Introducing 2 Kings (Part 1)

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Thank you for turning out on Saturday morning for our training day for Central Focus. Welcome to— so who’s new amongst us for the first time in Central Focus? All sitting together, excellent. Welcome to you. And hi, Caroline.

Just a couple of practical things before we get stuck into Two Kings and so forth. Um, you’ll have noticed that we asked you on your way in to take a Catering with Care and a Safeguarding for Small Group Leaders. Let me say briefly about those 2. Catering with Care is really a miracle of miniaturisation. This used to be a whole book you had to read to satisfy our legal responsibility to serve food safely, and some genius has got it down to a single sheet of A4.

So count your blessings, this is much shorter than it was. But please do take it seriously. Um, obviously we serve lots of meals here, and if we were to food poison everyone one week, uh, that would be a bad thing to do in terms of loving our church family, and also a bad thing to do legally. So, um, if you could just read that and then sign to say that you have read it, um, that would be very kind. Um, and then the safeguarding thing— if you were here, um, for the Small Group Leaders evening, you’ll have heard Charlie speak about this.

Um, it’s a slightly grim topic to have to address but a necessary one. So we are responsible as a church to deal appropriately with any information that we’re given about abuse of any kind. And that might be child abuse— I think that’s the category we’re familiar with— but it might also be historical abuse. So somebody talks to you just in the course of a one-to-one catch-up chat and they mention something that happened years ago, either that they might have done or that was done to them. And the moment someone says that to you, you have a responsibility to deal with that information correctly.

As you’ll know, the church has a history of dealing with that badly. Certainly some parts of the church have a history of doing it badly, and we need to make sure that we get it right. So you’ll see just some guidelines on this It’s not very pleasant reading, it’s a very difficult subject. Essentially, the headlines are, if you’re told about abuse of any kind, either that the person might have committed it or been a victim of it, you must listen carefully to what’s said. Don’t push for information, don’t put ideas in people’s minds about what might have happened, but do make a note of what’s said.

And don’t promise confidentiality. Explain to them that you will have to pass it on. And if it relates to Centre Focus on Sunday Morning, you need to tell me about it. But if it’s abuse, an allegation of abuse that involves me, then you need to tell Andrew Wales, who is the Church Safeguarding Officer. All this information is on the leaflet.

Again, we need to take it seriously. Please read it and please sign to say that you have read it. And again, I think it wouldn’t be a surprise if this actually did involve some of us here, so don’t think of it as a purely theoretical thing. A group this size, there probably will be people who’ve been victims or perpetrators of stuff, even if it’s long in the past, and it may come up, so please deal with that appropriately.

Also, by way of housekeeping, you’ll see on the back of these screens we’ve put the very provisional what your group might look like this year. It’s very provisional because people are notorious for not signing up, so we don’t actually know about everyone’s intentions. Also because we haven’t yet had your feedback, so don’t think this is sort of set in stone and presented to you as a fait accompli. We’d love input from you. In particular, we’ve done a bit of rejigging of the 4 PM groups.

And I’d be grateful if the 4 PM group leaders— I think you know who you are— could get together just to discuss how to make those groups of a more even size. At the moment, I think Charlie’s got about 2 group members, so maybe you could just get together with him and discuss what might be best between you. But also, across other groups, I’m very happy to take suggestions or comments. Group members won’t know about these lists yet. It’s only here for us, and we can just try and get them right before term starts.

Also, we’d love to recruit people into Central Focus. So if your group’s a bit small, that’s quite a good thing because there’s room to grow. And I’m just conscious that there’s lots of people in St Helen’s for whom small groups still aren’t part of their normal experience for a variety of reasons. So last year I remember a couple who were nervous of coming because he’d had a stroke and wasn’t so quick-thinking and thought it would be an embarrassment. We assured them that we promised that they would never be put on the spot.

They came, they absolutely loved it, they’ve been coming for the whole year. So somebody else who just never got round to coming, or somebody else whose life circumstances changed from a time when they couldn’t come and they’d never re-evaluated. I think there’s lots of people like that across St Helen’s, and probably the way that they’ll find their way into groups is by our inviting of them. And so think of who you know, get your group members to think of who they know, and let’s try and grow the groups in that way. Well, we come to our morning.

We’re going to spend the first hour and a half or so on 2 Kings and how to understand the Bible. We do that every year. I’ve tried to make it a little bit different each year so that it’s not just a repeat. Some things will be familiar, some things will be new, and that way both old-timers and first-timers will have something, hopefully, to take away. It’s going to be interactive.

I’m really happy to be interrupted if anything’s unclear, so please do stop me and quiz me. But it’d be great to begin, as we should begin all Bible study, with prayer. And rather than just a quick prayer, let’s have a little time of prayer for 5 minutes or so. Why don’t we turn to greet one another. So let’s ask for God to bless today.

Let’s ask him to help give us understanding of his word and humility before it. And pray that we’ll be attentive through the morning with our coffee and sugar rush that he’s provided. Let’s just pray and we’ll make the best use of the day that way.

Okay, let’s draw together. Well, as you know, if you’ve ever been on a training weekend that I’ve led, I like to begin the Saturday morning with a quiz, or you could call it an exam, but that sounds frightening, so we’ll call it a quiz. I was debating whether to do this. I was talking to Kyle about it even this morning. I was debating it, but I think we will because it’s traditional.

It’s meant to encourage you, so we’ll do it in groups rather than individually. Otherwise, you’ll, you know, your failure to have read Two Kings over the summer will be exposed. But let’s get into teams. Which means the 2 or 3 people around you, and there’s going to be a few questions on your memory of 2 Kings. So firstly, can you name 3 evil kings in 2 Kings?

There’s quite a lot to choose from. Can you name 3 between you?

You’re not allowed Bibles, by the way.

Okay, secondly, can you name 3 miracles performed by Elisha?

Elisha. Question 3: Can you name 3 agents of God’s judgement against his people? 3 agents of God’s judgement.

They can either be Israelite or foreign.

Can you name 3 agents of God’s judgments against his people?

And finally, can you name 3 good eggs in the book of 2 Kings?

Okay. Let’s hear some suggestions. I hope you— obviously if they’re obscure answers, I don’t trust my own exhaustive knowledge of Tea Kings to be able to even mark it, but let’s try. So hopefully you’ve gone for famous ones. So firstly, 3 evil kings.

