This is our next to the last message on the Elijah Elisha series. Pastor Kevin, I want to thank you for having such appropriate songs for us. Oh, Lord, we cast down our idols. Give us clean hands. Give us pure hearts. We will not lift our souls to another. Thank you, worship team. Thank you, church. You'll notice in 2 Kings, this last chapter, we have one more message that includes the death of Elisha, and then we'll conclude our series. But here in chapter 13 of 2 Kings, in verse 10 through 11, we hear about Jehoash. We're just going to call him Joash because the Je, a lot of times they leave it off. It's Joash most of the time, and it's even Joash here in the words of Jeremiah as well as in Ezra, so we're going to call him by that name. In the 37th year of Joash king of Judah, Joash, the son of Jehoahaz, began to reign over Israel and Samaria, and he reigned 16 years. He also did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. He did not depart from all the sins of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, which he made Israel to sin, that's the golden calves, but he walked in them. And I'll turn over to 2 Chronicles, and we're gonna stay there for the message. 2 Chronicles, and I want us to look. 2 Chronicles 25 verse 17, and it introduces what we're going to look at today, the war between Joash of Israel and Amaziah, the king of Judah. Then Amaziah, king of Judah, took counsel and sent to Joash the son of Jehoahaz, son of Jehu, king of Israel, saying, Come, let us look one another in the face, which is his way. He isn't saying, I want to meet you. He is saying, I want to meet you in battle. Let's see each other face to face. I've entitled this message, Our Big Fight, Our Big War Is Against Idols. Our big war is against idols. Father, teach us what we need to learn today. There isn't a possibility that one of us here could say, well, I've never had any idols in my life. They might not have been Edomite idols, but they've been idols. Even wanting our own way can become idolatry because it comes before you. Teach us in this message. Prepare our hearts for the rest of this day, the rest of this week, the rest of this month, the rest of this year, the rest of our lives that we would cast down our idols. Give us clean hands. Give us pure hearts. Let us not lift our souls to another. Oh God, let us be a generation that seeks your face, that seeks your face, oh God of Jacob. For Jesus' sake we pray, amen. Our greatest fight, our greatest battle in life, our greatest war is just like the Israelite kings and just like the kings of Judah. It's their same battle. It's the battle against idols, the battle against idolatry. We aren't tempted to worship the idols of the Edomites. At least I'm not sure any of you even would know an Edomite god any more than I would. If I had some gods and idols brought in here, I couldn't pick out which were the Edomite gods. So I don't think we struggle with the Edomite gods, the idols of these sons of Esau. who lived in the rocks in the area today of modern Jordan, Petra. I don't think those gods are bothering us, but those gods, even though Amaziah defeated the Edomites, those gods were used to defeat King Amaziah. All of us are tempted every day of our lives to think there is something more out there We're tempted to think there's something better than just God and His Word. There's a little more. We've got to find there's something else. I know God is good, but there's something else too. The serpent's original temptation to Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, 4 to 5 is basically, you can do better than this. Sure, you're living in a perfect garden. But why can't you have that fruit of the knowledge of good and evil? Why is God prohibiting you from that? You will not surely die. God knows that when you eat of the fruit of the tree in the midst of the garden, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God. It's not enough to just worship God. There's something more. You can be a God. You can be like God. The enemies lie. The enemy wants us to doubt the word of God. He wants us to contradict the word of God, and he wants us as well to deny the consequences of disobeying God's word and worshiping idols. Tim Keller recently said it this way. You might want to write it down. The real danger is not atheism, but that we ask God to coexist comfortably with the idols in our heart. I'll say it again. The real danger is not atheism, but that we ask God to coexist comfortably with the idols in our heart. If anything becomes more important, or more fundamental, or more needed in our life, then God. For our happiness, for our meaningfulness in life, for our identity, for our pleasure. God ought to be the one we want to please, then that item, whatever it is, is an idol and we