039. Are we Just a Heartbeat from Disaster Today?

I have a question for all of us today and it’s also the title for our message... Are We Just a Heartbeat from Disaster Today?

We’re going in our Bibles to page 452, 2 Kings 23 verses 4-16.  Page 452,  2Kings 23:4-16.

In this particular passage of Scripture, the nation of Israel, to the north, has fallen so far from God’s desire and purpose that He has given up on them, and they have been defeated and carried off into captivity. Judah, the southern kingdom, is following the same pattern. They have become more and more distant from God’s desire for them. This portion of Scripture deals with Josiah, king of the southern kingdom. Josiah found the temple full of corruption. As king, he asked his priests to clean up the temple. They found the Law of God hidden back in a cupboard. The high priest brought out the Law and read it to the king, and the king was so impressed he decided to make the southern kingdom of Judah as God would desire before He allowed it to be destroyed as He had already allowed Israel to be destroyed.  ---- 
Firstly, we’ll put up on the screen, this statement …

pp        Astrology is still dangerous

That brings us to chapter 23 of  2nd Kings, and I want to start with the fourth verse. There are three directions I see us going today. First, I want us to see exactly how we can drift away from what God wants and end up with a terrible mess in our lives. Then we’ll deal with what we might do to undo the mess we find ourselves in. Then we’ll see the hope that God has for us. 

We begin in the fourth verse. It says, “And the king commanded Hilkiah the high priest, the priests of the second order, and the doorkeepers, to bring out of the temple of the Lord all the articles that were made for Baal, for Asherah, and for all the host of heaven; and he burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of Kidron, and carried their ashes to Bethel.” (Bethel was a city 100km north of Jerusalem—right on the border of what had been Israel.) 

 The king said, “Look, we have got ourselves into such a difficult mess that if we have any hope of getting out of it, we have to separate ourselves from that which has been giving us problems.” 

That is also very true for us today too. Sometimes we fall into the trap of thinking we’re going to straighten out our lives. The things we have done in the past have taken us away from God. We sometimes think we’ll hold on to those things. They’re not going to do any harm we say. They’ll just be there, and we’ll have them if we need them. Otherwise, they won’t make any difference. Well, what the king discovered, and the truth for us, is this: When we decide to get right with God, one of the things we have to do is to destroy all those parts of our life, those things in the past that have been important to us, but were destroying us, and get them away so they can no longer be an influence. 
Look at verse five, “Then he removed the idolatrous priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense on the high places in the cities of Judah and in the places all around Jerusalem….”

Sometimes people couldn’t make it to the temple, and so they began to have little areas where they could worship in the mountains around the cities and around Jerusalem. So if you couldn’t get to the temple to worship, you could at least be out where you could supposedly draw near to God. But you’ll remember that one of the foolish things Solomon did was to begin building temples in these mountains around Jerusalem, temples to the pagan gods of the women he’d married. What had happened by this time was that here were all these areas known as the high places—areas having shrines to the various pagan gods. The people did things there that were offensive to the true God. In the last half of that verse 5, it says he (that’s King Josiah) got rid of “those who burned incense to Baal, to the sun, to the moon, to the constellations, and to all the host of heaven.” 
What if someone came to you in this church, this sanctuary, and said, “I’ve got a great idea. Why don’t you ignore everything you’ve ever believed about God and Jesus Christ? Start out in a whole new direction by worshiping a whole new kind of god.” -----  I honestly believe you’d say, “No I don’t want to do that.” But that isn’t the way we drift from God. It seems to me that what is also in 2 Kings is also the danger that we have today in our country. What happens is that we tend to slowly drift away from God. 

 Here in the temple they had a whole system of worship of the stars and all the constellations. They had priests who were responsible to determine what the stars do and how they might speak to us and guide us. 

 I’ve had people sometimes ask me, “Ray, you really don’t believe there’s anything wrong with my doing horoscopes in the newspaper, do you?     I mean, they’re in the TV Guide and in the newspaper, right next to the crossword puzzles. There isn’t anything wrong with that, is there?” Well, the answer is, yes. It’s the same kind of a question as, “There isn’t anything wrong with taking just a little bit of crack, is there?”  -----   People, as we begin to do these things, they become - part - of - our - life. 

