Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / August 4, 2021 | Chronological Bible Study with Patty Diliberto - Session 20: The Exile

Transcript

August 4, 2021 | Chronological Bible Study with Patty Diliberto - Session 20: The Exile · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: God warned the people through the prophets that judgment was coming.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's what we've seen the last couple of weeks.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: And it came.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Foreign powers stronger than Israel invaded the land, and the people were powerless to fight against it.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: You might be feeling pretty powerless right now with what is going on in the world and around the world.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: I think that we can relate to Israel more than we thought we could.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: So let's pray and ask God to bless our time together.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Father, thank you so much for the things that we are going to see today.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: God, let it build our faith in you and in your sovereignty more than we could ever imagine.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, please empower this time and impress upon our minds the importance of what we're going to see and what we're going to take in.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I ask this in the mighty name of Jesus.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: The powerful nations surrounding Israel are a huge part of the exile, of course, and that period of time.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: In order for us to understand what happens to Israel and Judah, we have to understand some things about these powerful nations that came in and took them over.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's a bit tedious here at the beginning, but hang in there to the good stuff.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: The first great power that we will look at is Assyria.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: The capital of Assyria is Nineveh.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Assyria rose to power under the leadership of Tiglith Pelazer III.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: So why does the capital Nineveh sound familiar to us?
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Because Jonah, the reluctant prophet, was sent to Nineveh by God with a message of repentance.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Jonah preached to the Assyrians before the captivity, before the exile, and of the exile of the northern kingdom of Israel.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Jonah reluctantly went with a message from God between 785 and 775 B.C.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: The exile took place in 722 BC.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: So at least 53 years before Assyria took Israel captive, God sent his prophet.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Chuck Swindal says this about Assyria.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: Nineveh, even by our standards, was a huge city.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: The capital city of the Assyrians, it numbered from 600,000 to 750,000 people.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: The people of Assyria were brutal, vicious, godless people.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's a known fact that after they plundered an area, they would behead the victims and stack the heads in mounds resembling a huge pyramid to serve as a visual reminder to all nations of the power of the Assyrians.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: They were a cruel people, wicked to the core.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: God saw who they were and what they were doing, and this is what he said in Jonah 1, 2.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's wickedness has come up before me.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: God knew the condition of the Assyrians.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, he dispatched one of his prophets, Jonah, to them.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: No wonder Jonah was reluctant to go to Nineveh and preach to them.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: But this shows us that God's mission to the nations is that the message of salvation is going to be proclaimed to the people who don't know him and who don't love him.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: And that will be the outcome because his love can transform even the most wicked of people.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: This is absolute proof that God cares about the spiritual condition of heathen nations.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: He sent a Jewish prophet to a group of wicked Gentiles to prove how much he cares.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: Nineveh responds to the preaching of Jonah and they repent.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: At some point, though, in the next 50 years, they revert back to their wicked ways.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: That is Assyria.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: And in 722 BC, Assyria came in and conquered the northern kingdom of Israel, carrying off most of the exiles or the Israelites back into exile.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: By 663 BC, Assyria had expanded its military control all the way down into Egypt.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: You can see this.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: To secure its southern flank, exposed toward Egypt, down here or down there where you saw it, Nebuchadnezzar came in and conquered the southern kingdom of Judah.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: In 562 BC, Nebuchadnezzar died, and less than two decades later, Babylonia ceased to be a militant political or military power.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: And by 540 BC, Persia takes over.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: In 550 BC, Cyrus the Great of Persia began to expand his rule.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: He pushed east toward Babylonia and conquered it.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: It was Cyrus the Great who reversed the Babylonian policy of deportation and permitted the captives to return back to Jerusalem after the 70 years of exile.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: He hoped that his generosity in this would make Judah more cooperative with him, more cooperative subjects.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: And they were.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: It worked.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: Judah saw Persia as a benevolent power.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: And it was because of Cyrus the Great who authorized the rebuilding of the temple.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: We will look at all of that in more detail next time we're together, and it's very interesting.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: But all of this is tedious, I know, but it's important.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: What we need to see and understand here is that Israel and Judah are tiny little nations in the midst of these big, powerful nations.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: To the south is Egypt, and then to the north in sequence is Assyria, Babylonia, and then Persia, which is occupied today by Syria, Iraq, and Iran.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's important to understand these nations and their role in the exile.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: But another huge part of the exile is the rebellion of Israel and Judah.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: The captivity of Israel, the northern kingdom, and Judah, the southern kingdom, has many causes, but chief among them is their rebellious, idolatrous, stubborn nature, which we've seen over and over and over.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: Israel thought that the best way to deal with these bullies on the block was to make alliances with them.