Episode Transcript
It's 10 o'clock now.
We're ready to start.
2 Kings chapter 22 and verse 20 was our stopping point last week.
So let's begin there today.
And try to finish this verse and chapter.
Glad to have you here.
Glad to have Miss Reba, our visitor, and all of our online visitors and members.
That's red meat for a Sunday school teacher.
2 Kings chapter 22 and verse 20.
A prophetess named Huldah was.
How many of y'all are going to name your children?
Any Jeremy girls one day you're going to name your daughter Huld?
No?
Well, I tried.
I may suggest that for my next granddaughter because I can't seem to have any grandsons.
I got three daughters, four granddaughters.
And I'm okay with that.
So I think Huld may be the next granddaughter, if I have anything to say about it.
But she has presented the king's messengers with God's word as it pertains to Judah and then specifically to King Josiah.
And the news for Judah, as we learned, was severe.
The news for Josiah was severe.
But God had provided a refuge for Josiah.
His wasn't as bad as it was for Jerusalem and Judah.
And that refuge God provided For Josiah was a peaceful ending, and going to his grave without seeing all of the evil that would be brought upon Judah.
So he was going to get to live his days out in peace and die in peace.
And looking now at the end of verse 20 in our text.
It says, and they brought the king word again.
So, all of the things that we saw.
Or we read that Huld told these messengers had now come to an end, and it was time for the messengers to take that word back to the king.
And these were faithful messengers.
And so it says they brought the king word again.
So we know they completed that act successfully.
And they brought it back minus nothing and plus nothing.
You've played the game telephone before, where you start up here with a sim message, and by the time it gets back to Brother Billy, it doesn't look anything like how it started.
Well, a faithful messenger wouldn't do that and make sure that every word is transmitted.
Back to the king.
And so they did that.
But you know, this news they carried to King Josiah was heavy.
Because their names were not mentioned as recipients of the same grace that Josiah would receive.
God didn't tell, the prophetess didn't tell the messengers, hey, God said that you also will go to your grave in peace, and that you also will not see the evil brought upon Judah.
That wasn't for them.
That was for them to tell the king.
So that made it pretty heavy.
And God did not say Hilkiah.
Now remember, he was the high priest.
He wasn't a very good high priest, or none of this would have happened.
But he was the high priest, and Shaphan.
Who was the scribe who found the book of the law in the house of the Lord, or his son, even the king's servant?
None of them could say, we're not going to see the evil God brings upon Jerusalem.
Only Josiah.
He was the only one who was given that refuge.
And so I think they probably wept and mourned on their way back to Jerusalem.
They didn't run back with happy news, even though they were probably glad for their king.
They were thankful he would be spared.
But in general, it was bad news.
And then we were going to have to tell the king, you're going to die.
That's another thing.
You're going to die.
And if you remember, from the beginning of our study of Josiah's reign.
That we learned, we did the math, he was eight when he assumed the throne, and he stayed on the throne 31 years.
And we learned that kings don't live after they Are off the throne.
The reason they're off the throne is that they die.
So we learned that he was going to die at the age of 39.
With thirty-one of those years as the king.
So, in telling him that he would die.
They would also tell him that God was not going to hold back on the evil that he promised to pour out upon Judah.
Now, if Josiah had been a narcissist, if he thought only of himself, he would have said, Well, that's fine, whatever happens to Judah happens, but I'm going to be spared.
Well, he wasn't.
He cared deeply about his country.
Not only about Judah, but he cared about Israel as well.
So, this news.
Was heavy to bear for the messengers, but it was also going to be heavy upon Josiah.
And yes, his eyes would be spared from seeing evil, but his family and his friends would have to endure it.
Now anybody who loves their family and their friends If they knew bad things were about to happen to them because God said they were, there would be a lot of mourning, weeping.
You wouldn't say, Well, at least I'm not having to go through it.
That's not how we think.
Our pastor and I, as well as anyone else who preaches God's word, have terrible news to deliver to the people, don't we?
He that believeth not is condemned already because he hath not believed on the name of the only begotten Son of God.
We have terrible news to deliver to the ones who are unbelievers.
