Judah and Israel
In the record of Chronicles, particularly 2 Chronicles 11, we have the separation of Judah and Israel. With the introduction of a new form of religion, Jeroboam sets a disastrous direction before the children of Israel. And immediately, we see the devastating effects on the ecclesia for the faithful who were in the land. Jeroboam did the following:
- Set up his calves of worship;
- Changed the feast days;
- Changed the qualifications of who could be a spiritual leader in Israel;
- Made priests of the lowest of the land.
As a result, the priests, the Levites, and all who were faithful throughout the land, left Israel and fled to the south. Many years later we come to the end of the northern ten tribes of history in the land which demonstrates to us the powerful impact that this new religion, this tweaking of the truth that Jeroboam introduced, had on the nation. It was mainly as a result of this apostasy that Israel is carried away in captivity by the Assyrians.
“Then the king of Assyria came up throughout all the land, and went up to Samaria, and besieged it three years. In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria took Samaria, and carried Israel away into Assyria, and placed them in Halah and in Habor by the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes… And they left all the commandments of the Lord their God, and made them molten images, even two calves, and made a grove, and worshipped all the host of heaven, and served Baal. And they caused their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire, and used divination and enchantments, and sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the Lord, to provoke him to anger. Therefore the Lord was very angry with Israel, and removed them out of his sight: there was none left but the tribe of Judah only” (2Kgs 17:5-6, 16-18).
The new form of the “truth” that Jeroboam had introduced in the north had this devastating effect, and in fact we see it in all the kings of Israel, that they followed in the ways that Jeroboam had set up. “And the Lord rejected all the seed of Israel, and afflicted them, and delivered them into the hand of spoilers, until he had cast them out of his sight” (2Kgs 17:20). The word “rejected” there has a meaning of He “despised them.” God cast them off, but of course we know it was just for a time, which we see later with the prophet Ezekiel.
When it comes to the end of Judah’s history, we see that there was no remedy for the children of Israel in the two southern tribes. And now Hosea, who comes 150 years after the period in 2 Chronicles 11, would stand up in the north. Just before they would be carried away captive, and say: “Hear the word of the Lord, ye children of Israel: for the Lord hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land” (Hos 4:1). In the grand scheme of things, 150 years is not a long time. The truth being re-founded and recorded again by John Thomas was just over 150 years ago. In a very short period of time there can be a blossoming of faith and truth, but also it can be completely lost. It is a blessing that we are still able to hold on to that truth.
God pleaded with the children of Israel through all the prophets, as we see in Ezekiel again, but they would not return to Him. We know that there is a clear warning in all these things. Paul told us, “Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come” (1 Cor 10:11). These things were written for our learning, and we see how they ended — in a state where God despises the ecclesia and there is no knowledge of Him anymore. We realize the warning for us, that we can easily be deceived by changes to the truth. We can lose our love for the truth, and in the end lose the truth all together, as it was the case in the north, and eventually in the south as well. There was no way that God could bring salvation to the children of Israel. He tried and exhausted every means. The offer was there, the means by which they could have been saved was presented many times, but they continually rejected it. So there is a very clear warning and when we come to the prophet Ezekiel, his words to the people were: “And, lo, thou art unto them as a very lovely song of one that hath a pleasant voice, and can play well on an instrument: for they hear thy words, but they do them not” (Ezek 33:32). We will take a look at that aspect of Ezekiel as we move forward.
The message for us
So we want to consider how we prevent ourselves from falling into the same condemnation. How do we keep ourselves from making those same mistakes? If these things are recorded for our learning, then what have we learned, and what can we apply? Well the first thing we saw, when Jeroboam introduced his new form of worship, is that clearly they did not have a relationship with their Father. They worshiped the golden calves, they worshipped the host of heaven, they worshipped Baal — they worshipped everything else but God. They lost their love for their heavenly Father. They hadn’t worked on building a personal relationship with their God. That would be the first thing we learn as we look at Israel’s history and from our account here with the ecclesia of old. We need to work diligently on our relationship with our heavenly Father.
Any relationship we want to be successful requires work. We have to nurture that relationship, we have to build it up. And a key aspect in having a successful relationship is communication, good and open communication. Our communication with our heavenly Father has two fundamental aspects of living in the truth. These two forms of communication really are the two most basic elements of our life in the truth. If we hold onto nothing else but these two elements, we would still be doing very well in our walk, and form a stronger relationship with our heavenly Father. They seem like obvious statements but are extremely important ones.
The two ways of communication
The first form of communication is listening. Listen to our heavenly Father by reading His word. God says that He has shown us what is good, and what He requires of us, “…what does the Lord require of thee, but to fear the Lord thy God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul” (Deut 10:12). Our relationship with our heavenly Father starts with that fundamental part of communication — listening to God’s words. If not, like with relationships we have now, it will negatively impact how we see and interact with God. And as we go to the New Testament, if we don’t listen to the words of His son through the Gospels, our relationship with our God will start to diminish. We come together each Sunday, to listen to His word being read, to hear the words of exhortation, and to examine ourselves. Not only should we do these things on a Sunday morning, but continually, taking care to examine ourselves every night as the day ends.
Prayer is the other basic part of our relationship with God and our communication with our heavenly Father. We need to listen to Him by reading His word on a daily basis, and then He listens to us as we approach Him in prayer. The more in tune we are with God’s word the easier it is for us to pray. Praying to God, speaking to our heavenly Father through His son, can nurture that relationship. So at the end of every day, as we contemplate the things of the day, we contemplate how we have performed mentally and physically. We approach our heavenly Father in prayer, asking for forgiveness and asking for help as we start a new day the next morning. We gather on Sunday morning, we listen to the word being read, and the exhortation from it, and we are exhorted to look inwardly at ourselves. And the word of God needs to be used as a tool in our lives for self-examination.