You could have chosen Pekahaya.

Or Pekah, or Jotham, or Zechariah, or in fact almost anyone. Some suggestions? Amaziah, Hoshea, Zedekiah, Jehoash. Oh, interesting, Hezekiah is down as an evil king by a synthe. Although he’s better than some.

Yeah, okay. Good, so quite a lot of kings basically. Just name a king and they’re probably evil with a couple of exceptions. Yep. Can you name 3 miracles of Elisha?

Healing water. Yeah. Yep, definitely. Shunammite woman. What did he do for her?

Yeah. Oil and her son. Very good, that’s 3. Any others?

Naaman the Syrian, whose leprosy cured. Yeah. Say again? Axe head flating. It was borrowed, moreover.

Multiplying bread, parting the water. Excellent. Laser cheese from— good, good knowledge of Elijah. I think we’re gonna, we’re gonna start well at least in 2 things. Um, how about, what was the 3rd question?

Uh, 3 agents of God’s judgement.

Jehu. Yeah. Nebuchadnezzar. Very good. Zael.

Yep. Sennacherib. Yeah, although he doesn’t succeed. Yeah, okay, good. And finally, this is harder, but good eggs?

Josiah. Here’s the good guy.

Simpe and Simon can debate Hezekiah over coffee. Yeah, good in parts. Yep.

Elijah. Yeah, right at the beginning. And Elisha? Jehoiada? Quite a good little secret mission he has.

Yeah, good, excellent. So, um, hopefully by the end of— I mean, one of the exciting things I think about studying a new book of the Bible is that at the end of term those questions will be, you know, patronisingly easy. We actually will know another book of the Bible well. Um, and I, I— one of the things I enjoy about Centre Focus is sort of adding a book to my personal biblical canon. I know in God’s canon there’s 66 books, but in Andrew Satcher’s canon, not so many of those are at my fingertips.

But some of them are. So if you ask me now to explain a chapter of 2 Samuel, I probably could, because we spent the whole year working our way through it, or almost a year working through it. Or 1 Kings, or part of Luke. And I love that, that as you go through your Christian life, you can add books to your at-your-fingertips canon. And this year, 2 Kings, however familiar it is now, will become more familiar.

But also an encouragement to make it more familiar before you necessarily get to those studies. I know that’s difficult to say, and even for myself, I hear the hypocrisy of it. I know the first 8 chapters pretty well. That’s as far as Ali and I have got preparing our notes, getting ahead. And I know the second half of the book much less well.

But actually there are things in the second half of the book that inform the first half of the book and vice versa. So really, if you can get ahead and get an idea of the whole before we zoom in the parts, it is going to help. So be encouraged to have a go, maybe just reading ahead in your quiet time, trying— even if you’re not trying to read to understand everything, just read it to get familiar a couple of times. We’re going to begin then with getting our bearings. Now some of you recognise this diagram from last year’s training weekend and from last year’s review of 1 Kings, and here it is again, partly because it’s quite difficult to draw this, and so I wanted to get the best use out of it, and partly because I think it’s just helpful to reinforce.

Here’s a diagram that you could reproduce yourself, and after I repeat it endlessly, you’ll know it well. So firstly, the storey of the Bible in 3 sentences. Here’s my attempt to give a super short Bible overview. God made a good world, number one, We stuffed it up, number 2, but God will fix the world and make it even better through Jesus. It’s basically the history of the world, isn’t it?

It started good, made by God, then it got corrupted and became miserable, and then in the future— well, partly it started already in the cross and resurrection, but in the future, culmination of the fixing of the world, the redemption or salvation of the world through the Lord Jesus. And 2 Kings obviously happens within that storey. So it’s not a self-contained book, it’s part of a sweeping overall storey. And I’ve said before and I’ll say again, the storey of Israel, the nation of Israel, is like a Russian doll miniature of the whole storey. So you know, you know, you get Gorbachev and inside Gorbachev is Chrustchev, or I don’t know the order of them, but anyway, you get the previous.

Well, it’s a bit like that, as in there’s a miniature storey inside the big storey and it looks sort of the same. So if the Bible’s big storey begins with Adam and Eve in a garden, and then they’re expelled from the garden because of their sin, and one day Adam and the children of Adam will be redeemed through Jesus, the whole creation is redeemed through Christ. The storey of Israel is basically the same. So they start off not in a garden but in a promised land, land flowing with milk and honey. They get kicked out of the land because of their sin, just as Adam and Eve get kicked out of Eden.

And one day they will be restored, actually not to the physical land of Israel but to the heavenly Jerusalem, through the Lord Jesus. At least those Jews who trust in the Messiah will be rescued in that way. And so actually you’ll see that at the end the 2 storeys converge, because the salvation of Israel turns out to be the salvation of the world, the salvation of all of Adam who trust in Jesus the Saviour. So it’s the same storey repeated over. But it’s a little bit more detailed, and if you zoom in you’ll see we’ve got a crown on a house.

That’s as best as my graphics can do. Because this particular part of the Old Testament is where we’re introduced to the categories of king and temple. So, back in 1 Samuel, we met the first king, Saul, and then the first king after God’s heart, David. And then all the way through Kings, obviously, we traced their genealogy, those who are descended from David. And we also meet the temple that Solomon builds for God’s glory.

And it’s a wonderful, wonderful place. And as we saw in 1 Kings, looking at the kingship and the temple is a chance to glimpse a foreshadowing of what will be the case in the future. So you see I’ve put the crown and the house on the right-hand side of the diagram, because in the new creation, well, there won’t be a temple as a building, because the Lord Jesus will be the temple. But many of the aspects that we learn about the temple will be true there. So it will be splendid and glorious, and God will be present, and there’ll be forgiveness and intimacy and answered prayers.

All of those things foreshadow the presence of God experienced in full. And again, and there’ll be a king in the new creation. What is foreshadowed in the kings of Israel when they’re at their best, what it looks like to be ruled over by a king who’s wise and just and and fears the Lord, we will experience eternally as we live under the rule of the Lord Jesus, the perfect Son of David. But that was, I suppose, largely 1 Kings. But then in 2 Kings we start seeing things go wrong, and the kings continued to turn away from God.

