Wednesday Night Bible Study 2 Chronicles 15:3-4

All right, so now we see more of Azariah the prophet, his prophecy to Asa.

They have come back from battle and Azariah meets them out at the, as they're coming back from battle along with the people of Israel.

And so he's addressing all of Judah and Benjamin. So this first part says, Now for a long season

Israel was without the true God. So what was that long season? If you think about when

Israel has existed, it really seems to refer to the time of the judges. There's not really many other times that fit that so well.

You could say it was the time during the, the time while they were in Egypt or something like that.

But it really does seem to be the time of the judges where they turned to the

Lord. So in what sense were they without the true God?

Many of them practice idolatry. That's kind of the repeated thing that happens in judges. The people forget

God and then they turn back to him and they forget him and they turn back to him, etc. And so how does this relate to the previous verse?

Well, this gives the evidence of the claim that he's made that if they seek God, he'll be found.

If they abandon him, God will forsake them. So now the demonstration of that with history.

If you go ahead and turn to Judges chapter 17, we'll look at one of these passages that is fairly representative of the kind of thing that they were dealing with.

So in Judges 17, it says, And he restored the 1 ,100 pieces of silver to his mother.

His mother said, I dedicate the silver to the Lord from my hand for my son to make a carved image in a metal image.

Now, therefore, I will restore it to you. So when he restored the money to his mother, his mother took 200 pieces of silver and gave it to the silversmith who made it into a carved image in a metal image.

And it was in the house of Micah. And the man Micah had a shrine. And he made an ephod and household gods and ordained one of his sons who became his priest.

In those days, there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

Now, there was a young man of Bethlehem and Judah, of the family of Judah, who was a Levite. And he sojourned there.

And the man departed from the town of Bethlehem and Judah to sojourn where he could find a place. And as he journeyed, he came to the hill country of Ephraim, to the house of Micah.

And Micah said to him, where do you come from? And he said to him, I'm a Levite of Bethlehem and Judah, and I am going to sojourn where I may find a place.

And Micah said to him, stay with me and be to me a father and a priest. And I will give you 10 pieces of silver a year and a suit of clothes in your living.

And the Levite went in and the Levite was content to dwell with the man. And the young man became to him like one of his sons.

And Micah ordained the Levite. And the young man became his priest. And he was in the house of Micah.

Then Micah said, now I know that the Lord will prosper me because I have a Levite as a priest. All right,

I read a little longer than the passage here, but we'll just skip the reading when we come to it in the next part.

What problems exist with the worship depicted here? Well, there are a number of problems.

They're just worshiping as seems best. First, Micah had stolen these funds.

And now these stolen funds, they're making this idol for the Lord, which is very much like what you see throughout

Israel's history. But with the golden calf, that is an idol that's supposed to be for the Lord himself. It's not a different God.

It's supposed to be the true God. All this is supposed to be for the true God, but it's a false idol.

It's a false shrine. It's a false priest. Because even though he's a Levite, you need to be of the house of Aaron, and he is not suitable to be a priest.

A false ephod. And then, yeah, there are other gods mentioned elsewhere.

I forget if it was in this passage or elsewhere. And then this is all perpetuated because there's no king in the land, so they would do what is actually right.

They instead do what is right in their own eyes. The king being one who would punish false worship. So, this is a good example of the situation described by Azariah, where a long season where they're without the true

God and don't know how to seek him or anything. Also, if you're interested in this passage, there's a very famous sermon by a man whose name

I believe, I don't know if this is how you pronounce it, but Paris Readhead, and it's called

Ten Shekels and a Shirt. It's a very good old sermon about this passage and just, you know, being in ministry for the sake of money without any real sense of calling.

Yeah, Ten Shekels and a Shirt. All right, so the second part of this verse, and without a teaching priest and without a law.

Okay, a teaching priest is obviously a priest who teaches. They're without a teaching priest in that they don't have someone who knows the law to be able to communicate it to them.

There are a lot of passages that talk about the priest's job to teach the people. You have Leviticus 10, 11,

Deuteronomy 33, 10, Jeremiah 18, 18, Hosea 4, 6 through 7, and Malachi 2, 7.

But yeah, there's no real functioning well priesthood to accomplish these things.

And later, we even see in 2 Kings 17, 27, which is a time after this, that when

Sennacherib conquers the northern kingdom of Israel and then settles his own people in Samaria, he commissions, he captures a

Levite and commissions him to go teach the people how to serve the true God because he understands that, okay, well, we're going into Yahweh's land.

