Divided Kingdom
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Hello and welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything else along the way. I’m your host, Bryan Broome, and today I’m joined by Greg Uttinger.
Today we’ll be talking about the divided kingdom of Israel. Man, it’s just a mess. That’s the best way to describe it. There’s not a lot of winners on either side for a good stretch of time. Greg, why don’t you go ahead and start us off.
We saw Solomon’s fall into partial apostasy. Now, given that he wrote the book of Ecclesiastes, at some point he looked back and realized, “That was dumb,” but the historical books don’t give us any hint of that. They just take us to, “Well, he married all these wives, a total of 1,000 of them, and made room for their gods on the Mount of Olives in the end, and practiced polygamy outwardly, if not with his heart.”
God having warned him about this in two previous visions said, “Well, that’s that. We’re done now. I’m pulling the plug, as it were.”
Here are the words as Chronicles gives them to us. This is what he had warned –
But if ye turn away, and forsake my statutes and my commandments which I have set before you, and shall go and serve other gods, and worship them, then will I pluck them up by the roots out of my land which I have given them; and this house, which I have sanctified for my name, will I cast out of my sight, and will make it to be a proverb and a byword among all nations.
And this house, which is high, shall be an astonishment to everyone that passeth by it, so that he shall say, Why hath the LORD done thus unto this land, and unto this house? And it shall be answered, Because they forsook the LORD God of their fathers, which brought them forth out of the land of Egypt, and laid hold on other gods and worshipped them and served them: therefore hath he brought all this evil upon them.
Before Solomon is even dead, things begin to play out. God through his prophet Ahijah approaches Jeroboam, the young man who is the foreman of all of Solomon’s building projects, and one assumes that somewhat in privacy he grabs him, tears the cloak off his back, tears it into 12 pieces and gives him 10 of them and says basically, “I’m giving you 10 of the tribes because of Solomon’s apostasy, idolatry, and unbelief. And if you follow me, I’ll establish your house, but I’m keeping two tribes for David for the sake of my promise to him.”
That having happened, one assumes in private, it’s amazing how it got around. It sounds like Jeroboam probably told his friends, who told their friends. Anyway, in time Solomon found out and chased him off, and he ran down to Egypt, where he was until Solomon’s death.
When Solomon’s son Rehoboam is ready to come to the throne, Israel calls Jeroboam back. Jeroboam gladly comes, and the 10 northern tribes submit an ultimatum to Solomon’s son Rehoboam, which amounts to, “Your father taxed us too much, worked us too hard, and was just way too bossy all the way around. Line up on us and you can be our king.”
Interestingly enough, Israel called Rehoboam to them, into the tribe of Ephraim rather than Jerusalem, which is in Judah, to Shechem, a city that has a long history going back to Jacob. And throughout Jeroboam – we’ll see this next time as we look at the whole golden calf thing – there was a lot of play on, “Well, we’ve been God’s people for a long time, all the way back to Jacob, and we have the northern tribes and we have claims and we have monuments and we have important sites and we have traditions. What’s this thing about Judah and Jerusalem being all that important? God has lots of people. There’s a lot of patriarchal tradition going on here.” They basically tell Rehoboam, “Cool it or we’re out of here.”
Rehoboam talks to the old men who stood before Solomon and they say, “Be nice to them and this will go well.” He deserts that and goes to the young men and says, “What shall we say to them?” so he appeals to the younger men – younger meaning about 40, and that’s about how old he was. They said, “Nah, be tough with them. Just smack them down. Tell them they’re not getting away with anything. You’re going to be so much tougher than your dad,” and all that, and that’s what he does, and the 10 tribes leave.
This created one of the most difficult problems for Bible teachers, Sunday School teachers and such, in all of scripture, in that now we’re going to have two nations, one called Israel and one called Judah, with two lines of kings, and no one can keep them straight it seems.
I had the advantage when I was in elementary school that my teacher, who was also my pastor, in an effort I think to avoid doctrinal controversy, took us through the Old Testament histories over and over in detail, so I learned the history of Samuel and Kings backwards and forwards over and over again. But when I tried to help Bible teachers and Sunday School teachers understand it, it just seems that everyone scratches their head and says, “I just can’t keep them straight.”
Maybe you have to work on it, but what happens in a nutshell here is the kingdom is divided roughly north and south. It’s not a straight line, but it’s more or less that. The northern tribes are called the 10 tribes, although the number count is a little artificial because the tribe of Simeon had its possessions within the border of Judah, so it really didn’t go anywhere.
The descendants of David have Judah, the royal tribe. They also have Benjamin, which was Saul’s tribe and they’d won them over. They also have a good many Levites. A lot of Levites eventually moved down into Judah and Jerusalem when Jeroboam pulls the whole golden calf thing, but then so do a lot of other faithful people from the north. So it’s not a hard and fast separation by any means, but for our purposes let’s just say there are 10 northern tribes and they called themselves Israel. The southern tribes are Judah, Benjamin, and a host of other individuals, and they called themselves Judah.
