Episode Transcript
Good morning.
2 Kings chapter 18 verse 32 is where we left off.
2 Kings 18 verse 32.
And it is most certainly 10 o'clock and we are privileged to sit at the Lord's feet and learn of Him.
Aren't we brother?
Let me tell you what Jesus said about that by the way.
Are we okay back there?
I will.
In the Bible it was written about Jesus.
It said He went forth again by the seaside and all the multitude resorted unto Him and He taught them.
They resorted unto Him.
That means they came to Him.
And how amazing it would have been in those days to sit before Jesus and to learn of Him like this multitude did.
Well, did you know you and I have that same privilege today?
We do.
When Jesus taught that multitude He taught them His Word.
That was the feature attraction was God's Word being taught to the multitude.
And you might say well Jesus isn't here to teach us today.
Not physically, but He is.
And it's not in some mysterious magical way either.
In fact John 14 verses 25 through 26 Jesus said these things have I spoken unto you being yet present with you.
But the Comforter which is the Holy Ghost whom the Father will send in my name.
He shall teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance whatsoever I have said unto you.
So Jesus said there's going to be a time when I'm not here to teach you.
But you're going to be taught.
Because the Comforter, the Holy Spirit will be sent to teach you.
So even though Jesus physically isn't here to teach us, we have the Holy Spirit.
Jesus said the Holy Spirit, the Holy Ghost will teach us all things.
So if you are taught anything today from God's Word, it will be the Holy Ghost who teaches you.
Now I'm just a vessel.
So whether it's me or Brother Richard or some other teacher up here.
What we teach better match up with what God's Word says.
I'm not co-teaching with Jesus.
We're not teaching together.
You know one of us get up here and then the other one.
That's not how that happens.
He's teaching us by His Word and by His Spirit.
The human teacher just hands out the Word and explains it according to the gift God's given them.
So that way you may not say well I'm of Richard or I'm of Andy.
Because we're both ministers by whom many of you believed.
Now I pointed those things out to you because I never want you to lose sight of the great honor that we have to study God's Word together.
And when you could be here, but you set aside attending and studying with us in favor of some worldly thing, then you've dishonored the Lord by dishonoring the assembling of the saints.
So there's something for you to consider as well.
Now let's move on to our text.
Hopefully you're there by now.
2 Kings 18 32.
We're thankful for those who are here and those who joined by way of the Internet.
Let's reread verse 32.
Rabbi Sheikah says to Judah Until I come and take you away to a land like your own land, a land of corn and wine, a land of bread and vineyards, a land of oil olive and of honey, that ye may live and not die and hearken not unto Hezekiah when he persuadeth you saying the Lord will deliver you.
Now let's look at the phrase there that you may live and not die.
And we're going to take the two phrases in that phrase one at a time and then consider them together.
First he said that you may live.
Well, that would be a plus, wouldn't it?
Whatever deal he's offering to the people of Judah, what comes with that is you get to keep living.
You get to live.
Rabbi Sheikah said he would take Judah to a land just like their own with the corn and wine and bread and vineyards and olive oil and honey and that they would be able to live.
Isn't that what they're doing now?
At least in our text.
The Hebrew word translated live has several meanings and they are built upon one another.
That was instructive for me to research those in the concordance.
Because that word translated live is also translated alive, save, quicken, revive, surely and recover.
And I hope your wheels are turning.
Remember, Assyria promised Judah corn and wine and bread and vineyards and olive oil and honey and we compared the Assyrian version of each of those things to what the Lord had already provided Judah.
And even more importantly, we looked at the spiritual meaning that each of those things had.
And that was where we saw the Assyrian covenant falling short.
And it's the same principle here with Rabshikah's promise that you may live.
Let's see if this helps you understand the full significance of the Hebrew word that's translated live.
Now according to this word, and I mentioned that it was translated into other English words that are very similar.
According to this word, a man is alive.
According to that Hebrew word, if he is near death, he will be saved.
And if he dies, he will be quickened.
