Wednesday, March 27, 2024 PM

Now, we've been talking about the prophets, trying to understand as far as that prophets were God's man on the scene, they were a mediator of sorts, and we hear a lot about prophets in the Old Testament.

Some of them wrote books, like 1 and 2 Samuel, or Isaiah, or Ezekiel. Some of them didn't write books, like Elijah, and Elisha, and Micaiah. These were prophets, but we don't have any of their writing.

Prophets as God's Messengers and Mediators

We do have writings for some, we don't have writings for others. But what they share, they were especially called by God as seers, that they would see the truth of God and declare it in word. They would bring to everyone's attention, they didn't mind pointing their finger at the king, they didn't mind pointing their finger at the high priest, or even other.

Prophets.

They were to give God's word to show what God was concerned about. God's declaration of that which was to come, to reveal the ultimate expression of His image in human blood, and to say, this is what God wants you to know, which you are supposed.

To live.

Of course, most famously, there's the Ten Commandments, the covenant that God made at Sinai with Israel. So the prophets preached the covenants, and those covenants were all expressions of the image of God, to love God supremely, to love each other rightly, and to steward the creation faithfully.

Idolatry, the Image of God, and the Exchange of Worship

The image of God is in idolatry, because to love God supremely, that the worship switch is hardwired on. We're just always inhaling worth and exhaling worth-ship. The old English word is worth-ship.

We're ascribing worth to things in our worship, and so made in God's image, we're just always worshiping, and thus there's a caution against idolatry, worship, worthless things. Don't make that exchange in Romans 1, professing themselves to be wise.

They were actually fools, and exchanged the glory of being wise in their idolatry, but they were fools. Don't make that exchange. And, of course, it's important that we worship the image of the prophet, because we become like what we worship.

Whatever we worship, that's what we begin to look more and more and more like. Psalm 115 says that the idols are all worthless.

Why?

Because they have eyes that can't see, they have ears that can't hear, they have mouths that don't speak, so on and so forth. And when it gets done with this list of how worthless idols are, the psalmist says, and so also those who make them and worship them, they become just like them.

They have eyes but cannot see, ears that cannot hear. Those are expressions in the Bible, aren't they? When God addresses His people and says, and then He says to them, you have eyes but cannot see, you have ears but do not hear, your neck doesn't move.

And that's connected with the ears that don't hear and the eyes that don't see. Because the neck of an idol does not move, right? What was that first idol that Aaron made? A golden calf. Now a calf was to grow up and be an ox, it needed to be a working animal.

And you're going to put a yoke on the working animal and you're going to turn that working animal from one direction to another as you plowed your fields or pulled your cart, right? Now if that ox had a stiff neck, he's not turning.

You have to get him to turn his head before he'll turn his body. And God was saying to His people, you're idolatrous, you're stiff-necked, you don't turn anymore. So we become important, we understand, because if we worship idols, then the symptom is immorality and injustice, idolatry.

Idolatry Produces Moral Confusion and Injustice

Along with that, always talked about the immorality of the people and the injustice that was upheld among the covenant that God made. Hebrews 5, in verse 20, we get a sense of the kind of immorality that was going on in the life of Judah during the days of Israel.

In verse 20, it says, "...who put darkness for light, and light for light.". This verse used lightly. When people start calling evil, good, and they start calling good, evil, how'd they get so mixed up?

How did that happen?

Well, it wasn't social engineering, it was idolatry. It was idolatry. Something or someone is being worshipped as supreme, as superior. Perhaps man himself is being put up on the pedestal, man being made the highest value.

For example, the very next verse, verse 21 of Isaiah 5 says, "...woe to those who are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight.". You know, if everything comes down, if you're the final authority on matters, if there's just no going any further after you have stated, well, I just don't agree with that, well, case closed.

It's all over now. We best just go home. If it's wise in which I don't need to hear from outside of my own lived experience or the reservoir of my own understanding of where you should be. Possibly undergirding that is an elevation of human reasoning and human kind of idolatry getting all these vital categories mixed up, evil, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for.

Bitter.

Isn't this what happened in Genesis chapter 3? God said it was good, very good, that Adam and Eve have nothing to do, to not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So it was good that they not eat.