must cast it down. If anything becomes more important or more fundamental than God to our happiness, our meaningfulness in life, our identity, that is an idol. Jeremiah spent very little time expediting the history of Jehoash or Jehoashir in 2 Kings 13, 10-13. He simply tells us that he was evil in the sight of the Lord and that he died. If you want to know anything more about him, go to Chronicles. And you'll find out in Chronicles, so that's why we've turned to Chronicles today, because one of the things Jeremiah did say, and he gave us a clue, he said here in 2 Kings, now the rest of the acts of Joash and all that he did, and the might with which he fought against Amaziah king of Judah. Are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel? Now you remember that Israel wasn't very strong in these days. His dad Jehoahaz was down to 50 horsemen and 10 chariots and 10,000 footmen. So he didn't have a huge army, but he defeated King Amaziah who had 300,000. And we wonder why. This takes us back to message number 42. If you remember the message we preached on lean not on your own understanding. I want to summarize for a few moments so you are back in line and you understand the background of this message because we've had one message in between 42 and 44. I want to summarize. Our focus now in Chronicles is to go away from the northern kingdom in 2 Kings 13, 10 to 13, and to go to the southern kingdom. The focus is more on Judah than Israel, but it will involve both kingdoms. You may remember Amaziah was the son of a little boy, King Joash. Remember his life was spared and he was mentored by the high priest Jehoiada. Joash was mentored by him, and you remember he was a man who turned against the Lord after Jehoiada died at 130. He was assassinated by two of his own men, by Zabad, the son of Shimeith the Ammonite, and Jehozabad, the son of Shemrith the Moabite. And when Amaziah, Joash's son, became king of Judah at age 25, he struck down those two men, Zabab and Jehozabad. He killed them because they killed his daddy when he was dying and wounded on his own deathbed. Then you remember what Amaziah, the king of Judah, did. He foolishly numbered his soldiers, which God didn't want David to do. He didn't want Amaziah to do it. But he found out he had 300,000 soldiers. But he didn't think that was enough to defeat the Edomites, who lived there in those secure rocks, those rocks we call Petra today, those people who came from Esau, those Esauites, those Edomites. had been defeated by Judah many years earlier and they were paying tribute. They were paying wool and goats and sacrifice of all kinds. But then 50 years before Amaziah, they revolted. They got their freedom back to be a free nation and Amaziah knew that Judah was missing that tribute money, that tribute of sheep and goats and oxen. So he wanted to get Edom back under his kingdom. The year, 53 years later, is the year that Elisha died. We'll find out about that next week, 839 BC. So that's the setting that we're in. Amaziah, the king of Judah, without asking the Lord, thought his 300,000 troops were not enough, so he hired 100,000 Israeli mercenaries from one of the tribes, from the tribe of Ephraim. and God didn't like it. So he sent his prophet to tell Amazigh to send the mercenaries home even though he had paid them. He says, what will I do? I paid them four tons of silver. He says, God can do much more for you than that. These Ephraimites didn't like, they didn't take kindly to this turn of events. Even though they were paid, they didn't take kindly because they knew they would receive far more in spoils from the Edomites. And so, as this 100,000 mercenaries, as they took off to go home, they began to think the unthinkable. And that is, well, while Amaziah has gone down to Edom, we'll invade Judah. And so they did. While he's capturing the Edomites and killing 10,000 Edomites in the Valley of Salt and capturing 10,000 more Edomites and taking them to the top of one of those rocks around Petra and pushing them off the cliff, what a horrible thing. That unthinkable thing Amaziah did. What's happening is that these unhappy mercenaries, they went all the way from Samaria. went all the way down to Beth Horon near Bethel and struck down 3,000 unprotected people of Judah. Killed them off. That's the setting. But something even more despicable happened to Amaziah before we start this message. After he defeated the Edomites, killed 10,000, pushed 10,000 more off a cliff, he grabbed their gods their idols and took them home and began to sacrifice to them. He began to burn incense to them. The scripture tells us in 2 Chronicles 25, 14, after Amaziah came from striking down the Edomites, he brought the gods of the men of Seir and set them up as his own gods and worshiped them, making