 I don’t think Israel decided one Tuesday afternoon to go into the middle of God’s temple and change one of the rooms around and employ some pagan priests to try to understand what the stars were trying to tell them.  I don’t think they thought that. I don’t think they ever had any intention of one day having priests who would give honor and worship to the sun and to all of the stars. It came over hundreds of years as they began to be more and more influenced by things that were not about God. If we don’t have God, we’re going to have something. 

I’d say that one of the really foolish things that anyone in this room could do would be to play with horoscopes. If you do it, you’re not being smart.  You’re on touchy ground. You say, “Well it makes some way for me to pass the lonely afternoons.”   Friends, there’s got to be better ways to pass the lonely afternoons than to put things in your mind that pull you away from God.  Listen, that stuff is serious. It isn’t a game. In the Old Testament there was a nation that had fallen into the trap of thinking that the stars and the sun and the moon had control over their lives and deserved their worship and honor. -----   “But I don’t think that,” you say. “This is just a pastime.” But that’s what they did. That’s what got them into the mess they were in when King Josiah decided to change it. What he did was to take away all of the priests and all of the paraphernalia that had been there for the worship of the constellations. He destroyed them. ----
Next we’ll put up, …

pp     Our culture is absorbed with sex

In the sixth verse, it tells how he brought out the Asherah from the house of the Lord outside of Jerusalem to the Kidron Valley, burned it, ground it to dust, and threw its dust on the graves of common people. What in the world was an Asherah?

 The King James Version called it a wooden image. History tells us it stood about 11 or 12 metres tall. It probably weighed several tons. It was carved out of wood, and it was the shape and figure of an erect penis. That thing sat in the middle of the temple. It was a major part of the worship in the nation of Israel. 

 If you desired, you could worship this particular type of religion, which put a great emphasis on sex. There were buildings like in the red light districts of our day. There were women prostitutes or men prostitutes; take your pick. You could go in and have all of the enjoyment that you wanted as you were giving worship to God. There were, in fact, women who spent their time as priestesses weaving cloths to drape it, and they would stroke it. This was going on in the temple of God. 

And Josiah said, “Listen, this isn’t right.” -----  But you see, friends, in Australia today, it’s so easy for us to fall into all kinds of problems in this area of sex. Next to food, sex is about the heaviest drive that young and old people have. What happens is we begin to place more emphasis and more attention on this area of our lives. ---- I dare say that in the two or three hundred years before this passage of Scripture was written, if someone had gone to the nation of Israel and said, “What we’re going to do is put a great big penis in the middle of your sanctuary,” they would have said, “No way!” But as they began to put more and more emphasis on sex, the whole nation was destroyed. So King Josiah came and said, “We have to do something because astrology and sex are destroying our relationship with God and our life as a nation.” 

The northern kingdom became so corrupt that God gave up on them and let them be totally defeated, destroyed, and carried off into captivity. And the king said, “If we don’t change, the same thing is going to happen to us.” -------  Now, is there anything wrong with Playboy?   Well, is there anything wrong with just a little bit of crack? These things get into my life and into your life and they can distort and twist and ruin so much of what we are in our relationship with God. King Josiah said, “If we don’t stop, our nation is going to be destroyed because you can’t let things get ahead of God.”  God has got to be put first! ----

Next, we’re going to see that …

pp      Child sacrifice was an awful problem

It says in the eighth verse about King Josiah,  “And he brought all the priests from the cities of Judah, and defiled all the high places where the priests had burned incense from Geba to Beersheba;  also he broke down the high places at the gates which were at the entrance of the gate of Joshua the governor of the city, which were to the left of the city gate.  Nevertheless the priests of the high places did not come up to the altar of the Lord in Jerusalem, but they ate unleavened bread among their brethren.  (verse 10)  And he (King Josiah) defiled Topheth, which is in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, that no man might make his son or his daughter  pass through the fire to Molech.”  -----

They had another practice that had grown up. God’s temple was inside the walls of Jerusalem.  Just outside the walls, right over on the north side, there’s a valley – the Valley of Hinnom. That valley is still there today.  A hideous practice had grown up as the people became more corrupt. They began to worship a god by the name of Molech. They decided that what a person needed to do if he really wanted to have a life that was rich and full and complete was to get rid of one or more of his children. They would take their children, babies and even up to eight or nine years of age, to a large statue like the seated Buddha, cross-legged, with a fire burning in its belly. They would throw the children into the hole in its fiery belly.