And it's that terrible news that drives a person that God's Spirit uses to show the person the cross.
He tells him, without it, you're condemned.
And it is also the news that he tells to the unbeliever who refuses to put his trust in Jesus.
It is that news that's a witness against him, because his word says, he that believeth not is condemned already.
And if you think about all of the works-based salvation religions, the religions of Cain all over the world.
If you think about how they view gaining an entrance into heaven, they believe there are some things you have to do while you're living in order to gain an entrance into heaven.
And essentially, they believe that Jesus' death on the cross is not sufficient.
You've got to do some things to go along with it.
And we know that that is heres.
And it started in the Garden of Eden with Cain, believing he could do something to come to God in a way other than what God said.
And it's just been continued and refined.
And massaged and turned into all of these different religions that are in the world.
But if all of them would go back to this John 3 Passage.
It's John 3:18, and you can put the little letter B.
He that believeth not is condemned already because he hath not believed on the name of the only begotten Son of God.
Then, what they would learn is you're already condemned.
It's not that your condemnation is waiting.
To see what you'll do in life, you're already condemned because of one thing, not because you haven't done enough good things, not because you.
Forgot to pray today, or you didn't go to church Wednesday, or whatever, it's because you don't believe on the name of the only begotten Son of God.
And when you don't, you'll do all sorts of things to try to be accepted by God if that's what you want to do.
We have terrible news to deliver to people like that.
The soul that sinneth, it shall die.
The wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.
That's from Ezekiel chapter 18, verse 20.
We have terrible news because we have to tell people, and death and hell were cast into the lake of fire.
This is the second death, and whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire from Revelation chapter 20.
And yes, it's God's word.
It's holy.
It is just.
There's nothing unfair about it.
It's the right thing for God to do, but to the unbelievers, that's terrible news.
It's a grave sentence because it dashes all of their hope.
In their own efforts.
It dashes all of their hope in what their priest told them.
If you'll just do this, and we'll give you these indulgences, and you pay money to the church, and your sins will be absolved.
It dashes all of that.
It's also grave news to those of us who believe.
Because we have friends and loved ones who are lost.
And that pains your heart, doesn't it?
It pains mine.
And we know their doom is certain if they remain in their unbelief.
When we share the gospel with other people, We do so knowing, based on what God's Word says, that most of them will reject the Word of God.
They'll take the gospel and do something else with it.
When they're asked, What have you done with the Lord Jesus Christ?
they will have to say, I have rejected him.
We know that's going to happen.
Because the Bible tells us that there are two roads, there are two gates.
One road is broad and the gates wide, and the Bible says many there be which go in thereat.
And then there's a narrow road and a narrow gate, and that's the one that leads to life.
And the Bible says, few there be that find it.
So, when you give the news of the gospel to someone, you know that there's a greater probability that they're going to reject it than they're going to accept it, but we still share it, don't we?
We still share it because the lost sinner who's seeking to be saved needs hope.
Same hope we got.
And the one who remains in unbelief needs to know this there's terrible news awaiting you, and there's a terrible ending awaiting you.
We do it anyway.
And as the messengers brought Josiah word again, they did so knowing that this was terrible news.
For all of Judah, and even for the king, because his family and his fellow countrymen would have to go through this evil.
And what he does with it, and what people do with the gospel when we tell them about it, is between them and God.
We're witnesses.
And witnessing is about being obedient, it's not about results.
That's why you don't go out and keep the little scorecard that a lot of these and I, you know, I pretty much My adult life grew up in independent fundamental Baptist churches, and we could spend hours and hours talking about some of the heres that I learned along the way.
But you go out with this little card, and Make somebody say this sinner's prayer, and then you put a little tick mark down and come back and tell everybody, oh, had three people saved on their front porch this afternoon, and they have no idea what you just told them.
They don't understand the gospel.
And so that's obviously not how we do that.
But the point here is about the news they brought Josiah.
So now, if we look in chapter 23 and verse 1.
And so when we read this first verse, we've already understood that the king has been brought these words.
He's heard them, he's absorbed them, and now he's ready to act upon them.
Chapter 23, verse 1, and the king sent, and they gathered unto him all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem.
