not overcome him. At that time, while he was doing this, reason recovered Elath to Syria, and he drove the Jews out of the city. And the Syrians came to Elath and dwelt there to this day. So Ahaz sent messengers to Tiglath-Pileser, who was the king of Assyria, saying, I am your servant and your son. Come up and save me out of the hand of these two kings that have risen up against me. Ahaz took the silver and gold and the house of the Lord, all the treasuries of the king’s house, and sent it for a present to the king of Assyria. He bought mercenaries to give him some relief. And the king of Assyria says, okay, I’ll do that. He went up against Damascus and took it, carried captive the people of it, all the way to Kir and slew king Rezan, which Isaiah had long ago prophesied would happen. Well, King Ahaz went to Damascus to meet Tiglath-Pileser, the king of Assyria. He saw an altar at Damascus. And King Ahaz sent to Uriah the priest the fashion of the altar and the pattern of it according to all the workmanship. And Uriah the priest built an altar according to what he had been sent from Damascus. So Uriah the priest made it against King Ahaz, got home from Damascus, had it ready for him before he even got back. When the king came from Damascus, the king saw the altar. He approached the altar and offered thereon. The Bible doesn’t comment on this, but there’s something that just doesn’t feel right about an altar from Damascus being reproduced or replicated in Jerusalem and about the king, who is not a priest, offering on this altar. He burned his burnt offering and his meat offering, poured out his drink offering, sprinkled the blood of his peace offerings upon the altar. These are priestly duties, by the way. He also brought the brazen altar before the Lord from the forefront of the house, and he put it on the north side of the altar. And the king commanded Uriah the priest, saying, Upon the great altar burn the morning burnt offering and the evening meat offering and the king’s burnt sacrifice and his meal offering with the burnt offering of all the people of the land. Let’s do it all on this altar. So Uriah the priest did everything Ahaz told him to do. The king cut off the borders of the bases. He removed the laver from off of them. He took down the big basin off of the brazen oxen that were under it. He put it on a pavement of stones. And the covert for the Sabbath they had built in the house and the king’s entry on the outside, he turned from the house of the Lord for the king of Assyria. Hard to figure exactly what’s going on here, but it sounds like a part of what he sent to the king of Assyria were bits and pieces of several important things that were probably silver or gold. Now the rest of the acts of Ahaz which he did, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah? And Ahaz slept with his fathers, was buried with his fathers in the city of David, and Hezekiah his son reigned in his stead. Now we come to the last king of the house of Israel. Hezekiah, who will be a reasonably good king, now reigns in Jerusalem. But we have the final king, Hosea. who will begin to reign in Israel. It has been 245 years since the death of Solomon and the division of the kingdom. There are only nine years left to the fall of the house of Israel. In a way, it was a mercy killing. They couldn’t govern themselves, so they had to be governed by a Gentile. Think about that. I’ll be right back.
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Isaiah is the most loved and admired of all the Old Testament prophets. If you would like to receive a free introductory CD from the album Isaiah, the Messiah’s Prophet, write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll-free 1-888-BIBLE-44. That’s 1-888-242-5344. And tell us the call letters of this station.