We saw the kingdom divided into Israel in the north and Judah in the south. And then in 2 Kings we look at the fate of both of those sub-kingdoms, intertwined, but they’re both in a downward spiral. Israel goes wrong first and is exiled as the Assyrians come and take them into captivity. And then almost at the end of the book Judah goes into exile and Jerusalem, the city of the temple, David’s city, it falls to the Babylonians. And there we find that Israel is in the same predicament as Adam and Eve, cast out of the garden, cast out of the Promised Land, in exile, awaiting a rescue.

So that’s the storey of 1 and 2 Kings within the storey of the whole Bible. Many of you were here for 1 Kings, but not everyone was, so here’s an attempt at a quick summary. The early chapters of 1 Kings were really Really fun to study and really positive as we looked at the glory of king and temple. Those who were there, let’s have a— just to keep it interactive, shout out some of the things that were really excellent about life under David and Solomon at the start of 1 Kings.

Gold and silver, yes, so prosperity.

Security from enemies, yeah. Peace and victory everywhere, yeah.

Everyone sat around him in victory. Say provision and everyone prospering, yeah.

Solomon was wise. Big deal about Solomon’s wisdom. Tell me some things about Solomon’s wisdom that was so good. It wasn’t just that he was clever in the sense that we tend to idolise kind of intellect in our society, but wisdom is slightly different from intellect.

Godly, yeah.

It enabled him to govern the people well, yeah. To discern between good and evil, so it’s a moral wisdom, yeah.

Yeah, so people enjoy justice everywhere.

Yeah, God’s presence in his temple. Present. Let’s stay on wisdom, just one more. Wisdom internationally famous, so people coming. Remember the Queen of Sheba, famously?

Heard a bizarre fact about the Queen of Sheba from Hirri yesterday. Oh, where’s Hirri gone? Apparently the Ethiopian Orthodox Church thinks that the Queen of Sheba and Solomon snuck off had an affair, and now the King of Ethiopia is descended from him. Which is a bit bizarre. Harry himself doesn’t believe that, fortunately.

But random, random fact. Yeah, Queen of Sheba. But in the Bible, she comes and she’s amazed at— remember what she marvels at?

His wisdom and the temple. And she says, and how happy everyone is. And she said, God’s really kind to your people to give you a king like that. Wonderful verse, isn’t it? I mean, it’s God’s kindness to give a monarch who rules well.

I think we can be cynical about the monarchy. Certainly some in our society are about the Queen. Certainly we are about authorities in general and about governments. And we could become cynical through reading 2 Kings, because we get lots of rotters as kings. But remember, in 1 Kings, we saw that a king who governs wisely and justly is a great blessing and a wonderful thing to have.

Almost by contrast then, we feel the grief every time we meet a king who doesn’t fulfil what might be such a blessing for his people. And we long for one who will be. Then we talked about the temple. Tell us about the temple, what we learnt about that. God was present.

In what way? What was he present to do?

Answer prayers. Yeah, like we said, it’s a bit like a telephone exchange. You know, God doesn’t actually live there, but he hears there. Do you remember that, that wonderful play on words? Would you always look towards this place that you may hear?

So it’s a mixture of the sense. I love that verse. Um, see so that you may hear. It’s as if God’s got his attention on it. Um, so there’s access to to him, and particularly access for forgiveness.

Yeah, when you hear, forgive. When they prayed toward this place, when you hear, forgive. I think 7 times we had that. So the temple’s really key because there’s an understanding it’s not ever expected to be a perfect society. It’s not as if 1 Kings is naive and it says, you know, this will only work if it’s all perfect.

It knows there’ll be mess-ups. And there’ll be sin and people will need to apologise to God. That’s a given. But it’s okay, as long as you’ve got the temple, you’ve got access to God’s forgiveness. Which is why the destruction of the temple is an extra big tragedy.

Things have got so wrong that you’ve even got cut off the means of putting things right when they go wrong. Which is to go and offer sacrifices and to pray. So it’s worth just understanding the fall of the temple in the context of what the temple was for back in 1 Kings. It’s like, you know, bombing the hospital. It’s worse than bombing the troops, because if you bomb the troops, they can go to the hospital to get fixed.

If you bomb the hospital, then the place that you fix the problem is no longer available. It’s like that. You get rid of the temple, you’re really, really in trouble. So it was a glorious thing, but it forms the sort of foil or backdrop. A wonderful king, a wonderful temple, will be the foil to a corrupt line of kings and a destroyed temple.

And we saw things begin to go wrong back in 1 Kings, the tragedy of a king’s disobedience. So I’ve put 3 examples there. Solomon, remember, loved many foreign women, and they led him astray and turned his heart after other gods, as indeed happens again and again throughout history. Often the relationship with the unbeliever is the thing that tears the Christian away. And it was true of Solomon, and Nehemiah warns people not to do what Solomon did.

So it’s a general lesson for all Christians. Then Jeroboam— sorry, that’s a typo. Jeroboam— I was so concentrating on getting the spelling of Jeroboam right. Which I— every single time I type it, I get it wrong, and my spell checker underlines it because it knows that I didn’t get Nebat right. Anyway, son of Nebat.

He’s mentioned, I think, more than anyone else in 1 and 2 Kings, because whenever you’re told about a bad king of Israel, you’re told he walked in the way of Jeroboam son of Nebat. It’s pretty grim, isn’t it, to be the king— he’s famous to be the archetype of idolatry. Like father, like son. He’s the one, you remember, who, because he didn’t want people trekking off to Jerusalem, which was in Judah in the south, to worship, he thought that might threaten his government of the kingdom of Israel in the north. He said, well, people are going to be off on their pilgrimages, so I’ll create my own centres of worship so that they can stay within the boundaries of my administration.

And then he said, well, obviously I’ll need to create some priests of my own, and I’ll need to create an altar of my own, and in fact, why don’t I create a god of my own for good measure? And he made 2 golden calves, one at Dan and one at Bethel, for people under his own priests to worship. So he was the archetypal idolater, worshipping a calf instead of worshipping God. And then, of course, the evil duo, Ahab and Jezebel. Jezebel is still alive as we begin 2 Kings.

She doesn’t die for a while. She’s still in the background pulling the strings. Um, not a very popular girl’s name nowadays, you’ll notice, just like Adolf has fallen out of favour as a boy’s name. And, and like you say, if you ever, um, come across somebody looking through a dictionary of names and they don’t know the Bible very well and they’re thinking of Jezebel, do discourage them. Um, she is an evil lady.