Judah was a broken nation, and the healing of Judah would start with their king in this case.
And now their king, having received these words, this terrible news from the messengers.
This king has to present this truth to the elders, and they're going to have to accept it.
And if the elders accept God's word as it's delivered to them, then they'll turn around to their tribes and they'll say, This is God's word.
Thus saith the Lord.
All of the evil that's written in the book of the law shall be poured out upon us.
Well, that'd run people out of a church, wouldn out of the average church today.
They don't like bad news.
They don't want to hear preachers talking about the negative parts of the Bible, as they say.
But truth is truth, regardless of how we feel about it.
And the king, so think about the elders presenting this news.
Think about the king presenting this news to the elders and the elders to the people.
Somebody is going to reject it.
In fact, most of them are going to reject it.
They're going to mock the bringers of that bad news, even though it's straight.
From God to the prophetess to the messengers to the king to the elders to the people.
Unchanged.
You know, the king could have just made the proclamation to the whole nation himself.
He could have skipped the elders and all of that.
He could have just said, look.
Everybody gather, and I'll tell you my.
But this The way this was done is a wise strategy, and we use it in the church.
We use it outside the church.
In fact, this method of communication, this chain of command, and that's what it is.
It's a principle of the chain of command.
The king gets the message, he gives it to the elders, the elders give it to the people, and that's how we do in a workplace, isn't it?
We have a chain of command.
And in the chain of command, a leader will share his vision with the leaders who are under him.
In authority.
And ideally, in the perfect world, those leaders receive that vision and they believe in the vision.
And then they teach it to those who are under them.
And the goal of doing that is to have every person from top to bottom in the chain.
Sharing a vision, believing in it, and executing the things that are necessary to move it forward.
Whether it's Chick-fil-A or Central Baptist Church, that's what we do.
And if you take a pastor, now certainly a pastor is not a king.
And by the way, if you if along the way, if you give that message And there's somebody in the chain who rejects it, changes it, won't accept it, then that causes damage to the entire group.
It causes a lack of trust by the ones above them.
It causes confusion by the ones below them.
And in a nation, the king is the overseer, but the pastor in a church is the overseer.
The Bible is very clear about that.
So, if you're driving down the road, let's say you're headed to Tyler, I'm thinking of on I-2 this huge sign.
About a church that has pastors.
I'm going to just make up two names: John, Pastor John and Pastor Annette.
That's his wife.
They're co-pastors.
That's not a pastor.
That pastor is not even overseeing his own family.
That's not even a scriptural view of a marriage where the wife and the husband are each other's overseers.
God gave that order, that biblical order for the marriage, for the home, and He gave it for the church.
And so the pastor is the overseer.
He's not a king.
But he is placed in a position of authority, and with that authority comes a tremendous amount of responsibility.
You may have some idea, but I don't think you can fully appreciate it until you've been a pastor.
And if the pastor is a godly one, he's both excited and at the same time humbled.
By that office with which God has entrusted him.
And that kind of pasture takes God's vision.
Which is God's Word.
That's God's vision.
If you ever wonder, well, what's the vision of your church?
Well, the vision of our church is to teach God's word.
Because this is where, this is what we use to evangelize sinners.
And we take it across the parking lot over here and give you about a year.
To try to understand the gospel.
Some don't need that long, others may need a little bit longer.
But it comes from here.
And then we use it to build people up into faith once they become Christians, which is what you're doing in here.
But it always comes from here.
So when we say God's vision for this church, that's not some special message He gave me while I was driving down here And I was talking to my wife and Sarah about that on the way, about somebody we know who says, Well, you know, the Holy Spirit wants this, and the Holy Spirit wants that.
The only thing the Holy Spirit wants is what His Word says.
Anything outside of that, if you're saying, well, you know, the Holy Spirit told me.
To take a left on this street one day, no, he didn't.
You just took a left on that street one day.
Now, there may have been a greater purpose.
God may have moved upon your heart to witness to somebody.
That is scriptural.
And you may have taken that left turn and went by that person's house and witnessed.
That's what the Holy Spirit told you to do: to witness, to be witnesses to him.