 We understand that along the rim of that mountain on Molech celebration days, thousands of people with huge kettle drums would begin to beat the drums with more and more ardent fervour. The drumming did two things. It stirred up the people until they were willing to give their own child, their own newborn baby, to this god of Molech, and it would also keep the crowds from hearing the screams of the children.  ------

 Now why do we talk about all that in a day like today? We have no valley outside  our church. We have no drums. We hear no screams of children. But we have the sacrifice. If you want a good life, all you have to do is give up your children. We don’t use fire anymore; we use saline solutions. And all you need do is go to a clinic. Life is taken care of, and problems are over. You’re free to be and to do what you want. 

I think somewhere deep down inside, we are travelling right along the path that the people of Israel were going. Our lives have become so wrapped up with strange pagan religions, astrology, and other new age beliefs. We now see pleasure becoming more and more popular in our land. There’s more of an emphasis on finding what I want to do in the way I want to do it. I don’t want the burden of undesired children as a result of my pleasures. ----

You know, it’s possible that, …

 pp     Our nation may be destroyed too

Verse 11 tells us that Josiah “... removed the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun, at the entrance to the house of the Lord, by the chamber of Nathan Melech, the officer who was in the court; and he burned the chariots of the sun with fire.”

Have you ever heard of a day called Sun-day?   944 years after this story in 2Kings 23, there came an emperor called Constantine in 321AD who re-introduced Sun-day as the official weekly worship day to make it easy for the sun-worshippers to become a part of the Christian church.

So  in 624 BC, 944 years earlier, King Josiah, a dedicated follower of God, destroyed the idols and things dedicated to sun worship.

Now verse 12,  “The altars that were on the roof, the upper chamber of Ahaz, which the kings of Judah had made, and the altars that Manassah had made in the two courts of the house of the Lord, the king broke down and pulverized there, and threw their dust into the Brook Kidron.”

You see, things had become so corrupt that in the very temple built by Solomon to the glory of God, in all of the little anterooms and all of the little corridors and all of the little corners there had been built all kinds of altars to all kinds of gods. Whatever you desired to have, whatever pleasure you wanted, whatever need you had, somewhere within the confines of that temple you could go and have your dreams fulfilled. 

King Josiah said, “It’s wrong. It’s wrong.”  In verses 14 and 15 it says, “And he broke in pieces the sacred pillars and cut down the wooden images, and filled their places with the bones of men.  Moreover the altar that was at Bethel, and the high place which Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel sin, had made, both that altar and the high place he broke down; and he burned the high place and crushed it to powder, and burned the wooden image.

Not only was there a wooden image, an Asherah, in the temple at Jerusalem—you might not want to go all the way to Jerusalem to have your thrill—but all of the villages around and all of the hillsides had their own little individual Asherahs, and it was all there for pleasure. 

 In the 16th verse, it says that “As (King) Josiah turned, he saw the tombs that were there on the mountain.  And he sent and took the bones out of the tombs and burned them on the altar, and defiled it ( defiled the altar) according to the word of the Lord which the man of God proclaimed, who proclaimed (or foretold) these words.”  ------

What a mess they had in Israel. And Israel had fallen because of their mess. And now what a mess they’ve got in Judah. And the king says, “If we don’t change as a nation, our nation is going to be destroyed too, because God won’t let it happen much longer.”  ------

Here we are in Australia, and even on Bribie Island, and we have our strange little beliefs and things that we find in the newspapers and in the magazines and other things we put into our trolleys at the supermarkets and video shops and internet and so on. We have all of the things that we do in our lives, and we say there’s nothing wrong with them.----  Except we’re just going the same way those religious people went so long ago. --------

The question is, “What do we do about it?” 

