You'll notice I didn't actually say God save the king at any point during the service, but as tempting as it might be. Anyway, we are going to be discussing kings today in our sermon, so if you would turn in your Bibles to 1 Kings chapter 16. But unfortunately, the example of the kings that we'll be looking at is a poor one. As you know, in the Book of Kings, we track the history of the kings of Judah and the kings of Israel. And at times they are viewed concurrently or sometimes we'll look at one dynasty. Unfortunately, because the dynasties changed so quickly in Israel, the northern kingdom, it was often possible for just a few verses to contain the history of an entire house. rising and falling, as we'll see in the case of Baasha, the house that he established that did not continue because he disobeyed the Lord. One of the things we'll also see, unfortunately, is sons following the wicked example of their fathers, even though they knew what came of them. But before we turn our attention to the word of God and seek to glean wisdom from that, let us go to the one who has given us this word, and let's ask for his blessing. Please join me. Sovereign Lord, I am a weak man. I cannot hope to unpack your word, divide it aright, and apply it to your people. But I know, O Lord, that you can. I do pray, therefore, as your word is being read and preached, that you would be the one who would be sending it to hearts. that you would be, O Lord, breaking our hearts with your law and making them fertile ground for the gospel seed to take root and to flourish. As we hear about the bad examples of our forebears and the faith, your covenant people, Lord, those who have been set apart by you and given a land of their own, help us to remember to learn from this. and not, O Lord, to simply do the same kind of things that they did foolishly. O Lord, let us hear your word and let us apply it in our lives. Now, Lord, as we come before you and hear the word, we know that Satan will be seeking to distract us. The world and the flesh will also be drawing us off. They don't want us to profit. We're in the midst of spiritual warfare whenever the word is being preached. So we pray, Lord, that you would be the one who hedges us about and helps us to listen intently, and we pray this in Jesus' holy name, amen, amen. 1 Kings chapter 16, I'm gonna be reading verses one through 14, and I do remind you, this is the word of the Lord. Then the word of the Lord came to Jehu, the son of Hanani, against Baasha, saying, inasmuch as I lifted you out of the dust and made you ruler over my people Israel, and you have walked in the way of Jeroboam and have made my people Israel sin to provoke me to anger with their sins, surely I will take away the posterity of Baasha and the posterity of his house, and I will make your house like the house of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat. The dogs shall eat whoever belongs to Baasha and dies in the city. And the birds of the air shall eat whoever dies in the fields. Now the rest of the acts of Baasha, what he did and his might, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel? So Baasha rested with his fathers and was buried in Tirzah. Then Elah, his son, reigned in his place. And also the word of the Lord came by the prophet Jehu, the son of Hanani, against Baasha and his house because of all the evil that he did in the sight of the Lord and provoking him to anger with the work of his hands and being like the house of Jeroboam and because he killed them. In the 26th year of Asa, king of Judah, Elah, the son of Baasha, became king over Israel and reigned two years in Tirzah. Now his servant, Zimri, commander of half his chariots, conspired against him as he was in Tirza, drinking himself drunk in the house of Arzah, steward of his house in Tirza. And Zimri went in and struck him and killed him in the 27th year of Asa, king of Judah, and reigned in his place. Then it came to pass when he began to reign, as soon as he was seated on his throne, that he killed all the household of Baasha. He did not leave him one male, neither of his relatives nor of his friends. Thus Zimri destroyed all the household of Baasha according to the word of the Lord. which he spoke against Baasha by Jehu the prophet, for all the sins of Baasha and the sins of Elah his son, by which they had sinned and by which they had made Israel sin in provoking the Lord God of Israel to anger with their idols. Now the rest of the acts of Elah and all that he did, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel? The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. It's not certain that he said it, but at least he's credited with it. Albert Einstein is credited with the famous insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Dr. Phil used to be able to run a TV talk show program based upon that principle that people would continue to do the same thing and expect different results. And of course they would come on a show and they would talk about how their repeated dysfunctional sinful behaviors how they were working in their lives, and of course he would ask his catchphrase questions, so how's that working for you? And the answer was always, not well. But I'm told that most of the people to whom he spoke who were locked in those sinful cycles, unfortunately they never