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: So Hoshea, the last king of Israel, not only made a treaty with Assyria, but he double-crossed them by making a treaty with Egypt, with the king of Egypt.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: And we read about that in 2 Kings 17.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: In the twelfth year of Ahaz, king of Judah, Hoshea son of Ela became king of in Israel in Samaria.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: He reigned nine years.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: He did evil in the eyes of the Lord, but not like the kings of Israel who had preceded him, because remember, there are no good kings in the northern kingdom of Israel.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: Shalmanazar, king of Assyria, came up to attack Hoshea, who had been Shalmanazar's vassal and had paid him tribute.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: But the king of Assyria discovered that Hosheah was a traitor, for he had sent envoys to so king of Egypt, and he no longer paid tribute to the king of Assyria, as he had done year by year.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore Shalmanazar seized him, put and put him in prison.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: The king of Assyria invaded the entire land, marched against Samaria, and laid siege to it for three years.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria captured Samaria and deported the Israelites to Assyria.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: He settled them in Haloth and Gozan on the Habor River and in the towns of the Medes.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: All this took place because, because the Israelites had sinned against the Lord their God, who had brought them up out of Egypt from under the power of Pharaoh, king of Egypt.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: They worshipped other gods and followed the practices of the nations the Lord had driven out before them, as well as the practices that the kings of Israel had introduced.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: So the Lord was very angry with Israel and removed them from his presence.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: Only the tribe of Judah was left, and even Judah did not keep the commands of the Lord their God.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: They, Judah, followed the practices Israel had introduced.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, the Lord rejected all of the people of Israel.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: He afflicted them and gave them into the hands of plunderers until the Lord removed them from his presence, as he warned through his servants the prophets.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: So the people of Israel were taken from their homeland into exile in Assyria, and they are still there.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: So from a political standpoint, Israel's problem was easy to see and understand.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: They basically chose the wrong ally.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: From a scriptural standpoint, though, they brought on themselves the wrath of God because they turned from him to worthless idols.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: Pretty incredible.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: God, in essence, raised up Assyria so that they could do his will concerning Israel.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: Think about that for a moment.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: We look at our current world situation and our own country's turmoil, and we see how bad things are right now.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: Everything feels like it's falling apart, and we wonder if things could get any worse.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure things can always get worse.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: Even in this situation with Israel that we're looking at, we think what a terrible thing this is.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: And it is.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: All that God had worked to do with Israel and with Judah might have seemed like it has totally fallen apart at this point.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: It seems like the wheels have fallen off the bus and everything is unraveling, and it is.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: I have to tell you that when I first wrote this study a number of years ago, I really struggled with this lesson.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: I struggled to understand it and comprehend it.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I struggled because I just couldn't, I just couldn't figure things out.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's not easy to understand.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: And when you start to wrap your round your mind around it, more questions surface.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the more you know, the more you know you don't know, kind of thing.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: I found myself questioning God, really questioning God and saying, saying to him, are the Abrahamic and the Davidic promises null and void at this point?
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: What was there another purpose for all of this?
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: Or was a Jewish nation just some experiment?
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: Was God going to be faithful to those promises he made to Abraham and to David?
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: I understood why this was all happening, but the question I was asking God was what is the purpose?
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: What is the purpose of this captivity?
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: And it was a totally legit question.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's okay to question God like that and to ponder what he is doing.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: Because what he is doing doesn't always make sense.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: And it's never always going to make sense.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: But when you ask hard questions of God like that, you have to make sure that you keep listening to him and that you keep digging in his word.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: You have to keep seeking answers from him and from his word so that you don't let your questions turn into doubt or into judging God.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because remember, it's always too soon to judge God.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: Those questions led me to keep digging and digging until I felt like God had given me some insight.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: And his answer to me has built my faith incredibly, tremendously.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: I'll share that answer in just a minute, but we have to look at a few more things first.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: Things are at an all-time low for Israel and Judah, and we have to ask ourselves why.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: What was the purpose behind the captivity?
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: What was God really doing behind the scenes?
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: Almost all of the people, listen to me, almost all of the people who are carried away from the land of Israel do not come back.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: They do not come back.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: They are assimilated into their culture of the the culture of where they are exiled.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: They don't return when they have the opportunity because they settle in and they get comfortable in the cultures where they are assigned to live, in those different places.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: Sin and disobedience is kind of the same way for us, isn't it?