If he dies, he'll be revived.
If he's sick unto death, he will recover.
And the word surely and surely all of these things will come to pass.
Now all I did was use the various English translations from the same Hebrew word because it makes a critical point.
Rabshikah and the Assyrian covenant can only let those who are alive continue to live in an earthly body.
That's all they can do.
And once they die, the Assyrian covenant cannot revive them.
Remember, that was one of the translations of the Hebrew word was revive.
Assyria cannot quicken them.
That was also one of the translations of the Hebrew word is quicken.
Assyria cannot recover them.
Another translation.
So who then could save Judah alive?
Who could revive Judah and quicken them from death?
And who could surely do it?
Well, let's see what the Bible says.
Write down in your notes.
If you're taking notes, Romans chapter eight, verses nine through eleven.
Romans eight, verses nine through eleven.
Where Paul writes to the church in Rome, he said, But ye are not in the flesh, but in the spirit.
If so be that the spirit of God dwell in you.
Now, if any man have not the spirit of Christ, he is none of his.
He doesn't belong to him.
And if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin.
But the spirit is life because of righteousness.
But if the spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his spirit that dwell within you.
So let's break that down to what it how it applies to our text.
What Jesus is talking about or what Paul is writing about is that a person who is saved, someone who has the spirit of Christ, the spirit of God, it's the same spirit in him.
And that doesn't happen unless you're a Christian.
A person who is saved will have their mortal bodies quickened.
Their body will die.
So at no time does that possession of the spirit, that position of being born again, being a Christian, at no time does that position guarantee you that your body won't die.
In fact, it's just the opposite.
The Romans passage said our bodies are dead because of sin and the Assyrian covenant cannot quicken a dead body.
And Paul wrote that that same spirit that raised Jesus or who raised Jesus from the dead will also quicken or make alive your mortal bodies.
Is that a medical device somebody has on?
Oh, it's upstairs.
OK, I didn't as long as it keeps beeping, that's good, right?
I mean, if we heard the long tone, I was going to break out the stuff back here and let Brother Luke lead us.
All right.
Well, the Rabschika, and by the way, when you trust in the Lord for salvation, like Judah should have and like a remnant of them did, you don't have to be so concerned about your mortal life.
I mean, yes, we want to take care of ourselves and we would like to live a long time and have a good quality of life.
That doesn't always happen, does it?
And at some point, everybody goes to the same drain and circles the drain and goes down, right?
So if that's what your hope is in, you're in for quite a disappointment.
But the believers also had spiritual life both then and now.
And that's where our focus ought to be in the first place, is making our mortal lives honor.
That which God has done in our spiritual lives.
And Judah or we don't need the Assyrian covenant to extend or to improve our mortal lives.
They already had God's promise to quicken their mortal bodies and so do we.
So the death that their mortal bodies would one day face and ours too is nothing to fret about.
Don't fret about that if you're a Christian.
And Rab Sheikah telling God's people to come to Assyria that you may live was a mockery of God's promise to protect his people.
And his guarantee that he would quicken our mortal bodies.
Now, let's look at the second part of that phrase in verse 32.
Well, Rab Sheikah said that you may live and not die.
Now let's take those few words and not die.
And we have two meanings here.
The first one is a physical one.
If you have your Bible, look back up in verse 25, where Rab Sheikah told Judah's representatives, the Lord said to me, go up against this land and destroy it.
So if you remember us talking about that, Rab Sheikah said, hey, God sent me here to destroy Judah.
And we determined through Bible evidence that that was a lie.
God never told him to do that.
And the strong implication there was that the destruction of Judah by Assyria would bring about the death of everyone in Judah at the hands of Assyria.
Because if you totally destroy something, that means it cannot be fixed or repaired.
That's one of the differences between damage and destroy, isn't it?
Is to damage something, you probably can fix it or render it useful.
But when you destroy it, there's not anything you can do.
And that was what Rab Sheikah claimed God told him to do to Judah, is destroy it.