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2 Kings chapter 17. Ahaz had been reigning 12 years when Hosea the son of Elah began to reign in Samaria over the house of Israel. He reigned for 9 years. He did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord. He wasn’t as bad as the rest of the kingdom of Israel before him, but he was bad enough. Against him came up Shalmaneser, king of Assyria. Hosea became his servant. He gave him presents in the king of Assyria, though found conspiracy in Hosea. Because he sent messengers to Saul, king of Egypt, brought no present this year to the king of Assyria, as he’d done year by year before this. So finally, the king of Assyria shut him up, bound him in prison, and he came up throughout the land and went up to Samaria and besieged it for three years. Now, can you imagine this? Three solid years they had that city buttoned up behind walls, all because Hosea decided he wouldn’t just be the servant of Assyria anymore. He wanted the Egyptians to come up and save him. In the ninth year of Hosea, the king of Assyria, took Samaria and carried Israel away into Assyria. He placed them in Hala and Habor by the river Gozan and the cities of the Medes. They were taken all the way to what we now call Iran. What follows after this in 2 Kings 17 is a kind of a prophetic summary of what had happened and why it happened. He says, “…so it was that the children of Israel had sinned against the Lord their God, which had brought them up out of the land of Egypt, from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and they had feared other gods.” They walked in the statutes of the heathen, whom the Lord cast out from before the children of Israel and of the kings of Israel, which they had made. They did secretly those things which were not right against the Lord their God. They built high places in all their cities, from the tower of the watchman to the fenced city. They set up images and Asherah poles in every high hill under every green tree. You know, essentially what they have done is they have turned away from the worship of God. They have turned to the gods of the land, all of which involved rather a considerable amount of sex as a part of their worship. It created a powerful combination, sex and religion did. And they were basically houses of prostitution, ostensibly for religious purposes. And God hated it. He hated it, you know, for more than just envy, more than just jealousy, even though he calls himself a jealous God. He hated it because of what they were doing to themselves as a people. It seemed so harmless at first, you know, to begin to adopt pagan customs, do pagan things. Oh, the pagans have got some cool ideas over here. And the next thing you know, you’re doing some terrible things again. You never imagined that you would ever do. Well, the Lord testified against Israel by all the prophets and by the seers, saying, Turn from your evil ways. Keep my commandments and my statutes according to all the law that I commanded your fathers, that I sent you by my servants the prophets. Well, you know, the objective of the law is to keep you mindful of who God is, first, and secondly, to tell you how to live a life. And when you begin to turn your back on that law, you have no longer any firm moral base, and the result is moral collapse of a people. with the kind of society, a violent society, a corrupt society, a bunch of liars and thieves and murderers in that society. That’s where they went when they turned their back on God. He said, I sent prophets, but they wouldn’t listen. They hardened their necks like the neck of their fathers who wouldn’t believe in the Lord their God. They rejected his statutes. They rejected his covenant he made with their fathers and his testimonies that he testified against them. They followed vanity. They became vain. They went after the heathen all around them concerning whom the Lord had charged them, don’t do like these people. And they left all the commandments of the Lord their God. and made them molten images, two calves. They made an Asherah pole. They worshipped all the hosts of heaven and served Baal. And they caused their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire, used divination and enchantments, and sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the Lord to provoke him to anger. Now, I don’t know why the biblical authors are not more explicit in what they are describing here. I think it may be because the first readers understood all too well what it was they were saying. Now it’s left for us to do a little bit of research. Paul Robertson, writing in the Holman Bible Dictionary on this issue of causing their sons and daughters to pass through the fire, said this, In times of apostasy, some Israelites, apparently in desperation, made their children go through the fire to Moloch. There are at least seven specific references to the practice in the Bible. It generally is assumed that references like these are to the sacrifices of children in the valley of Hinnom at a site known as Topheth. Topheth probably means fire pit in Syriac. You can see also a little research on Hinnom, which is the valley of Hinnom, otherwise known as Gehenna, from which the images of hell are taken. Precisely how this was done is unknown. Some contend that the children were thrown into a raging fire. Certain rabbinic writers describe a hollow bronze statue in the form of a human, but with the head of an ox. According to the rabbis, children were placed in the structure which was then heated from below the and drums were pounded to drown out the cries of the children. An alternate view contends that the expression pass through Moloch refers not to human sacrifice, but that parents gave up their children to grow up as temple prostitutes. That, of course, is possible. The practice of offering children as human sacrifice was condemned in ancient Israel, but the implication is clear in the Old Testament that child sacrifice was practiced by some in Israel. The exile seems to have put an end to this type of worship in Israel. However, it lingered on in North Africa and among the Carthaginian Phoenicians all the way into the Christian era. So perhaps we can understand when we read what is involved and what they had given themselves over to, why the Lord was very angry with Israel and why he removed them out of his sight. Just carried them off and got them away. This is, you know, one way of getting Israel away from the religions of Canaan and the corruptions thereof was to take them to Persia. There was no one left but the tribe of Judah only. Problem was, Judah didn’t keep the commandments of the Lord their God. They walked in the statutes of Israel that they had made. And the Lord ultimately rejected all the seed of Israel and afflicted them and delivered them into the hands of spoilers until he had cast them out of his sight. For he tore Israel from the house of David. and they made Jeroboam the son of Nebat king, and Jeroboam drove Israel from following the Lord, and made them sin a great sin. It’s just a crucial example of the importance of leadership, the importance of faith in leadership, because all Jeroboam had to do was believe God, and God would have preserved him and his kingdom. but he just didn’t trust. The children of Israel walked in all his sins. They departed not from them until the Lord removed Israel out of his sight, as he had said by all his servants the prophets. So was Israel carried away out of their own land to Assyria unto this day. What the king of Assyria did at this point was rather interesting. I’ll tell you what that was, but first, grab a pencil and a pad. I want to give you an address and a phone number and an offer.