The Pharisees who were masters of the Law, read the law daily. They had that communication, yet had strayed so far away. So it isn’t just reading and praying, there was an essential element that was missing in the lives of the masters of the Law in Christ’s day. They looked outward in everything that they did. So all of the reading they did, they applied to outward things. Things that they would demonstrate proudly in their lives, and things that they saw in other people’s lives. The key here, is to have successful communication with our heavenly Father, and a successful relationship with Him. We need to look inwardly when we read His word. When we come here on a Sunday morning and consider what our Lord Jesus Christ did for us, it causes us to contemplate our lives, not to think about other people’s lives, not how this person could benefit from reading of the word or from an exhortation, but to look inwardly. In fact the Pharisees, despite the appearance of being important, were spiritually small and were by no means great men, as they never grew spiritually. So we can be so-called masters of biblical things, we can be the prestigious travelling speaker, mastering all kinds of knowledge, yet we can totally miss the lesson because we never looked inwardly to apply it to ourselves. We have an opportunity to look into our own lives and see what we need to do to build and nurture our relationship with our heavenly Father.
The second element of our walk
The other element that will help us from falling into the same mistakes as the children of Israel are the relationships that we have with each other. We just considered our relationship with our heavenly Father, built up with reading, prayer, and looking inwardly. That is important, but it is equally as important as our relationships with each other:
“Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering; (for he is faithful that promised;) And let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works: Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching” (Heb 10:23-25).
The word “consider” there means to fix our minds upon. There is the commandment of the apostle Paul by divine inspiration, that we meet together on a regular basis, that we don’t forsake coming together around the table of our Lord, and that we fix our minds upon… one another. So that we might love, and do good works. It’s not just when we come together on a Sunday morning. There needs to be a relationship so that our minds are fixed one upon another. Not just in our family or house, but for all of our brothers and sisters in the ecclesia. Now how do we help each other? We help each other by virtue of coming here every week. Coming together at any opportunity we have to work on those relationships with each other.
He that covereth a transgression seeketh love; but he that repeateth a matter separateth very friends” (Prov 17:9). That doesn’t mean we ignore a transgression, but we go speak to one another in private. An aspect of confidentiality. We don’t take that conversation we had with that brother or sister and expose it to others in the ecclesia. We work with them, and if more help is needed then ask for permission first so that love and good works can continue. In fact the proverbs teach us that hatred is the motivation behind seeing a problem in another person’s life and not approaching them about that problem:
“When I bring the sword upon a land, if the people of the land take a man of their coasts, and set him for their watchman: If when he seeth the sword come upon the land, he blow the trumpet, and warn the people;” (Ezek 33:1-2).
So when we love each other, when our love is fixed upon one another, we will be watchmen for each other. It applies to every single one of us… Can you imagine if the watchmen here hadn’t been told what to watch for? Armies would come in with ease. There needs to be some instruction first. You can’t be unsure of what is right and wrong. You see, to be watchmen, we first have to work on the relationship we first talked about — the one with our heavenly Father. We are people of the Book, because if we are not people of the Book, then we don’t know what to watch for in our own lives and in the lives of one another. And this is not the outward looking that the Pharisees had, because they looked outwardly in judgment upon their brothers and sisters and upon others in the ecclesia. No, our looking out for one another comes in response to looking at ourselves first. It comes from recognizing who we are as we come together on a Sunday morning and come before our Lord Jesus Christ to contemplate his perfect life and recognize how far we have fallen short. From all this we gain a love and a desire to help those in the ecclesia who are struggling, and possibly struggling with the same thing we are struggling with. That’s the type of outward looking that came from a watchman, but we can’t effectively do that role if we don’t know what we are watching for. So with daily reading, meditation, and time spent around God’s word, we come to know the principles that should direct our lives, and the lives of those who we fix our minds upon — for love of one another. So as we see that day of the Lord coming, our minds being fixed on one another, and our desire to come together should grow immensely. We know that by the grace of our Lord, there are signs everywhere. They seem to come more often and more intense as the days go by. There is worry and stress everywhere. We know that the day of the Lord is almost here.
Our dangers are subtle
Our day is not full of Assyrians or Babylonians surrounding our city wall, our day is very subtle. Christ describes it in Luke that our day would be like Noah’s and Lot’s day — the earth filled with violence and filled with immoral things. Christ says it will be a great affliction to us. Because the motivation behind the violence and immorality we see everywhere all comes from focusing on self rather than focusing on God. It’s a pattern — we stop reading the word; we stop communicating with our heavenly Father; we stop being reminded of the wonderful love that has been shown to us, especially seen in these emblems, and we forget and no longer have any knowledge of the Lord. Now our priorities in life change. No longer is the truth, our spiritual family, or our relationship with God the priority, but our priorities in life become ourselves. Life all of a sudden becomes about daily living and self-serving, and when that happens the violence and immorality comes with it.
“Behold, I come as a thief. Blessed is he that watcheth, and keepeth his garments, lest he walk naked, and they see his shame” (Rev 16:15).
We have been given a garment, a covering, with the sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ. Through this we are able to have a covenant relationship with our heavenly Father, and can have our sins forgiven. How great is our God, how great is His mercy, grace, and longsuffering nature. We examine ourselves, we exhort one another with the wonderful hope that we have, not having lack of clarity from the platforms but speaking the Truth, and we renew our faith in the hope of things that will shortly come to pass. Also we help each other… our minds fixed on each other, reminding each other to watch, rejoicing together in the innumerable signs, and rejoicing in the victory that our Lord Jesus Christ will give us at his return.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One