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2 Kings 20 by Robert Dean
Series:Kings (2007)
Duration:1 hr 3 mins 49 secs

Pathology of a Nation's Collapse

 

This last week I had surgery in my left wrist for carpal tunnel problems. There have been ongoing problems with numbness and tingling in my left arm and doing some activities my whole arm would just go to sleep and become extremely numb to where I couldn't even move it, and that's from my shoulder blade down to the tip of my fingers. If I would talk on the phone and have my elbow bent in ten seconds I couldn't even move my arm. In the last couple of days I have been on the phone several times for 35-minutes to an hour and holding the phone to my ear with no problems whatsoever. That tells me two things: #1 the doctor correctly diagnosed the problem, and #2, the doctor correctly diagnosed the solution.

 

There is a principle there. It is not just enough to correctly diagnose the problem. There are all kinds of people from all kinds of worldviews and perspectives who can look at any number of situations and correctly diagnose a problem in a way that agrees with you. But it is foolish to think that if they can correctly diagnose the problem means that their solution is correct. That is particularly important at this time of the election and political cycle because there are all manner of people out there who can correctly analyze the problem in a way that resonates and vibrates in your soul, but their solution stinks. Their solution is worse, and in many cases their solution just leads to further problems and increased governmental tyranny. At the root of every issue in life is one's view of God. At the root of your choice is your view of God. I can take a person's view of God and if they are serious and consistent can pretty much tell you what their values are in a number of different areas and what they are going to do in a number of areas.

 

One of the greatest problems we have in this nation is an inability to think critically and to be able to critically evaluate the issues of life—whether we are talking about, for example, living our life on a day by day basis as a believer in terms of serving an employer in a manner that honors and glorifies the Lord (our ultimate Employer)—and whatever the area may be when it comes, especially to politics because this affects our whole society. This is fundamentally a part of our spiritual life, and as believers we are commanded to do all things to the glory of God and that includes in the voting booth. There are a lot of people today who get very, very uncomfortable with pastors who talk about anything that relates to politics, but it is the job of the pastor to not only teach the Word but also to show how the Word applies to the issues of the day, the issues that most significantly affect our lives—whether that has to do with marriage, family, child-raising, education, or broader issues such as economic theory or politics. We believe that the God who created the heavens, the earth and the seas and all that is in them, includes those immaterial laws related to ethics, to moral absolutes, to economic laws, to societal laws which we refer to as the divine institutions; and that God in His omniscience left nothing out, and His Word which claims to teach us how to think about everything doesn't leave out politics. Some people want some little pet area that they can surgically slice out of the Scriptures and say that this is an area that is neutral that God hasn't addressed. God has addressed everything! We have to come to an understanding of just how the Word of God addresses the issues of our lives and the issues of the day.

 

That is a setup for what we are going to be studying for all of the rest of 2 Kings. Starting with the chapter we are in now, 2 Kings 20, where we see two episodes—Hezekiah's sickness in terms of the sin unto death and his return back to God where God relieved him of that punishment, and the second which relates to the Babylonian envoys who come to Jerusalem where Hezekiah takes them into the temple and shows off all of his wealth, operating on arrogance, building himself up, totally apart from humility to the Lord. We might ask the question: why are these two events given in chapter twenty when both occur prior to the events of chapter nineteen which describes the deliverance of Judah and Jerusalem from the invasion of Sennacherib? Why didn't the author put these in chronological order so it would be a lot easier for us to understand? Because we have to understand what happens in these two episodes are connected to each other. The second episode, which is the real issue in the chapter, is connected to the first chapter; if we don't know about the first episode we don't know why the second episode occurred. What happens in the second episode sets us up for the coming destruction and judgment on the southern kingdom of Judah and the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, because of the arrogance and hostility toward God, because of the disobedience of the people and their idolatry. We can't capture everything that is related to what happens in terms of the Babylonian invasion (605-586 BC) without understanding this chapter. So it is a setup to help us understand why the things that happened historically over the next one hundred and fifteen years happened. 