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever persisted in a sin knowing it was wrong, knowing God did not want you to do it, and yet you persisted in it?
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: I absolutely have done that.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you had a spouse or a child or a parent who has drifted away from God and has adopted a lifestyle that you never thought they would.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's usually gradual, isn't it?
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: All of those scenarios are usually gradual.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: In time, the person feels uncomfortable at church or with other believers, and so they stop coming to church and they stop associating, they isolate themselves and they drift farther and farther away.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: Some are absorbed into the culture they turn to and they never return to the Lord.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, we are seeing more and more of this today.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's amazing how much we are seeing of this.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: Young men and women who are walking away from the faith and adopting an atheist atheistic mindset.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know anyone like that?
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's very, very sad.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that shows us that we too have exiles today.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: There's always a true danger of being absorbed into the culture that we live in.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: And in the end times, in the end times, we know that this is going to be that there's going to be great apostasy.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: The word apostasy means falling away, a falling away from the Lord and from a biblical worldview is a sign of the end times.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that we are seeing these signs is another indication that we are living in the end times.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: This apostasy is picking up more than ever.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: We have exiles today.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: So now let's look at what happens to Judah.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: Judah continues to follow the Lord after Israel has been exiled.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: They have some good kings like Hezekiah and Josiah, and they have bad ones, more bad ones like Manasseh.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: But let's look at one incident that shows us why God was able to do battle against Assyria, who had taken their northern cousins captive when they came for Judah, because they did.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: They came for it.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a really cool story.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: The king of Assyria sent his supreme commander, his chief officer, and his field commander with a large army from Lakish to King Hezekiah at Jerusalem.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: They came up to Jerusalem and stopped at the aqueduct, can't talk today, at the upper pool on the road to the washerman's field.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: The field commander said to them, Tell Hezekiah, this is what the great king, the king of Assyria, says.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: On what are you basing this confidence of yours?
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: You say you have the counsel and the might for war, but you speak only empty words.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: On whom are you depending that you rebel against me?
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: Hezekiah received the letter.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, let me go back one, because I went too far.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: Hezekiah received the letter from the messengers and read it.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: Then he went up to the temple of the Lord and spread it out before the Lord.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: And Hezekiah prayed to the Lord, Lord, the God of Israel, enthroned between the cherubim, you alone are God over all the kingdoms of the earth.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: You have made heaven and earth.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: Give ear, Lord, and hear.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: Open your eyes, Lord, and see, listen to the words Sinnacherub has sent to ridicule the living God.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: It is true, Lord, that the Assyrian kings have laid waste these nations and their lands.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: They have not they have thrown their gods into the fire and destroyed them, for they were not gods, but only wood and stone, fashioned by human hands.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Lord our God, deliver us from his hand, so that all the nations of the earth may know that you alone are Lord and Lord our God.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: That night the angel of the Lord went out and put to death a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the Assyrian camp.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: When the people got up the next morning, there were all the dead bodies.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: So Sinacherub, king of Assyria, broke camp and withdrew.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: He returned to Nineveh and stayed there.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: Judah and their wise king Hezekiah chose the Lord as their ally, in sharp contrast to Hoshea and Israel, who chose Egypt as their ally.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: The Lord heard Hezekiah's prayer.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: Prayer is powerful.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: Without lifting a sword, Judah saw a hundred and eighty-five thousand soldiers of Assyria die at the hand of the Lord's avenging angel.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: Shortly after this, Sinacherub was assassinated in the temple of his God.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: But sadly, sadly, even after watching this amazing thing happen, Judah did not remain consistent in the conviction that the battle is the Lord's.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: This is what God says about Judah, 2 Kings 21.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: The Lord said through his servants, the prophets, Manasseh, king of Judah, has committed these detestable sins.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: He has done more evil than the Amorites who preceded him, and has led Judah into sin with his idols.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, this is what the Lord, the God of Israel says, I am going to bring such disaster on Jerusalem and Judah that the ears of everyone who hears it will tingle.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: How sad is that?
