Wednesday, March 27, 2024 PM

5. Now, we've been talking about the prophets, trying to understand what a prophet is.

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. 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 what God was concerned about.

God was concerned about that which was to come, to reveal the ultimate expression of His image in you, and to say, this is what

God wants you to do, which you were 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.

The image of God is in idolatry, because idolatry is wrong.

To love God supremely. 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 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 a 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, 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 that was going on in the life of Judah during the days of idolatry.

In verse 20, it's who put darkness 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 worshiped 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 to proof, 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 a wise in which

I don't need to hear from outside of my own lived experience or the reservoir of my own understanding 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 one on that terrible exchange, they exchanged 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.

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 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 in the Bible 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 their 1st and 2nd Chronicles. But in the

Bible they talked about 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 Joshua, Judges, because they were written by prophets.

Number one, Israel. The writing prophet was dealing with Israel based on the covenant he had made with them in Mount Sinai.

God out those books.

So when we think about what the prophets have, 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 this road.

You know what will happen.

The same thing happens in books like this. 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 literal. 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 had a special child.

And he had some of those, the

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 the life of Samson.

But just like Samson in all his ways, so also Israel's.

We also see sexual chaos in the tribes in Judges chapters 19 through 21, some rough reading.

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?

Chapter 17 and 18, idolatry that is wrong. But 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 hung.

Of course, injustice is a huge thing 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, who's in 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.

He was very fat. How did Eli get fat, by the way?

When every cut of the sacrifices that were accorded to the priest 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. These were stories, 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, it says here to 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.

Ammon raped, Absalom himself laid with his father's concubines publicly.

Look at what happened to Abel and Isaiah 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 in prophets, they were thinking about Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and then the scroll of the 12.

That's all the minor prophets, as we call them, from Hosea on to Malachi.

And these prophets had a lot to say about injustice. 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 just and filled

Jerusalem with blood from one gate to the other. Generations have to be atoned for and paid for by God.

Now, what they want to bring current

American experience and say, our great -grandparents and great -great -grandparents did.

Current generation must now pay for. Have you heard anything like that?

It's called reparations, right? Look, we must tear down all statutes of all these people who lived 150 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, right?

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, okay?

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, thoughts as we close? Welcome back, everyone, just in time.