Um, and they are— Ahab did more to provoke the Lord God to anger than any who were before him. Again, what a distinction. And he gets into the Guinness Book of Records for making God more angry than anyone else had ever done. Pretty bad character. And they were the king, that’s the shock.

It wasn’t just a rebel within the country, this was the one who was supposed to lead the people with justice and righteousness. And then in 1 Kings we also saw God’s word of judgement. Again and again the the way in which a bad king is brought down comes not from fire from the sky, although God does do that occasionally in the Bible, but usually it comes through someone speaking. And remember, 1 Kings was full of prophets who spoke words of judgement. And the most famous, the climactic one, was Elijah.

And I want to read you these verses back from 1 Kings. Remember, this is just before just after the prophets of Baal are defeated on Mount Carmel. And then Elijah flees for his life from Jezebel. And remember, he goes again to Sinai in the hope that maybe God might once again renew the covenant that was broken. And he goes there expecting to see maybe the earthquake or the fire and the— and he gets the earthquake and the fire, but he doesn’t get new stone tablets.

He doesn’t get a new covenant. Instead, he gets a word of judgement. Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus, and when you arrive, you shall anoint Hazael to be king over Syria. Jehu the son of Nimshi you shall anoint to be king over Israel, and Elisha the son of Shaphat and of Abel-meholah you shall anoint to be prophet in your place. And the one who escapes from the sword of Hazael shall Jehu put to death.

And the one who escapes from the sword of Jehu shall Elisha put to death. Yet I will leave 7,000 in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal and every mouth that has not kissed him. This is probably the most important bit of context that you need if you’re coming into Centre Focus at this point from 1 Kings, this prophecy, because this is a prophecy about several of the characters that we’ll meet early on in 2 kings, Hazael the Syrian, Jehu the Israelite king, and Elisha the prophet. And all of them are announced here as agents of judgement. In fact, one of them clears up where the other one leaves off.

So Hazael, but if anyone escapes from Hazael, Jehu. If anyone escapes from Jehu, Elisha. God’s judgement against a sinful people. That’s the background. Let’s turn the page and let me try and give you an overview of 2 Kings.

This is pretty difficult, I have to say. It’s one of the things where all the commentaries disagree about what the sections are and there’s no consistency. And so this is very rough and ready just to give you a kind of feel for it. So we begin with the end of the storey of Elijah. Obviously you know that because you prepared for the SLOB.

This afternoon. There’s no break really between 1 and 2 Kings, so it’s just a length of scroll issue. You’ve run out of scroll, you have to start a new scroll. But as far as I can see, there’s no meaningful break where they’ve broken it. So I think 1 and 2 Samuel are slightly different.

You remember 1 Samuel ends with the death of Saul, and then it’s recapped in the beginning of 2 Samuel, a bit like Luke ends with the resurrection of Jesus, and then Acts begins with the resurrection of Jesus, kind of overlap recap. But 1 and 2 Kings, it just reads straight through. In fact, we’re going to go back to the end of 1 Kings, because they, you know, sometimes the Bible puts the chapter divisions in the wrong place. I think in this one they’ve actually put the book division in the wrong place. So we’re going to just take it from the end of 1 Kings and read straight through.

We get the end of Elijah, then we get the Elisha cycle. Remember what we’re expecting from Elisha. We’re expecting him to be the judge, the one who cleans up after Hazael and Jehu. But bizarrely, all we discover Elisha doing is saving people and rescuing people. I think that’s the biggest shock if you know the context of the early chapters.

Why is Elisha not doing the thing we expect and in fact doing the very opposite? Of what we expect, bringing salvation. Then we get Hazael and Jehu, remember the other 2 characters in that promise? And they do do what we expect. They judge and kill people in huge numbers.

If you put it together, and again I’ve written at the top, we need the whole to make sense of the parts. It just helps to be a bit cautious about how we teach Elisha and salvation. So if you think you’re expecting judgement, but instead you get salvation. I can imagine a Christian running with that and saying, look, here’s the message of 2 Kings. God ought to judge, but instead he saves.

And you big that up with Elisha. But actually, that’s only true for 8 chapters, because then he judges. So I think instead you’d have to say something like, God offers terms of salvation first and then there’s judgement. Or you might have to say something like, God offers terms of salvation to those who will trust him, to that remnant who won’t bow to Baal, and then to the rest, judgement. So it’s not salvation instead of judgement, as if one cancels the other.

The two run side by side, but some get saved, as a minority against the prevailing tide of judgement. And so you have to start asking why. Limited time. The ministry of Elisha, the prophet of salvation. You’ve got to respond quickly because it doesn’t last forever.

You’ve got to be one of those who sides with him because not everyone is safe. So that relationship between judgement and salvation is going to be really important. Then, um, so Hazael and Jehu, they bring judgement. Then we get a— I’ve called it the Divided Kingdom. I’ve borrowed the title from Bruce Waltke.

If anyone bought, by the way, a couple of years ago Bruce Waltke’s Old Testament Theology, I think I recommended it for 2 Samuel, it’s still useful. Um, anyone who hasn’t bought it, it’s a massive— I didn’t bring it in because it would have, um, it would have doubled my journey time on my bike just because of the extra weight. But, um, it’s a monster volume. It’s quite expensive, about £30 But we discovered it was the best commentary on 2 Samuel, even though only one chapter of his book is on 2 Samuel. So that chapter was pretty much better than all the other chapters, and he’s pretty good on 1 Kings and 2 Kings as well.

So it’s like getting a whole set of commentaries for £30, really good. He calls it The Divided Kingdom. Yes, sorry? Oh, it’s called Bruce— it’s Bruce Waltke, Old Testament Theology. It’s called— yes, Walt, K-E, Walt Kee.

And he calls it the divided kingdom because this is the section of the book that alternates back and forth between the kings of Judah and the kings of Israel. And he makes the observation, I think well, that this is rubbing on Nathan, the fact that there is an Israel and there’s a Judah. This is not one nation. This is 2 nations. And just the fact that it flips back and forth is rubbing your nose in the fact that it’s fragmented.

And we watch decline over those chapters. Then Israel falls in chapter 17, and we get an extended commentary on why. So just look at it, chapter 17.

This is a good example of the linking words tool. You remember the principle, whenever you see the word therefore, you should ask what it’s there for. And the same goes for words like because and since and so that. Well, it actually only takes one verse to tell you what happened. Chapter 17, verse 6: In the 9th year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria captured Samaria.