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22.
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Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE-44. And tell us the call letters of this radio station.
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So the king of Assyria carried them all away, man, woman, child, the lot, and took them away to Babylon. And here he was with a very large, very good piece of real estate with nobody on it. So what he did was he reached out all over his kingdom, all the big cities, and sent into this area men. who were different nationalities, different races, a whole staggeringly different group of people, placed them in the land, obviously in thrall to himself and in debt to him, and they possessed Samaria and dwelt in the cities thereof. Now this is the origin of the people called the Samaritans. That nation was, by the first century, so despised by the Jews Nevertheless, they were a mixed bag of peoples who lived in that northern tribe up there. They were not Israelites or anything close to Israelites. Well, what happened was at the beginning of their dwelling there, they didn’t show any kind of respect to Jehovah, who was the God of the land. So the Lord sent lions among them and killed some of them. And they spoke to the king of Assyria, sent a delegation and said, look, the nations you have removed in place in the cities of Samaria don’t know the manner of the God of the land. We don’t know what we’re supposed to do religiously here. So the king of Assyria, problem solver that he was, said, carry back over there one of the priests that you brought from thence and let him go and live there and let him teach them the manner of the God of the land. Okay, so they took one of the priests they carried away from Samaria. They brought him back to Bethel, and he taught them how they should respect the Lord. Well, isn’t that interesting? Well, then one of the priests whom they had carried away from Samaria came. He dwelt in Bethel and taught them how to fear the Lord. Apparently, this priest brought a copy of the law with him, which formed the basis of what is today called the Samaritan Pentateuch. It was the first five books of the Old Testament in a very, very old version, which differs, interestingly enough, from the Masoretic text from which your Old Testament was translated. They followed the law to a degree, and there were Samaritans still keeping the Passover on the mountains near the old city of Samaria as late as 50 years ago. No, I don’t mean 50 years ago back then. I mean 50 years ago from now. They were still observing the Passover according to their book of the law. He went on to say that they did this, but at the same time, every nation made gods of their own. They put them in the houses of the high places the Samaritans had made. Every nation in their city wherein they dwelt. I’ll tell you, this Asherah, this goddess of the Middle East, she was so pervasive and almost impossible to get rid of. And you can kind of understand why it was so. She was a sex goddess. The men of Babylon made Sukkoth Benoth. The men of Kuthah made Nergal their god. The men of Hamath used Ashima as their god. The Avites made Nebahaz and Tartak. That was their god. And the Sepharbites burnt their children in fire to Adrammelech and Anamelech, the gods of Sepharvaim. Just so, so corrupt and rotten. You know, I think of this passage every time I hear it. the remark about burning aborted fetuses in hospital incinerators. Well, for all, they’re just medical waste. So, they feared the Lord and made unto themselves of the lowest of them priests of the high places, who sacrificed for them in the houses of the high places. They feared the Lord and served their own gods after the manner of the nations whom they carried away from there. Now, that’s something important there I want you to keep in mind, the combination. They feared the Lord and served their own gods. How can you do that? Well, it’s a kind of synchronism, a blending together of two religions and two faiths, keeping part of each of them and perhaps discarding much of the other. It’s a tragedy when people try to worship God their own way, much less after the way of another god. Unto this day, they keep up their former manners. They don’t really fear the Lord. Neither do they after their statutes or after their ordinances or after the law and commandments the Lord commanded the children of Jacob. They don’t follow faithfully anything. They just simply have a religion, which is kind of a state religion, I guess. Anyhow, these people would not obey. But the Lord who brought you up out of the land of Egypt with great power and stretched out arm, him shall you fear, and him shall you worship, and to him only shall you do sacrifice. God insists on keeping this stuff very close. Because if he lets us all do our own thing, before long, we will cease to exist.
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