And so if a pastor were to tell you, God gave me a vision for this church that we would expand this wing over here and we would have beautiful vanities in the women's restroom, and we would have a parking lot paved with gold.
No, God did not give that pastor that vision.
That pastor's vision came from his own mind.
But a pastor who takes God's vision, God's word, and stud it, understand it and believes it.
Because he has to do that before he can pass it on, right?
Once he's studied it, then he has to make sure the leaders below him in this rank structure that God has for the church.
That we also share that vision.
I can tell you this: I've known Brother Fult for a long time.
And as I've told y'all before, he was my pastor before he ever even knew he was my pastor.
That was when I was in other churches.
He was still my pastor.
But I can tell you this: if he and I weren't settled on.
The major doctrines, in fact, the majority of the doctrines in the Bible, and certainly the ones that we teach from up here, if we weren't settled on them the same way, if we weren't in agreement on them, I wouldn't be up here.
I'd be down there, or maybe not even here.
But he could not say.
Now, you know, Brother Andy, I know that you have a different view of how a person is saved, but that's okay.
You and I have been friends a long time.
No, sir, we could still be friends, but we could not share the vision that God's given in His Word because the vision He preaches and the one I preach would be different.
So that's what has to happen in a church.
Sunday school teachers, if we find out that a Sunday school teacher is teaching something other than God's word, then we have to say something to them: say, hey, look, that's not what we want here.
And we get it straightened out.
And if we don't, they're not a Sunday school teacher anymore.
Doesn't mean we don't love them, doesn't mean we don't want them in the church, but we cannot have them in a position of responsibility.
And suppose a king has a prime minister or a military leader who opposes his words.
And that, in doing that, that prime minister or that military leader can cause tremendous harm because he creates division in the body.
And the people below him, the captains and the lieutenants, the sergeants, or in the prime ministers.
Role, those people below him will see that his vision conflicts with the king's vision.
And so that's what division is.
That's division.
When the vision of the king conflicts with the vision of the people or anyone in that chain of command.
So, if an associate pastor or a Sunday school teacher or someone who may not really have a position in the church, but they have great influence over the people.
Over the members.
If they were to begin teaching and espousing something outside of God's word, then God's vision, which became the pastor's vision, would be met with division.
And the people whom the associate pastor or the powerful church member influence would see two visions then.
The pastors and the vision of the one who's causing the division.
And so to prevent this division, the king.
As gathered not only the elders together, but look back here in verse 2.
And the king went up into the house of the Lord, and all the men of Judah, and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem with him.
And the priests and the prophets, and all the people, both small and great.
So the king gathers the elders, and then he goes to the house of the Lord.
And the people follow the elders as the elders follow the king.
You notice Josiah didn't go to the groves of Baal.
He didn't go to the house of the high priest.
He didn't go to the military training grounds.
He went to the house of the Lord.
He went to the place where all things should be done right, even when the world is falling apart around us, and it is on every level.
And I've you know, I have a pretty thorough disgust for politics and politicians on both sides.
I've somebody asked me, what are you?
Well, I'm a constitutional conservative, so wherever that puts me when it comes to politics, that's what I am.
And I'm nothing beyond that.
I end up voting for the lesser of two evils every time I cast my vote.
I'm rarely, ever pleased with a candidate for whom I vote.
Maybe initially, but at some point I go, There we are.
The real self is coming out again.
Everything falls apart around us, but the place where it ought to be done right is in the church.
That's why, and I bet some of you could.
Testify to this too: that when you come to church, you have probably dealt with a week full of hardships and heartaches and stress.
And dysfunction, profanity, all of the things that just bombard us.
Rude drivers.
And it just drives you up the wall.
And when you get here and you sit under the teaching of God's word, it's like a refuge, isn't it?
I promise you it is to me because I come here with not the exact same issues you do, but I got it on both shoulders too.
I've got heavy, heavy burdens in my life.
But when I come here, and I've told our pastor this several times after, especially Wednesday night messages, I'll say, man, I needed this.
I needed to be here.
I needed to hear God's word because that short time we were here, I totally forgot about everything going on around me, and I was able to focus on the scriptures.
So it's important, not only in Josiah's time, but in our time, that everything starts right in the house of the Lord.