We have to figure out how to serve Yahweh now. So it's even understood by the pagans that you would need a priest to teach the people how to serve the true

God. And yeah, you see that corruption in the failure to teach as they ought all over scripture.

Micah 3, 11 says, her heads give judgment for a bribe, her priests teach for a price, her prophets practice divination for money.

Yet they lean on the Lord and say, is not the Lord in the midst of us?

No disaster shall come upon us. The idea being that people can do all these things without the right intentions, instead charging for the things that God has called them to do freely.

And they just don't understand. So yeah, having true teachers was a rare thing.

And then when it was a thing that existed, God blessed the people through it. All right, why does

Micah want a Levite as a priesthood? The priests are supposed to be Levites. However, they are supposed to be particularly of the house of Aaron.

One thing that the chronicler does a lot, and this is one of those things that you only really notice once you start comparing it, but he likes to say the priests and the

Levites, or the Levites and the priests, the idea being that it's not enough to be a

Levite. The priests are a distinct group. I mean, they're a group within the Levites, but he speaks of them as though they're a mutually exclusive group.

In order to emphasize that it's not enough just to be a Levite. And in Ezekiel, which remember, he's writing basically after the time of Ezekiel, most likely.

In Ezekiel, it talks about how they had even hired out some of the priest jobs to foreigners, having them come in and guard the temple.

So an important thing for him to emphasize to his audience that you have to have the right kind of priesthood, the kind that God commanded.

All right, is he suited to be a priest?

Clearly not. He does not know what he's doing. Yeah, Micah is giving money for the sake of security, but it's a false sense of religious security.

It's interesting too that he told this Levite that this

Levite will be a father and a priest, right? Father, I remarked last time, is a term used frequently throughout

Scripture for any kind of authority figure. That's why the reformed interpretation of the fifth commandment has to do with all authority relationships, not just biological father and mother.

So here he says that he will be a priest and a father to him. But then in the next verse, it says, and the

Levite was content to dwell with the man and the young man became to him like one of his sons. So he hired this priest to be a father to him, but it ended up being a son to him.

So very, yeah, clearly it's not a sensible arrangement.

All right, and yeah, 2 Chronicles, why does it speak of this time? Because, well, is that the question?

Yeah, how does this relate to the passage in 2 Chronicles? 2 Chronicles speaks of this time because few who identified as priests were capable of teaching.

They didn't know the law of God and didn't teach the law of God at that time. And so during Asa's time, it's important that there be priests who are teaching the people.

This is part of seeking the Lord. Part of the seeking the Lord is maintaining an understanding of what his word says in order that they do it rightly.

It's interesting. There are some, of course, since I've been doing some retrieval work,

I've been interested in what others have said about retrieval. John Owen has this interesting passage where he talks about the importance of not losing doctrine, of making sure that you teach things even if you think they're well understood.

And his point ultimately isn't primarily about the fact that you would veer into error if you do not teach those things, which is how most people quote him on this point.

His primary point is that you lose zeal about the matter when it ceases to be taught.

If you keep teaching something, it stokes a zeal for that thing.

And if you don't teach it, even if people know it in some measure, they won't have the zeal for it.

If you think about, if you're really honest with yourself about why you would get so offended if someone spoke certain heresies or said certain things about God, a lot of it would be dictated by how clearly you have been taught certain things.

Otherwise, you would likely say, hmm, well, maybe that's not that important or maybe that,

I don't know. So just because something is understood is not sufficient reason to stop teaching it.

If it stops being taught, people will not be zealous about the matter. Okay, continuing on here, verse four.

But when in their distress, they turned Jehovah the God of Israel. All right, so the people's distress, their military struggles.

Over and over, this is what happens is that the other nations come and attack them and then they turn to the Lord and the judge is raised up and ends up leading the people through the struggle because he's also leading the people to seek the

Lord. You remember, Gideon is called Jerubbel because he defeats the

Baals and then he leads the people into that and then ultimately leads the people back into false worship at the end of his life, which is, yeah, tragic.

What is the significance of the Lord being called the God of Israel in this context? Once again, when he talks about the

God of Israel, that's important because Judah is the true Israel, right? They are up against the people who's called

Israel and a people who claim to have a greater hold on their God because they have two places of worship with two golden calves called

Yahweh, right? And so from, you know, just step back into that perspective if you're living back in that era, that seems like a significant claim.

They're called Israel. They have two places where they worship Yahweh, right?

And Judah only has one and is not called Israel. But if Judah is going to be the true

Israel, it is necessary that they, yeah, that they turn to this

God with real repentance and real, yeah, real zeal.