 

What we see in this chapter is really the definition of the basic problem that Israel is facing. Hezekiah personifies that problem. The problem that Hezekiah has as a person is a problem that we often have as individuals. The problem that Hezekiah has as an individual is the problem that Israel has had as a united kingdom, as a divided kingdom, and is still manifest in the southern kingdom of Judah. We can define it in one word: arrogance.

 

But arrogance is one of those words that often becomes a little too familiar to us and we become a little too comfortable with it. Arrogance is sort of the mirror twin of the other aspect or component in Satan's thinking. Arrogance glorifies self; arrogance is focused on the individual, on me, on what I want, all about my agenda, what makes me happy. Arrogance is all about avoiding personal responsibility toward God and making me, the individual, the ultimate definer, the ultimate determiner for the issues in life. But when we operate on arrogance we always run into a little problem, a little conflict, and that is that God says something that isn't exactly what we want to hear. That immediately generates something called antagonism. So arrogance and antagonism are these mirror twins—arrogance towards God, arrogance in relation to self and antagonism in relationship to God. Whenever we are operating in arrogance we are also operating in terms of antagonism toward God. We may camouflage it, dress it up, suppress it in unrighteousness, but the more we suppress it and stuff it down in the garbage can of our soul and some body comes along and just mentions, e.g. like asking an evolutionist, Is it possible that evolution is wrong? Their anger goes from 1 to 10: Why do you want to bring God into this? That is the real issue: they don't want to be personally accountable to God; they want to run life their own way. So whenever we tweak our arrogance and the fact that we have stuffed all this stuff down into the garbage can of our soul by suppressing truth in unrighteousness, whenever we are challenged by truth and something starts to bubble up from the bottom of the garbage can of our soul, then we just go ballistic because we have worked so hard to stuff that stuff in the garbage can and put the lid on it. And it just comes back, and so we see this again and again and again because it is still God's world, God is still in charge, and the truth as He has defined it is still the truth of reality.

 

When people come face to face with reality, especially when it gives them a bloody nose, their reaction is anger and their reaction is hostility. That is ultimately why we see the contentiousness that has developed over the past twenty years in the political sphere. It is because, as it has been called, a culture war but it is more profound than that. It is a spiritual conflict because there are those who are aligned in their thinking with the truth and reality as it is, and there are those who aren't; and those who aren't are consistently suppressing the truth. As our culture has been on a pagan trajectory for the last 125-150 years what happens is that those who are promoting the pagan agenda in many different shapes and forms have thought that they have had victory within their grasp. Then what happens is you get a 911 and you get a president who is willing to go to war, and all of a sudden they think they are losing everything and they press the political panic button. Then there is a ricochet off to the other side and they are not always correct either because we have to remember that evil is always multi-faceted. There can be evil on the left and there can be evil on the right and often what we see is just a battle between two manifestations of evil. Evil in terms of the sin nature can manifest itself in antinomianism as well as in terms of legalism. Antinomianism is against law. These are the ones who just want to do everything without any regulations, without any kind of restrictions, and just not have any accountability whatsoever and do just whatever they want to do. They are the free spirits that don't want any kind of regulation on their soul (I'm talking ethically).

 

Then there are those who want to regulate everything ethically, such as the Pharisees, and those are the religious legalists. They are both manifestations of evil. It is not one is right and the other is wrong; they are both wrong. We can see the same manifestations in political parties, so just because there are issues that one party or one individual who is in one party agrees with or another it doesn't mean that that party is always right. There are many in both parties and most in some parties that are just so far out of bounds that we can't give them any credibility whatsoever. But just because somebody is a member of one party that generally we think is right doesn't mean they always are. The ultimate criteria for us is not party affiliation, it is the Word of God. And the Word of God tells us and defines for us what right and wrong is all about and what the real issues in life are. This is what we learn from a passage such as this.