Well, I’m not really sure how much you and I are going to do to change what happens to Australia. That sounds negative and pessimistic. I don’t mean it to be that way. I think it’s probably a fact. Even though Josiah said, “We’re going to have a reformation,” and even though Josiah and the priests destroyed all of the things that had been there, the truth of the matter was that Judah had become so corrupted, so far from God’s reality, that God never did bring them back. Not too long after that, the city of Jerusalem was totally destroyed. The temple was burnt to the ground, and the nation was carried off into slavery. 

 If you look at it in that way, Josiah failed because he didn’t save the nation from
destruction.--- They’d gone too far;  they’d become too corrupt. But there were individuals in the nation who he had touched and who turned back to God. They gave themselves again to God, and when the nation was carried off, God made a promise to those who would be the faithful remnant, and he said, “You will come back.”  ----

 I think the hope for us is to do everything we can to change the direction that our island and our nation are going. Maybe we’ll be more successful than Josiah was. But more than that, the task you and I have is to do what Josiah urged all of the people to do, in our own lives. We need to evaluate who we are, where we are, what we are, what we do, and who we really worship. -----  What we have to do is to come to a point where we see our sin—our separation—as offensive, and our sin as tragedy. 

Most of the time today in our land we try to justify the sin we have in our own lives – we try to explain it away. I’m good at that! We justify sin in our own lives and therefore see no problem with anybody else doing it.  -----   You can’t tell someone they shouldn’t do something.  It sounds a lot like discrimination.  We should be free to do anything we want, and it isn’t fair to have restrictions. Can you picture Australia where there are temples to a god like Molech where we kill children, and no one can stop us? It’s our religion, and we have that right. Can you see the corruption that might come in our land where there could be religions built on this glory of sex, and no one can stop it because it’s religion? We’re free! -------   That’s what happened to Israel. That’s what happened to Judah. And you know what happened to Israel and Judah.  -----

God has made no promise to make Australia survive.    I don’t believe our nation has any more right to exist than Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece and the Roman Empire that the ancient prophet said would fall one by one. ------

Second Kings is a devastating book because it’s a story of how a whole nation was finally destroyed.  I would say for you and for me that the most important thing we can get out of Second Kings is to look at ourselves and say, “God, is it me? Am I adding to this thing in Australia that puts all of its emphasis on pleasure, all of its attention on what is fun and enjoyable with no thought or care about the consequence or pain? Am I a part of that? Am I giving to my children a message that what really matters in life is how much fun I can have and how much recreation I can enjoy and how much I can gain? Am I doing that? If I am, I ought to read Second Kings very carefully.” 

Today friends, we need to get out the Ten Commandments of Exodus 20 verses 3-17, the only part of the entire Bible that was written personally by God Himself.   We need to read it, and pore over it, and digest it, and with God’s help, do His commandments and be abundantly blessed as a result.  ----  How many of His ten commandmnts should we obey? Not five of them, or seven of them, or nine of them, but all ten of them.  Pick up the CD after church called ‘God’s Special Message’.  And don’t just listen to it, but do what God says to do, and receive His blessings in your life.---

In the beginning of chapter 23, the Word of God was read out publicly to all the people.  So in verse 3 it says, “Then the king stood by a pillar and made a covenant before the Lord, to follow the Lord and to keep His commandments and His testimonies and His statutes, with all his heart and all his soul, to perform the words of this covenant that were written in this book.  And all the people took a stand for the covenant.” ----

But you know, they really didn’t did they?  When it was all done, they disobeyed, and they died. ----

So, in …

pp   Conclusion

Friends, if somehow we on Bribie Island and in this great nation of Australia don’t understand what’s being said in this passage of Scripture, then our country is going down the tube. We can sit and talk about freedom of choice and rights and privileges. We can do it till the end. But God doesn’t have to pay much attention to our logic. ---- I hope and I pray that in my life, and in your life, that you and I will do, with God’s help, whatever we need to do to pull our own lives, our own families, our own children, and maybe our nation, out of this path we’re following right now.  And not make the mistake that those people of old made.  ---- and God will bless us, as we step out and follow Him.

Please stand and we’ll pray.

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