So turning to him, of course, means repenting from sin, following his ways.

The primary thing that's concerned here is true worship. For B, and sought him, he was found by them.

So every time the people turned to him in the book of Judges, they were blessed by it.

There wasn't a time where that didn't happen. They were always blessed when they turned to the Lord. Yeah, is seeking different than turning?

Turning suggests a repentance. So it's something that's needed in order to seek him for any sinful person.

So they're distinct concepts, but really they're interchangeable given that all people are sinful people and need to turn in order to seek him.

So in what sense did they find him? They were blessed with his favor. If you remember, one of the main things that 1

Chronicles centered on, because 1 Chronicles covers particular points of David's life, is the fact that they brought the ark into Jerusalem.

And that was significant because this is them seeking the Lord. They had ignored the Lord before, and he stayed elsewhere, and then they brought him into Jerusalem and were blessed by him.

So this has just been a theme throughout. All right, going ahead and reading 1

Samuel 7, one through four. And the men of Kiriath -Jerim came and took up the ark of the

Lord and brought it to the house of Abinadab on the hill. And they consecrated his son

Eleazar to have charge of the ark of the Lord. From the day the ark was lodged at Kiriath -Jerim, a long time passed, some 20 years, and all the house of Israel lamented after the

Lord. And Samuel said to all the house of Israel, if you are returning to the Lord with all your heart, then put away the foreign gods and the

Ashtoreth from among you and direct your heart to the Lord and serve him only. And he will deliver you out of the hand of the

Philistines. So the people of Israel put away the Baals and the Ashtoreth and they served the

Lord only. So this is what happens in Samuel's time. This is the definitive point.

Of course, he is the last judge. So they serve the Lord, turn away, serve the Lord, turn away. Samuel, the one where they definitively turn to the

Lord and continue following after him. It's not that they aren't ever disobedient again, but there is something about having

Samuel and then after that the kings that ensures a little more constancy of the worship of God.

All right, and how does this narrative relate to the situation of Azariah's audience? So they need to keep going the way that they are going.

They have sought the Lord by defeating the enemy with a lot of zeal. And now they need to keep serving the

Lord with zeal. They had turned to the Lord in battle and the Lord blessed them in battle. If they want to keep being defended from their enemies, they need to continue seeking the

Lord, worshiping him and none other. All right, the reflection questions here are what does true religion look like in our time?

How can you seek the Lord? What results can you anticipate from seeking the Lord? It is good to reflect on what that is supposed to look like first, it's not immediate.

The blessings are not always immediate. Yeah, look through judges and you'll see that a lot of times there's a delay between people turning to the

Lord and blessing, but there's always a blessing. Also, these pictures are given in a temporal sphere in order that you would understand, you know, with a kind of visual what will be happening for you spiritually.

So don't think primarily that you would experience, you know, whether it be financial wealth, whatever the case may be.

Some of those God may bless you with as you seek him, but you should be primarily anticipating spiritual well -being and rewards in the final promised land, not the one that is of this earth, but rather the one that is of the new heavens and the new earth.

That is where the primary blessing will be found. But you will experience blessings in this life as you serve the

Lord and as the enemy is defeated because you are facing the enemy all the time. He's tempting you.

He's working in your congregation. He's working outside the congregation. He's working everywhere and we need the

Lord at all times. We do not battle against flesh and blood. So to anticipate flesh and blood kind of results would be foolish.

If that's the primary thing you're anticipating, but we should anticipate spiritual victory.

And a lot of people really doubt the Lord when it comes to spiritual victory. It's really, it's really incredible how powerful he shows himself to be.

And then how little we're willing to trust him, how little time we're willing to give him a prayer, how in a certain situation that seems too bleak, people just kind of assume that God won't answer.

Regardless of what the situation is, especially in matters where there should be more of a guarantee.

You know, you don't have, like I said, you don't have huge guarantees on health or finances, et cetera.

God is perfectly capable of blessing you with all those things, but we don't necessarily have the same guarantees that that's his intention at all times.

However, his intention is for the good of the church at all times. And the discouragement that people face thinking that, oh, this person won't repent, this person won't reconcile with me, this is pointless to address the matter, et cetera.

It's really incredible the unbelief that exists.

And why should God answer in the face of such unbelief? Just like Jesus, just like it said about Jesus that he could not do miracles because of their unbelief.

The idea is not that he isn't powerful, but he wouldn't be glorified in the face of such unbelief. All right, any questions on any of this or comments?

All right, let's go ahead and close in prayer. Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for this picture that you've given us of the people seeking you and finding you.