 

In the last part of this chapter, beginning in verse twelve we have the episode where Merodach-baladan, the son of the king of Babylon—and we know from that indication when this occurs: about the time Sennacherib begins to come into Judah and is not really focused on Jerusalem but it dealing with the Philistines and Phoenicians and some of those areas—sends letters and a present to Hezekiah because he heard that Hezekiah had been sick. The episode from vv. 12-21 is tied to the fact that he heard what happened in vv. 1-11, so one of the reasons we need to know about his sickness is that we know that is the occasion for Merodach-baladan sending these envoys to Jerusalem. He sends a magnificent present and tribute and what it does is puff up Hezekiah in terms of his own arrogance and self-absorption, because here is this powerful team that is complimenting him and sending this tribute. So all of a sudden Hezekiah is back out of fellowship, he is just all full of himself. He wants to show how great and how powerful he is, and how wealthy he is.

 

In verse 13 NASB "Hezekiah listened to them, and showed them all his treasure house, the silver and the gold and the spices and the precious oil and the house of his armor and all that was found in his treasuries. There was nothing in his house nor in all his dominion that Hezekiah did not show them." That tells us this is before he has to pay this big tribute to Sennacherib; he still has money in the bank.

 

Preview of coming attractions: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah and Hosea and Amos are all writing at approximately the same time: from 700 down to 586 BC. And they castigate the Israelites for their self-absorption and their refusal to do justice to those in society—biblical justice as defined by the law. What we find is that the theologically and politically liberal crowd, which loves to talk about social justice, goes to these passages to try to justify their position, that the government should be supporting people, that is should be providing a welfare system, should be taking care of the widows, the orphans and all these other things. But the trouble is that is not what the text says.

The text isn't a condemnation of the government of Judah or Israel, it is a condemnation of the people because it was the individual person's responsibility to take care of the elderly, the sick, the orphans, and those who could not work or provide for themselves; it wasn't the government's responsibility. The individual people had become focused on themselves, their own personal pleasure and personal prosperity. That is why they got sucked into the fertility religions. And because they got sucked into that they were violating all of the commandments that are in the Mosaic law related to loving your neighbor as yourself. It doesn't say the government is supposed to love your neighbor with your money, it says you are to love your neighbor as yourself. It is your responsibility to take care of those God has put within your circle of experience, to help them with whatever resources God has given you. 

When the government comes in and steals the money from you under some program of pseudo compassion to take care of everyone what they do is they limit your ability to fulfill God's mandate that we are to take care of those in our periphery. Now we don't have the resources because they are being squandered on some government socialist program in Washington. By the way, social justice is just a buzz word or code word for Marxism, so whenever we hear that we know that this person is promoting a socialist, Marxist program.

 

Hezekiah has gone into self-absorption here so Isaiah is going to bring out the revelatory sledge hammer and wake him up. So he comes to him and starts asking questions, always a good way to get to the truth. The divine critique. 2 Kings 20:14 NASB "Then Isaiah the prophet came to King Hezekiah and said to him, 'What did these men say, and from where have they come to you?' And Hezekiah said, 'They have come from a far country, from Babylon.'"

 

2 Kings 20:16 NASB "Then Isaiah said to Hezekiah, 'Hear the word of the LORD. [17] 'Behold, the days are coming when all that is in your house…' wealth, possessions, everything you have just glorified in and bragged about … 'and all that your fathers have laid up in store to this day will be carried to Babylon; nothing shall be left,' says the LORD.' That is a great prophesy in about 701 BC and it is going to be fulfilled in about one hundred years—three invasions from Babylon, 605, 593 and 586 are going to just decimate the southern kingdom of Judah. [18] 'Some of your sons who shall issue from you, whom you will beget, will be taken away; and they will become officials in the palace of the king of Babylon.'" The sons were Daniel and others who were with him in that first deportation, sons of the aristocracy.

2 Kings 20:19 NASB "Then Hezekiah said to Isaiah, 'The word of the LORD which you have spoken is good'… There is humility here, he has just been confronted with the truth of God's Word and he responds appropriately in terms of humility and accepting God's Word; he doesn't react in anger or bitterness. Hezekiah was a true spiritual giant and leader but he also had as many true spiritual giants do some great flaws—because we are all sinners. '…For he thought, 'Is it not so, if there will be peace and truth in my days?'" See, that little arrogance comes up—as long as this doesn't happen when I am alive I guess we can get away with it. Just put the consequences off for a couple of dozen years, let the next generation pay for our trillion-dollar debt. As long as I don't have to do it as long as I am in office, that's great. Haven't we heard that before? How modern Hezekiah is!

