This is an Open Group - both men and women are welcome to attend!
Park on Old Va Beach Rd. You won't be towed there!
The Prophetic King
Theme Verse:
“In the days of those kings the God of Heaven will set up a Kingdom which will never be destroyed, and that Kingdom will not be left for another people; it will crush and put an end to all these kingdoms, but it will itself endure forever.”
The Kingdom - Session 02
Set the Stage:
When all was lost because of Adam's sin, humanity quickly forgot about God. Most people were happy to go their own way and do their own thing. God knew it would be necessary to reintroduce Himself to mankind. He started that process through a man named Abraham and his descendants, who eventually became the nation of Israel.
When you look at it in the natural, the Israelites had a lot working against them in the Old Testament. They had to occupy a land with fortified cities. When they settled into that land, the peoples who surrounded them on all sides automatically became their enemies. And those enemies were pagans who worshipped false gods that they viewed as local deities, limited in power to the geographical area in which they were worshiped.
“God knew it would be necessary to reintroduce Himself to mankind.”
This last difficulty plagued the ancient Hebrew people worse than any other they faced as a nation. Time and again the Old Testament tells us how the Israelites fell away from following God and turned to the false gods of their neighbors and enemies, despite all the warnings and punishments God sent them. From our New Testament Christian perspective, it's tempting to think that the Israelites must have been out of their minds. If we consider the issue in its historical context, however, it becomes easier to sympathize with them.
“Time and again the Old Testament tells us how the Israelites fell away from following God and turned to the false gods of their neighbors and enemies.”
Israel's initial identity as a nation was shaped during their captivity as slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt. At that period of history, Egypt was the most powerful nation on earth. It was also a thoroughly pagan country where it was illegal to worship anyone other than the numerous Egyptian gods - the most important of whom was Pharaoh himself. The Hebrew people gradually forgot about the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. When Moses returned to Egypt to set the people free, it is fairly clear that Yahweh was a pretty distant memory for them (see Exodus 6:8-9).
Old habits die hard. After their release from four hundred years of slavery and pagan worship under the Pharaohs, Israel had a difficult time seeing Yahweh as anything other than just another god: limited in power and influence, contending with other local gods. We see evidence of this all throughout the Old Testament - perhaps nowhere as clearly as in Exodus 32, when the golden calf was made at the foot of Mount Sinai. There the people thought Moses had died and God had fallen silent.