I would invite you to turn with me in your Bibles this evening to 2 Kings 6, and we're going to be taking a look at verses 24 through 33. 2 Kings 6, 24 through 33. We are continuing on in 2 Kings, and here we are going to see the author of 2 Kings has been highlighting the miracles performed by Elisha, the ministry, we might say, of Elisha. And one of the things that we're gonna see here is... the deficiencies, shall we say, of the Northern Kingdom, their failure to repent, their blasphemous, abominable religion, and we're going to see also the hope that only Christianity can give and how man-made religion or man-made isms will never deliver us from our true enemies. But before we do that, let's turn our attention to the one who has given us his word, and let's ask for his help tonight. Sovereign Lord, I do pray that as I preach your word, that I would say nothing that's out of keeping with it, that O Lord, You would make us attentive. It is, of course, the evening, and we know that we begin to get sleepy and tired, and we are in the midst of spiritual warfare whenever Your Word is being preached. So I pray, Lord, that You would help us to have open ears, and that we would have alert brains, and that we would have receptive spirits, Lord, that our hearts would be that good soil, ready to receive Your Word. I pray, O Lord, that also we would take the things that we learn and that we would apply them in our lives and share them with others. We know that the gospel truth is not something that we're meant to hold on to, but something that we are to share with all the world. We pray this in Jesus' holy name. Amen. Amen. 2 Kings chapter 6, verses 24 through 33. I need to remind you, this is the word of the Lord. And it happened after this that Ben-Hadad, king of Syria, gathered all his army and went up and besieged Samaria. And there was a great famine in Samaria, and indeed, they besieged it until a donkey's head was sold for 80 shekels of silver and one-fourth of a cab of dove droppings for five shekels of silver. Then, as the king of Israel was passing by on the wall, a woman cried out to him, saying, help my lord, O king. And he said, if the lord does not help you, where can I find help for you, from the threshing floor or from the wine press? Then the king said to her, what is troubling you? And she answered, this woman said to me, give your son that we may eat him today, and we will eat my son tomorrow. So he boiled my son and ate him. And I said to her on the next day, give your son that we may eat him. But she has hidden her son. Now it happened when the king heard the words of the woman, that he tore his clothes, and as he passed by on the wall, the people looked, and there underneath he had sackcloth on his body. Then he said, God, do so to me and more if the head of Elisha, the son of Shaphat, remains on him today. But Elisha was sitting in his house, and the elders were sitting with him. And the king sent a man ahead of him. But before the messenger came to him, he said to the elders, Do you see how this son of a murderer has sent someone to take away my head? Look, when the messenger comes, shut the door and hold him fast at the door. Is not the sound of his master's feet behind him? And while he was still talking with them, there was the messenger coming down to him. And then the king said, surely this calamity is from the Lord. Why should I wait for the Lord any longer? The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. One of the things you need to remember is that the Bible records history for us. It is a true account of the things that have taken place in the past, and that's a fact that I'm constantly reminded of as I go through biblical archaeology review. Hardly a month goes by in which some biblical location is not identified, or a seal, or a ring, or an inscription of some major figure from the Bible is discovered. reading today, as a matter of fact, in an article that the biblical city of Ziklag, which you may remember was the town that David had taken refuge in. It was given to him by Akish, who was one of the Palestinian, Palestinian, what am I talking about? There were no Palestinians at that point. Philistine kings had given to him while Saul was searching for him. And the archeologists are fairly certain that they've identified the city of Ziklag yet another in a long line of confirmations as if we needed them, that the Bible is true history. But sometimes it requires an investigation as we're reading the Bible to figure out where and when and who a certain section of scripture refers to. For instance, there are some questions about when the events in this section of scripture took place and who was involved. We know where it happened. It happened in the capital city of the Northern Kingdom, Samaria, which was under siege, but regarding when, The question is, does this immediately follow after the previous events that we read about before? You remember how there had been that cavalry section that was sent by the king of Syria in order to capture Elisha because Elisha was giving away all of his war plans to the king of Israel. And so the king of Syria said, aha, we'll just capture him and then I won't have this problem anymore, forgetting that the lord who informed Elisha where the king of Syria was moving his armies would certainly take care of his servant. And so, of course, Elisha had led the armies of Syria who had been blinded as to who he was and where they were. He'd led them into the very heart of Samaria. And the king of Israel