Hope From the Word

Guest (Male): If the hole you're digging in life is getting deeper, put down the shovel. Here's Pastor Bill Luebkemann.

Bill Luebkemann: If we're walking in our lives today, not seeking after God, not serving the Creator of the universe, the Maker of all things, and things aren't going right in our lives, and we know it's because God's not blessing it, because we're not walking with Him. We can keep digging ourselves in deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper, or we can call upon His name and ask Him to forgive our sins and come into our lives and redeem us, and He will.

This is not talking about health and wealth and prosperity here. This is talking about having a successful life blessed by worshipping God.

Guest (Male): What happens to a culture and a society that doesn't promote what is right and good? The answer is obvious. Eventually that society will become everything that's wrong and evil. What will God do, and what should we as His people do? The answers to those questions are next on Hope From the Word with Bill Luebkemann.

In Second Chronicles chapter 28, we have a graphic picture of what happens when a nation turns away from righteousness, and it has a striking similarity to our day. Let's look at it together, shall we? Again, from Second Chronicles chapter 28, picking up in verse 16. Here's Pastor Bill.

Bill Luebkemann: Now, you'd think that Ahaz, the king of Judah, would, you know, take that as some kind of a token of peace between him and the northern kingdom, maybe. You know, they they returned. It doesn't say here that Ahaz, you know, got killed. He didn't get killed yet. So he he's still surviving, although 120,000 of his troops were killed, 200,000 people were carried away as prisoners, but now returned. That's 320,000 people at a minimum that were affected by this in a very bad way.

And what happens? You think Ahaz would say, "Well, those people show me some grace. Maybe I should show them some grace. Maybe there's something to this grace thing. Maybe I should ask for forgiveness." Maybe there's something going on here that needs to be explored. Maybe there is a God. Maybe I should seek after Him. None of that stuff, unfortunately.

At that time, King Ahaz sent to the king of Assyria for help. He didn't ask the Lord for help. He didn't try to make a peace treaty with Israel, the northern kingdom. He didn't stop worshipping idols. He followed a human plan, using a human technique. "You need help? I'll try to make a treaty with somebody. How about the Assyrians? They're strong."

You know, that's what you need. If you're going to make a peace treaty, you make it with the strong guy, so he can protect you. At that time, King Ahaz went to the king of Assyria for help. The Edomites had again come and attacked Judah and carried away prisoners, while the Philistines had raided towns in the foothills and in the Negev of Judah. They captured and occupied Beth Shemesh, Aijalon and Gederoth, as well as Soko, Timnah, and Ginzo and their surrounding villages.

The Lord had humbled Judah because of Ahaz, king of Israel, for he had promoted wickedness in Judah and had been most unfaithful to the Lord. So this guy was getting hit on all sides. I'll give you the Luebkemann translation here. His enemies are fighting him in every direction: north, east, west, and south. And they are winning. And the reason why? Because of his unfaithfulness.

The Lord did this. The Lord did it. It wasn't because the enemies were stronger. It wasn't because they out-numbered him. Numbers were nothing to do with it. One person in the Lord can win a war. And a million people without the Lord would be nothing compared to one with the Lord. The Lord humbled Judah because of this guy Ahaz, the king. For he had promoted.

Now, we saw that they were bad enough on their own, by the way, but specifically for Ahaz's wickedness. He'd been most unfaithful to the Lord. Tiglath-Pileser, king of Assyria, came to him, but he gave him trouble instead of help. He went to the Assyrians and said, "Hey, can you help me out here?" and the guy instead gave him a hard time. Ahaz took some of the things from the temple of the Lord and from the royal palace and from the princes and presented them to the king of Assyria, but that did not help him. He bribed the guy.

Buy him off. Take some of God's possessions out of the temple. Let's take God's property, God's things, the objects in the temple that were holy. Let's take some of them and some things from the palace and from the princes and we'll try to buy the help of this guy when the help of the Lord God would have been free. Just if they had asked. Just ask for it.

And it didn't help him. He did all that work. He was getting attacked in every direction on every side. He was losing everywhere. People were dying, being carried away as prisoners. He's trying to make a peace treaty with the Assyrians to get them on his side, and that ain't working either. And he pays the guy, but he still doesn't get his help. Should have asked for a refund.

In his time of trouble, King Ahaz became even more unfaithful to the Lord. You can see a kind of a progression here. You know, we like to say today when somebody is unsaved and we're we're praying for them, we you know, we like to say that, you know, we we pray the Lord would get through to them and that he won't have to make them fall too far. When they do that, you know, that they won't get so prideful when they come to the Lord that he won't have to take them down too many notches.

But the more puffed up somebody gets, the more notches they have to come down to be humbled. And we can see an example of that here in this guy King Ahaz. At any time here, he could have called out to the Lord. He could have called out to the Lord when he lost the first battle, you know, way back at the beginning.