He carried the Israelites away to Assyria and placed them in Halah, and on the harbour, the river of Gezan, and the cities of the Medes. One sentence is enough to explain what happened. But then verse 7, and this occurred because— linking word. And the rest of the chapter is an extended meditation on why this tragedy occurred. Why did God’s judgement fall in this way?

The fall of Israel. Then we get Hezekiah. Who Simon and Simpoe are going to fight over, who in some ways is good, in some ways is bad, but he gets salvation. So Sennacherib comes to besiege Jerusalem, and you think that it’s going to go the same way as Israel did, and it doesn’t, amazingly. Hezekiah and his people are spared.

There’s a note of salvation. Again, if you only had this and you went to count on it, you’d say, ah, it’s okay because all the threat to God’s people is all cancelled out by a prayer. But of course that isn’t the storey, the big storey, because it does fall later. So again, we’ve got to understand this act of salvation against the backdrop of the judgement that will come. And you’d have to say something like there’s offers of salvation first before judgement comes, or there’s offers of salvation for those who trust him.

Something like that. Then you get Manasseh and Amnon, who are pretty much the worst of all. Manasseh, particularly evil. And then you get Josiah, he’s the best of all. So you’ve got the worst of all followed by the best of all.

And Josiah brings in various reforms and really, in every way, is the king that you want. He’s the David king. And he looks like he sorts everything out. And so you might think We’re going to be okay then. We’re going to avert disaster because finally there’s repentance.

But then judgement falls at the fall of Jerusalem. It’s very interesting, isn’t it? Because you’d think we expect a bad king to bring a bad outcome and a good king to bring a good outcome. So unsurprisingly, when there’s a bad king who walks in the way of Jeroboam the son of Nebat in Israel, Israel’s going to fall. And when there’s a bad king like Manasseh, this king of Judah, you expect Judah to fall.

But then when there’s a good king who reforms everything, you expect everything to be better. But it’s not. And the lesson seems to be it’s too little, too late. Even repentance doesn’t cancel sin. Repentance is the right thing to do, Certainly everything that Josiah does is, you know, a great joy to read, but it doesn’t deal with what has happened.

Of course, that’s true of the Christian as well, isn’t it? To repent, to turn back to God, is the right thing to do, but by itself that doesn’t solve the problem of the sin that has passed and how it can be atoned for. And so judgement comes just after the best king of all. And then interestingly, the book doesn’t end there. I think my quick summary, if you’d asked me before, would be 2 Kings, Israel falls, a few more chapters, Judah falls.

And that’s pretty pessimistic. And the interesting thing is 2 Kings is not as pessimistic as that. You think it’s a book of gloom. It actually ends with a paragraph of hope. So the gloomy version of 2 Kings would end in chapter 25, verse 26.

But actual 2 Kings ends like this, verse 27. In the 37th year of the exile of Jehoiachin king of Judah, in the 12th month, on the 27th day of the month, Evil-Merodach— what a great name, eh? I don’t think it means he is evil. I think it’s just his name. Evil-Merodach king of Babylon, in the year that he began to reign, graciously freed Jehoiachin king of Judah from prison.

And he spake kindly to him and gave him a seat above the seats of the kings who were with him in Babylon. So Jehoiachin put off his prison garments, and every day of his life he dined regularly at the king’s table. And his allowance, a regular allowance, was given him by the king according to his daily needs, as long as he lived.

Why is that there? I mean, it’s just a random fact about how Jehoiachin’s life got a bit easier. It’s not the rescue of the whole country. He’s still under— well, sort of under house arrest. He’s no longer in prison, but he now lives in the house of the king of Babylon, but gets good food.

What’s that there for? I think it’s because it’s forward-looking to better things, to restoration, to hope. It’s the silver lining in the cloud. And my— yeah.

Yes, though exiles, God is good to him. Yeah, no, that’s— I think that’s fair. Yeah, yeah, I think that is— it’s a note of grace in judgement, and it’s a sort of anticipation of what happens next. And as you know, the storey continues in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, which you might do next. Who knows, after he’d done Luke.

And they go back and it’s sort of good but not quite good enough. And then we get to the Lord Jesus who brings the rescue from exile in the end. That brings me to a piece of general advice in 2 Kings. Please don’t see it as a book of uniform gloom. So there is gloom there, there’s a lot about sin and God’s judgement, but there certainly are silver linings, and actually quite a lot of them.

When you look for it. So God’s grace in the midst of judgement. And this is my particular caution to— I put a special note to graduates of RML Overview. Um, I think Overview is great, but the nature of the beast is you’re very zoomed out and it’s very broad brushstrokes. And I think it might— may be different since I did it, but basically 2 Kings is doom.

If you have to summarise it in a word, it’s the doom study. You know, this is how we got into trouble. And And if you had to summarise it in a broad brushstroke, that would be fair, I think. You couldn’t say it’s one of the most optimistic books of the Bible. It’s not.

It’s about doom. But a closer look at it shows the kind of flecks of silver lining within the doom. Here’s doom with salvation for a remnant. Here’s doom with God’s kindness even to repentant evil rotters, etc., etc. At this level of close looking, we’ve got the whole of this term and the beginning of next term to look at it, we’ll be able to see the silver linings too.

And so I don’t think it will be a uniformly depressing experience, in other words. So, from 2 Kings to the Christian, I’ve put. We did something a bit like this last year. I think we need it whenever we look at the Old Testament. How do we get from then to now?

Well, here are 3 principles. Firstly, God’s the same. This is the easiest one. Wherever you are in the Bible, if you learn something about God, it’s still true about God. That’s the easiest, easiest question.

You just can’t get this wrong. What do I learn about God’s character? That is true of the God that I’m praying to now. He hasn’t changed since then. That’s the easiest one.

Secondly, the root of salvation history, which in other words is to stretch out the whole Bible timeline and realise that I come later than this does. And to get to me, I need to kind of go through all the storey fast-forwarding after this. So, in simple terms, 2 Kings is the book where Israel goes into exile, and Jesus is the place that Israel comes back from exile. He’s the rescuer. This is where sin takes you.