offerings, doubtless sacrifices of animals and incense to these idols. And it angered the Lord. And he sent another prophet, a second prophet, the first one he appeared to obey, even though it wasn't in time to avert that disaster of losing 3,000. But this second prophet came and he told him, why would you ever start worshiping gods that couldn't keep the Edomites from being defeated? Why would you worship them? And he said, who called you to be a royal counselor? Stop. Should you be killed? Was Amaziah, were his men pushing him back after the dastardly deed? Can you imagine that you are commanded to push your own brothers? These were all brothers. It's Jacob and Esau. They were twins. Are you going to push 10,000 off the cliff? It's one thing to kill them in battle. Are you going to push them off the cliff? And maybe they were saying something like, that wasn't a wise idea, Amaziah. Those Edomite gods are going to get you. And so maybe, you know, you ought to kind of kowtow to those Edomite gods because they might hurt you. I don't know what made him do this, but he made his most futile, his most foolish, and his most final idolatrous act of worship by bringing them home with him and bowing down to them. The prophet told Amaziah God was determined to destroy him. What Amaziah should have done was to thank God for defeating the Edomites. He should have released the 10,000 captives to let them go home. and taken all their gods and pushed them off the cliff. If you're going to push something off the cliff, cast down their idols. But inside his proud, evil heart, though he knew hiring those mercenaries had caused the death of 3,000 of his own people, he blamed the Northern Kingdom. Therefore, he decided We will go to war. I'll go up against King Joash on the battlefield. Come, I want to see you face to face. His demise is all about one thing. It's all about his worship of idols. And almost always, The hard things we face in our life are almost always because of our idols. We disobey the first of the Ten Commandments where we read in Exodus 20, 2 and 3, I am the Lord your God. I brought you up out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. Today I want us to discover how idolatry is our greatest battle. And what happens when we worship idols, which is anything, including our own selves, our own way, our own will, our own control, anything we put before God Almighty, anything we put before our face besides Him. And I want you to look with me at four results, sad and bad and awful results of worshiping idols. Number one. Worshipping idols gives us a false bravado. Ever seen people with a false bravado? They sure talk big. We think that we can do as we please without seeking godly counsel. I want to tell you this is something that we hear over and over in America today. We hear it on the news. There's a false bravado on all sides of all things today. It's because of idolatry in America. We're worshiping ourselves. 2 Chronicles 25, 17 says, Then Amaziah king of Judah took counsel, it wasn't of God, and he sent to Joash the son of Jehoahaz, saying, Come, let's look one another in the face. What Amaziah was doing was poking. He was poking Joash in the chest, if you will, saying, Come outside. Come outside and I'll show you. You ever had someone poke you in the chest and then step outside? I'll show you. Who's biggest? He was baiting him. He was calling him to war instead of seeking the advice of Elisha or one of the sons of the prophets. He was saying, come, let us look one another in the face. He was calling Israel to war. Now I want you to understand that the southern kingdom and the northern kingdom weren't fighting each other. They were simply separated. In fact, to keep them from fighting, the good king of Judah did a despicably wicked thing. Jehoshaphat sanctioned a marriage alliance between his son, Joram, or Jehoram, with the daughter of Jezebel and Ahab, Athaliah. It linked the north with the south in an evil marriage, but it was desirable in one way, but not in what happened. Here came Athaliah bringing the Baals and introduced the Baals into Judah. So now you have both the north and the south worshiping Baal. But it's desirable that brothers don't fight each other. That's desirable. And because of the acceptance of Baal, they weren't fighting one another. But now this false peace with both nations who accepted the worship of Baal, now they saw the peace end. The bond was broken by the overwhelming idolatry and pride and vanity in Amaziah ben Joash of Judah. His victory over the Edomites and his conquest of Petra had made him puffed up with the mistaken notion somehow that he was a great man and he was an invincible warrior. He was totally infatuated with himself, and he had a passion to kindle an unprovoked war against