2 Kings 20:20 NASB "Now the rest of the acts of Hezekiah and all his might, and how he made the pool and the conduit and brought water into the city, are they not written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah? [21] So Hezekiah slept with his fathers, and Manasseh his son became king in his place." That is when we hear the heavy things start to play as we introduce the most evil king in the history of the southern kingdom of Israel, Manasseh. He is going to reign for 55 years and he is much worse than his grandfather, Ahaz.

Ahaz goes back to the sins of Ahab and Jezebel in the northern kingdom. He is going to introduce the worst of the worst religions in all of the history of humanity, the fertility religions of Baal and the Asherah, and the human sacrifice of the worship of Chemosh where there was an infant sacrifice, where parents would bring their babies to be immolated (burned alive) in the arms of this idol where there was an extremely hot fire in order to placate the god and somehow get blessing. In other words, in order to trade with the gods for prosperity, for money, for wealth and their security they would sacrifice their children.

2 Kings 16:2 NASB "Ahaz {was} twenty years old when he became king, and he reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem; and he did not do what was right in the sight of the LORD his God, as his father David {had done.} [3] But he walked in the way of the kings of Israel, and even made his son pass through the fire, according to the abominations of the nations whom the LORD had driven out from before the sons of Israel." He had his son immolated in the fiery arms of Moloch/Chemosh. [4] "He sacrificed and burned incense on the high places and on the hills and under every green tree." This sets us up for then fact that he has compromised in the worst way at the most foundational level of thought, and that he had become a traitor to God in Israel. In Israel choosing another god or religion isn't just a matter of personal choice, as it is so, often framed today. We really have to pay attention to that because that is what people want to say. They say it's just like you want a vanilla ice cream and you want chocolate ice cream; whatever, as long as you're happy. But if you don't want any ice cream, that's fine, just whatever you're happy with. It really has no consequence unless maybe you eat too much or you've become some kind of a radical. Of course, they try to paint fundamentalists as radicals, and anybody who believes in the Bible is taking things way, way too seriously.

But as Bible believers, as those who believe that there really is a personal, infinite God who created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them we believe there are implications of that reality that extend to every area of our life, and that that has been revealed to us by that God in His Word. So that when somebody makes a choice for another god, even though they have the freedom to do so, that choice isn't as simple as just choosing chocolate ice cream instead of vanilla ice cream. It brings with it an entire host of beliefs and ideas and values that are a hundred per cent antagonistic to the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob and all that He has revealed to us. Those values that they hold, even though at some point they may appear to be similar or the same or complimentary—after all the most pagan priest of Baal is going to look at an oak tree and say that's an oak tree, and you can agree with him, but that doesn't mean that the oak tree is the same as your view of the oak tree. Just because somebody can identify a problem doesn't mean they have the correct solution. Even though you may stand up and cheer at the way they define the problem it doesn't mean that you want to have anything to do with their solution, because their solution is going to come out of their whole worldview. So we have to understand a lot of things and have to evaluate a lot of issues whenever it comes to the voting booth. It means we have to be knowledgeable, we have to study, we have to read, we have to watch the right news, listen to various different t pundits; we have to study, think, get out of our little shells of comfort and prosperity. Because we are not living in  a world like we lived in for the last forty or fifty years of our lives where we could afford to complacently go about the issues of our lives and just go into the voting booth and say this guy looks good, this guy looks good, I've heard his name before. We can't do that; too many people have been doing it, or they haven't voted because they don't think it matters.

I think that we are in the third most significant time in the history of this nation. The first was at the time of the American war for independence, the second was during the time of the war of northern aggression, and the third is now and that the very life and future of the history of this Constitutional recovery is at stake. And there are a lot of people on both sides of the aisle who are using Constitutional verbiage. Just because they use language you like doesn't mean it; go look at their voting record, look at their belief systems. Learn about this because if the wrong people get elected you won't have the freedoms much longer. Just because they talk a lot about freedom, just because people talk the talk, it doesn't mean they really believe that; and at election time everybody wants to sound like a patriotic Constitutionalist, but that doesn't mean that they are. Maxine: "Voting is like choosing your favorite mosquito out of a swarm."