left them. He may have pointed out to them their errors, but very few of those people actually change, and that's something we see in human nature. It requires something radical to happen in someone's life and in their heart for them usually to leave those behaviors behind. So even though they know that they aren't working, they keep doing the same thing. And then, unfortunately, it's often the case that their children, who saw how these things worked out in their parents' lives, they do the same thing as well. Often the patterns of sinful, destructive behavior that go from parent to child go on from generation to generation to generation. And every single generation doing these things thinks suddenly, we'll be the ones who will finally make this sinful pattern of behavior work. It'll work out in our life, but it never does. And unfortunately, as we go through the Book of First Kings, we are going to see exactly that kind of insanity, doing the same thing again and again and again, and expecting different results. We are going to see how, again and again, kings do exactly the same wicked things that their predecessors did, and they get exactly the same bad results. Now, happily, or maybe unhappily, back in 1 Kings 16, in this particular time frame, there was no Dr. Phil. There was no, there were no psychologists on television to point out to them that it wasn't working well, but they had something far better than that. They had prophets who were sent by God to rebuke them, to tell them the right way, and to warn these kings and their successors. King Jeroboam, you remember, was warned by Ahijah. He had a prophet sent to him to tell him that his false worship of Yahweh, the way that he had disconnected the people of Israel from the cycle of worship at the temple that was supposed to point them to the Lord Jesus Christ, and it created his own holy days, his own priests, and of course he created these two calves and said, these things symbolize Yahweh, the mighty God, repeating, stupidly, the sin of Aaron in making the calf for Israel at Sinai. This golden calf worship was supposed to point the people to Yahweh to be a visible symbol of the true God of Israel, but the false worship did not teach them the right lessons. And by breaking that connection with the temple, Unfortunately, Jeroboam had sent the nation off in an entirely different direction, away from God, further and further and further. And unfortunately, his son, Nadab, had continued on, even though he saw the prophecy of destruction that had been given to his father through his mother. You remember, Jeroboam had sent the queen to Ahijah to ask whether or not their son, who was sick, would die. And he said that he surely wouldn't. He told her, he will die the moment that you cross the threshold. And Nadab must have known that his brother had indeed died when his mother had crossed the threshold and entered into the city. But he, too, continued on in the false worship that his father had set up until Baasha killed him and his household at Gibeathon. Now, we might imagine that Baasha, seeing the fulfillment of that prophecy against Jeroboam, to the very letter, and brought about by his own hand, that he might have thought, maybe, maybe I shouldn't be doing exactly the same things that my predecessor did. But no, he continues on in that. And then when Jehu comes to him with a prophecy that mirrored what the Lord had told Jeroboam, and he knew that the prophecy that had been made to Jeroboam had come to pass, did he repent? Did he say, pray that these things don't happen? Did he say, as David, when Nathan came to him, you remember, and through the use of a parable showed him the wickedness of what he had done with Bathsheba, did he say, I have sinned? No, he did not. In fact, he went even further. In verse 13, we say that he added idols to the worship of Israel. As commentator Russell Dilday points out, he says, until now, the kings have been guilty of making graven images of Yahweh, like the golden calves of Jeroboam. But now, the nation had been led to worship idols or false gods. The word translated idols in verse 13 is literally vanities or vapor. It is sometimes used adverbially to mean to no purpose. The word appears here for the first time for idols and emphasizes the nothingness of alien gods. They had gone from worshiping the true God in a false manner to worshiping false gods. But that should be a warning to us. Everything that we read here, remember this. These things were not written merely for the people of Israel many, many years ago. They were written for you, too. They were written for me. They were written to warn us that false worship, for instance, is always Dangerous it always degenerates into idolatry the moment that you begin to say when the Lord has said Don't do this. We're going to do it or when he said do this and you say no We're not going to do that when it comes to his worship. You are on the wrong path. I you're headed in the wrong direction. It's one of the reasons why Presbyterians historically were so zealous for the idea that all worship is set forth by God. The Reformed have held to this principle, we call it the regulative principle of worship, basically saying that God's word should regulate our worship. We shouldn't go beyond it and we shouldn't fail to keep it. We shouldn't