the ten northern tribes. He was about to learn a very hard lesson. There's a difference in fighting a battle that God tells you to stand up and fight, a battle that God sanctions, and to fight a battle that God doesn't sanction. Be sure what battles you fight. Be careful where you stand and put up your dukes. There are battles we have to fight for the Lord, but there are many battles that are our own battles. This was his own battle, sanctioned by his pride, sanctioned without God's direction. It's dangerous to overlook and overstep the God of all battles, the Lord God of hosts. I am a Zion sought counsel, bless his heart. You say, isn't that great, he sought counsel but from the wrong place. Have you ever looked for counsel but in the wrong place? He knew he was justifying his prideful actions. He knew he didn't want to hear from God. He shut up the prophet of God. Who made you? Who made you the royal counselor? The greatest idol at this time, even trumping all his Edomite idols that he took after defeating the Edomites, his greatest idol that he was worshiping was the idol deep inside the king, and the idol's name was Amaziah. Sometimes the greatest idol is someone by our name. We become our own idol. He was worshipping himself. He was insisting He was insisting on his own way, doubtless, and as I was pointing out to the public officials and the courtiers, the conduct of these 100,000 mercenaries, that they had killed 3,000 of his own people, but he was doing that to justify himself and worshiping idols and going against the 10 northern tribes. I want to warn you. As God has warned me this week, when we try to justify our wrong behavior by pointing out the wrong conduct of others, we are aiming very low. The Bible says sin is missing the mark. You're missing the mark when you justify your wrong behavior by pointing out the wrong conduct of others and when you say, look at what they did. They killed 3,000 of our people. rather than saying, what do you think about me worshiping the Edomite gods? Reminds me of a story that happened some time back. In a college, a number of young men were involved in a dastardly deed that I won't speak of. But it was certainly misbehavior, reason to be cast out of the school. And one of the men involved in it was one of the leaders, one of the student leaders. And the president asked this student leader to come in, and he said, why did you do this dastardly deed? And the student said these words. He said, sir, you'd find it difficult to locate 10 men in this college who wouldn't have done exactly as I did had they been in my same circumstances. And the president replied, has it ever occurred to you that you could have been one of those 10 men, you could have been one of those 10 men who said no. I warn us, if we start justifying our actions by pointing to others, and if we start speaking with proud bravado, most often it is because we are idle worshipers, bowing down to ourselves and our selfish egos. Secondly now, We've noticed that worshipping idols gives us a false bravado, thinking we can do whatever we please without seeking God's advice. Number two, worshipping idols makes us unwilling to listen to warnings that God brings through sometimes even the most unlikely people. You'll notice here in verses 18 to 20 that Amaziah's letter reached the king of Israel. It didn't go by, it wasn't one of those emailed letters or it wasn't a text message or it wasn't a telegram. It had to be sent all the way from Jerusalem to Samaria. But when he got there, it reached King Joash and Joash sent a letter back warning warning the king of Judah. It must have been a laugher for Amaziah. Who does this weak king think he is to warn me? I've just shellacked all of the Edomites. Who does he think he is? I've killed 20,000 Edomite soldiers. The last thing he's going to do is listen to this weak king of Israel with a smaller army, as far as he knows. The last thing Amazigh had heard was that Joash's daddy, Jehoahaz, had 50 horsemen, 10 chariots, and 10,000 foot soldiers weakened by Haziel, the Syrian king. What could have happened to make Joash's son much stronger? He failed to realize that from just one of the tribes, he had already hired 100,000 mercenaries. These Ephraimites, should they have been asked by Joash to help him, they would have gone in a heartbeat. Things had changed. Joash, king of Israel, didn't bat an eye when he got the letter. He just wrote back an interesting little story, little counseling story filled with diplomacy and wisdom and warning. He just tells this story. You find it here. You want to look at it with me? Amaziah says, come, let's look at one another face to face. Joash the king of Israel sent word to Amaziah, king of Judah. He answers with this little poem, this little parable. A thistle. Do