had been very excited and said, shall I kill them? Shall I kill them? And he pointed out that these were the prisoners that the Lord had delivered into his hand. And also, as I said before, it would have spoiled the effect if the prisoners had simply been put to death and they hadn't heard about the miraculous way in which they were delivered. Does what we just read, though, about the siege follow on immediately after that? After all, the miraculous capture and release of the raiding band sent to capture Elisha. At the end of that, we read, so the bands of Syrian raiders came no more into the land of Israel. Does this mean that this was something that happened before the raiders or something significantly after the raiders? Well, Russell Dilde, who's guessing that it occurred actually just a little while after what is recorded in the previous verse, it says, The answer may be that Syria no longer dared to bother Israel with small groups of guerrilla raiders, and that the result was the complete mobilization of the Syrian army described in verse 24, maybe in revenge for the humiliation of the preceding event in which their soldiers were deceived. In other words, he says, well, the king said, okay, I've had it with this. We're not going to send raids in any longer. I know where the king of Israel is. He's in Samaria. We're going to go directly for the capital city, which I tend to think is probably the answer. But then the question is asked, which king of Israel are we talking about and which king of Syria? It may seem straightforward after all 2 Kings 6, 24 reads, and it happened after this that Ben-Hadad, king of Syria, gathered all his army and went up and besieged Samaria. Aha! So the Syrian king's name is Ben-Hadad. Easy enough. But it immediately begs the question, which Ben Hadad are we talking about? Because there are three kings of Syria who had that title. It meant literally son of Hadad. Hadad was their false god. Hadad was the storm god, the rain god in these regions. And the king claimed his adoption from him. I'm the son of the god. He wasn't saying he was literally the son of the god, but that he was. his adopted representative, in that sense, over the people. So there were at least three Ben-Hadad's, but we can identify this one from the fact that Elisha refers to the king of Israel as this son of a murderer to the elders. That murderer, who he was the son of, would have been Ahab, who murdered Nadab for his vineyard, and significant numbers, of course, of the sons of the prophets as Jezebel was conducting her extermination campaign, trying to wipe out biblical religion in the northern kingdom and replace it with Baalism. Jehoram, the son of Ahab and Jezebel, is therefore the king, and therefore this is Ben-Hadad II, the same king of Syria who his father, that is Jehoram's father, had foolishly let live. You remember way back in 1 Kings 20, we saw how God had given miraculous assistance to the armies of Israel to defeat the Syria, the armies of Syria. He'd given Ahab victory despite the fact that Ahab was an evil man. And then Ahab had foolishly let Ben-Hadad live. You remember they had been about to, they'd wiped out the army. The wall had fallen in the city and gotten everybody else who had fled inside. And so Ben-Hadad comes out seeking, he's seeking for the king to let him go. He wraps himself with rope and sackcloth. And Ahab foolishly says, my brother the king, is he alive? Is he alive? He's my brother, bring him to me. And they all seized on that, yes, yes, your brother the king. And so he makes a treaty with him. But then the Lord sent one of the sons of the prophets to rebuke him later on. Then he said to him, thus says the Lord, because you have let slip out of your hand a man whom I appointed to utter destruction, therefore your life shall go for his life and your people for his people. So the king of Israel went to his house sullen and displeased and came to Samaria. And now that curse that was spoken over Ahab is coming to pass, as the Lord had said, in the days of his son. Now, you probably know this from history. There are two ways that you can take a city. The first way is an assault. You just go straight at it. You put up scaling ladders or you hit it with siege equipment and so on, and then you run into the gaps that are made and so on. But that is very costly. Not only do you have to pay to make all the siege equipment and ladders and things like that, but you also end up paying in the blood of your men. they're killed in the assault. The advantage in that is generally always on the side of the defenders. It's much easier to shoot a bow down on the heads of men or just drop rocks on them than it is for them to get at you at the top of the wall. The other option, therefore, is a siege where you just camp around the walls and you starve your enemy out. And Ben-Hadad had obviously opted for the second option. So now there is a famine in Samaria. There is no food. And we're given gruesome details of the conditions that were now prevailing in the city of Samaria in verses 25 through 29. We see a black market had developed within the city selling foodstuffs at incredible prices, and the food that they're selling is nauseating. A donkey, for instance, was not considered clean food. The Israelites were not supposed to be eating donkeys. But the head would be the most disgusting portion of the donkey. And yet, it was selling for the equivalent of $400. This is one meal. Think about that. One donkey head, 400 bucks. Less than a pint of dove