add to it. We shouldn't seek, for instance, to visualize God the way that Jeroboam did, creating statues and so on, or bowing down before them. Because once we abandon God's word and do what seems right in our own eyes, pretty soon, what do we do? We begin to remake God in our own image. We begin to say to ourselves, I know what God likes. God likes the same things that I like. He's entirely like me. When, in fact, Isaiah, the prophet, brought the news to the people, I'm not like you. My thoughts are not as your thoughts. The Lord is high and exalted. He is truly holy, holy, holy. And if we are to know his mind, we have to listen to his voice as he has given it to us in his word. But what happens then after we begin to say, I know what God wants, he wants whatever I want, we create false idols. The Presbyterian Church has unfortunately gone off the rails many, many, or Presbyterian churches, I should say, have gone off the rails many times because of this. The PCUSA, from which the OPC split and which eventually joined up with the PCUS, the Southern Church, They began to say, well, God's Word says this, but we know better. They began to teach, for instance, evolution, abortion, no-fault divorce, and embraced all manner of things. And their worship became less and less Presbyterian, more and more Episcopalian, as it's sometimes referred to, bringing investments and all sorts of things that God had not commanded. They moved from simplicity to all of these man-made traditions, and then they began adding their own traditions until They got to the point where in 1993 they had what they called the Reimagining God Conference in which 2,200 people, one-third of them clergy and almost all of them feminist women, met together to quote, reimagine God. The first thing they did was reimagine God from being God the Father to Blessed Goddess Sophia, following after the example of the French revolutionaries in bringing the goddess of wisdom, Sophia, into Notre Dame. They chanted throughout the conference, bless Sophia, dream the vision, share the wisdom dwelling deep within. It was utterly pagan. going back to not Christianity, but the fallen pre-Christian pagan position. First, they remade God over as the goddess Sophia, and then they began to preach all sorts of sexual immorality. They preached understanding and acceptance for homosexual, bisexual, transgenderism, lesbianism, whatever you can think of was okay. according to them. They went on then and they celebrated, after imagining God as feminine, they celebrated Sophia by blasphemously recreating the Eucharist and using milk and honey instead of wine and bread. And then they taught all sorts of blasphemies. I don't think, said one of the speakers, we need a theory of atonement. And I don't think we need folks hanging on crosses and blood dripping and weird stuff. They denied that man was fallen. They denied we needed an atoning sacrifice. They denied the very essence of the Christian message. Were they disciplined? No. The PCUSA did not have a spasm and say, oh my word, oh my word, we have departed so far. People were shocked, but they continued on. And they got further and further and further away. So it shouldn't surprise us now when mainline churches, PCUSA churches, UMC churches, and so on, refer to God as mother, or call God transgender. And the things that they champion often in these churches, I'm sending all of these clips with these pastors standing up and saying the same kind of blasphemous things that they were saying at that Reimagining God conference and then going on much, much further than that until they are literally championing the same things. And I'm not speaking here hyperbolically, I'm so sorry. They're literally saying the same things that were being taught at the recent SatanCon that was held by the Satanic Temple, which is based in Boston. They held it there in Boston. The Satanic Temple, incidentally, is trademarked. It has 700,000 members, and incidentally, that makes them larger than all the Napark churches put together. It should concern us to no end that according to their statistics, there are now more Satanists in the world than there are members of Presbyterian or Reformed churches in the United States. But what did they put front and center in their con? And incidentally, they say they don't believe in supernaturalism, so they don't actually believe that Satan is a person, but it's the spirit of the thing that they're after. They love the satanic spirit of it all. I knew Satanists when I was into the occult. They're just nuts. But anyway, moving on. And I'm not joking there. I used to ask, is it, you know, that the people who get involved in the occult start out flaky or the occult makes you flaky? And I think it's a little of both. It makes you, you know, the further and further you get into demonic influences, the more unhinged you become. Certainly, had I continued on in it, it wouldn't have done me any good. I would have become more and more let's just say, odd, and then beyond that, downright evil. But what were they discussing? What were their breakout sessions talking about? Abortion? Transgenderism? Smashing patriarchy? Homosexuality? Redefining the family? And on and on and on and on. But the funny thing is, you will find those as the topics for sermons in mainline churches all