you know what a thistle is around here? Do any of you know what a thistle is? Is there a difference between a thistle and a cedar? A little bit. A thistle on Lebanon sent to a cedar on Lebanon, and you have to understand the cedars of Lebanon were what the temple was made out of, cedars of Lebanon, huge timber. A thistle on Lebanon sent to a cedar on Lebanon saying, let's make an alliance. Give your daughter to my son for a wife. And a wild beast just walking through the wilderness, Maybe it's a lion, maybe it's an elk, maybe it's a wild boar. I don't know. But some wild beast walking through steps on the thistle and smashes it. End of story. That's it. What's he calling Amaziah? Anybody know what he's calling Amaziah? You want to say it? He's calling him a thistle. He thinks he's so strong, and then he continues. He says, you say, see, I have struck down Edom, and your heart has lifted you up in boastfulness, but now stay at home. Why should you provoke trouble so that you fall, you and Judah with you? So it's a warning. But we read, but Amaziah would not listen. He would not listen. He would not listen. Anyone could see that King Joash was saying the thistle thinks he's equal with the cedar. He's presumptuously suggesting a marriage between us. The difference between the thistle and the cedar is a wild beast has to walk around a cedar, but he can, with one misstep, mash a thistle. And Joash is saying, why should you meddle with trouble so that you fall in your nation of Judah? When we worship idols and the idol is I want my own way and I won't listen, we provoke a fight we should always avoid. Worshiping idols blinds us to having a listening ear to consider the poor chances we have of success when we refuse to listen. And we don't consider the effects of what our defeat will be, whether it's with one another, at work, at church, wherever it may be. I want to just say a little bit about listening. I don't think there's a person here that hasn't been bad at listening. So you're speaking with a pastor who admits, sometimes, I've been a poor listener. And so have all of you. We've all been poor listeners at times. And when we do, we are really, idolatrously thinking only of ourselves. Listening requires a choice of where we place our attention. To tune in to others, we must first choose to put down our cell phones, put down our pride. Amazigh wouldn't do that. Putting down all that will divide our attention. We might have to lay down the newspaper. We might have to move away from washing dishes, as good as that is to wash dishes. We might have to put down the book we're reading, but listening means we drop everything to listen to the person God wants us to listen to. Chuck Swindoll tells an interesting story on himself in his book, Stress Fractures. It's a sweet little story. It happened one day that he got home from work. He said it was a very hairy time in his life when he was feeling drug around by his schedule. And so Colleen, his young daughter, his younger of two daughters, wanted to tell him something important at the supper table. So she began very hurriedly and she said it very fast. She says, ''Daddy, I know you're very stressed and busy, but I want to tell you something. I want to tell you really fast.'' Chuck was hurt by that. He could realize her frustration with him. He stopped and he said, ''Honey, you don't have to tell me really fast. Say it slowly. And Colleen's answer just cut him to the quick, it pierced him. She says, if I say it very slowly, will you listen very slowly, Daddy? Sometimes idols in our heart keep us from listening very slowly and hearing what someone says. Even our schedules that we keep can become idolatrous. A tip off that we're worshipping our schedule is we have stopped listening. When we stop listening, there's something that's becoming an idol in our lives. I've told you first, worshipping idols brings a false bravado. We think we can do whatever we want without asking godly counsel. Secondly, we're unwilling to listen. We won't listen to warnings by anyone. Number three, when it persists, worshiping idols persistently risks God no longer striving with us and turning us over to our enemies. You'll notice verse 20, but Amaziah would not listen. Why? For it was of God. in order that he might give them, that's Judah, into the hand of their enemies because they, that's Judah under King Amaziah, had sought the gods of Edom. Noah was told by God before he built the ark in the worldwide flood. God said these things about himself. This is one of the scariest things that I've read in scripture about God. Listen to me. Genesis 6.3 says, my spirit shall not always strive with man. That means there does even come for God a time when he says, okay, you know, you can do what you're going to do. That's