And Jesus gets you back from there. So that would be a kind of— I think that’s what you do in the overview, basically. It’s the kind of longitudinal view, the beginning, the middle, and the end of the Bible storey. But there is another way as well, and this isn’t allowed in the overview but is allowed in the Central Focus 2 Kings, okay? It’s not allowed in the overview just because of a decision about how to teach that particular course, which is fair enough.

You can’t do everything in a year, and so the overview majors on the salvation history read longitudinally. But the third method is valid because the New Testament often, often uses it, which is to see types and shadows of the New Testament in the Old Testament. This is what I think of as like hyperlinks, you know, in old-style web pages. I don’t think they happen so much now, but you’re reading along and then a block of text and some of it’s in blue with an underlining, or purple, and you click on it and it jumps you forward to later in the document. Well, it’s a bit like that, that buried within 2 Kings are legitimate places that you can fast forward to Jesus.

Again, not allowed in the overview, but allowed in Centre Focus 2 Kings because it’s allowed in the New Testament. You can find examples. For example, Elisha. Elisha’s name means— anyone know enough Hebrew?

Eli means God, sha means saves. It means God saves. Sounds a bit like someone else’s name. You’ll call him Jesus because he will save his people from their sins.

Elisha takes over from his predecessor at the Jordan River where he is anointed with God’s Spirit. Sounds a bit like somebody else. Elisha discovers a bread shortage and fixes it by multiplying bread to feed a large crowd of people. Sounds a bit like somebody else, doesn’t it? And it is absolutely allowed to name who that somebody else is, okay?

So we’re allowed those kind of types and shadows. But beware, Because typology can go mad. So it— there are legitimate places to go to the New Testament, but you, if you’re not careful, you can go from everywhere. Brian is smiling because he knows what I’m about to say. Um, uh, one commentary that I’ll name in a moment, um, on the— Alistair’s also smiling because he’s read this— on the axe head.

Okay, um, Ali and I were reading this a few weeks ago. Um, you remember the axe head? Um, it was borrowed And Elisha throws in the bit of wood and the axe head floats. See if you can see where he’s gonna go with this. So, is borrowed means that the guy would have gone into debt servitude, he couldn’t restore it, which is equivalent to death.

So he’s sort of saved from death by this act of salvation, which occurs through a bit of wood, which of course makes you think of The cross, yeah, that’s right. Moreover, the axe goes into the water and then comes out of the water, which makes you think of baptism, you know, and so on. Now, I think this is mad, okay? There’s no suggestion, there’s no control on this within the Bible itself, and it really becomes a game of Mornington Crescent, if anyone knows that particular Radio 4 programme. Basically random word association.

You can do any link, and we’re going to try and avoid that. So the challenge with typology, I think, is to sort of calibrate your level of scepticism correctly. You can be too sceptical, so you refuse to see any shadows of Jesus, and I think there are lots of them. Certainly Elisha is very like Jesus, and I think Josiah is pretty like him, and other examples as well. But not to be too gullible about it.

And there’s some that are kind of in between. So do you remember how we’re about to look at in the slob study, we haven’t got time probably to go into this this afternoon, how Elisha is told that he must see Elijah ascend to heaven in order to receive his spirit and continue his work.

Is there a type of the apostles at Jesus’ ascension being there to see him ascend into heaven, at which point they then receive his spirit to continue his work? I genuinely don’t know. That would be an example of a typology that is, you know, not mad but not absolutely certain, and you’ll need to use your judgement. So, um, I think it’s worth trying to calibrate your sense correctly, but there will be legitimate places to go to Jesus. Um, a note on using commentaries.

Um, these are quite rude things to say about commentaries, and I don’t mean them unkindly, but I think of the commentaries I’ve used and looked at, They can be variously pietistic, by which I mean the commentary that’s faithful but tends to give you a little self-contained spiritual lesson from every paragraph without necessarily saying what’s the big sweep or what’s the author doing in the book as a whole. It has value, but you need to be wary of just the little kind of sermonettes. Or obvious. I think sometimes the most faithful commentaries just tell you the thing that you already got and they don’t help you with the thing that you don’t get. Um, it’s something maddening for me to just think, oh, there’s one— there’s a glaringly obvious question that I’m struggling with, and here’s somebody who’s written a book that they’ve persuaded me to buy and they don’t even discuss the question.

I think they must know the question exists, they’re just avoiding it. So questions can be obvious, uh, comments can be obvious. Um, other commentaries can be unfaithful So, ironically, sometimes the unfaithful ones can be useful if you read them very, very carefully. So there’s a commentary by a guy called Richard Nelson that I’ve been using that is one of the most careful at observing the text, and he often notices things that I didn’t notice. I think, well, that’s useful.

But he really has no regard at all for God and no respect for God’s word. And so it’s actually sometimes a very unedifying experience to read him. So if you can stomach it, there’s nuggets in there, but actually it’s quite offensive sometimes the way in which he’s dismissive of the God he knows about. And sometimes he says quite stupid things because he doesn’t have an overarching Christian worldview. Other commentaries are mad.

I mean, Brian Donaghy on Facebook over the summer asked people for commentary suggestions because I was on holiday, so he graciously didn’t want to bother me. And quite a lot of my friends recommended a commentary that I thought, have you read that commentary? It is barking mad. So, the axe head, the cross, the baptism, the, you know, what one of my friends called the— there’s a typological reading of Scripture, there’s a salvation historical reading of Scripture, and then there’s the whatever-you-want-ological. And at points it is that.

Well, see, ironically, it has good stuff in it, but it has mad stuff. It has some good stuff in it, so I’ll come to that in a second. And then of course there are the Centre Focus notes that you’ll receive weekly.

And that obviously, that’s meant to be a joke, because obviously they’re also going to have their weaknesses. So the point is about commentaries is you can’t trust any one commentary to tell you the ultimate meaning of the Bible text. In fact, if God had wanted you to do that, then instead of putting 2 Kings in the canon, he could have put the Central Focus Notes or Peter Lightheart’s Braidsdale’s Commentary or whatever. And he didn’t. God decided that this was what he’d written in the Bible rather than that.

So don’t make the commentary the substitute or the improved version of the 2 Kings that’s in your Bible. The 2 Kings in your Bible is better than the commentary that tries to help you with it. My suggestion to be safe with commentaries are the following steps. Firstly, don’t read a commentary until you’ve done an hour’s thinking at least on the text without a commentary. So if you’ve wrestled with it yourself, then you have that sort of fresh perspective before somebody else starts shaping your thinking, and you have your own kind kind of questions and you notice the things that you think stand out.