the time. The only difference, they have a slight, you know, well, they sometimes believe in supernaturalism still. But that seems to be the only difference. What happened though? Well, if we go back to where all of this started, it started when they said, we know better than God, and then moved away from his word. Watch out for that because there's no end to it. Once you say that you're wiser than God, that you can improve upon his worship, you can improve upon his word, you can improve upon his commandments, you begin to listen more and more to the deceiver. Your adversary, the one who lies to you, the father of lies, that is the devil. And after a while, yes, our worship becomes satanic. And you will see, unfortunately, the very same thing going on in Israel as we go through 1 Kings, until the point where the number of genuine Yahweh worshippers in the Northern Kingdom is reduced to a tiny remnant, where there are only a few prophets left, and where it's possible to actually introduce Baal worship from the Sidonians, and to begin building temples to Baal and false gods throughout the land, where the worship of the true God is almost entirely extinguished. Baasha continued in the path towards that sad end, and his son Elah, who no doubt also knew the prophecy, what had been said, continued on in it. But Elah apparently, his son, was worse than the father in that he had another moral failing that apparently his father didn't have. Elah was out drunkard. When he should have been at Gibeathon fighting against the Philistines who had taken that city of Dan and prosecuting the war, he was not doing that. What was he doing? He was drinking himself drunk, we read, in the house of Arza, steward of his house in Tirza. And apparently, Zimri, one of the commanders in his army, the commander of half of his cavalry, half of his chariots, knew his weakness. And so it looks very much like he conspired, because it's spoken of as a conspiracy, conspired with Arza, the steward, to assassinate King Elah and put himself in his place. But again, notice this, he didn't just kill Elah, he killed all of his friends and his relatives. Everybody who had a sympathetic view of Elah was removed. To know this king became a death sentence when Zimri ascended the throne. And obviously, that should caution us on a number of different points. It should be a cautionary tale, of course, against heavy drinking. Elaw dies as one of the most ignoble and infamous characters in the Bible. Rather than dying on the field of battle, shedding his blood to defend his country, no matter how poorly he ruled it, what happened? He died in a drunken stupor, assassinated in the house of his steward. This is a strong warning not to let ourselves, especially if we are in positions of authority to develop those habits, those addictions that weaken us. It is very tempting, of course, to allow yourself to go with the party spirit and so on and to drink too much and then for it to become a habit. We were warned, if you were last week in the evening service, we remember how we were told by Paul not to be drunk with wine, but to be filled with the Spirit. Elah was filled with a spirit, but it was not the Spirit of God. He was looking for that counterfeit happiness that drink can bring. And as I said, it's very tempting to seek that kind of solace. Now, we are told in the Psalms that wine is a good gift of God. It's given to gladden the hearts of men. We know that our Lord and Savior created wine at the wedding at Cana. It is something associated with celebration. But to drink oneself drunk, to drink with the objective of getting drunk, is a sin. and therefore it is something that we must avoid, we must be careful, we must be seeking to remain sober, even if we are a little bit happy. Let us then go to some applications. One of the things I want you to see here, I hope you see it, is that God seldom leaves people without warning. He seldom visits disaster upon men or nations without giving them a lot of warning ahead of time. And even when the prophecy comes, is set before them, that terrible things are going to happen, there is yet room to repent. David showed that in his response to Nathan. A terrible, wicked king, Ahab, is going to be given this awful prophecy, we'll see, and he is actually going to repent for a little while. And the Lord is going to stay his hand. The Lord is gracious. But he tells people in advance, if you do these things, disaster will result. He does that for two reasons. One, so that hopefully the person will turn from their course. But secondly, when the disaster comes, he wants us to know why it happened. Why are these terrible things happening to me? Well, the word of God said that if you followed that course, bad things would happen. And will you look at that? Bad things did happen. And that works with nations as well. A nation that turns its back on God, throws his word away, seeks to dishonor him, will not do well. It never has. It will join the ash heap of history just as the Northern Kingdom did when they turned their back on God and worshipped false gods. And it will be no different for you, brothers and sisters, if you ignore the warnings of the Lord, if you don't embrace his mercy. Because he sets before us life and death, doesn't he? He sets before us, you can be judged by the law, or