Now, imagine if we were to start your week off.
It's the first day of the week.
This is Sunday, first day of the week.
And we were to start your week off by teaching you error.
And you walked out of here confused.
Now, that's a great way to start the week.
You're already going to encounter the world when you go to work or you go to whatever things you're doing during the day.
See your family next or your friend or the guy down the street.
You're already going to encounter the world when you get out on the highway and see people who are selfish drivers and rude, distracted, drunk, and all of that.
You don't need it to start here.
You need to start off right.
And that means we need to share God's vision with you, just like He shares it with us in His Word.
If you notice, he went to the place where Judah was to bring their sin offerings.
Their peace offerings, their free will offerings, their redemption money, and all of the other things that were originally commanded by the Lord in Moses' day.
Those still apply.
Notice that Josiah didn't summon all the elders to the palace.
Now, he could have done that.
That would have been very presidential of him to say, Well, I'm the king.
You guys come to me.
He could have said, I have the book of the law with me, so we'll just meet at my office.
How's that?
No, the book of the law and the house of the Lord.
Are to be as inseparable as the Word of God and the Church are today.
There should be absolutely no separation of those two.
After all, what is the house of the Lord?
The house of the Lord is evidence that the people followed the instructions that were given to them.
You go back to the tabernacle, and God told them how to sew every curtain and every pillar and every hook and selvage, all these words that we weren, we had to learn what they meant.
And the fact that that was completed was evidence that they had obeyed God's word.
They did it according to the pattern showed to Moses in the mount.
That's exactly how it was done.
So there's no separation.
You don't say, well, we have church and then we have the Bible over here.
The church is based upon the Bible.
The reason we have a church is because we have a Bible.
Because we have God's word.
The church didn't come first, and then God said, Well, you know, I need to give these fine people something to read while they're there.
Well, the church was founded.
Upon the Word of God, the living Word of God, may I say.
And as we As we draw closer to the Lord's return, I'm amazed by the apostasy that has become accepted.
In most churches, and I mean most.
I wish I didn't have to say that.
Not just a few, and it comes in a lot of forms.
But it has to do with the separation of the Lord's word from the Lord's church.
God did not teach the children of Israel to make their own altars at home.
So they could just take care of their own sacrifices without having to trouble themselves to go to the tabernacle or the temple.
He's bound the two together.
Here's a few examples in the scripture.
Exodus 23, 19.
Exodus 23, 19.
The first of the first fruits of thy land shalt thou bring into the house of the Lord thy God.
He didn't say, Send ye all the tithes into the storehouse.
He said, Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse.
So when you come and you come down here and leave your tithes, your offerings, that's what you're doing.
You're bringing those first fruits.
Numbers chapter 11, verses 16 through 17.
Numbers chapter 11, verses 16 through 17.
And the LORD said unto Moses, Gather unt To me, seventy men of the elders of Israel. whom thou knowest to be the elders of the people, and officers over them, and bring them unto the tabernacle of the congregation, that they may stand there with thee, and I will come down and talk with thee there.
And I will take of the spirit which is upon thee, and will put it upon them.
And they shall bear the burden of the people with thee, that thou bear it not thyself alone.
When God promised to meet with the children of Israel in the Old Testament, where did he promise to meet with them?
Exodus 25, verses 21 through 22.
Exodus 25, 21 through 22.
We're looking at why it was significant that Josiah and the elders went to the house of the Lord.
And that passage in Exodus says, And thou shalt put the mercy seat above the ark, and in the ark, that's the ark of the covenant, thou shalt put the testimony that I shall give thee.
And there.
I will meet with thee, and I will commun with thee from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubims which are upon the ark of the testimony.
Of all things which I will give thee in commandment unto the children of Israel.
That ark was the ark of the covenant that you studied across the parking lot and that we come back to from time to time.
It was in the Holy of Holies, which was inside the tabernacle.
Now we apply this to the church in the New Testament.
After Paul and Barnabas, the apostles, had preached the gospel in many places, they arrived in Antioch, which is where Christians were first called Christians.
They arrived in Antioch in Acts chapter 14.
Acts 14: says, And when they were come and had gathered the church together, you see what they did?