And then when a commentary airbrushes something, you notice it because you think, no, but that was an important theme that I noticed that you’ve done nothing with. But you won’t notice it if you read them straight away because they’ll just be taken away. So do your own work first. That’s the first rule. Secondly, never use only one commentary.

So if you were to do a graph of usefulness— number of commentaries against usefulness— the least useful number of commentaries to have is 1, and 0 commentaries is better than 1. So the graph would kind of go like that. But 2 commentaries is better than 0, it’s better than 1. If you’ve got 2 commentaries, they’re not going to agree with each other. They’ll say different things.

If they say different things, how are you going to decide who’s right? You’ve got to look at the text. So 2 commentaries are going to make you look at the text more, whereas 1 commentary makes you look at the text less, because you just trust the commentary. So if you can afford it, buy 2, and if you can’t afford 2, buy zero. That’s my suggestion when it comes to commentaries.

Which are they? I don’t want to line them up with these rude adjectives, because that’s not really fair. But actually, I will. Peter Lightheart, sometimes very insightful, sometimes mad. It’s both the most— one of the most enjoyable and the most frustrating.

And I couldn’t recommend it widely for that reason. So if you’re discerning, read it. If you don’t trust yourself to be discerning, don’t. And don’t recommend it to your group. But it can— it’s got lots of really good stuff in it.

Richard Nelson, similarly, very, very useful stuff in there, but frustratingly low view of Scripture. And I don’t think he’s a— he’s certainly not a humble believer in the Lord, and that’s pretty annoying. Bruce Waltke, very helpful, but very brief, doesn’t always have time for the things that puzzle you. Darryl F. Davis, always enjoyable, always faithful, always a very high regard for the texts, sometimes little sermonettes, so not the big picture but this little paragraph turned into a spiritual lesson. Dale Ralph Davis.

So really useful but I would say not ultimate. If you thought that’s the ultimate solution, it’s got some weaknesses as well.

Mordecai Kogan, don’t bother with.

Others may have used others that they can recommend. Anyone want to share?

Way Beale.

Good.

Yeah. Yes, that’s because it was recommended to me by someone I trust, but I haven’t, I haven’t used it myself. Thank you, good point.

Yeah, so I think, I think it’s just that he’ll draw a spiritual lesson from each paragraph, which are often sensible and, you know, I’d say controlled by the rest of Scripture. But sometimes he doesn’t say, what’s this doing within the sweep of these chapters? So I think use it to your benefit, but don’t think this is the last word on 2 Kings. Like, don’t think that with any of them. And as I say, Ali and I will be producing the notes, but don’t think that with our notes either.

Last year, certainly, the notes got revised several times because of useful comments and insights from you, and we hope for the same again. Good. Over the page. Hee hee hee.

I’ll give you this again. This is my personal obsession, as you know, but an attempt to make— to summarise just on a page some of the principles of Bible handling and Bible reading.

I actually mentally cheque through them whenever I’m doing a— looking at a passage. Eventually it becomes more second nature, but I think if you go through them as a checklist, they just help you notice things. So you think, the ultimate aim is always the author’s purpose. Make what the author shows you the criterion for what is there. So if you notice something that the author makes nothing of, then it’s not very important.

And if you ignore something that takes him half the chapter, then you’ve missed what was important. So the author’s your guide. And then, you know, things we know well: context. Take a text out of context, you’re left with a con. Structure.

Linking words. Whenever you see the word therefore, what it’s there for. Repetition. When the author says something more than once, you know it’s important. When the author says something more than once, you know it’s important.

When the author says something more than once, etc. Just what— I mean, these are probably familiar to you, just worth bearing them in mind for every passage. Not every tool will be useful every time, but if you work through the checklist, then you’ll notice the things that are there, that they’ll help you to spot. Over the page, I’m going to get you to do a little exercise in the next kind of 10-15 minutes. I’ve put, write my sermon.

I’m preaching tomorrow in John 1. I was trying to think, I want for the session after coffee, I want us to have a bit of the Bible at our fingertips. And I thought, what could we do? We could do 1 Kings, but that kind of gives the advantage to people who were here last year. It’s not fair on the newcomers.

We could do 2 Kings, but that steals the thunder from the Sunday school. And I thought, you could help me write my sermon. So there we are. So John 1. It’s not Kings, and I’ll talk a bit about some of the differences afterwards.

But here are some of the steps that I would go through with every passage I was studying. Okay, so first thing, I’d pray. The Holy Spirit inspired the Scriptures. The Holy Spirit lives within us. So if you’ve got the author there, it’s crazy not to ask for his help.

And we often forget to, but pray. And I would say, don’t just pray at the beginning, but pray when you get stuck. Sometimes Alistair and I do this. We, you know, we get to a bit, we just don’t get it. And you look at a commentary, you still don’t get it.

Why not just say, Lord, we’re stuck on this. Please help us to see what’s correct. Please help us not to mislead your people, etc. And, you know, often God will answer those prayers with clarity. So pray.

Then read the passage. And then I said, read it again. And then I said, read it again. People think that you’re joking after that. They think, I’ve already read it, I know what it says.

But Actually, you don’t. Here’s my experience. You read a chapter of the Bible and you think you know what you read, but you miss loads of things. And actually, the most useful thing you can do after reading it is reading it again. Now, obviously it doesn’t really work because your brain thinks that you know what it says, so you don’t read it.

Your eyes just skip over every 5 words. So read it out loud so that you have to actually read it. Or read it in another translation so you have to actually read it. Or read it on different Even better, read it on different days of the week. If you could read the passage once a day, even if you don’t have any time to think about it, it means that come the study you’ve read it 7 times.

You’ll just know your way around it much, much better and really, really useful. And then my steps every single time would be structure. Can you come up with a structure? How do the bits fit together? I think I would spend half my prep probably on that.

‘Cause if you understand what the bits are and how they fit, you’re halfway to understanding the point. Put it into the context of the book.

Question everything, especially the surprising. Why does it say this? Why does it say this like this? I would have expected it to say that, but it doesn’t say that, it says this. Why?

As many questions as you can ask, Even if you can’t find the answers to them, they kind of set you to look more closely. And then at that stage you then get loads of stuff on the table, so you notice enormous amounts about the text. You know about this verse and this issue here, and you’ve seen a connection between those, and you’ve got way too much to go into a sermon or a study. So then you’ve got to try and work out what is the priority. Out of all the data I’ve got, what is front and centre?