When the when the king of Aram beat him back in verse five, he could have called out to the Lord then, but he didn't. He could have called out to the Lord when the Israelites were beating him, but he didn't. He could have called out to the Lord when those prisoners were returned, but he didn't. He could have called out to the Lord instead of asking the king of Assyria for help. These these things didn't all happen in the same week here. We're reading about his whole reign as king over a 16-year period.

He had all these skirmishes, all these battles going everywhere, and every time in the Old Testament, somebody called out to God, He was there for them. I can't think of a single case where someone called out for God's help and God didn't deliver. If you know of something, please correct me, but I can't think of a single thing in the Old Testament or the New Testament for that matter, where somebody asked God for His assistance and He wasn't there immediately.

And this guy was unfaithful, and at any point he could have turned around and wrote a new chapter in his book. In his time of trouble, King Ahaz became even more unfaithful to the Lord. He offered sacrifices to the gods of Damascus, who had defeated him. For he thought, since the gods of the kings of Aram have helped them, I will sacrifice to them, so they will help me. But they were his downfall and the downfall of all Israel.

So he says, you know, the other people won, the Arameans won. And since they won, they must have better gods, right? So I'm going to make some sacrifices to their gods, and maybe we can even the score up here a little bit. Maybe they'll help me as well. This is what the pagans did. If they were fighting a war, the pagans in one area and they lost, they said, "Well, it must be the gods in that area." You know, our own gods are back at our house and, you know, where we live, and we went to the over there. Gods up in the hills are different from the gods down in the valley and the gods over here over there. They're all different gods. You got to find out which God is the God in each area and sacrifice to that God.

And if you can just get the right God, then maybe you might win the battle. This is what the pagans did. And that's what this guy did as well. He thought to himself, "The Arameans won, so their gods must be good." He wasn't thinking, his God was really the strongest God if he would acknowledge it. And his God allowed the Arameans to win because he wasn't serving them. Their gods were useless.

This particular batch of Arameans were just lucky that day that they were in the right place at the right time. The God allowed them to have the victory there. Verse 24. Ahaz gets worse, by the way. Ahaz gathered together the furnishings from the temple of God and took them away. He shut the doors of the Lord's temple and set up altars at every street corner in Jerusalem.

In every town in Judah, he built high places to burn sacrifices to other gods and provoked the Lord, the God of his fathers, to anger. He completely left the Lord in a way that was more complete than most of these kings. He cleaned out the temple of God, took taking away the furnishing. Then he shut it up. It was closed up, locked up, abandoned, empty.

The sacrifices weren't going on. The priests were not doing their job. They weren't burning the incense. They weren't putting out the bread. They weren't offering the sacrifices to God each day. And instead, he set up altars all over Jerusalem and high places in every town in Judah so that people could burn incense and worship other gods. And that provoked the Lord God, the real God, even to more anger.

This guy just didn't learn and didn't learn and didn't learn and didn't learn and didn't learn and didn't learn and didn't learn. It got worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. And he dug himself in further and further and further. He could have climbed out of the hole, but he was standing in the hole as he was digging it deeper. He was standing in it and it kept getting deeper. And he was he was burying himself in his own hole.

And he could have turned around easily and called upon the name of the Lord. And so can we. If we're walking in our lives today, not seeking after God, not serving the Creator of the universe, the Maker of all things, and things aren't going right in our lives, and we know it's because God's not blessing it, because we're not walking with Him. We can keep digging ourselves in deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper, or we can call upon His name and ask Him to forgive our sins and come into our lives and redeem us, and He will.

This is not talking about health and wealth and prosperity here. This is talking about having a successful life blessed by worshipping God. And this guy was doing all the wrong things consistently, and he didn't seem to have any capacity to learn his lessons. You know, they say if you don't learn from the history, you're going to repeat it. We can see that happening today as well, and it was certainly happening in this guy's life.

Verse 26. The other events of his reign and all his ways from beginning to end are written in the book of the Kings of Judah and Israel. Ahaz rested with his fathers and was buried in the city of Jerusalem, but he was not placed in the tombs of the kings of Israel. And Hezekiah his son succeeded him as king. He got the eternal snub there. He wasn't buried with the other kings.

And his son Hezekiah took over. Hezekiah was 25 years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem 29 years. His mother's name was Abijah, daughter of Zechariah. He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, just as his father David had done. So this guy here reigning from when he was 25 to when he was 54, 29 years. And this guy for some reason now, don't ask me why, you go from Jotham, who was a good king, Uzziah and Jotham, basically good kings.

Then you have this bad king here stuck in the middle here, Ahaz. And now we're back to Hezekiah, who was a great king, one of the best, one of the greatest. He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord. Don't ask me how. He was probably home-schooled or something. He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, just as his father David had done. He was taught the ways of the Lord growing up.