Now, if it occurred to me in my study that Rab Sheikah was not only a liar, but he also implied to Judah that he was not going to obey the Lord's supposed command to him to destroy Judah.
If it had been true that God told Rab Sheikah to destroy Judah, then Rab Sheikah would have had no business offering any sort of covenant to the people of Judah.
He would have no business offering them a place to live in Assyria or offering them all of its corn and wine and vineyards and olive oil and so forth.
In fact, if it were true that God told Rab Sheikah to destroy Judah, there would be no need to have a conversation with Hezekiah's representatives to try to bargain with him, to talk about putting men on horses and all of that.
So not only do we know that Rab Sheikah lied when he said God commanded him to destroy Judah, but he was also showing himself to be disobedient.
To the Lord by modifying this supposed command he received.
It was all based on a lie.
Now, while Rab Sheikah could not honestly offer to keep Judah from dying, who could?
Is there any covenant that this world has ever had that could keep somebody from dying?
No, not even Benny Hinn.
Nobody.
Well, let's look at whether there has ever been a covenant that could keep someone from dying.
After all, Rab Sheikah said that you may live and not die.
John chapter six, verses 47 through 50.
John six, verses 47 through 50.
Jesus is going to teach here about the physical and about the spiritual.
So always, anytime you read a Bible passage, listen for both.
Look for both.
Don't get stuck with the physical lesson and say, well, that was interesting.
Look for the spiritual if it's there.
Don't spiritualize it if it's not there, but look for the spiritual lesson because there will be one.
John six, verses 47 through 50.
He said, verily, verily, I say unto you, he that believeth on me hath everlasting life.
I am that bread of life.
Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness and are dead.
Now there are two deaths Jesus speaks about right here.
One is the physical death.
When he says your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness and are dead.
The manna is not what killed them.
What killed them was the wages of sin, which is death.
So the manna they ate in the wilderness had no spiritual life to give.
There was nothing it could do for the person.
It was God teaching them many lessons, but one of them is that the bread that would give them life.
Remember that that bread, that that manna was had covered the ground like whore frost.
That was sent from God.
They didn't make that.
It was sent from God.
And so the bread that would come down from heaven, Jesus said, that's me.
When you all think about that manna, that's me.
That's pointing to me.
The people who ate that bread, if that's all they got out of it was a full stomach for a few days.
And they did not accept the bread of life.
Jesus, then they're dead and they're in hell.
They're out lift up their eyes in torment, just like the rich man.
No difference.
But the one who believes on Jesus, the one who has eaten that bread offered by his covenant has everlasting life.
So even though he said your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness and are dead, there are some believers who ate manna in the wilderness and died.
Their physical body died.
But guess what happened to their spiritual bodies, their spiritual man, their inner man.
They had everlasting life.
They're in the presence of the Lord even now.
No Assyrian covenant, no Egyptian covenant or Babylonian covenant or any other earthly covenant can spare a mortal man from death.
They can't do it.
The wages of sin is death and every one of us have earned those wages and it didn't take long.
Now, Jesus spoke about a second type of death when he said, this is the bread which cometh down from heaven that a man may eat thereof and not die.
Now, what was it that Rab sheikah promised to Judah?
He said that he may live and not die.
Oh, it's covenant you're going to go to the Assyrian covenant, which can't be kept or the covenant, the gospel covenant where Jesus said man eats of me.
He shall not die.
That's a pretty easy choice, isn't it?
Or it should be spiritually speaking when a man eats that bread and we've taught this in here before when a man eats of that bread by placing his faith or her faith in the gospel of Jesus, that person is born again spiritually.
And his new spiritual man will never die.
And we're not promised to live forever in this mortal body.
In fact, it's very clear that we shall die.
Adam and Eve forfeited the opportunity to live forever in the bodies, the mortal bodies they had, the ones God created.
They forfeited that by sin.
When sin entered into the world and Romans five says sin entered into the world and death by sin so that death passed upon all men for that all have sinned.