you can have salvation through the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. If you continue on in the way of foolishness, you're warned in the book of Proverbs and elsewhere, that the end of the line that you're walking on is disaster. You're literally walking yourself into hell. But if you will turn, if you'll turn as the prodigal turned, it doesn't matter how far you've gone in the wrong direction, if you will turn and you'll return to the Lord. If you will say, I have sinned, and you will go to Christ, then you will be forgiven. And given that new heart, I said it takes a radical change in a person to get them to stop continuing on in those harmful and terrible habits. I'm not speaking simply because the word tells me and shows me that. I know it from my own experience. I'm not kidding when I said I was once involved in the occult myself. I knew Satanists because I was involved in the world of the dark arts and so on. I was raised amongst occultists. I was raised amongst psychics and mediums and so on. They were part of my life since I was a young boy and had I continued on in that path, I have no doubt it would have resulted in disaster. But the Lord had better plans for me than I had for myself. And he turned me in the right direction. He changed my heart. He brought me to love the things that I once hated and to despise the things that I once loved. That radical change of heart wasn't something that I ginned up in myself. That was something that he did through his Holy Spirit. And I have seen that process and been amazed by it. I've seen it happening again and again in the lives of people who they would have said had no hope Oh, forget it, he's a lost cause. I've heard literally people referred to as, oh, he's trash, give up. But the Lord can take that which seems hopeless, that which seems impossible to men, and do the impossible. He's the one who changes lives. He is the one who takes that which is the offscourings of the world and exalts them to an incredible position. I have seen that with my own eyes. I've seen the work of the Lord miraculously bringing the dead to life, miraculously taking people out of darkness and sin and bringing them into his marvelous life. People who were once engaged in theft and gang members, prostitutes, the infamous biker who was converted and so on. I've seen that happen, and I've rejoiced to see it happen. I've even seen covenant kids who have walked away from the Lord brought back, believe it or not. And that's a wonderful thing to see as well. It happens. Now, why is it when people are warned that they don't listen? Why was it when all of these kings were warned they had these examples, they had fulfilled prophecy and so on, well, why do people continue on in destructive habits today? Why do they continue doing drugs when they see their friends dying around them? If you are, for instance, a fentanyl or a meth user, you know people who have died using it. close friends, and yet you continue on, expecting that the lightning bolt that hit them won't hit you. Foolishness, but nonetheless, we do it. People who know people who have been killed by drunk drivers, nonetheless, they'll get in the car drunk themselves and then drive. We see what adultery and fornication and pornography are doing to our families, and yet the church indulges in it too. It's wrong. It's wrong-headed. It's not looking at the examples before us, but it shows us that merely knowing the results of sin will never be enough to change us. There has to be that gospel. We can't simply preach moralism. I know men who have gone into prisons And they have attempted to teach prisoners, okay guys, if you continue on in the way you're going, you'll actually earn less in your lifetime than you would if you lived on welfare. Okay, they'll make more than you because you'll spend years and years incarcerated going through the system, constantly recycling through this. And the guys will, you know, they're there. They have to listen. They'll nod and acknowledge it at some level. And then as soon as they get out, they'll go back into the former ways of life. Simply going in and teaching prisoners statistics and morals isn't going to work. What do you have to do? You have to bring them the gospel. That's why prison ministry works so much better than those things. And now that prison ministries are being removed from so many prisons, I've heard reports that things are worse than ever. Brothers and sisters, we desperately need the gospel. We can't teach our children to be good and expect them to be good because they don't have it within them. We have to have the gospel or they will continue down that path of foolishness and prodigality. We look at, and people are amazed to see youngsters rioting, looting, and doing all of these things. I'm not. That's what happens when you throw the gospel away, when you throw the teaching of the word, when you take away all of the moral supports also that God has built in, the family, the church. the civil magistrate actually doing their job? When you take all of those things away, and the abomination that is the natural human heart is all that's at work, you don't get good stuff. I can't, I think it was, was it Charles Haddon Spurgeon who said if you take a ruffian who's stealing bits and pieces from the railroad tracks and selling