Judah contains Jerusalem, Solomon’s temple, and it is ruled over in almost unbroken succession by the sons of David. There is an interruption briefly later on that we’ll talk about at some point, actually quite at length eventually.
The northern tribes are ruled over by one dynasty after another, starting with this Jeroboam guy. He sets up golden calves as a rival to the Jerusalem temple and claims it’s the old-time religion, appealing back to the golden calf in Moses’ day. “These are your gods that brought you up out of the land of Egypt.”
That’s also an odd claim to make. It’s like the verse-a-day calendar for motivation. “You are the man!” or “Bow down and worship me, and all these things I will give unto you.” You’re missing the context around this thing.
“Judas went out and hung himself. Go thou and do likewise. What you do, do quickly.”
In that tangent, my girls were once more expressing their sorrow that we wouldn’t let them use “We are the world” as their recessional for high school. I think I’ve mentioned this before. I recently realized, “Wait, there’s this verse in there about ‘As God has showed us by changing stones to bread.’”
I don’t know how many times I’d heard that without registering, “Wait, that’s Satan talking. You are not going to put that in God’s mouth.”
“We are the world. We are the children.” A bunch of rockstars got together to produce a video and a song to raise money for suffering children in Africa.
Yeah, led by Michael Jackson. I had no problem with the music, and I’m glad to see them spend their money on children in Africa. There’s nothing wrong with that, but that one line – “God changed stones to bread.” No, he didn’t. Let’s not confuse people. Context is key.
So the northern kingdom goes through a series of dynasties, each one basically initiated by some kind of bloody coup, revolution, or something, because God has said all along that idolaters survive to the third and fourth generation, then he overthrows them, and the history of the northern kingdom is good evidence of that.
Now, this is part of the point for tonight. Despite what God had said – “When this happens, when you worship idols, I’m going to move you out of my sight and destroy this temple” – God lets the northern kingdom go on for a couple hundred years. They have their downs and they have their bad kings and they have their blood purges and their revolutions, and yet right at the end another king named Jeroboam – why someone else named their son Jeroboam and made him king is a good question, but they did, Jeroboam II and he becomes the most successful ruler of the northern kingdom.
He expands Israel’s borders to basically what they were at the time of David. They had tremendous economic success and were at peace with their neighbors. They even have Judah under their thumb. Jonah gets to prophesy all this and says, “You’re going to get all this and you don’t even have to repent.” Then came the whole big fish thing.
Then suddenly, after Jeroboam II dies, it all spirals into destruction real fast, but – and here’s the point for tonight – it took a long, long time. What’s with God here? God said, “You do this, I’m going to smack you.” No smackage came. It just seemed to go on and on and on.
Judah did a little better, but not a lot. They maintained the temple, kind of. Some of the kings treated it very badly. God did grant them two great revivals toward the end, at least outward reforms. Hezekiah and Josiah both led what we generally call revivals, but for a good part of it it was outward reform powered by the kings, because as soon as the kings died the people went right back to idolatry. But Judah outlasted Israel by 150 years or so. I don’t have the dates in front of me.
Then finally, finally, finally the Chaldeans under Nebuchadnezzar came, and did not destroy Jerusalem right away. In fact, he invested I think three times before he finally said, “Okay, we’re done now.” By that time, Daniel was his right-hand man. God wants it destroyed.
It’s the same kind of pattern that we see God display towards the people – at least in this epoch of history – who are in the line of Messiah, which is “In the day you eat of it you will surely die.” Technically that has been fulfilled because the curse was released and the Messiah needed to come. Temporally speaking that order happened, but they didn’t die that day. He let them continue existing.
And the warning of the flood. “I’m going to destroy it all.” They had 120 years. What?
And Abraham. “I’m going to give you this land. It’s going to be 400 years from now.”
Here’s what we’re getting at. God’s times are not our times. God’s not in a hurry. Truly we can say his mercy is infinite, but even within our temporal situation he is longsuffering. We look and say, “Where are the judgments of God?”
God himself says, “Woe to you that desire the day of Lord. It’s darkness, not light, even very dark and there’s no light in it.”
The application to our age and time – and this is personal testimony and then I know you have some things to say with regard to Psalm 89 – but as I was growing up, I grew up in a very conservative home where conspiracy theory was the gospel, in some respects quite literally. I was told over and over again that the United States was on a short leash. It was going down, if not by subversion from the inside then by pressure from the outside.
The Soviet Union was at some point just going to take over, whether it was just by threatening or whether it was by launching a first strike and knocking out our missiles so we had no response, or whatever. ‘They’ the conspirators, the insiders, had everything in their hand, and although we could try desperately and maybe possibly by some remote chance something could happen - yes, you could pray, of course you should pray – but really it’s all over. This is what I grew up with, and it was very depressing.
My mother lived in the shadow of this, and anytime it kind of resurfaced she would become very depressed and afraid. I dealt with that some, and you know what? America after a fashion is still here. Is it the America I grew up with? No, not exactly, and yet I still have most of the freedoms I had as a kid. I can come and go. I can buy things at the store. There’s more to buy. Technology has advanced. Healthcare has advanced. If I get sick I can go to the doctor and actually to better doctors than I had.