Look, if you teach a kid the ways of the Lord when they're growing up, they're not going to forget them when they're old. No matter what anybody tells you, they won't forget what you teach them. In the first month of the first year of his reign. Now, look, that probably means the first calendar month. In other words, the first like the first month of their calendar. So it was the first year of his reign, but it was in the first month of their yearly calendar.

And the first, it wasn't necessarily the first month of his reign. It'd be like if your reign was in July, and the new year started in January. January was the first month of the new year, and it was in the first year of your reign. In the first month of the calendar that would be, in the first month of the first year of his reign, he opened the doors of the temple of the Lord and repaired them.

He brought in the priests and the Levites, assembled them in the square on the east side, and said, "Listen to me, Levites, consecrate yourselves now, and consecrate the temple of the Lord, the God of your fathers." So he got everybody together, this guy Hezekiah, called a big meeting. And now the priests hadn't been consecrated. They they were just who knows what they were doing. They were working at Starbucks or something. They weren't as priests serving in the temple.

And he called them all together. He brought in the priests, brought in the Levites, got them all together there on the east side of the temple. "Listen to me," he said. "Consecrate yourselves and consecrate the temple." We're going to clean this show up. He got right on this in the first year of his reign. He says in verse five, continuing, "Remove all defilement from the sanctuary. Clear out everything that doesn't belong in there. Our fathers were unfaithful. They did evil in the eyes of the Lord our God and forsook him. They turned their faces away from the Lord's dwelling place and turned their backs on him."

"They also shut the doors of the portico and put out the lamps. They did not burn incense or present any burnt offerings at the sanctuary to the God of Israel. Therefore, the anger of the Lord has fallen on Judah and Jerusalem. He has made them an object of dread and horror and scorn, as you can see with your own eyes." This guy has discernment. He can see what's going on now. He knows the scriptures. He knows what the priests are supposed to be doing.

He knows how the temple is supposed to work. He understands that it has to be cleansed before they can use it again. So he knows the good things that need to be done because he's been obviously taught the scriptures at some point. But he also knows the bad things that were not done. He knows how their ancestors had closed up the the temple and did not burn incense and did not make offerings and that and he knows, more importantly than anything else, he knows the anger of the Lord was on Judah because of that.

"He has made them an object of dread and horror and scorn, as you can see with your own eyes." The Lord did all this because of what our ancestors have done. This was a connected dots moment here. I used to love those things when we were kids, connected dots. You get all these dots, they're all numbered and everything connected. Get a nice picture. Say, "Wow, look what I drew."

And that's what this was. This was a connected dots moment. He took his knowledge of the scriptures and he looked around and saw what was going on in the world, in the nation, in their land. And he said, "Hey, God's not blessing this act here." And by the way, we should be able to look around our nation and connected dots in a kind of a similar way almost. "This is why our fathers have fallen by the sword and why our and why our sons and daughters and our wives are in captivity." Now, look, the the northern kingdom sent back the prisoners, but the Damascus did not. Remember that we saw in the earlier chapter, the Assyrians took some prisoners to Damascus.

So he said, "This is why some of us have died, why our sons and daughters and our wives are in captivity. Now, I intend to make a covenant with the Lord, the God of Israel, so that His fierce anger will turn away from us." Boy, wouldn't it be great if a politician would say that today? "This is what I intend to do, folks. I intend to make a covenant with the Lord, the God of Israel."

He put it all together. He said, "This is all a God thing. We don't need a bigger army. We don't need better basic training. We don't need better weapons, more tanks, more bullets, or anything like that. We need to worship God. We need to make a covenant with Him." And he said, "I intend to do that. My sons, do not be negligent now, for the Lord has chosen you to stand before Him and serve Him." They were the priests.

They were the ones whose job it was to do this. "To minister before Him and to burn incense." Then these Levites set to work. From the Kohathites, Mahath, son of Amasai and Joel, son of Azariah. From the Merarites, Kish, son of Abdai and Azariah, son of Jehallelel. From the Gershonites, Joah, son of Zimmah, and Eden, son of Joah.

From the descendants of Elizaphan, Shimri and Jeiel. From the descendants of Asaph, Zechariah and Mattaniah. From the descendants of Heman, Jeiel and Shimmei. From the descendants of Jeduthun, Shemaiah and Uzziel. How'd you like to have those people for friends? "Hey, what are you doing today?" "Well, we're just having Azariah and the Gershonites and Zimmah over for dinner." "What about tomorrow?" "Well, tomorrow we're having Zechariah, Mattaniah." Is that a TV network or something? Shemaiah and Uzziel.

When they had assembled their brothers and consecrated themselves, they went in to purify the temple of the Lord, as the king had ordered, following the Word of the Lord. The priests went into the sanctuary of the Lord to purify it. They brought out to the courtyard of the Lord's temple everything unclean that they found in the temple of the Lord. The Levites took it and carried it out to the Kidron Valley. So, look, only the priests could go inside.