They rehearsed all that God had done with them.
Now that's what Josiah is about to do.
He's about to tell the people what God said.
They rehearsed all that God had done with them and how he had opened the door of faith unto the Gentiles.
And then one more passage on that.
Hebrews 10, verses 24 through 25.
Hebrews 10 verses 24 through 25.
And let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works, not fors the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is, but exhorting one another.
And so much more as you see the day approaching.
And there's so much in that passage to talk about.
Listen, a big reason.
That we come to church is to be gathered together in the same place so we can all hear the same message from God's Word at the same time.
Now there are many other reasons that we do that.
There's a reason that we have an online presence for those who are unable to be here, whether because of distance or illness, infirmity.
And it's so that they can gather with us in that way.
But I'll promise you, and I know this for a fact: the times when I have had to work late and I had to catch church online, it's different.
I mean, I love hearing the preaching, but it is different than coming in here and making personal contact with the people who are here.
Whether I wave at them or shake their hand or bump fist, you better watch doing that with Ann.
She will hurt you.
She doesn't just hold that fist up there, man.
She so be careful.
But whether I do any of that, if I'm not here, I'm missing something.
And I promise you, you ask Sister Leah or ask Gabriel and James when they're out on the road, Leah and Mark and their kids, and Kelly, and all the people we have online, our members and our visitors alike.
Ask them, wouldn't you like to be here with us in person?
And I promise you they would.
I guarantee you they would.
Because there's something missing when you're not.
And as we read earlier, God chose to meet with his people over the mercy seat, and the only one allowed in that room ever.
Was the high priest, and that was one time a year, and he had to bring the blood of a perfect innocent animal with him, or he would die.
And when the people came to the tabernacle, and this is what I think a lot of people miss by not studying the Old Testament and understanding its application to us today.
When people came to the tabernacle, they weren't just coming to a building.
They were becoming acquainted with all of the types of Jesus Christ that were represented in that tabernacle and those who served it.
Particularly with the high priest.
They came, they brought their animal, their sacrifice, and then there was the high priest.
And that high priest took the blood which was shed on their behalf, and he presented that to God.
And he did that.
Not at their house, not while they were on the lake, not in the hunting stand.
He did that in the Holy of Holies in the tabernacle.
And that high priest was a type of Jesus Christ.
And the people would have missed out on that.
Had they just said, Well, I'm going to send my sacrifice with somebody else.
I've got stuff to do today.
That I want you to see how critical it was that Josiah led the people to the house of the Lord.
Because apart from their obedience to God's word concerning the house of the Lord and the sacrifices and the ordinances.
They would have never understood truly or believed in the Messiah whom all of those things represented.
And just to clarify in our verse the word into, look back down there in the verse, you see the word into.
It you start thinking, well, how did all those people fit in the house of the Lord?
Well, they didn't.
Most translations have that as the word to, and there actually isn't a Hebrew word for into in this verse.
It's understood in the conjugation of the verb, I assume.
I'm not a Hebrew scholar by any means.
But the Hebrew word here simply addresses the word for house.
So, practically speaking, the square footage of that temple, as magnificent as it was, could not have accommodated all of those people at one time inside.
So, we Allow that most of them probably stood outside within hearing distance.
They went to the house of the Lord.
They were outside, and it says, looking back in your text, and he read.
In their ears, all the words of the book of the covenant which was found in the house of the Lord.
And by now, we ought to recognize.
That the godliest man in this large assembly of people was the king, King Josiah, not the high priest.
And that was a problem.
Joshua chapter 8, verses 34 through 35.
Joshua 8, 34 through 35.
Speaking of Joshua, and afterward he read all the words of the law, the blessings and cursings, according to all that is written in the book of the law.
There was not a word of all that Moses commanded, which Joshua read not before all the congregation of Israel, with the women and the little ones and the strangers that were conversant among them.
Now the children of Israel in this passage had been led by Joshua as they conquered Ai.
And the king of Ai was not fit to read these words.
He'd been hung on a tree.
So his voice was dramatically affected there.
Joshua did the honors, and he didn't miss a single word.