I’ve had three wonderful daughters and they’re growing up with a sense of hope. I have a church and I can go freely, except for that little thing a couple years ago where everything shut down. That was a little scary.
What I was told didn’t happen. Although on the one hand it came out of a right-wing conservative perspective, you heard the same thing in right-wing fundamentalism. “Jesus is coming back. The end is at hand.”
In my generation a lot of people firmly believed that Jesus was coming back by 1981. The reasoning was this. Israel was reborn as a nation in 1948. In Matthew’s Olivet discourse Jesus says something about a budding fig tree in this generation will not pass away. It’s not what that means, but that’s how it was interpreted. So from the time Israel was reborn, a generation is about 40 years, so 48 + 40 is 88. Seven years backward for the Great Tribulation is 1981.
Some people would just say, “Well, in there someplace.” Others were pretty specific. If you didn’t believe it – this is what the Bible said, so you were a liberal. You did not believe the Word of God, and we weren’t going to be around much longer.
Hal Lindsay wrote The Late Great Planet Earth. “We should be living like people who don’t plan on being around much longer.” Judgement was coming. The last days were inevitable. It didn’t happen.
It’s always interesting to me when someone gets accused of being a liberal for holding to an eschatological framework that is older than some supposed conservatives.
And involves a sounder hermeneutic. “I actually have read the text. Have you? It does not say what you think it says.”
Today as a teacher in a Christian school we have a lot of kids in our school whose parents immigrated from Russia or the satellite countries a generation back, and they’re still very rooted in that Slavic culture. So when Russia invaded Ukraine, the first assertion was, “This is the beginning of World War III, obviously, because it’s all about our people so it has to be the center of history. And since this is the beginning of World War III, that means this leads to Armageddon because World War III leads to Armageddon, because we’ve been told this for a very, very long time. So Jesus is coming back in our lifetime real soon.”
Let’s see. All of these points are wrong, and yet this is what these young people are growing up with. It’s a little scary. Without contradicting their parents and their churches it’s kind of hard to say, “You know, there are other ways you could look at this.”
We are disposed in our unbelief, in our inability to trust God to say, “Things have now got as bad as they are, or at least we’re at the breaking point, and from here everything goes downhill. This is the line. Somewhere in here we’ve crossed a line from which there is no return.”
Think about Rome. If you think about the fall of Rome, people were like, “This is the end. History is over. There is nothing else that could possibly happen. It’s all downhill and Jesus is coming back.” And look, we’re roughly 1500 years on from that.
Rome is interesting because as a history student I was taught matter-of-factly that Rome fell in 476, so every now and then as a history teacher I would run across an earlier date, 410 or something. I was like, “What’s that? What’s going on there?”
Eventually I found out that was the first time Rome was sacked. Then there was the time it was almost sacked, but I think it was the Vikings who missed and got the wrong city and nobody bothered to tell them, or they were ashamed to admit it.
A few years ago I ran into an article that said, “This fall of Rome thing is a big conspiracy.” There’s conspiracy again. “Rome never fell. Look, it’s still there! This is all a Germanic conspiracy to sideline Rome and to put the emphasis on Charlemagne’s kingdom and the Holy Roman Empire that grew out of that, and all of northern Europe, but look, Rome’s there.”
Who puts an emphasis on the Holy Roman Empire? Everyone goes, “It’s none of those things.”
Exactly. And then of course there’s the Eastern Empire, whose capital was Constantinople or, as people choose to call it, Byzantium. They actually called it Constantinople because that was its name. Byzantium was its former Greek name. There’s a little bit of historical conspiracy there going on.
Yes, I know. It endured for 1,000 years. Then if you read good dispensational writers on the book of Daniel, the true successor of pagan Rome is papal Rome. And when you look at the 4th beast of Daniel, that little horn that stands up, that’s the pope, so Rome never fell because it’s reincarnated in the papacy. Can we not do that? We are too quick to look for the horrors of destruction and failure, and too quick to draw lines.
There are a couple lines that have hung with me from books that are relevant here. Isaac Asimov in Foundation, his science-fiction novel set in the far distant future, has a character say, “Somewhere in the 50 years just past is where the historians of the future will place an arbitrary line and say, ‘This marks the fall of the galactic empire.’”
The point is, the fall of anything takes decades or centuries or even millennia, and any line is arbitrary. When did the Reformation actually begin? Did trumpets sound the day that Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door – a document which acknowledged the existence of purgatory and the authority and goodwill of the Pope? There are other things you could pick that were a little more thorough, and yet we’ve latched onto that one.
You can also point even earlier back to Hus and several other pre-Luther reformers going back 300 years.
Yeah. It’s hard to mark off eras. With a war you can say opening shots and peace treaty and at least kind of narrow it down, but even that…
That’s practicality. A lot of people are fond of saying that World War II was just an extension of World War I, with some breathing room in-between. The history teacher who does CrashCourse, John Green, has a program about the Renaissance, and the title is “Was the Renaissance a thing?”