So if all have sinned, all are going to die.
And even those few believers who remain on earth in their mortal bodies at the rapture or the catching away, which is actually how the Bible talks about it, is that they'll be caught away, are going to be relieved of their corrupt mortal bodies.
Those corrupt mortal bodies aren't going to go up in the air to meet the Lord in the air.
They're going to be shed right here.
Listen, the Assyrian covenant couldn't do any of this.
Now where does the Assyrian covenant stand when it comes to a person living or dying?
I think Paul points it out very nicely in First Timothy chapter five, verses five through six.
First Timothy chapter five, verses five through six.
In fact, we learn this in his writing about widows and how the church is supposed to deal with widows.
He said, now she that is a widow indeed and desolate trusteth in God and continueth in supplications and prayers night and day.
But she that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth.
So you have a contrast.
You have a widow who trusts in God, one who saved.
You have a widow who's not saved.
One who's not trusting in the Lord, but who lives in pleasure.
You have a contrast between the two types of widows.
The word pleasure means luxury.
And the implication is that that widow does not trust in God, the one who lives in pleasure or luxury.
Now notice in that passage, though, that such a woman, the widow who lives in pleasure, that she is alive in the physical sense.
There's no doubt about that.
Paul said she lives in pleasure.
She's alive in the physical sense.
And that's exactly what the Assyrian covenant offers.
It offers the people the opportunity to be physically alive while they're spiritually dead.
I'm going to say that again.
The Assyrian covenant offers people the opportunity to be physically alive while they are spiritually dead.
That's it.
And if they were honest about the covenant, Rabbi Sheikah and Sennacher of the king of Assyria would tell Judah, "Come to Assyria, enjoy the same things you enjoyed in Judah, and be dead while you live.
Be spiritually dead while you live."
Now, that's not how Satan actually puts it to people, because that would sound pretty repulsive, wouldn't it?
No, he uses cunning preachers to convince people.
Now, here's the new, wacko-liberal word of the last five years.
Any time they want to speak against something that's godly, they'll say, "That's dangerous."
Or something they don't agree with, they'll say, "Those people are dangerous."
So they call us dangerous.
They call conservatives dangerous.
They call the Ten Commandments dangerous.
And so that's what Satan does, is he uses preachers to convince people that Christianity is dangerous.
I'm not talking about godly preachers.
A saved preacher would never preach something like that.
He uses these so-called preachers, they're false preachers, to convince people Christianity is narrow-minded and bigoted, and that other religions offer a more tolerant, friendly, accepting atmosphere.
Those religions offer you the opportunity to be dead while you live.
I'll give you an example.
I remember Brother Doug and I talking about the... had something to do with the associations that churches are in, the Southern Baptist Convention and this and that, and he wasn't familiar with all that.
I said, "Good, don't be.
Don't worry about any of that."
You just focus on the things that are written here in the scripture, and that'll take care of all that other business.
But we are an independent Baptist church in the truest sense, I believe.
That is, we don't reach outside this church to find our doctrinal statements.
We don't subscribe to some other... to some online service or some organized religious group for our teaching material.
We have all the teaching material we need right here.
And we're not going to be able to get to all of it during our lifetime.
We don't depend on a convention or association for financial assistance.
And we also don't send them our money.
I did a church I was at...
Oh, 30 years ago, 25 years ago, the pastor of the church wanted to not be independent anymore and wanted to go join the Southern Baptist Convention.
And so I did an analysis of the financial impact for our church, and I said, "Did you know that 45% of the money sent there goes to administration?"
I said, "Is that what we want?
Almost half of our money going to pay people to run the Southern Baptist Convention and send out missionaries, or would we rather send 100% of it to the work?"
So, anyhow, I knew a little bit about it.
Now, we don't ally ourselves with fellowships or associations like some so-called independent Baptist churches do.
I know some who'll say, "We're an independent Baptist church."
And yet they're a member of an association, so they're not really independent.
But we'll leave that up to them.