a sad moment. Here in our text is an illustration of God saying to Amaziah, okay, You want your own way? You won't listen to the king of Israel who gave you a good warning. You won't listen to my man I sent to you, one of the sons of the prophets. We don't know what else God had done, but he said to Amaziah, your time is up. I sent two men of God to you. You mocked the last one. I warned you with the mouth of the king of Israel. You're now at the mercy of your own helpless Edomite idols. They can't help you. When Judah went into captivity, the same thing was still going on. It was because of their idolatry that Nebuchadnezzar took them away. And when they went into idolatry, do you know what Judah took with them? On their beasts of burden, they carried thousands of their gods that they had in their homes. on beasts of burden. They're going to move, they're captives, but one thing they're not going to forget, they can't take all their whole wardrobe but they'll take their idols with them. And Isaiah 46, 1 to 4 says, Baal bows down, Nebo stoops. Their idols are on beasts and livestock. These things you carry are born as burdens on weary beasts. They stoop, they bow down together. They cannot save the burden, but they themselves, those gods, are going into captivity. And then he says one of the most beautiful things in all of scripture. In Isaiah, I love this passage. I quote it all the time. Listen to me, O house of Jacob, all the remnant of the house of Israel. You have been born by me, carried by me from before your birth, carried from the womb, even to your old age I am He, and to gray hairs or to hoary hairs, I will carry you, I have made you, and I will bear you, I will carry you, and I will save you. All the things that you have before your face that won't save you from defeat. Cast down your idols. Only God can carry us through. There can come a time when God may say, enough. So if you're hell-bent, you're hell-bent on your own way, there are going to be consequences. The scripture talks about how that can happen in 1 Corinthians. Weak, sick, even in early death. What happened to Judas King Amaziah when he saw Israel's king face to face? You'll notice verse 16, he had been so proud to say, who made you a royal counselor? He says, I know God is going to destroy you. That was the moment God said enough. He told the prophet what to tell him. You're dead. It's going to take a while, but you're dead. You're going to be destroyed. So before the prophet stopped he says, I know God is determined to destroy you because you have done this, you haven't listened to my counsel. So this grand army of Judah, 300,000 soldiers went up against a smaller Israeli army, verse 21. And so Joash king of Israel went up and he and Amaziah king of Judah faced one another in battle at Beth Shemesh. Now I need to tell you, there are three Beth Shemesh's in Palestine. So which one is this? Interesting, we're told in 2 Kings 14, 11, this is the Beth Shemesh of Judah, 15 miles from Jerusalem, northwest. So we know which one. They faced one another. And Joash, king of Israel, didn't wait a moment. He has gone quite a ways, all the way south. He is going to attack. When he sees he's not going to listen, he's after him. So he marched 44 miles straight south of Samaria to prove he was a cedar and Amaziah was a thistle. And his weaker army defeated Amaziah. That's why we say, if you want to hear about the might of Joash, turn to 2 Chronicles. Amaziah and his army, they saw him. They were defeated. They all fled to their homes. Everybody took off and went home. And Amaziah, however, got to see Joash up close and personal, face to face, a lot closer than he wanted to. He was captured. and like a wild beast tromps on a thistle. Guess what he did? He says, I'm going to tromp on you. And so he walks like a big wild beast and he comes into Jerusalem and he tromps down and knocks down 400 cubits, that's 600 feet of wall. If you can imagine a 600 foot wall here, that's a big breach in a wall. It's from the Ephraim gate to the corner gate on the northern wall, the side, Jerusalem was the weakest. just slapped it down like a wild bee stepping on a thistle. And then the historian Josephus adds this. It's not the Bible, but it's history. He says, and then Joash drove his chariot and took his army through the breach in the wall into Jerusalem. He says that's a practice that wasn't unusual for armies in that day. And he stripped, the army stripped all the gold and all the silver and all the vessels found in the house of God that was in the care of Obed-Edom and Joash seized all the treasuries of King Amaziah's house and he took captives and hostages and returned home to Samaria. And one of the most interesting things in scripture that I found out, I noticed it as I read the