It’s very interesting. He’s a great teacher. As far as I know he’s not a Christian, but he tries to maintain balance. He’s very humorous. He moves very fast. One of the signs is, “Did some father walk out one day and say, ‘Yvonne, come out here. Do you smell that? Do you hear that? The Renaissance has just dawned! You stand at the beginning of an era!’” No, nobody did that. Most people just went on with their lives. They didn’t know there was such a thing as a Renaissance.
He in the long run concludes that strictly speaking it wasn’t a thing, but there were things that happened more or less parallel or as cause and effect that we can take note of. But God did not write in flaming letters across the sky, “Today the Renaissance begins,” any more than he wrote, “Now the Reformation has begun.”
Even today with our very fast modes of communication, the same kind of societal changes or movements or whatever don’t take place in the same locations at the same time, so you can’t say that the Reformation was from 1517 to 1601 everywhere.
Even saying it started in one country, and at that date ended in another country, and other stuff happened. We do that because to learn we have to draw arbitrary lines, circles, boundaries, whatever. But it is wisdom to acknowledge these are arbitrary. They’re our labels, not God’s. They leave a lot to the imagination and a lot of wiggle room, and sometimes they’re just flat-out wrong.
Yeah, there’s a good one, the Dark Ages, which at one point encompassed the whole Middle Ages. And then of course the Middle Ages – what are they? The fall of Rome? The conversion of Constantine? Where exactly – to the beginning of the Renaissance, whenever that was? To Dante? To the fall of Constantinople? That’s what I was taught, again as an arbitrary marker.
But then the Dark Ages, modern scholarship began a little less prejudicially to look at them said, “Well wait, these later years weren’t so dark. Let’s move that back. Oh, this happened here, and these inventions, let’s push it back.”
So today even secular scholars pretty much acknowledge that the Dark Ages, such as they were, were a rather limited time after the Roman Senate packed up and said, “We’re done here and the barbarian kings are welcome to rule.” There was a little bit of time when Roman bureaucracy was not doing its thing and before other entities picked up their jobs. Okay, we’ll call that the Dark Ages, but it was brief.
It’s less ‘ages’ and more like ‘the dark years.’ It’s a period of Pink Floyd albums.
And then the title Middle Ages – middle between what? Well, in their mind it was in between the classic golden age of Greece and Rome, and the new age of the Renaissance, or later the Enlightenment. Talk about a prejudicial completely biased way of drawing timelines and of labeling things.
I’m sure you may have seen that chart – I’ll have to send it to you so you can see the visual, but it’s essentially like “Cultural Sophistication over Time.” Greece and Rome are up here above the graph. Then it’s spiking up to Rome, then it’s the fall of Rome and everything goes down. It’s the Christian Dark Ages, just flat, like an inch above the ground for like 1,000 years, and suddenly goes up and it’s like, “Ah, the Renaissance. Now look at us. We could have been here because of this gap now, and it’s all religion’s fault.” It's incredibly biased and just non-factual.
There have been a lot of books written in the last 10 years or so from all sorts of directions, from Protestant historians but also from Roman Catholics, who don’t appreciate being told their religion destroyed the world, to secularists who are really just saying, “Wait, I think we’ve been a little biased here. Let’s look at the facts for a minute.” They’re saying, “That’s not what really happened.”
We were talking earlier about how someone might analyze the death of the United States. I ran into an article a few years back by I’m sure a nice lady, Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh. It’s anti-Marxist but upon Obama’s re-election she said the United States has reached the point of no return. The United States of America is now relegated to the dustbin of history as a has-been empire. All she saw ahead was endless years of darkness, dictatorship, and serfdom.
Yeah. Why draw the line at 2008 when you could draw the line at any other period in American history – FDR’s election or Woodrow Wilson and the First World War. If you want a spicy take you could say Nixon’s removing currency from the gold standard even, or Lincoln suspending habeus corpus during the Civil War, for instance.
If you want to get really radical, how about the creation of the Constitution that contains no explicit acknowledgment of Christ and his reign over the nations, and in fact forbids asking any questions about such of any political candidate – no religious tests allowed, and an oath sworn to no God in particular.
There are people – the Covenanters come to mind – who say, “Yeah, that’s right out. Jesus is Lord of the nations. If you haven’t covenanted in his name then this is not a Christian nation,” and they didn’t support the Constitution.
What this is coming back to, first of all, is that God doesn’t do things the way we think he ought to. He’s on a different timeline. His mercies are infinite and his plans are devious. I’ve said many, many times – God is sneaky. Devious may be my new word now. What that means is that God is smarter than we are. Our ways are not his ways. Our thoughts are not his thoughts.
Yeah, and infinite wisdom, but I like those other words in that they suggest that he’s deliberately not doing things the way we want. Now, is that because he’s laughing at us or is that because we are just so foolish that we can’t see in a straight line?