The Southern Baptist Convention has itself in another quandary right now.
And it could be solved by simply requiring all of its member churches and all of its members to adhere to agree with what the Bible says about women as pastors.
That's the current thing.
You've seen it in the newspaper.
If you read your newspaper or read your online news.
So, yes, there is trouble in the SBC over that.
And apparently, according to what I read, hundreds of member churches, SBC member churches, have female pastors.
And on page 47 of their own bylaws, here's what it says.
"While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastors is limited to men as qualified by scripture."
1 Timothy 2, 12, which is our bylaws, and the basis of theirs.
Paul wrote, "But I suffer not a woman to teach nor usurp authority over a man, but to be in silence."
So, Paul wrote, "The woman is not to teach a man.
The woman is not to usurp authority over a man, but to be in silence."
We can have them teach our children and teach the girls and all of that and have conferences with other women and so forth.
But that's what the Bible says.
And I thank God for godly women who have no trouble with that at all.
They say, "If that's what the Bible says, that's what I'm going with.
Amen."
And if that were the case, if the SBC would require its member churches to just obey God's Word, whatever God's Word says about a matter, that's what we're going to do whether people like it or not, then they wouldn't have to make a statement in their bylaws.
But because God's Word and their bylaws say the same thing, why is there any contention?
Well, I'll tell you why.
There's a few reasons.
One has to do with money.
You start losing member churches, you lose money.
And that's a big one.
And don't you think that the church isn't rife with that?
There's corruption within and without, and I'm sad to say it.
But another reason is that the Assyrian covenant was accepted by some members of the SBC long ago.
There are others who did not accept it who said, "Oh, no, no, I'm a conservative."
And it's really, it's not just them, it's any religious person of any association or non-association who has honored the traditions of men over God's Word.
There are 1189 chapters and 66 books in the Bible that tell us what God wants us to know and what he wants us to do and what he wants us to not do.
And we don't need a 614 page set of articles and bylaws.
And yes, that is how long it is.
Southern Baptist Convention has a 614.
I don't know that I could remember about a third of that.
And it's a man-made association that God's Word knows nothing about.
Now, do they have some good aims in there?
Yes.
If their aim is to preach the gospel to the world, praise God.
I don't care what association they're in or where they're from.
I'm all for that.
If it's to promote holiness among the member churches and point people to God's Word, praise God for it.
And that may be offensive to somebody, but I challenge you to take God's Word and examine it and examine it well before you let your flesh get bitter or angry about such a statement.
I love our SBC brethren, by the way, my grandfather, my mother's dad, pastored SBC churches the whole time he was a pastor.
I trusted the Lord for salvation and was baptized in one of those churches.
And I'm going to tell you, he was conservative.
He would spit fire if he saw some of the stuff they were doing today.
I guarantee you.
And some of y'all know pastors, SBC pastors who would too.
And those memories are precious to me.
And I don't mean to go off on the SBC as much as I wanted to show you what happens when the followers of the Assyrian covenant are allowed to creep into the Lord's work, into the Lord's church, or into an association that is supposed to be doing the Lord's work because that Assyrian covenant cannot get life.
It cannot save from death.
Now, what else does Rab Sheikah say in his sales pitch to Judah?
Look back in your text in verse 32, he said, "Harken not to Hezekiah."
Now Hezekiah, if you remember, was the king of Judah.
And he was a good king.
He was the best king they ever had.
He said, "Don't listen to your king.
What's the implication?
Listen to my king."
To get someone to leave their situation, which is what Rab Sheikah was trying to do, to get someone to leave their situation, whether it be a job or a relationship or the place where they live, that someone has to be convinced that his current situation is bad enough to leave.
I imagine by now, most of you've lived long enough to where, wherever it is you live, you're pretty happy there.
You like to go home and you like the way things are arranged in your house.
You don't have a desire to move off somewhere.
You like where you are.
And for you to leave, you would have to be convinced that staying there is so bad that you just can't afford to do it.