Can I work out the author’s priority? Can I summarise his message in 7 words? Well, we haven’t got very long, but I think you know this passage fairly well. So have a look at John 1:1-18. Read it only once, which isn’t the ideal, but let all those Christmas carol services from the past be to your benefit.

And just see if you can have a go with some of those steps. Can you work out a structure? Don’t bother putting it in context, because that’s— we haven’t got time for that. But can you work out a structure, and can you think of some questions I’d love to hear your— just, you don’t have to get the answers to them, but why is this like this? Why is that like that?

I’d love to just hear some questions about the text. That will help me very much for tomorrow. Thank you very much.

Okay, let’s draw back together. That’s a woefully inadequate amount of time. So what about my microphone? It’s been specially rigged so that mute does not silence the microphone. So I’m glad I discovered that now rather than when I was making a trip to the user facilities or something.

Beware this evil microphone.

Yes, you have to do some editing. I don’t think I said anything indiscreet to Elspeth. We’re just discussing the door that does lock, but there we are. Thoughts on sections? Takes longer than this, so I don’t expect profound ones, but any initial thoughts?

1 to 3, 1 to 5. Yeah, about what? What’s the section about? Jesus the Creator? Yeah, Jesus’ divinity.

This— okay, so we don’t yet know it’s Jesus. Good. So the structure of the passage actually is slightly mysterious. It’s this character called the Word who’s only named later. Yeah.

He’s divine, therefore the source of life. Yeah.

Okay, let’s do some more sections. So sort of 1 to 3, 1 to 5, he’s the creator, source of life, divine. Yeah, yes, let’s just do sections first and then we’ll have a Okay, 6 to 8, this little paragraph about John the Baptist. That’s a good question, isn’t it? What’s this doing here?

So that would be exactly the kind of question you’d ask. Why do we get John the Baptist? Um, I read one commentary said there’s not many people about whom you have to say he’s not the light. So it’s not even necessary to say that, is it, about most people? There’s obviously something very, very special about John the Baptist that you need to be told.

You think he’s one, but he’s not. But he fits in somehow. Yeah, so why John the Baptist is so important. And if you did the context tool, you’d know that the very, very next section begins, and this is the testimony of John. So actually it’s setting up the way that the gospel is going to begin.

Yeah, good. So a paragraph about John, then last bit, 9 to Bookends, we like those. So same phrase at the beginning, the end. So the idea of the Trinitarian relationship between the Word and God, 2 distinct characters in verse 1 and in verse 18. Thank you.

Yeah, well, I mean, it’s interesting, isn’t it? It’s all about the creator of the universe and his mystery of life, and then John the Baptist gets a paragraph, and it is a surprise.

At the time, lots of people thought he was the Messiah at the time. Presumably speaking to them is to contextualise it. So there’s more of that. Thank you.

Yes, yes, right, exactly. So John has this— sorry, yeah, sure, sure. So Simon’s saying John the Baptist is the forerunner. He’s coming to prepare the way for this, to set the stage for Jesus coming. Let’s ask some— this is excellent, you’re doing lots of explaining which is going to help my sermon, thank you.

Let’s just ask some questions, the things that we think, why? What are the curious things we’re wondering that maybe you haven’t got answers to? Yeah. Why is this Baptist material interlaced with the work material itself? Thank you.

Why flip back and forth between— Yeah, exactly. So you could think 6 to 8 could go just before verse 19. There was a man that would begin the John the Baptist section, but somehow it’s interspersed with that. What— why is that? That’d be a good question.

Other questions?

The life and the light we get from the first section is then witnessed to by John. You would expect that if there’s a word, there must be a word spoken. People must be spoken to, and John begins that process. Thank you. Yeah, so John has— well, the whole language of testimony and witness will be key throughout John, and it starts with, for John’s Gospel, it starts with John the Baptist.

More questions? I’ll give you a question. Why is verse 4, the life was the light of men? That’s the other way around to what I expect. I expected it to say, the light was the life of men.

In other words, the revelation of Jesus brings life to people. But it says the opposite way around, the life was the light. That’s Curious. That’s not what I expected. Other questions?

Yeah, okay. Why is it so complicated?

Thanks, Jeff. Why is it so complicated? That’s Jeff’s question. Why didn’t John make it simpler? Yeah.

Why is he being so mysterious and cosmic and— yeah, good. Ali?

Yes.

Yeah, who are his own people? Why are we told they reject him? Here’s another question of mine. In verse 12, who makes the decision?

Those who received him, who believed in his name. I think it’s their decision. They were born not of the decision of man, but by God. Who made the decision? It’s a tricky one.

Good. So I think this kind of process of— I think Jonathan Fletcher called it boxing the text with questions. So just imagine you’re just kind of pummelling it to try and get its reading, try and get information out of it. And actually the question— later you’ll decide which questions weren’t important. And, you know, but at the beginning, just ask everything that you can.

And then you end up with— that’s what we’re doing now— a huge amount of information. And then comes the stage, what’s front and centre? What makes it into my Bible study? What makes it into my talk? Can I summarise?

What if John were here and you say, John, thanks for writing 18 verses, but if you had to give us just one, what would you say? Could we kind of second-guess what his answer that question would be. Can we boil it down? Now, I think we’re going to stop because we’ve run out of time scheduled, so I think I’m going to begin the next session with some particular advice concerning Old Testament narrative. But thanks for that.

That exercise was partly just to get us thinking about the sort of process. Read it, read it, read it. Structure, context, questions. Question everything. And then try and boil it down.

I would use that process for, for any passage, I think, almost anywhere in the Bible, and it would be a good process to use also for 2 Kings. Um, let’s have coffee. Um, anyone who fancies themselves as an engineer, it looks like, um, on exiting the building, someone instead of pressing the green let me out button pressed the— just above that— emergency let me out button. The trouble with pressing the emergency let me out button is it kind of bends the plastic so that the door is now permanently unlocked. So Elspeth is monitoring the door because we can’t lock it.

So if anyone fancies their chance at how to— yeah, have a look at it, basically. It looks like it could be reset somehow, but it’s slightly beyond me. So there’s a coffee break challenge for the engineering-minded amongst you. Otherwise, let’s enjoy coffee.