So in the days when the kingdom was divided, a lot of people could say, “Well, that’s it. It’s all going to fall in pieces,” and Egypt did invade the southern kingdom of Judah shortly, and yet it all endured.
Why don’t you tell us about Psalm 89. You just read it in your family devotions.
It’s a wonderful, wonderful psalm. The way that our reading plan split it up, it split it right down the middle across two different days. The first half is all praises to God. “Lord God of hosts, who is a strong Lord like unto thee? The heavens are thine.” I’m skipping around, this is not in order. “The north and the south, thou has created them. A mighty arm, strong is thy hand and high is thy right hand. The Lord is our defense and the Holy One of Israel is our king. Thou spakest in a vision to thy Holy One and saidist, I have laid help upon one that is mighty. I have exalted one chosen out of the people. I have found David my servant; with my holy oil have I anointed him.”
Then in the second half it continues talking about the seed of David. It talks about even the punishments. In verse 30 it says –
If his children forsake my law, and walk not in my judgments, if they break my statutes and keep not my commandments, then will I visit their transgression with the rod, and their iniquity with stripes.
Nevertheless, my lovingkindness will I not utterly take from him, nor suffer my faithfulness to fail.
Thou hast made void the covenant of thy servant. Thou hast profaned his crown by casting it to the ground. Thou hast broken down all his hedges. Thou hast brought his strongholds to ruin. All that pass by the way spoil him. He is a reproach to his neighbours.
The days of his youth hast thou shortened. Thou hast covered him with shame. Selah.
How long, LORD? wilt thou hide thyself forever? shall thy wrath burn like fire?
Right there at the end it’s destruction, destruction, destruction, and the very last glimmer of hope, as so many psalms end with this sudden doxology of praise, he says –
After he just seemed to have said, “You’re unfaithful, and you’ve ruined it all. You’ve ruined everything and brought it down to the ground because of your sin.” If any period of time, this Psalm 89 – whatever period in Israel’s history this was written around – that would seem to be the time you’d draw the line and say, “It’s all downhill from here. There’s no more hope for Israel.” But the thing is, like you were saying, decline takes time.
But we also have the promise, and that’s the promise that God is going to keep David’s house forever, ultimately leading to Jesus the Messiah, whose throne lasts forever. And since he has eternal life within him, it is lasting forever. We’re brought into that. We’re brought into the kingdom of life from the kingdom of darkness.
Looking at it externally is the same kind of problem that the Pharisees in the time of Jesus’ earthly ministry fell into. They looked at the exterior and they said, “Well, you know, this Jesus guy, we don’t like him. He makes fun of us. We’re the ones with authority, not him. And also he’s not a conquering king. He’s not setting up Jerusalem as the capital of an earthly nation that is going to throw off the shackles of Caesar.”
It's all external to them. They don’t have a category for the underlying spiritual reality that Jesus’ earthly ministry, and ultimately his death and resurrection represent. We short-change God by assuming that he’s going to do things the way we think he’s going to do them.
And part of that is drawing the line and saying, “It’s over. The church has failed.” That was Dispensationalism. When John Darby in England, a member of the Plymouth Brethren, looked at the established church of his day he looked and said, “It’s dead. It’s sterile. Nothing is coming out of this,” and there was a great deal of truth in that. He said, “Therefore, the church age has failed.” Well, that’s a huge generalization. Therefore, his conclusion was that God obviously never intended for it to succeed.
All the prophecies about the success of God’s kingdom are in terms of power and glory and the returning king and armies and angels and signs in the heavens, and they’re all wrapped up with Israel and all these external things. That has to be the main thing. The church was just a side affair that God had for a little bit, and now he’s going back, and this church needs to leave.
Somewhere in there somebody – you can read the various church histories to try to decide who it was – came up with this idea of the church leaving well before the visible Second Coming. To that point in history they had been more or less simultaneous events. Jesus will return visibly, take his church to himself, and then within a short matter of time judge the world.
This idea that there would actually be years between them, during which the Great Tribulation and a great many prophecies came, that was brand new, but it started with this – “The church has failed and there’s nothing we can do. We’ve tried.”
In fact, the first step actually was to disassociate from the established church and focus on little Christian cell groups, what we would call today small groups, not within the church but to the detriment of the church. “We’ve abandoned the church. The church is gone, and we who remain are the last remnant.”
We still have that. Jesus said, “I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” And we say, “Yeah, but he didn’t mean it.”
I was going to say, that’s the primary method of discipleship in a lot of broader evangelicalism. It’s like you come to church for the happy feelings of worship music and a feel-good sermon, which is actually just all law wrapped up in a bow. It’s a broken on-fire bow. And then you go and hook up in a small group and that’s where you actually learn about the Bible. The pastor is just an entertainment factor.
Yeah, to draw the crowd. I appreciate that you said law, because that of course is exactly what it is, but if you told them that they’d be horrified. “No, there’s no law here. We don’t preach God’s law at all,” and they would be correct. It’s not God’s law they’re preaching, it’s their own traditions, their own “10 easy steps to doing this or that.”