And in this part of the persuasive speech, Rab Sheikah insinuates to Judah when he says, "Harken not to Hezekiah."
He's insinuating to them.
He can't be trusted.
Your king can't be trusted.
Don't listen to him.
And because he cannot be trusted, you should not hearken to him.
And remember, if you've been in here before, we've studied the word "harken" many times.
And it means to hear with the intention of obeying.
It doesn't mean that a sound strikes the auditory nerve, is carried to the brain, and is interpreted as a word or a statement or a noise.
It means that you heard it, you processed it, and you said, "Yeah, I'm going to do that."
That's what harkening is.
It's what we do with our children when we say, "Did you hear me?"
They know the wrong answer is, "Oh yeah, I heard you all right, Dad."
The right answer is, "Yes, sir."
And then they do whatever it was you asked them to do.
So that's what harken is here.
And that's what Rabsheikah is saying.
Don't listen to him.
Don't do what he says.
He's implying Judah should not obey their king.
Now, don't listen to him and don't do what he says.
Rabsheikah is no fool.
And he knows, I suppose he knows, that man is going to serve a master.
He's going to serve some master.
And so he's continuing his appeal to Judah to not accept their king, but to accept his king.
You reject your king, you accept my king and his kingdom.
After all, you can't have two kings, at least not in the spiritual sense.
But here, Judah, flat out, could not have two kings in an earthly sense or a spiritual sense.
They weren't supposed to be under anybody except the Lord.
Otherwise, Rabsheikah could have said, "Well, sometimes Sennacherib will be your king, and sometimes Hezekiah can be your king.
We'll just rotate them, kind of like a child custody after a divorce."
Well, what a foolish notion is that.
I know there are people in this world who have dual citizenship.
In 2020 alone, there were approximately 900,000 people from other countries who obtained citizenship in the United States, but also kept the citizenship of the country where they were from.
They did it legally.
And although that may be a practice among the inhabitants of this earth, there is no such thing as dual citizenship when it comes to the kingdom of heaven.
It's absolutely impossible.
You're either a citizen of the kingdom of heaven, or you're not.
And Luke chapter 9 verses 61 through 62, Luke 9, 61 through 62, when Jesus was appealing to men to follow Him.
Here was His interaction with one of them.
And another also said, "Lord, I will follow Thee, but let me first go bid them farewell, which are at home at my house."
And Jesus said unto Him, "No man having put his hand to the plow and looking back is fit for the kingdom of God."
The man in this passage wanted to be a dual citizen.
Now, just physically speaking, you can't follow and go back at the same time, can you?
It's impossible.
You either go that way or you go that way.
But you can't do both.
And so you have to make a choice, which is more important to you.
And to that man, it was more important to go back where he came from than it was to follow Jesus.
It sounded good to follow Jesus, but it wasn't important enough to him to actually do that.
He put his family before the kingdom of God.
I remember a gentleman in a church, I went to the same one I was talking about earlier.
And the pastor had preached about the importance of your family and how God instituted the family before He did the church.
And of course, the extension of that was you love your family and bring them to church.
But he didn't say that part.
Everybody understood it except for this one gentleman who did not come to church.
And he was on the, I guess you'd call it the staff, we didn't pay anybody, but he taught the children.
And so the pastor asked him, "Where were you?"
He said, "Well, I listened to your message and you said family comes before church."
And he said, "No, that's not how you interpret that.
You actually let your family get in the way of your service to the Lord.
Bring them to church.
That's how you love them.
Bring your children, bring your wife."
And so he had it all wrong.
And this man in our passage in Luke 9, 61 and 62, if his faith would have been in Jesus, then his love for his family would have been right.
You cannot love your family right if you don't love Jesus right.
I love what Lester Roloff said many years ago when he was talking to these girls that would come to his home because they were in trouble.
They were outcasts and they were a mess.
They were society's outcasts.
And he told them, "Before you ever marry a man, you better make sure he loves Jesus.
Because if he doesn't love a perfect Jesus, how can he love an imperfect you?"