A lot of times the choices we make are not choices between good and bad, sometimes it is between bad or worse. We just have to be careful. How do we make these decisions? As a believer you have five basic criteria. It basically comes down to understanding the divine institutions. Divine institution is a term that has been used by Christians to speak of certain absolute social structures, and in Scripture these social structures take precedent over economic structures. Today we are all concerned about the economy and jobs and these kinds of things but when we study the Mosaic law what God says is that our belief, our theology, is more determinative of the health of the economy of a nation than our understanding of sound economic policy. We have been so secularized we think that understanding causative issues in history and causative issues in economics and in politics ultimately boils down to what can be measured in the laboratory of life or history. That is a lie, because what God says in the Mosaic law to Israel is, If you disobey me and you go after other gods then I am going to bring these judgments on you and you are going to lose jobs, your crops will not come to fertility, you are going to lose money, I am going to defeat you militarily. It doesn't matter ultimately how much technology we have, how much money we have, how much education we have; if we are divorced from the truth then God says that will destroy all these other things. So the ultimate issue is always going to be God.

The divine institutions come out of our understanding of Scripture and they apply to everybody, every nation, believer and unbeliever, Christian, Moslem, whatever. If we honor these institutions there will be a measure of stability and success in a nation because this is how God structures human beings and society. So these are absolute social structures established by God, embedded within the social structure of the human race, and thus these are for all the human race and they are unbreakable realities. Modern paganism rejects them at their core and looks at these institutions as simply pragmatic byproducts of man's psycho-social evolution and their cultural conventions. So we can change our definition of marriage, we can change our emphasis on human responsibility. Then we are not individually responsible to an external creator God, we are just responsible for one another, sins aren't individual acts that violate the character of God but they are social mistakes that hurt humanity. That is what sin is and everybody is basically good instead of what the Scripture says, that it is basically evil.

The first three divine institutions are individual responsibility, and we are responsible to God. Each institution has an authority. The authority of the first divine institution is God. We are all accountable to God for everything in life. We are accountable to what God's commands are to us and part of that includes labor and responsibility. Adam was put in the garden to work the garden before sin ever cast its shadow on the garden. He had responsibility, he labored but not in a toilsome way. Toil gets added to it as a result of sin, but before that he had things to do. God assigned him tasks and this is the whole basis for understanding free market economic theory. It's personal responsibility and accountability for what you do, and you get out of what you produce what then benefits you and builds wealth in your life.

The second divine institution is marriage; the authority is husband. When the authority becomes the wife or marriage breaks down due to the ease of divorce laws, or because it is redefined as marriage between same sex partners, this will have devastating consequences in the culture. Then the family. We have seen the black family just decimated by welfare over the last fifty years. Marxism within the black community as a result of the thinking of the NAACP has devastated the black community and the black family, because the divine institution of the family got redefined by the federal government in terms of the welfare system and how that was applied. That is a doctoral dissertation in and of itself. Most people have no idea about that, and because they don't have knowledge the nation has gone through the horrible consequences. Somewhere Hosea said: "When there is no knowledge the people perish."

The next two divine institutions are government and nation—individual national identity. These represent two different groups of institutions. The first three were all established before the fall, before there was sin. They are designed to promote productivity and to advance civilization. If we don't honor those three we cannot see productivity, we cannot see economic expansion, we cannot see civilization secure. But then after the fall we have to restrain sin. Evil was rampant before the flood of Noah, so after the flood of Noah there were two institutions established. The first was human government. The institution isn't inherently evil but its practice becomes so because it is practiced by fallen human beings, so government has to be limited as much as possible. The fifth divine institution was set up some 2-300 years after the flood at the tower of Babel, so these must be understood as two distinct institutions. They were both designed to restrain evil. It is only when evil is restrained that productivity and prosperity can take place. But when evil is allowed to flourish then productivity will diminish and tyranny will increase. When the federal government of this nation increases in size: the larger the government gets, the larger the deficit becomes, the fewer the freedoms are; the smaller the government is the greater freedoms will be, that is just political reality.