Josiah, in our text, read all the wor of the book of the covenant, which was the book of the law, which was the word of God.
It's the same thing.
There's not a book of the law over here, and a book of the covenant over here, and God's Word over here.
It's all the same thing.
So Josiah led the elders and the people to the house of the Lord, and once he arrived, he read them the whole Bible.
At least the part he had then, which was a lot, by the way.
Have you ever read the first five books of the Bible?
I hope you have.
I hope you've read through the whole Bible.
But if you read the first five books of the Bible out loud to somebody, that's pretty long, isn't it?
That's a lot of reading.
But Josiah also had some of the words of the prophets at his disposal.
He had the Psalms of David.
He had the Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon.
And probably some other books as well.
And Judah heard every bit of it.
They were accountable for every word they heard.
In my years of attending independent fundamental Baptist churches and then Southern Baptist churches before that and along the way, I found a disturbing trend in most cases.
The teaching of the Old Testament was almost non-existent.
And I'll bet some of you may have experienced that as well before coming here.
Oh, there were sprinklings of Psalms and kind of hit-or-miss Old Testament verses that were quoted.
But as far as a systematic effort to teach Genesis 1 to the end of Genesis.
To teach all the way to the book of Malachi, that was generally absent.
Now, to the teachers who did teach.
Some of these books from verse to verse, I thank you.
I mean, I appreciate them.
I really do.
But some of these same teachers and pastors would hold up a Bible.
And they'd holler and scream about it and talk about how we need to get back to the Word of God and then spend almost all their time in the New Testament.
And even then, there was very little verse by verse teaching when all the teaching, in my opinion, should have been done verse by verse.
And the effect of that sparse Infrequent expositional teaching where we expose the text, we tell you what it says and what the context is and the companion words and what the words mean and all of that.
When that is absent, then that pastor cannot say all the words of the book of the law were read in the ears of the people.
And it takes a long time and a lot of church meetings like this to teach through some of these books.
It took me over two years to teach through the book of Jeremiah.
Nelda knows exactly how many days it took me.
She has them in her notes.
We've been in the books of the kings for Probably over two years.
I'm certain of that.
Our pastor spends a full year teaching Genesis to Jesus.
For two reasons.
Number one, as he said the other day, it takes a long time to deprogram people who've been taught wrong and who've believed wrong.
And two, This system teaching over there prepares the students to transition from milk to strong meat, which is what you get in here.
And even with all of our effort directed toward teaching this way, we can't teach you every verse of God's Word before you die.
We just can't do it.
It's just not enough time.
I read yesterday where Pastor John MacArthur passed away, and although Pastor MacArthur and I differ on a few things.
I really appreciate his devotion to expositional preaching.
That's what his whole ministry has been.
He took 55 years to preach through, verse by verse, to preach through the entire New Testament.
It was important to him to read, to study, and to teach all the words in the book of the law.
But there's also a responsibility that the hearers of this book have.
You have the responsibility to read all the book of the law, to learn it, to study it.
And I'll close with this.
I have a dear friend who I wish would start coming to our church with his family.
He loves to study his Bible.
And he will sometimes email me questions about difficult passages, and I'll help him as time allows.
A lot of those questions would be answered if he were here.
He'd say, I already know the answer to that.
But I've always wondered if his pastor is much of a teacher.
When people miss the teaching of the Bible, either by not coming to church or not tuning in to our broadcasted lessons or going back and watching them when they can.
They're not only missing the reading of the book of the law, but they're also missing out on something else that would help them tremendously.
When you hear the way we teach the Bible, You'll notice some things we have in common, and we're going to go over those next week as we learn the importance of read all the words in the book of the law.
Father, thank you for everyone who came and tuned in today.
Thank you for all those who will watch the broadcast later.
Thank you for all those who hunger for your word.
And thank you for the gifts that you give men to be able to teach it.
And may you be glorified in all these things in your saints.
And we pray today that the lost sinner would be drawn to you through the gospel of Jesus Christ.
That you'd give our pastor the mind of Christ concerning the scriptures and give him the liberty to teach them to us today.
Bless the singing.
The fellowship, the exhortation that we receive both from your word and from each other.
In Jesus' name, amen.
