I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on 2 Kings 17-18.

    The Northern Kingdom went into captivity. The writer tells us that this happened because they had rejected God’s commands. The writer spends quite a bit of time emphasizing their sins of worshiping other gods. The writer does not go into detail for the most part, but we know that many of those worship practices were sins in and of themselves. He does however bring special attention to the fact that the people of Israel had sacrificed their own children as part of their worship of idols. Their greatest failing resulted from wanting to be like everybody else. The same thing is the greatest danger facing Christians today. Just like it did for the ancient Israelites, wanting to be like our neighbors will lead us into sin.

    After the Assyrians settled other people in the lands of the Northern Kingdom something happened which influenced their attitude when they later invaded the Southern Kingdom. After initial problems they sent priests they had removed from that land back to teach the new settlers “what the god of the land requires.” When they did this the problems diminished. As a result, they viewed the God of Abraham as just another regional deity. This led them to two false conclusions. First, they thought that Hezekiah’s insistence that people worship God only at the Temple in Jerusalem was a slight against God which would reduce His interest in protecting the people of Judah. Second, they thought that their victory over other peoples with local gods indicated that God had no power to stop them. The failure of the people of Israel to faithfully follow God led the Assyrians to a false understanding of the nature of God. The failure of the Israelites to faithfully follow God led the Assyrians to hold Him in contempt. In the same way, our failure to faithfully serve God may lead non-believers to hold Him in contempt.