“Images of War” – FBC Morning Light (9/2/2024)

Well, good Monday morning to you. How was your weekend? I hope you had a good time yesterday at church, gathering with God's people and worshiping and serving Him, and that the Lord taught you something.

Maybe He challenged you, and perhaps He convicted you. The Holy Spirit has that power to take God's Word and to confront us with it, convicting us of areas where we need to repent and change and grow, and it's critical that we respond well when that happens.

It kind of ties into today's Bible reading. We're in 2 Kings 25, reading verses 8 to 26, and then we jump to Jeremiah chapters 39 to 41, and then back to 1 Chronicles chapter 6, for 15 verses in 1 Chronicles 6.

What I want to zero in on is this passage in 2 Kings, and when you read through it, you could have come to mind all kinds of images that you see in today's newscasts, whether you get your news on the Internet or through cable news or whatever, wherever you get your news, you've seen these images.

You read verses 8 to 26 of 2 Kings 25, and it begins this way, it says, In the fifth month on the seventh day of the month, Nebuchadnezzar, the captain of the guard, a servant of the king of Babylon, came to Nebuzaradan, I'm sorry, Nebuzaradan, the captain of the guard, a servant of the king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem.

He burned the house of the Lord and the king's house, all the houses of Jerusalem, that is, all the houses of the great, he burned with fire. The army of the Chaldeans, they broke down the walls of Jerusalem all around, they carried away captive the rest of the people who remained in the city, and the defectors who had deserted the king of Babylon with the rest of the multitude, and left some of the poor in the land to be vinedressers and farmers and so forth.

And it goes on to talk about further destruction and tearing down of the temple and the artifice, the very articles of the temple and so forth used in worship, and then you get down to verses 22 and following, and the Babylonians put a puppet king, puppet governor, if you will, in place after this.

And if you could have watched the evening news in 586 BC when all of this occurred, to see the images, you would have seen destroyed, bombed out buildings, you would have seen smoke pillowing up, you would have seen warriors looting, you would have seen people being taken captive, being led away from the city in captivity, you would have seen a bunch of shell-shocked refugees who were left behind, a lot of tears, a lot of grief, a lot of death and dying and chaos and all the rest of that.

And it would look very much like our modern newscast, wouldn't it? These images in 2 Kings 25 are really just reflections of the modern experience that we see in our world. But these examples in 2 Kings 25 are the sufferings of Judah as Babylon destroys Jerusalem, attacking God's people, taking God's people captive off out of the country of Israel and Judah and into the Babylonian captivity.

And the sad thing is, the sad reality is, that all of this could have been averted. All of it could have been averted. Judah had been warned for years by various prophets coming and warning them that you need to put away your false gods, you need to turn away from your paganism and your idolatry and your child sacrifices and all those kinds of things.

Return to the Lord, repent, return to the Lord. Otherwise, this is coming. And of course, they ignored the prophets and the proclaimers of God's promised judgment. And here we are. Here we are. Now when you pass forward into our modern world and we see these images in our evening news, we got to wonder, you know, what's going on behind the scenes that we don't know?

I mean, sure, we know what's going on in the Middle East on the surface level, right? We know what's going on in Ukraine and Russia on the surface of things. And, you know, we see the bombs flying and we see the buildings destroyed, we see the people suffering, we see the grief, the heartache.

We see all of that. And it would be very easy to draw simplistic conclusions about who's at fault and who's doing wrong and all the rest of that stuff, and there's plenty of that that's going around. But I read these Old Testament accounts of God sending judgment and punishing and chastening his people, and I look at the modern world and the news and I wonder, you know, what's going on behind the scene?

What is God doing? What is he doing? Because I don't believe for a second that all the stuff, the chaos, the crises, the catastrophes, and so forth that are going on in our world are simply the actions of violent, stubborn men who want to have their way and want to destroy other people.

I believe God uses them for his purposes. What are those purposes? What is God doing? What is he setting up? What is he preparing to do? I don't have the answers to all of those questions, but I do know, and I'm quite confident, that God is at work.

God is at work. You know, he's promised that Jesus will come again, and until Jesus comes, we'll be in the birth pangs of his coming, and I think we are experiencing those birth pangs today. God is at work.

Let's not miss sight of that as we watch the news and as we see the events of this world unfold before our very eyes. God is at work. Now, Father, we do thank you that you are. We thank you that we can have the confidence of your work and your control and your using even wicked, evil people to bring about the greater purposes that you have and that you are working toward in this world.

Help us as your people, O Lord, to trust you and to be confident that you, our good, righteous, and just God, are doing a work that is right and good. Help us, O Lord, to trust you, we pray in Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well listen, I hope your week gets off to a great start, and may the Lord bless you in it. Good day.