And that's exactly true.
So if this man would have loved Jesus, if he would have been a Christian, he'd have said, "I'm coming right now," because he would have trusted the Lord to take care of everything else.
And today, as it has always been, there are many religious people who are looking for a church that allows them to be comfortable being both religious and worldly at the same time.
They want a church that will tell them how good they are rather than the truth about their sin.
If you want to preach the love of God to people, don't just say, "God loves you."
Say, "God loves you so much that he sent Jesus, his only son, into the world to save sinners just like you.
And you're hopeless.
You're condemned unless you turn to him in faith and repentance."
That's preaching the love of God, not glossing over and leaving out parts of the gospel to make people feel good.
They don't want to come to a church like ours, whether it's this one or some other that preaches the Bible, teaches the Bible.
And we've had many come and go right back out the door for different reasons, but I think one of them is we don't preach dual citizenship.
We preach kingdom citizenship through faith in the gospel.
That's our number one job here, is to preach that men and women may be saved and that they may grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.
God's perfect will and commandment was that Israel would be one nation under God and under nobody else but God.
I think people, if they say the pledge of allegiance, I don't know if they really believe, some of them really believe what it says.
One nation under God, are we really?
Well, this nation's not.
We ought to be, that ought to be a pledge that we make.
We ought to be able to pledge allegiance that the Lord is over this country, but you see what kind of shape it's in now.
So by and large, it's not true.
Now, at the time our text is referring to here, Israel was divided.
Remember the Northern Kingdom was the 10 tribes and that was called Israel and the Southern was Judah, the two tribes.
And the Southern Kingdom Judah was under attack.
The Northern Kingdom had already been taken over by Assyria and Assyria was allowing temporary dual citizenship to the people of Judah.
Because remember he said, you can eat your, of your vineyards and your figs and drink of your own cisterns until I take you away.
So for right now, you can have your dual citizenship but then I'm going to take you away and there will be no more dual citizenship.
You will leave your kingdom and you will come to this one.
He said, "Harken not to Hezekiah."
Now, not only did Rab Sheikah not want Judah to hearken to Hezekiah, but he said, "Harken not unto Hezekiah when he persuadeth you."
So he had something in mind that Hezekiah was going to tell the people of Judah and that's what he didn't want them to listen to.
In other words, Hezekiah is not just going to speak to you, he is going to persuade you.
And that Hebrew word translated as persuade in our text was first used in Deuteronomy chapter 13 verse 6.
Deuteronomy 13 verse 6.
But it's a different English word and I'll tell you what it is.
It'll help us understand what Rab Sheikah meant when he said Hezekiah would persuade Judah.
And here's what Moses said in Deuteronomy 13 6, "Speaking to the children of Israel before they went into the promised land, if thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, 'Let us go serve other gods which thou hast not known, thou nor thy fathers.'"
Now, that word entice is the same as the word persuade in our text.
So what Rab Sheikah is accusing Hezekiah of doing is actually what Rab Sheikah is doing himself.
He's gaslighting Hezekiah.
Who's trying to entice whom right now?
Who's standing at the gate of another city in another country trying to persuade the people, "If you stay here, you're going to die.
If you come with me, you'll live and you'll enjoy all the same things you enjoy in your own land."
Judah is in their own land.
They're under their own rule or under the rule of their own king, and the Lord God is their protector and He is their provider.
And to get Judah to leave is going to require persuasion just like getting them to stay is going to require persuasion.
And we'll look more closely at that when we meet again, Lord willing, next week.
Father, we thank you for the good attention given by those who've come, and we thank you for those who've tuned in for the people who will watch this broadcast at whatever time, because it's the same.
It's the word of God.
And Father, we do desire that it be thy spirit who teaches us all things as you've promised to do, and that the traditions of men would never be honored above the word of God, that they wouldn't even be considered equal to the word of God, but put in their own proper place as nothing more than traditions.
And we pray this in Jesus' name.
Amen.