Until Eve was deceived and Adam agreed that it was evil that they should be kept from that fruit. And they had replaced good for evil and evil for good because they were wise in their own.

Eyes.

They replaced the supreme value of God for themselves. And that the train of thought there in Romans chapter 1 on that terrible exchange, they exchange the glory of the incorruptible God for an image made like corruptible man.

Man first worships himself and elevates himself. Isn't this the undergirding principle of the enlightenment where man shrugs off accountability to the scriptures, to the teachings of the church? And man begins to say, we don't need God anymore.

We can do science and we can do philosophy and we can do all of life that is needed here on earth without having to reference God. We can explain our origins, we can explain how things work and we can have wisdom without.

God.

That was the undergirding assumption of the project known as the enlightenment. And then the enlightenment produces what? Produces the revolution. Produces the revolution in France where things become even more extreme.

It's not just that we don't need God, it's that religion is the worst thing that anybody has ever come up with and it all needs to go away. And anything pertaining to any kind of external authority that we have not ourselves thought up must all go away.

And so the enlightenment goes to the revolution which produces horror where there was blood in the streets. This is what happens to man without God. He starts by worshiping man but by the end they were worshiping beasts and creeping and crawling things and they become more and more and more deranged.

The Prophets on Moral Chaos in Judges, Ruth, Samuel, and Kings

So, in Isaiah chapter 29 and in verse 15, there is another woe. Woe to those who seek deep to hide their counsel far from the Lord and their works are in the.

Dark.

They say, who sees us and who knows us? Surely you have things turned around. Shall the potter be esteemed as the clay? For shall the thing made say of him who made it, he did not make me? Or shall the thing form say of him who formed it, he has no understanding?

I doubt that God's image begin to say of their creator, he doesn't know what he's talking.

About.

We're the smart ones around here. After all, we've liberated ourselves from his word. After all, we know that God didn't make us. Isn't it interesting that God knew exactly where the thoughts of men would go if they think that God doesn't know the thoughts of men?

They said, Lord doesn't know what we're thinking, Lord doesn't know what we know. He's not involved. We're not accountable to him. He didn't make us. He doesn't know anything. So, of moral confusion is the denial of God, and how did we get to denying God except by idolatry?

It's downstream. Now, when we read the prophets, a bit of a preview, but when we read the prophets, in the Bible, we have books that sometimes we call the historical books in the Old Testament. And we list them usually as Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1st and 2nd Samuel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther.

And we'll add in there 1st and 2nd Chronicles. But in the Old Testament, they have books of the Bible, and they talked about the prophets, and they talked about the writings. And in the prophets, they had a kind of two subcategories of the prophets.

They had prophets, Joshua, Judges, because they were written by prophets. Number one, Israel, the writing prophet dealing with Israel based on the covenant he had made with them in Mount Sinai. God wrote about those books.

So, when we think about what the prophets have to say. So, what do the prophets have to say about immorality? Well, they talk about and display the comes from idolatry. They show it so as to be a road.

You know what will happen. The same thing happens in books like Judges. Have you ever read through the book of Judges? A lot of chaos in the book of Judges, isn't there? You know, it's unsurprising that we find a great deal of immorality and indeed sexual chaos in the days of the Judges given sexual chaos.

Samson couldn't hold it together. He was all over the place. He was a wild card. Samson's name means Israel who had a hard time obeying God's commandments, was always compromised given the covenant, right?

They had a special covenant, a special upbringing. God was proud. And he had some Nazarite vows. And he just kept on over and over again just like violating the covenant from bad connections and arrangements with the Philistines and the pagans around him.

That was Israel, wasn't it? They were always getting involved. And Samson put his affections upon a Philistine maid just like Israel looked to intermarry with the pagan nations around them. And then God kept stirring Samson up and giving him a hard time through the various circumstances of his life.

And then he'd lash out and blow up a bunch of Philistines. All throughout the book of Judges, what would happen? Israel would get compromised. They would get in bed with the pagan nations. And then things would go bad.

And then all of a sudden, God would ruin the life of Samson. But just like Samuel in all his ways, so also Israel. We also see sexual chaos in the tribes in Judges 19 through 21. That's some rough reading.

