Hey, this is Shelby and Paul. We're in the book of Second Kings. We're going to talk through chapters 7 through 9 today and hopefully help you understand these chapters and also give you a little bit of guidance on how to apply them to your lives. So, Paul, can you take us through these chapters? Yeah, yesterday in our reading at the end of chapter 6, we concluded with the capital of the Northern Kingdom, Samaria, being sieged by a foreign nation, Aram. And we didn't mention it on the podcast, but that's what was going on. And their starvation from this siege became so bad that they began to cannibalize. And we even have this really difficult narrative of these two mothers eating their own children even. But Elisha sees with, you know, heavenly vision, that there are chariots in the spiritual realm surrounding the army of Aram. And so, we kind of get this idea that God's going to deliver them, right? So, chapter 7 opens with Elisha prophesying that there's going to be a miraculous provision of food. And so, God makes it come to pass that the Armeans kind of hear sounds of chariots and this army, this spiritual army, and causes them to flee. And so, we have these two diseased men that decide, okay, I'm just going to go surrender, because then at least I can maybe have food if I'm a prisoner of war, right? But when they go out to the Armean camp, they find that it's empty because they had fled. So, they come back to the camp and they're like, hey, there's no one there. And they're kind of, for a second, they're like, is it a trap? But they go out there and there's no one there. So, they plunder the camp and they have food. And then in chapter 8, we get some foreign political shifts as well as descriptions of two Judahite kings, both of which were evil, unfortunately. And then in chapter 9 is in a fulfillment of a prophecy of Elijah from a while ago that Ahab's house would fall and that Jezebel would die. Jehu is appointed as Israel's king and he goes on this destructive campaign to make that come to pass, to wipe out Ahab's house. Yeah. So, we're seeing starvation. We're seeing some really unfortunate circumstances. We're seeing bloodshed in these chapters. And, you know, we've talked about this several times because this isn't the first time we've seen bloodshed as we're reading through the Bible this year. But can you help us make sense of these chapters? Yeah. So, I think something that can really help us when we come to these passages that our moral consciences kind of chafe against, we kind of feel uncomfortable as we're reading, is to go back to some basic questions. And I've said this before on the podcast, but asking two questions, what does this say about God and what does this say about man? And so, for the example of Jehu, you know, inflicting destruction on the house of Ahab, it's lots of bloodshed. But again, this is a fulfillment of prophecy that Ahab, who is very evil, his house was going to be destroyed. And so, it shows us two things. It shows us that God is a God of justice, that he punishes evil, and he shows us that he keeps his word. When he says he's going to do something, he does it, right? And then as far as what it says about humanity, I think it reminds us that we are inherently evil at the end of the day. We are sinful people, we all have fallen short of the glory of God, and we're really worthy of God's punishment, ultimately. But that points us to what grace we have in Christ, right? That through him, he received the punishment and the curse that we deserved, so that we could have joyful life with him, right? Because all of the punishments and the judgments that we see in the Old Testament, those are things that we deserve. And yet, because of Christ's love for us, we don't have to experience that. And really, in this book in particular, we see that God maintains a piece of Judah, because that's the tribe that Jesus comes from, right? So even in the midst of all this bloodshed, all of this difficult circumstances, Judah is maintained so that eventually Jesus can be born in the line of David. Yeah, thank you for taking us through that. That's super helpful. I think that my takeaway from these chapters is we long for a perfect world, right? We want there to be no strife, we want there to be no sin, we want there to be peace. We don't see that happening here, we don't see that happening today, where that perfection exists is in eternity with the Lord. And so that craving for a peaceful world is good in us. But this is a reminder to me that it's not going to be fulfilled here, it's going to be fulfilled in eternity. And I will be able to be a part of that through Christ. And so the brokenness of today is really, really difficult. It's really difficult. In this passage, it's sometimes difficult today, but as believers, we have this hope in Christ of eternity one day. And I also just want to mention at the end of this episode that if you are following along with us, but you aren't using the studies, we really encourage that difficult passages like this. If you want a little bit more context, you want to be able to think through it more deeply. That's why we provide those studies that are going to do that for you. And so you can check out the link for those in the show notes. There's other links to our YouTube channel to the reading plan to help you follow along in a number of ways. Thank you, Paul. We're going to keep going through Second Kings. And we have another great episode for everyone tomorrow.