Yes, they’re not old enough to even be traditions yet. “But these things that we do and that you do will make you happy, healthy, wise and all that, and get God’s blessings, but holding up Jesus and calling you to repent of your sins and receive his blood-bought salvation, that’s offensive. So we’ll channel you into small groups and eventually we’re sure somebody will tell you about the gospel sooner or later.”
And this is not to disparage small groups. We have a Bible study that meets on Wednesday night and it’s more or less a lot of the same people that come and go, and people kind of rotate in and out, but that’s not church. That’s something additional. That’s something that we do because we want to spend time together and because we love the Word of God and want to talk about it.
The church is something else. Church is God-ordained. It’s sacramental and it’s the place God has established the preaching of the gospel, not only to call people to faith but to create faith in them by preaching, by the work of the Spirit, and it’s the kind of thing that does not happen anyplace else.
It is of this, not of small groups, that God says, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” We completely misread that. The original context was excommunicating somebody. The two or three are the apostles or two or three church elders executing God’s sentence on sin. God’s there.
Again, go to your small group, good. Learn the Bible, excellent. But don’t let that take the place of the church. It can’t and it won’t.
Church is the place that God has promised to work. He may work other ways. He may work through a small group that somebody happens to be invited to and they’re converted by God’s grace, but that’s not the place that God has promised to show up.
Right. The promise is that Jesus stands and knocks at the door of the church, because in that case the church at Laodicea had pushed him outside. But he came not to their small groups, he came to the church and knocked on the door.
This is something of course we keep coming back to again and again. If depravity is indeed total, if there is absolutely nothing man can do for himself, then trying to minister to man’s flesh, to his Adamic nature, to try to give him some button he can push, some ring he can pull, some act of service he can do to start the process is a waste of time and an insult to God. It is the preaching of the law. It is contrary to the gospel. It is anti-Christ, however well-intentioned.
If man is totally depraved, then only God can save him, and the only ordinances God will use are those that God has promised to use, either by extension or directly. As you say, the one place he’s promised to be is the church. Now, by extension he may work through individuals, Bible reading, Christian radio…
Absolutely, he promises that, but that’s the work of the church. That’s why in the passage we know in Romans 10, “We know that faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God,” but he asks, “How shall they call upon him of whom they’ve not heard? And how shall they hear of him if no one preaches? And how shall they preach except they be sent?”
In Paul’s mind, preaching is an official act of the church, whereby the church sends out men to evangelize, to be missionaries. And yes, they may have lots of support and helpers and wives and children and all kinds of other people, and technologies of various sorts, but the church authorizes and ordains them to go do this.
Again, in addition, the individual worship or witness of private Christians – yes, keep doing that please – but in the process don’t despise the church, our mother, because she’s the bride of Christ and we do that at our peril.
So let us not say the church has failed. Let us rather reckon with God’s incredible wisdom and his sneakiness. Look at the American church. How is God going to fix this? I have no idea, but he knows exactly what he’s doing and it’s going to be fun in a couple thousand years to be in heaven and say, “So what happened? All you people from earth who have died and come to heaven in the last hundred years or so, what happened? What happened to the United States of America?”
“Yeah, there used to be a nation called that. Right now it’s called the kingdom of God.”
“What?” – or however God is going to do it. Our imaginations are too small and it’s stupid even to speculate.
There’s one other thing I want to say just in passing, but any other thoughts along these lines?
I just think reaffirming the fact that the United States is not the subject of Bible prophecy. We’re a nation and we happen to be the Top Nation, as [Seller and Yates? 41:25] would capitalize it, but there’s been lots of top nations before us. There will likely be many more after us. It is the greatest foolishness to tie your eschatology to your nationality.
Or to anyone’s nationality, whether it would be United States or Israel or Russia.
I don’t know how many people listening have ever heard of Robert Nisbet, but he was a conservative sociologist back in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. His book History of the Idea of Progress is worth everybody’s time, because he goes back and looks historically at this thing we call – well, not even progress, but the very idea of progress.
Living in America we assume, “Well, progress is a thing. Progress happens,” but you know, for the Classical age no one believed that really. They didn’t. All things continue as they are from the beginning of creation, if there was a creation from their point of view. Nothing really, really changed. They had a cyclical or static view of history.
It was Augustine who first really introduced this idea of a linear history that was going someplace. And once you open the possibility of history going someplace, you have to ask the question, “Where’s it going?”
In the Middle Ages, Christendom was able to stop and say, “I guess it could get better.” It took the Reformation to say, “Well, in terms of worship and preaching it can get a lot better, and we’re going to do that right now.”
But then that opened the door to, “So could it get better in other ways? Could technology improve? Could moral character improve? Could political conditions improve? Could economic conditions improve?” That whole possibility of change became a thing that sociologists could now get a job studying, because it was the thing now.