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: God had told them what he would do if they forsook him and disobeyed him.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: They did, and they had to pay the consequences.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: This is how Judah's exile happens in 2 Kings 25.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: So in the ninth year of Zedekiah's reign, on the tenth day of the tenth month, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, marched against Jerusalem with his whole army.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: He encamped outside the city and built siege works all around it.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: The city was kept under siege until the eleventh year of King Zedekiah.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: By the ninth month of the fourth, ninth day of the fourth month, the famine in the city had become so severe that there was no food for the people to eat.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: On the seventh day of the fifth month in the 19th year of Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, Nebuzeredan, commander of the Imperial Guard, an official of the king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: He set fire to the temple of the Lord, the royal palace, and all the houses of Jerusalem.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: Every important building he burned down.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: The whole Babylonian army under the commander of the Imperial Guard broke down the walls around Jerusalem.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: Nebuzeredon, the commander of the guard, carried into exile the people who remained in the city, along with the rest of the populace and those who had deserted to the king of Babylon.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: But the commander left behind some of the poorest people of the land who work to work the vineyards and fields.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: This is the saddest day in Israel's history to this point.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: They were sure that God would never let the holy city of Jerusalem and the temple be destroyed.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: But he did.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: This marked the end of Israel as a nation.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: They were no longer a united nation or a divided nation.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: They were no longer a political entity at all.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: They were devastated, destroyed, and dispersed among the Gentile nations.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: By 586 BC, the people of Israel should have ceased to exist.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: They should have ceased to exist.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: There's no way on earth the people of Israel should have survived, except for one thing.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: God chose that they would because God chose them to be his people.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: Burning the temple of the captives God was a way that the Babylonians had of showing that they had defeated that God.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then tearing down the walls prevented the inhabitants to protect themselves.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: And it visualized that Judah no longer had any defense.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: It was a terrible time, a time of great suffering and destruction.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: The Babylonians were only a little better in their torture techniques than the Assyrians had been, but not by much.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: So let's put that into what they what they were experiencing into our context.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: Do you remember where you were and what you were doing when you first heard about 9-11?
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: Or when you saw the awful destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina?
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: Or on any of the other terrible things that have happened in our country in the last 25 years.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: If you were like me, you were glued to your television.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's what we do when something terrible happens.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: We just remember it like it was yesterday.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: That is what this timeline was like for Israel.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: Everything was burning, everything was destroyed, and those images were imprinted on their brains.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: The people have been besieged, they are starving, they are totally overwhelmed and defeated.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: And as they are led away into captivity, into a foreign country, this burning of all of Jerusalem is the last thing that they see.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: And although Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, knew the day of judgment was going to come, nothing could have prepared him for the actual experience of seeing all of this happen with Jerusalem, with the temple, and with the people.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: All that lamenting is recorded in the book of Lamentations.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: They had to be wondering what was going to happen now, now, between the exiled people and their God.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: Can't you?
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: If you and I had been in that situation, we would have been questioning this, asking the same questions.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_00: And this led to many questions and problems, especially the problem of their identity.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: Prior to the Babylonian exile, they had been in an independent political state with a secure military power and a God-ordained king over them.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: They saw all of this as proof, as absolute proof that their God was God.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: Now none of those conditions existed.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: They were powerless, they were subject to a great empire whose rulers thought that Yahweh was just one more God among many gods.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: Their lives are now controlled by the Babylonians.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: The people of Judah would have been tempted to surrender their claims to having exclusive revelation from God.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: They would have been tempted to give up and discontinue the behaviors and the laws that had kept them separate from the other people, even the dietary laws and their, and be absorbed into their culture.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: Their identity is in ruins as well as everything else.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: How do we know this?
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: We know this because of Daniel and Daniel chapter 1.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: In the third year of the reign of Jehaakim, king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem and besieged it.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: And the Lord delivered Jehakim, king of Judah, into his hand along with the articles from the temple of God.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_00: These he carried off to the temple of his God in Babylonia and put in the treasure house of his God.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: Then the king ordered Ashpenaz, chief of his court officials, to bring to the king's service some of the Israelites from the royal family and the nobility, young men without any physical defect, handsome, showing aptitude for every kind of learning, well informed, quick to understand, and qualified to serve in the king's palace.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: He was to teach them the language and literature of the Babylonians.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: The king assigned them a daily amount of food and wine from the king's table.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: They were to be trained for three years, and after that they were to enter the king's service.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: You know all of this.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: Among those who were chosen were some from Judah, Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: The chief official gave them new names, Daniel, he named Belthazzar, to Hananiah Shadrach, to Meshel, Meshach, and to Azariah Abednego.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: But Daniel resolved not to defile himself with the royal food and wine, and he asked the chief official for permission not to defile himself in this way.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: Now God had caused the official to show favor and compassion to Daniel.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: Understanding the context of the exile brings new insights now into Daniel and his friends, doesn't it?