What happens when government grows beyond its stated size it begins to assault the first three divine institutions. Because either you are going to be individually accountable for your life and your decisions to God or you are going to be accountable for them to the government. When the government is outside of the Biblical bounds it is in competition with God and has a messianic complex. The federal government under the progressive political philosophy since the late 19th century has had a messiah complex: the government can solve the problem. This is a core belief that is in contrast with a constitutional belief that government must be limited. This is why when we get into debates with people over specific political issues that may come up there are more fundamental issues that are involved. Limited government versus unlimited presumes and presupposes total depravity and the evil of man, or not. That is where the discussion needs to be. The discussion is not over individual or specific issues. We need to debate those but the only reason they come up and become sources of such heated argumentation is because there are more profound issues at stake.

Political/national or individual actions: three cases in point right now in which we recognize we have a problem. And nobody debates this problem. It goes back to the opening illustration: most people can identify a problem. One problem we are facing in the city right now is the problem of drainage. Another example at national level is the debate over the improvement of health care health care costs. We have a serious problem with rising health care costs in this country; that is the problem. Everybody can agree to that, it is the solution to that where the debate lies, not in identifying the problem. Another issue is global warming. We can all agree there is hard data that there is warming that is occurring and we can agree that there are cycles, fluctuations of earth's temperature. The issue is what causes it and what the solution to that is. That is where the debate lies. But what happens is that those who are very sophisticated in their debating techniques like to shift it to just identifying the problem and staying away from the real root issues that caused the debate and disagreement over the solutions.

Whenever we propose one solution or another, e.g. proposition #1: relating to the creation of the dedicated funding source to enhance, improve and renew drainage systems and streets. I think we can all agree that that is a good thing—to have a better drainage system and to renew the one that we have. The proposition is: "Shall the city charter of the city of Houston be amended to provide for the enhancement, improvement and ongoing renewal of Houston's drainage and streets by creating a dedicated pay-as-you-go fund for drainage and streets?" See how innocuously that is worded? Isn't that a good thing! Let's all hold hands, sing, and go home and vote for this! It is what is not said that is the problem. This is where critical thinking skills come in. In most political issues the legislators are crafty enough to put things down in a way that we read them and say what is wrong with that? Well it is not what is said in many cases that is wrong, it is what is not said. Who is going to be assessed for the financing of this? How much is the assessment going to be? What are the regulations going to be for the assessment? This is just an open-ended opportunity for the city government to come and take as much money as they want from every individual and organization, including non-profit churches and schools. Once they get their foot in the door on this, once they establish this as a legal precedent, you have basically reached out and taken the handcuffs from city government and have chained yourself to the city government as a slave. And you have taken away very seductively the non-profit, non-tax status of every church in the city.

In the case of this proposition there are many people who will read it and say, Isn't that nice, we are going to solve the flood problem; we are going to have better streets; let's just give away our freedom. This is a serious issue; this is tyranny in action, a direct assault on First Amendment rights which is the establishment of freedom for worship and religious expression. This will limit a church. In fact, it is limiting education. It is horrible, poorly-written legislation, almost as bad as the healthcare legislation

The problem isn't the solution, that some things need to be fixed, it is that when they start writing the solutions there are so many loopholes and so many things that are left unstated or open-ended that you can drive truckloads of Gestapo troops through to enslave the population. So this kind of thing has to stop, whether it is talking about something like a local ordinance or healthcare or global warming.

The real issue we are expected to ignore is: is it legal, and is it right to do this? That implies some subterranean issues: how do we know what right or wrong is? Now we are getting into some real heavy discussions. That is why some people in this country end up on one side of the aisle and other people on the other side of the aisle and the same people consistently end up on the same sides of the aisle over different issues. It is because of these two categories: How do you know right or wrong and what is your understanding of ultimate reality? This is where the debate is; this is why we have these culture wars. It is because you have people operating on a worldview that doesn't take into account any of the divine institutions.

The battle takes place here on epistemology and basically on the ultimate issue of God. So we have to think these things through. These are all logically-related categories and you start with God and you are going to end up trying to understand how you should act and move on particular issues like this.