So they went inside, and they were hauling out all the trash. And they were bringing it to the door, and the Levites took over from there and took it on down to the town dump. And this temple had become like the public storage space out at the Marlton Circle. It was just filled up with all kinds of junk. Saw on TV how people fill them things up with junk and then they don't pay the bill.

And then they auction off the contents of those little storage areas to to get the money. I'm thinking, why did you pay the money to get the thing in the first place if the stuff you put in it isn't valuable? Why don't you just throw out your junk? It seems like in America, we just have to have more room to have more junk. My house isn't big enough, I'll use the garage. So now my garage isn't big enough, I'll build a shed. You know, the shed isn't big enough, let's get a storage locker somewhere so we can store more of our stuff in it. How much stuff do we need?

And they were using the temple of the Lord like a big storage locker, it seems. You see the priests cleaning it out, the Levites taking it, carrying it out to the town dump. They began the consecration on the first day of the first month, and by the eighth day of the month, they reached the portico of the Lord. For eight more days, they consecrated the temple of the Lord itself, finishing on the 16th day of the first month. 16 days to clean out the garbage.

Sweep it out, consecrate it, get it ready for use. It's amazing how much stuff had accumulated in that place because it had been ignored for so long. Then they went in to King Hezekiah and reported, "We have purified the entire temple of the Lord, the altar of burnt offering with all its utensils, and the table for setting out the consecrated bread with all its articles. We have prepared and consecrated all the articles that King Ahaz removed in his unfaithfulness while he was king." They are now in front of the Lord's altar. So, the things Ahaz had removed, they got back.

Or if they couldn't get them back, they made new ones. But the entire temple was cleaned, was consecrated, set aside, purified, ready to resume the worship. And it was an amazing feat. It's amazing to me that there was that much stuff in it that it took 16 days to do it. But I think it was amazing to them that they could get it done in such a short period of time. As we keep going through Second Chronicles here, we see the ups and downs. They serve the Lord and good things happen. They didn't serve the Lord and bad things happen. They serve the Lord, they didn't serve the Lord. They serve the Lord, they didn't serve the Lord.

And you see the same thing going on in the world today and maybe even in our own lives. You see countries and peoples and nations and and even churches and families that start out strong and end weak, or that begin weak and end strong. And if we could learn any lesson as we go through Second Chronicles, it seems like it's always the same lesson over and over again. I ask God sometimes, "Why are there so many chapters in this book?"

And why does the same thing go up and down so many times? "Why don't you just put half the chapters if we could still get the same point, because we we just wouldn't see it happen as many times?" It's like watching a rerun with different actors every time. But I can only assume, because it is repeated in here so many times, I can only assume it's because it's really, really important.

I use the Luebkemann principle here, something in the Bible 10 times is probably more important than something mentioned once. And if it's in here 100 times, then God probably really wants us to know it. As we go through the Old Testament, we see walking with God brought blessings and worshipping idols and golden calves and and whatever else was was always brought their downfall. And yet they never learned their lesson.

And a generation or two would go by and they'd be back at it again. Look, I think a lot of it has to do with what you teach your kids. And there's a lot of scriptures where God said, "Don't forget to tell your kids this." "Why are we putting these rocks here, Lord?" "You're putting them there so your kids will ask you what they're for, and then you can tell them, 'This is where this happened. This is where you crossed the river into the Promised Land.'"

The Lord wanted them to remember these things and to pass them on to the next generation. And I think we can see how important that is. When they got passed on, they were blessed, and and when they didn't get passed on, they weren't blessed. And at at the very least, we should all learn that for the sake of raising our own children. It seems like the same lesson, and it seems a little tiring, but we go over and over again and again, and hopefully, we'll get it right.

Guest (Male): You've been listening to Hope From the Word. We're currently in Pastor Bill Luebkemann's study of Second Chronicles. If you'd like to hear this message again, you have several options. Visit our website at ccmarlton.org, download the Hope FM app to your smartphone or tablet, or look for us wherever you find podcasts.

If you've been thinking about visiting Calvary Chapel of Marlton, where Bill serves as pastor, we'd love to have you. Our service times are on Sunday mornings at 10:00. We also meet midweek on Wednesdays at 7:00 PM. You can also live stream from home when you visit our YouTube channel at Calvary Chapel of Marlton. For more information, go to ccmarlton.org. We hope to see you soon.

Before the day is done, we'd like to connect with you. Share a praise report, prayer request, or what you're learning from this series. You can easily email us from our website, ccmarlton.org, or just call us at 856-983-1662. There's more to come from Bill's study of Second Chronicles, and we'll have that for you next time on Hope From the Word with Pastor Bill Luebkemann. This program is brought to you by Calvary Chapel of Marlton.