That's some rough reading as we read about a disgusting amount, a five-fold amount of immorality in Judges 19 through 21. How did they get so flowing? Chapters 17 and 18, idolatry that is rapid. It's so confusing that at some point you have a guy from the tribe of Manasseh who's called himself a Levite who stole money and who went to the city of Dan.

And everything's hunky-dory. And, of course, injustice is a huge theme in those three chapters at the end of Judges as well. Even that nice, pleasant story, Ruth, was during the days of the Judges, wasn't it?

Now, who's the…. His fields. And he begins to treat her very kindly. One of the things he says to her is,.

Why?

Because he knew how much rape was going on in his culture, didn't he? He also said, don't go to another field. He was trying to protect her, wasn't he? They lived during the days of the Judges where it was chaos even at the tabernacle.

It was very fat. How did Eli get fat, by the way? When every cut of the sacrifices that were accorded to the priests didn't have fat on them.

Right?

You should never see a fat priest.

So he was….

The women at the entrance of the tabernacle. This is how chaotic it was in the days of the Judges. In the days of the kings, we also see the same. In the days of the kings, we focus on David's house. And when you look at David's house, we find polygamy wasn't pretty.

We have David and Bathsheba. We have the adultery with Bathsheba, the murder of Uriah, and Joab as accessory. And if we want to talk about immorality and sexual chaos, I just have to say one word, Solomon.

Solomon. These were stories and these were details given by the prophets, and they were not approving of it. They talked about it and showed God's judgment. In fact, that here, Solomon, sexual immorality, it was connected to what?

Idolatry. His wives turned his heart away from the Lord to all of their idols. And that's why God said he was going to split the kingdom. Between Rehoboam and Jeroboam in the wake of Solomon's infidelity.

Pure. Ammon raped his wife. Absalom himself laid with his father's concubines publicly. This is just one example of sin. Look at what happened to the people who were denied by their father, Esau, and good king Josiah.

The things that they did. Prostitution was rampant, and then they fought against it, and they eradicated it. Think about this theme of immorality all the way through in Judges and Samuel and in Kings.

We see that it's connected to idolatry, and we see that God brings judgment upon the nation because of it. Now, this immorality. Prophets, they were thinking about Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and then the scroll of the twelve.

The scroll of the twelve. That's all the minor prophets, as we call them, from Hosea on to Malachi. These prophets had a lot to say about injustice. This injustice is not an expression of basic circumstances.

This has to do with Israel, how the king is supposed to act because he made a covenant with David, and how the Israelites are supposed to act towards each other given the covenant at Sinai. The covenant God made with Israel at Mount Sinai.

He said, I am a Jew, and I will trust and fill Jerusalem with blood from one gate to the other. These generations have to be atoned for and paid for by God.

Covenant Justice, Sin, and the Limits of Modern Reparations

Now, what does that mean?

They want to bring current American experience and say, our great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents did a great job. The current generation must now pay for. Have you heard anything like that?

It's called reparations. We must tear down all the statues of all these people who lived a hundred and fifty years ago because this is part of our penance, and we have to pay now for the sins of people.

And they can't raise the dead. They can't get General Lee out of the grave and hang him for being an awful person. They can't get Thomas Jefferson out of the grave and execute him as he so properly deserved because he was such an awful person.

And so they want the generation today to pay for the past generations. And some people in seminaries and churches and so on will take up Old Testament passages and say, see, it's biblical, it's biblical.

Well, it is biblical for Israel and the covenant that God made at Sinai, right? So when we read about injustices and how God settles matters within the prophets, as he talks about the prophets, let's remember who was the original audience, what was the covenant that God made, and then we can think about how Christ has fulfilled the old covenant and what that means for how we live today.

Now, injustice is still injustice. But how we understand what that is takes a little bit of work. We're going to look at that, Lord willing, next time we get to meet together, talk about injustice. For homework, you can read in Isaiah chapter 1, Isaiah chapter 1, verses 13 through 17, and read about how Isaiah connects treating others or loving others.

So we're going to take a look at that next time. Any questions or thoughts as we close? Welcome back, everyone. Just in time. Good color.

Everyone look up.