In Israel Hezekiah changed everything. He shifted back to God who created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them, and cleaned everything up, but he didn't really change the hearts of the people. The problem in this country is not that we have elected officials that dominate Congress and that are in the Whitehouse, but that we have a nation of people who elected them. The problem is with the people is that they elected these leaders. We get what we deserve because we have a culture that has denied the truth in terms of Biblical Christianity. For the last 50-70 years we have been operating on pagan ideas of God and pagan ideas of how we know truth, and thus we get pagan ethics and pagan political decisions. We can change out everybody in Washington and we can put in every fiscal conservative that we can think of and we haven't solved the problem. That is because the problem is a spiritual problem; we are just dealing with symptoms. The only real solution is a solution that takes us back to the absolute truths of Scripture.

Deuteronomy 4:5, 6 NASB "See, I have taught you statutes and judgments just as the LORD my God commanded me, that you should do thus in the land where you are entering to possess it. So keep and do {them,} for that is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples who will hear all these statutes and say, 'Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.'"

The principle was that if Israel did this they would be so prosperous they would be blessed by God to such an extent that people around the world would come and look at them with their mouths open and say, How in the world do they do that? And their prosperity and their blessing wasn't related to the fact that they had a good constitution but because they had a divinely-given, divinely-inspired constitution. When you throw that out what you are left with is just personal opinion and inclination. This was warned about by one of our founding fathers who said: "When a man's will and pleasures is his only rule and guide what safety can there be either for him or against him but in the point of the sword?"

We have to have an absolute, external value system otherwise it just comes down to my personal opinion against yours, and that leads to conflict. [Words indistinct] of the Supreme Court in the late nineteenth century said that the Christian concept of right and wrong—and that would be the Judeo-Christian concept because all of this is really grounded in the Hebrew Scriptures of the Old Testament—or right and justice motivates every rule of equity. It is the guide by which we dissolve domestic frictions and the rule by which all legal controversies are settled. Of course they don't believe that anymore and that's why we have this cultural friction today.

But is there hope? Yes, there is always hope. Scripture says, Jeremiah 17:7 NASB "Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD And whose trust is the LORD. [8] For he will be like a tree planted by the water, That extends its roots by a stream And will not fear when the heat comes; But its leaves will be green, And it will not be anxious in a year of drought Nor cease to yield fruit….[13] O LORD, the hope of Israel…" That is the only hope; the Lord.

When we go back and look at what we have been studying in Kings there was Ahaz who was evil, but there was hope because Hezekiah came to turn the people back to the Lord—superficially because it didn't take root in their hearts. Then there was Manasseh. Now we have to decide. Are we living in a time of Ahaz where there is going to be a real change and real hope? But even though the administration changes as it did between Ahaz and Hezekiah, unless there is a heart change of the people, if there is a superficial change then all we are going to do is go back, like Peter says, to a dog returning to his vomit; we are just going to go back and have Manasseh and it will be even worse.

Our only hope is the Lord, even if we go through horrible circumstances. So many of us are just like the culture around us. We are so tied to our personal prosperity and comfort and security. We just want to live our lives and not be involved with all of this garbage. We think that if it is all going to fall apart that God somehow lost control. God never lost control. Look at Daniel, look at Shadrach, Meshcach and Abed-nego; they all got transported as captives back to Babylon. Their lives are completely turned over, they lose everything that they had, but they knew that God had a plan for their lives. If things don't go well in this nation and it goes into a grease skid into complete collapse we ought to be the happiest people in the world because we have hope. Our hope isn't based on what happens in this temporal world, our hope is based on the eternality of God and in the truth of His promise.

Lamentations 3:21 NASB "This I recall to my mind [doctrine], Therefore I have hope. [22] The LORD'S lovingkindnesses indeed never cease, For His compassions never fail. [23] {They} are new every morning; Great is Your faithfulness."

He is the only hope, and He is the only one who is going to provide any measure of stability. Without Him it doesn't matter what happens at the next election, but with Him it does; it can make a difference. We dare not put our hope in man. Our hope is in Jesus Christ; it is not in a political solution.