Nisbet in one of his quotes – and I’m not sure where it comes from, I just have the quote itself – says, “Sociologists ought to ask, ‘What is the nature of change and what’s so natural about it?’” In an article called “The Year 2000 and All That” he argued that historical prediction based on statistics, cycles, and current trends is impossible because historians and sociologists always have to reckon with four things: the random event, the maniac, the prophet, and the genius.
Every evolutionist in the end has to admit, first of all, random events. What is evolution but a series of random events? And random means random. You cannot predict this thing is going to happen. As for these other things – the maniac, I suppose you could think of someone like Adolf Hitler here, or other people. The prophet – anyone from Mohammed to Gandhi. The genius – Einstein. Think of how these individuals changed the course of history.
You could look at history just before them and say, “Well, I see where this is going, a straight line to…oops. What do you mean you invented physics and calculus in the space of a lifetime? You overthrew all of standard physics in just a few years and gave us the atomic bomb indirectly.” You think that maybe affected history a little bit?
Or “You had conversations with Gabriel and he gave you a book called the Quran. Surely that could have no substantial effects anytime anyplace. Or I’m sure they were all burned out by 732, when we chased you guys out of Europe.”
To this Nesbit writes, “We have absolutely no way of escaping these elements. The future predictors don’t suggest that we can avoid or escape, nor ever be able to predict or forecast them. What the future predictors, the change analysts, and the trendsayers say in effect is with the aid of institute resources, computers, linear programming etc, they will deal with the kinds of changes that are not the consequences of the random event, the genius, the maniac, and the prophet, to which I can only say there really aren’t any, not any worth looking at anyhow.”
I don’t know if Nesbit was a Christian. He doesn’t come across as one, although he seems to respect Christianity as an intellectual force. He’s basically saying we can’t predict the future because there are random elements, which any good evolutionist should admit. Reality is random. We can’t foretell the future so give it up.
From a Christian point of view, we can look at history. Let’s look at two days. Let’s look at Good Friday. Wow, that was a sad day. These 11 guys went into mourning and hiding. It was all over. They’d trusted that it should have been him that redeemed Israel, and from there on out they could draw the line straight to hell. God failed. The promise failed. It’s all over.
Let’s pick the third day. It’s called Easter morning. Even Satan didn’t see that one coming, and that day changed the history of the world.
We need to be very careful about saying, “Oh, things are so dark and so black and so horrible.” Let’s stop drawing lines and let’s just start believing the promises of God, and not feel overwhelmed by the world around us.
We have this relationship with God. He’s got us. He’s our Shepherd. We shall not want. Let’s just keep on keeping on with the stuff he’s given us, and be thankful for our families and our jobs and our food and our homes, and for the freedom we have to worship him.
Amen. I also want to add, it’s an interesting thing that secularists think that they can predict the future to any extent, because at least conceivably, according to their understanding of evolutionary biology, today’s men are not the same as yesterday’s men, so what reason do we have to suspect that they will continue to act the way that they have in the past? We don’t.
Carl Trueman wrote a book called The Creedal Imperative. It’s about the necessity, the importance of having your beliefs about God written down as a Christian, kind of drawing from Paul’s instruction to “Remember the pattern of sound words that I have taught to you.”
He says one of the reasons why modern man, and just generally man, revolts against having a written set of beliefs, a tradition – Catholics call it the Magesterium, but what the Protestants would consider tradition are things like the creeds and the confessions of the Reformation era - he basically says why people don’t like these things is because they don’t think people 1,000 years ago were as developed as them or as intelligent as them or understand the world as much as we do, so why should we listen to anything they say? Human nature is something that for them is ever-constant and never in flux, so you can’t even say things about humanity that are true from AD 1000 to AD 2000.
“Men were primitive and we are smarter than they were,” despite our profound ignorance of everything, one reason you should all enroll in a history class right now – if nothing else, just to find out how the rest of men in the rest of time lived and thought, and find out, you know what, they were the image of God, too. They were sinners, too. They were not as stupid as you think, just maybe a little more consistent to their unbelief at times.
I think that’s a perfect place to wrap up. I know what I would like to recommend. Do you have a recommendation?
I do, as a matter of fact. I mentioned it in passing, and the more we talked the more I thought, “Hmm, this will do.”
Some of you may know the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. Others may say, “Science fiction? Eww.” Well, he’s not the greatest literary stylist in the world. I’ll give you that easily. But in his original Foundation series – it was a trilogy back then and now it encompasses every book he ever wrote, but originally it was three books, Foundation, Second Foundation, and there was a third one I’m forgetting.
It’s set in the far distant future. The galactic empire has expanded to, well, the galaxy, so it’s kind of a play on the idea of the Roman Empire. One man, a psycho-mathematician, has turned psychology into a statistical science, where if you deal with large enough populations you can statistically predict the future, and what he has predicted is the fall of the Empire.
Well, the powers-that-be want to shut him up because that’s not helpful to anybody, but what we find out eventually is that using this new science he has actually engineered the future of the galaxy. If he can just push a couple buttons in the right places and trick a couple people into doing the right things at the right moment, then history will move toward a new empire.