word hostages and I thought to myself, that's kind of different. The other kings took hostages. You don't hear about Israel taking hostages. This is the only time in history this word is ever used. It's a hapax legomena, though it occurs in both Kings and Chronicles, this one event. Same word, taharubah. It means to make your point secure by taking the person captive. And what was he doing? He was making his point clear. You're the thistle, and I'm the cedar. You're beaten, and I'm taking you to Samaria with a bunch of your men, hostages, to put you in prison along with him. I told you you would fall, and I told you I would take Judah down with you. Bam! The wall's gone. Bam! The treasures are gone. Why? because my spirit will not always strive with those who are idolatrous. We've talked about a false bravado, unwilling to listen. Finally, God not striving with us. The last warning is worshiping idols pays miserable wages of sin, which are always death when we turn away from the Lord, always death. Notice that Amaziah outlived King Joash. Joash died. When he died, after what appears to be about 10 years of captivity in a prison somewhere in Samaria, they let him go. When he goes back home, he goes home and finds out that his son Azariah, also better known as Uzziah, is reigning. So now they co-reign. History tells us they co-reign for a little while, but nobody wanted Amaziah back home. So what happens? Well, what happens is the truth of the Word of God in Proverbs 16, 18. Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall. What happens in the New Testament, Romans 6, 23? The wages of sin is death. So we turn to verse 27 and 28 to find out what happens to Amaziah. What are the wages of sin? And it says, from the time when he turned away from the Lord. From the time that he did what? Turned away from the Lord. From the time that he did what? Turned away from the Lord. From the time that he did what? Say it out loud. Turned away from the Lord. Have you turned away from the Lord? From the time when he turned away from the Lord, they made a conspiracy against him in Jerusalem. And he fled to Lachish, and they sent after him to Lachish and put him to death there. He's assassinated just like his daddy was. And they brought him upon horses, that's his body, and he was buried with his fathers in the city of David. What an awful end because of turning away from the Lord. but it will always be true. God's word is always true. Exodus 23 says, you shall have no other gods before you. Now I want you to know I grew up knowing that verse. I knew it and I knew it and I knew it and I knew it until this week when I found out I didn't know it. Not completely, until I looked up the word. And the word is not even found in Strong's, except in the appendix, and there you have to, I had to search for quite a while to just say, what is being said here? Before preposition and then me? No, it's one word, before me. And it means before my face. I will have no other gods before my face. Now, maybe you've read it this way. It doesn't matter what you have in your life, as long as God's number one. That's not what it says. It says, you shall have no other important thing before my face that comes first. I am the one before my face. I'm the one that's before your face. He wants no other gods on the table of worship. Now, I want to warn us in closing, and I'll be done. I'm warning me, I'm warning you, and you may say afterwards, why'd you pick those? You could have picked somebody else's, but I'm going to say it this way. When we place anything before God's face in worship, recreation, football, fishing, hunting, money, clothes, food, Netflix, Amazon Prime, social media, video games, Pokemon Go, our own selfish way, our desire to control, whatever it may be, and then you add all the others, it leads to a hard heart, to no repentance, Final judgment, sooner or later, when we trust in the Lord alone for our salvation offered in the gospel, when we turn from sin and back to God, blessings await. Now, what have I told you? I told you worshiping idols brings a false bravado, an ear that won't listen. Finally, God won't strive with us anymore. And finally, the wages of sin is death. And now I will repeat what I said as I began. The real danger is not atheism, but that we ask God to coexist comfortably with the idols of our heart. If anything becomes more important or more fundamental than God to our happiness, our meaning in life, and our identity, that thing is an idol. And God is saying to me and he's saying to all of you, Lord, we sang it this morning. We cast down our idols. Give us clean hands. Give us pure hearts. We will not lift our souls to another. Oh God, let us be a generation that seeks, that seeks your face, oh God of Jacob. Would you all bow your heads?