droppings, dove doo-doo, was $40. And yes, people in the midst of a famine would eat that. Bernie, the English diarist, cites a Spanish record of a terrible famine in England in the 14th century, in the years 1316 to 1317, and he records, 1316, so great a famine distressed the English that men ate their own children, dogs, mice, and pigeons dung. So literally, these people were so hungry that they would eat anything. But that, of course, leads us to this most distressing of events that we're told about. The king is passing along the wall. He's surveying his faltering defenses, probably wringing his hands when a mother cries out, help, oh king. And rightly, he concludes, she is looking for help during the famine. Obviously, he didn't like the reference to the baby thing. I wouldn't either. She's asking for relief from the famine. And so he says, in essence, am I God to help you in this situation? There's no grapes in the wine press. There's no grain on the threshing floor. What am I supposed to do? But what she wanted was justice. She had entered into this wicked covenant with another woman to eat their sons. But the other woman had cheated and hidden her son when it came her time to offer him up. And probably she wants, she says, this woman, so the woman's nearby, she wants the king to get her to produce her son by force. And the situation is so awful that the king literally tears his clothes. But while he sees this as coming from the Lord, note this, he believes in the sovereignty of God that these things happen because God ordains them. He doesn't see how by divine intervention the catastrophe might be averted. Interestingly enough, he'd followed the same pattern in chapter 5, the previous passage concerning name in the Syrian. In 2 Kings 5, 7 we read, and it happened when the king of Israel read the letter that he tore his clothes and said, am I God to kill and make alive that this man sends a man to me to heal him of his leprosy? Therefore, please consider and see how he seeks a quarrel with me. So it was when Elisha, the man of God, heard that the king of Israel had torn his clothes, that he sent to the king, saying, Why have you torn your clothes? Please let him come to me, and he shall know there is a prophet in Israel. This is a king who has a very distant view of God. Okay, there's the God that they worship falsely using golden calves. It still associates him with the same God that delivered them out of Egypt, the same God who brought them into the land of milk and honey, but he's a God who is far removed. He had seen the Lord do miracles, but even after seeing them, note this, Jehoram had never, neither had Ahab. Ahab and his son had never actually repented and closed with God by faith. They had never actualized their relationship with this God. They had never gone from the objective, yes, yes, he's in charge of the universe, to the, I can know him by faith. I can call him my father and know that I am his son. I can depend upon him. I can go to him in my times of difficulty. He doesn't even say that he prayed. And he doesn't even go to Elisha and say, at some point, we have done wickedly. Take away our judgment. Implore the Lord on our behalf. He puts on sackcloth, which was, you know, we call it sackcloth. It was what they used to make bags and so on. It was made of hemp and very scratchy, itchy, and so on. And it's meant to symbolize his mourning, and perhaps God will see that and take pity on him and take away his judgment. It's very possible that he'd seen how his father, Ahab, in 1 Kings 21, 27, had done the same thing to avert judgment. We read there in 1 Kings 21-27, So it was, when Ahab heard those words, that he tore his clothes, and put sackcloth on his body, and fasted, and lay in sackcloth, and went about mourning. And the word of the Lord came to Elijah the Tishbite, saying, See how Ahab has humbled himself before me, because he has humbled himself before me. I will not bring the calamity in his days, in the days of his son. I will bring calamity on his house. It's interesting that he said, ah, I remember how my dad put on sackcloth. And he humbled himself, and the Lord relented, not remembering that he'd said that he was going to bring calamity on his house in his day. But does he repent of his false religion? Does he seek the face of the Lord? As I said, does he go to Elisha and say, I and my people have sinned. Seek the face of the Lord on our behalf. No. What does he do? He decides the problem is Elisha. It's Elisha. As Matthew Henry points out, he did not lament his own iniquity, nor the iniquity of his people, which was the procuring cause of this calamity. He was not sensible that his ways and his doings had procured this to himself. This is his wickedness, for it is bitter. The foolishness of man perverts his way, and then his heart fretteth against the Lord. Instead of vowing to pull down the calves at Dan and Bethel, or letting the law have its course against the prophets of Baal and of the groves, he swears the death of Elisha. Now, he should have known why all of this was happening, because the Lord had said it would if they did the things that they were doing in Israel prior even to entering the promised land. Moses, when they were still on the other side of the Jordan, when they were still in Moab, had told them that they would have blessings if they were a people of faith who listened to the Lord, who worshipped him, who depended upon his promises, and kept to his commandments, but if they did not, if they turned aside, if they worshiped