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

I love the story about Hezekiah and the king of Assyria.  And it is right to admire Hezekiah, because the passage tells us, “Hezekiah trusted in the Lord, the God of Israel. There was no one like him among all the kings of Judah, either before him or after him.”  However, today I want to look at what the passage tells us about the exile of the people from the Northern Kingdom.  It tells us that God caused this to happen because they had sinned against God.  The phrase which really struck me was, “They followed worthless idols and themselves became worthless.”  They had value because they were made in the image of God, and because God had chosen them as His people.  But, instead of doing what He asked of them, serving and worshiping Him, they chose to worship idols.  As a result, they destroyed the value which God had given them and made themselves worthless.  In the same way, we have value because we too were made in God’s image, and Jesus died for our sins so that we might become children of God, God’s chosen people.  If, instead of seeking to follow God’s commands we worship idols , we too will become worthless.  This passage even foreshadows this when it speaks of those whom the Assyrians settled in the land of Israel after taking its people into exile.  It tells us that these settlers worshiped the Lord, but also served their own gods in accordance with the customs of the lands they had come from.  The implication being that if they had given up their idols, God would have welcomed them into His people.  Today, we have the same choice.  God has chosen us and used the death if His Son, Jesus Christ, to bring us into His people and give us value.  Will we destroy that value by serving worthless idols and refusing to follow His commands?

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