them for salvage and you train him and you educate him for many years but you don't teach him the gospel, you'll just raise up a man who's willing to steal the entire railroad and knows how to do it. Hitler's Germany showed what happens when you just have science but not the gospel. A deeply, deeply wicked, wicked place. Well, when you are warned, what should you do? When the prophet comes to you and says, down this road lies destruction, but down that road lies salvation, what should you do? Well, of course, you should continue going down the road to destruction, hoping that he's wrong. When I come before you, Sunday by Sunday, and I say, if you go on in this direction, what should you do? You should, well, hope that I'm wrong, hope that Jesus was lying, hope that everything that the Bible says is false. No, you should not do that. That's foolishness. Christ did not lie. And nobody talked about hell more often than he did. When I stand up here and I warn you not to continue on the path that goes to destruction, but instead to follow Christ, the path that leads to salvation, I'm not doing it because I want you not to have fun. I'm doing it because I love you, but more importantly, because I love Christ, and because I want you to have eternal life. I want you to be holy, and I know that ultimately you'll be happier being holy. I pursued all sorts of methodologies for getting counterfeit joy. I was one of those people who, and my wife knows I'm telling the truth, throughout my college years, I can't remember a day when I was sober. I can't. I can't remember a day when I was completely sober. Did it bring me joy, though? Did it bring me contentment? No. It never did. I tried, but it never did, because it can't. It's trying to pour alcohol into a bottomless pit and hoping that it will fill it up. The only thing that can fill the God-shaped vacuum in your heart is God himself. The only thing that can bring happiness and contentment forever is the Lord. And so continuing on, trying desperately to find joy in the counterfeits, drinking yourself silly or using drugs like Ila, or going after power like Baasha and Zimri and money and wealth and so on and thinking, these things will bring me joy. They will not. They'll only bring unhappiness, not just in this lifetime, but unhappiness forever. And you don't have to look just at the example within the Bible. You can look at the example of all the celebrities who have tried to find happiness following sinful methodologies. Look at all of the people, including Jeffrey Epstein, who were rich and powerful and around him. and how miserable, really, they are. And their lives, how they've fallen apart, how many of them are divorced, and so on. I was not super wealthy when I was a kid, obviously. My parents did well, but my parents gravitated around people who were very, very wealthy. And they were some of the unhappiest people I've met in my entire life. Joy literally was something they did not have in their life. I'm not speaking about my wife because I married her, you know. They did not have that contentment. So when you're warned, what should you do? You should repent. You should follow the course of David. When somebody comes to you and says, you have sinned, I have sinned. And then what should you do? Turn and go in the opposite direction. Now, here's an experiment. This is how you can tell whether or not it's too late for you to repent. All right? We'll do this together. If you can do that, it's not too late. The point at which you can no longer do that, it's too late. But there is a day coming when you won't be able to anymore. And we don't know when that day will come. This could be, and sometimes I feel like it, the last day of my life. Could be the last sermon I'll ever preach. I don't know. But there will be a last sermon I ever preach. There will be a last day. And I need to be ready for that. And so do you. Are you? Are you ready to go before your Maker now, this day, this moment? If you aren't, you are in terrible peril, and you need to get off of the road that you're walking on and onto the road of following the Savior, Jesus Christ. He tells you what you need. He tells you you need Him. You need faith in Him. Follow Him. What are you waiting for? The Lord Jesus Christ came into this world not to save good people, but sinners like us. And whoever follows Him will have everlasting life. Do you believe that? Do you believe that? Good. Then follow the Savior. Let's go before Him now. God, our gracious Father, thank you for sending your Son into the world. We pray, Lord, that we would not follow the bad examples that have been set before us by our forebears. Lord, I know, looking back into my family history, there were several generations of unbelief. I thank you, Lord, that you broke that long stream. And I pray, Lord, that it would never be the case that the Webb household doesn't follow you. I pray that for all the households that are represented here. I pray that for the singles, Lord, who are striving to have households of their own. I pray that you would grant them that great boon. And I pray, Lord, that you would give them a faith that endures. Oh, Lord, help us to be ready for your return or for the day when we go to meet you. Let us not be unprepared. And, oh, Lord, we pray all these things in Jesus' holy name.