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: There was real danger that the people who were carried away into captivity would become so assimilated into those cultures that they would surrender the covenants of God, the covenants that he had made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_00: I am so glad that God gives us this picture of Daniel to see how he, God, was working even in captivity.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: That all of them did not become assimilated into Babylonian culture was largely due to God's faithfulness in giving Judah the ministries of the prophet Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, and the priest Ezra and the governor Nehemiah.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: These men helped Judah stay connected to God, even though they had lost the land.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: It was their covenant with God that made them his people, not the land.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: The land was part of the Abrahamic promise, and it still is.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: That this is important.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: Their faith was expanding.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: Their faith was expanding out into the world through the captivity.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_00: It is likely that many of the books of the Jewish scripture, the Old Testament, were written down or edited during this time of the exile.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: They were no longer able to identify the center of their faith as the temple.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, the exiles focused on Scripture.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_00: Specifically, the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: Their fellowship and their worship meeting in small gatherings that would later be called synagogues, stressed the reading of the Torah and worship.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_00: A new class of religious leader arose, the scribe, whose function was to learn and interpret the Torah.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: One scholar said, it is likely, let me go back.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: The exiled Jews became the people of the book.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: The people of the book.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_00: And this is it.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_00: God had a purpose in this exile that went far beyond just teaching Israel and Judah a lesson and disciplining them.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry, I keep going the wrong way.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: He wanted to teach all people about himself through the eternal word of God.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: Were these events ever out of his control?
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_00: Never.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: Never.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_00: The exiles had to adopt, adapt to their new position as a minority faith.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: In Babylon, they could not expect the king or an official priesthood to preserve the correct worship.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: They had to define their faith themselves.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: And they did this by emphasizing the laws that distinguished Judah from the other peoples, such as the Sabbath and keeping it holy and the dietary laws.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_00: And above all, the command, you shall have no other God before me.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: All of these things help us see the purpose behind the exile.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_00: It takes faith to see the purposes behind what is happening currently, what we are seeing and what we are experiencing in our world.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: It takes faith to see beyond just what's happening.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: There is a purpose in the apostasy, in the turmoil, in the dysfunction of our government and of other governments and peoples around the world.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_00: I believe that the purpose, or one of the purposes, of God in all of this is to usher in the end times.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: I could be wrong, but with what we know of the tribulation period and the time preceding that, everything is lining up.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: Everything is lining up.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: Personally, 26 years ago, I too was a captive and felt exiled from God.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: It was a captivity and an exile of my own choosing and making for sure.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: It was.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_00: How might, how might the dispersion of the Jews and the establishment of synagogues help the early church and the preaching of the gospel?
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: God was setting up a way for the whole world to learn about the redemptive promises of God found in Jesus Christ.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's what he's setting up with the exile.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: That was the purpose, or a huge one, of the exile.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: Acts chapter 4, 14, 1.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_00: At Iconium, Paul and Barnabas went as usual into the Jewish synagogue.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_00: There they spoke so effectively that a great number of Jews and Gentiles believed.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_00: Why was there a synagogue so far away from Jerusalem?
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because of the exile.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_00: The difficult times ahead in the end times will be used by God to get people's attention and to bring them to a place of either defiance against God or dependence on God.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's going to be the outcome in the end days.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_00: They're either going to be in defiance or dependence.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_00: So what do we learn?
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_00: What do we learn from these events?
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_00: We learned that God is merciful and that he is long-suffering.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_00: But when his people persistently depart from his word, they will reap what they sow.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_00: But even in the sowing and in the reaping, God always, always has a purpose.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_00: And he can be trusted.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: Aren't you glad you see that today?
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_00: It builds my faith, and I hope and pray that it builds yours.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: Pray with me.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: Father God, thank you.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_00: We thank you so much that you are in control.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: That you will bring about your purposes and your agenda in this world, in our lives, in your church, you will do this.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_00: God, give us eyes to see.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_00: Keep us from looking and evaluating and then doubting or questioning too deeply.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_00: God, keep us grounded in the truth that you are sovereign, that you have all authority in heaven and on earth, and that your purposes will succeed because you are God alone.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_00: We praise you and we worship you for that.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: I ask you to continue to build our faith through your glorious word.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_00: And we pray this in the mighty name of Jesus.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_00: I will see you next week when we will look at the return.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: Have a great day.