In terms of this conversation, and in terms also of the whole Enlightenment ideal, that using mathematics and science, give us enough time, give us enough money, give us enough data, and we can hand you an ideal future. We can predict it, we can manipulate it, and we can drop Utopia into the laps of your grandchildren. Just give us a little time.
This is as good a statement of how that idea can be simply explained as anything, and you can get teenagers who are interested in sci-fi to read it. It’s not super profound or super deep. It’s played out in very plain language without a lot of color and metaphor. As I say, he’s not a great literary stylist, but reading the first book alone I think will be worth your time if you want a clearer idea of this whole idea of predicting the future scientifically.
Before the birth of science we called it magic or called it divination, but now science claims to be able to do it rationally by analyzing cause and effect.
Yes, numbers are everything. Oh, don’t get me started on that. I’m going to stop right there. So that’s my recommendation. We’ll talk about the Enlightenment, Rosicrucianism, alchemy and Newton some other time. It’s all yours.
Before I get to my recommendation, related to that is actually one of my favorite TV shows, definitely in my top 10, called Person of Interest. It plays on that as well. This is a mild spoiler, but by the end of the series you have a side character who ended up becoming a main character, and she is openly referring to these artificial intelligence systems that are able to watch everyone, learn their behavior, predict their quirks and everything. I don’t want to get to into the weeds on that, but functionally speaking it can predict the future.
Every week it spits out a Social Security number for somebody that’s in danger that week, but by the end most of that is gone away because more metaplot considerations have taken over. Essentially this side character (now main character) is openly referring to the rival AI systems as gods, because what else do you call something that sees everyone and knows everything and can tell you the future?
Speaking of knowing the future, the opposite of that is knowing the past, and that is what my recommendation is, a wonderful podcast. I’ve recommended the author who is one of the co-hosts before, Tom Holland, the historian, not the Spiderman. The podcast he hosts with another historian named Dominic Sandbrook is called The Rest is History.
They started it in either 2019 or early 2020, right before the pandemic hit. Neither host is a Christian, but I’ve recommended before Tom Holland’s book, Dominion, the history of Western culture. It’s so good, even though he’s agnostic by his own declaration, but he loves the history that Christianity has created.
He basically says, “I grew up and I loved Rome and I loved Greece and I read them when I was older and I thought ‘None of these people I want to be.’ All the things that I value as a modern Western man are directly descended from Christianity’s influence on Europe.”
His podcast is really great because they talk about various things. It’s kind of funny because his co-host pokes fun at Tom. He’s like, “Oh yes, of course in this section you’re going to speak about Christianity again,” and Tom is like, “Well, yes, of course I’m going to talk about Christianity because we’re talking about Europe in the Middle Ages. Everything is about Christianity here.” It’s really wonderful.
I’ve been binge listening to them because I have like a 2-year backlog to catch up on. The first one that was really interesting was about the Aztec empire. They had a guest on who talked about the history of the Aztec empire that she had studied for a book that she had written about them, and it was very interesting to hear these people talk about it. “So tell us more. Are we wrong about the Aztecs being horrible?”
“Well, not entirely. The stereotypes are a bit extreme, but they were bad. Let’s not get it wrong.”
It was kind of interesting to hear them say, “In their mindset, in their culture, in their religion and all this, if you read poetry from the Aztecs you actually see sadness over the fact that death is a thing,” even as they were out there murdering people.
“Oh, but they were doing it to save the world and postpone the age of fire.”
That may not have been what they believed, is the interesting fact. It’s a way of essentially feeding the gods, because the gods eat up blood. They also thought that warriors who died in battle got to live past death spiritually in some sense, in the form of a butterfly bringing nectar to the goddess of nature. Great hope for the afterlife, but even then that’s only four years. After that it’s oblivion functionally.
There are all sorts of horrible details about what the priests did to themselves bodily. It seems like every weird religion, which is all of them except Christianity basically, they do weird things to male genitalia. It’s probably something about the fifth point of covenant there, continuity.
Then the other one was about Nero, which I also found interesting. They said, “A lot of the writing we have is from people who didn’t like him, including senators and all this.” He was bad, but the other thing is that to have lasted as long as he did, he had to have some skill, so he wasn’t a fop. He could ride horses very well, and apparently write poetry. Maybe a lot of the things that he did were pure pageantry, but he was still a bit nuts.
In any case, it was very interesting to hear. We’re very used to hearing about Nero and Aztecs from a Christian perspective, which is a good thing. We should be analyzing these things objectively and saying, “What they did was wicked.” But it’s also good I think to hear other perspectives and try to get a more cohesive idea, and still obviously come out the other end saying, “Yeah, they still deserved everything they got.”
As an interesting ending side note, Tom Holland mentioned that there is a tradition in Rabbinic Judaism that states that Nero actually faked his death, fled to Judea and converted to Judaism, and that there is a line of Rabbis descended from him. So that’s a thing.
That would make an interesting conspiracy story, I guess. I’ll keep that in mind. Maybe I can use it some day.
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