the false gods, if they worshiped the Baals, or if they created their own awful, syncretistic, man-made religion like they did here, he told them what would happen. Go with me in your Bibles to Deuteronomy 28. I want you to see how everything that was happening in Samaria at this point was something that the Lord had warned about. Deuteronomy chapter 28, and then I'm gonna start reading at verse 45 of Deuteronomy 28. We read there, the word of the Lord, moreover, all these curses shall come upon you and pursue and overtake you until you are destroyed because you did not obey the voice of the Lord your God to keep his commandments and his statutes which he had commanded you. And they shall be upon you for a sign and a wonder and on your descendants forever because you did not serve the Lord your God with joy and gladness of heart for the abundance of everything. Therefore, you shall serve your enemies, whom the Lord will send against you in hunger, in thirst, in nakedness, and in need of everything, and he will put a yoke of iron on your neck until he has destroyed you. The Lord will bring a nation against you from afar, from the end of the earth, as swift as the eagle flies, a nation whose language you will not understand, a nation of fierce countenance, which does not respect the elderly nor show favor to the young, and they shall eat the increase of your livestock and the produce of your land until you are destroyed. They shall not leave you grain, or new wine, or oil, or the increase of your cattle, or the offspring of your flocks, until they have destroyed you. They shall besiege you at all your gates, until your high and fortified walls, in which you trust, come down through all your land. And they shall besiege you at all your gates throughout all your land, which the Lord your God has given you. You shall eat the fruit of your own body, the flesh of your sons and your daughters, whom the Lord your God has given you in the siege, and desperate straits in which your enemy shall distress you." The Lord had told them, this is what will happen to you. And now it's playing out. And the answer, of course, is to repent. and to return in faith to the Lord who had delivered them in the first place. But they will not. No, I'm gonna send an executioner to cut off Elisha's head. He's the problem. But although Jehoram was a wicked king, and therefore most of the members of his court would be people like him, they would have the same attitude towards Elisha and so on, many we see here of the elders had been won over to true religion. And that was the purpose, you remember, of the Sons of the Prophets and of Elisha's preaching. He was keeping that contact with living religion going. In a time of apostasy, he was the one who was preaching the truth, who was telling them what they should be doing. And so he had many, even amongst the high men in Israel, the elders, he had men who were still listening to him. And so he's having a meeting at one of their houses, probably a prayer meeting, And he tells the elders of the city, because the Lord informs him that an executioner is coming to kill him, to hold the door and block the executioner's entrance, because he knew also that the king was coming after him. It was either that he had come to see that what he had said would take place, or that he had come to stop him. And it seems clear that the statement that the king makes in verse 33, surely this calamity is from the Lord. Why should I wait for the Lord any longer? These are words of despair. Shouldn't I just surrender at this point in time? The Lord is not going to deliver us. Is there any reason to wait on the Lord before I surrender? And the answer, of course, is yes, there is. You have Elisha sitting before you who has brought the power of God by his prayers against the people who have stood against you time and time again. He delivered your army when they were all about to die of thirst in Moab. Don't you remember that? Don't you remember the living God who has power over all the earth and you could call upon him? but he does not seem to be aware of how near the Lord is to those who need him. Well, a few applications. Some are just obvious, but they're all, I think, very needful in our own time, and I hope you're getting this. If you can't see at this point the similarities between the Northern Kingdom of Israel in their day and the United States of America in our day, I don't know what's going on. Either you don't see America as it actually is, or you haven't been listening to what the Lord tells you in the word. But I hope that you will, because there are obviously implications, not just for what they should have done, but what we should be doing. First, learn to value the plenty that we have. Have you ever thought about how rich we are in terms of the abundance of things that we have before us constantly? When I go to Africa, I've been there twice, I'm going to actually one of the more prosperous nations in Africa, and yet I still see women and children who are literally bringing filthy water to their homes, walking, after collecting it in a swamp, walking up the road, and that's gonna be the water that they drink for the entire day. The food that they eat, generally speaking, they have grown themselves, they have cut down themselves, and hopefully it will be enough. There are stores, but a lot of the population cannot afford to buy much from them at all. Certainly they could never live from them unless they have a government job or they work within one of the cities. We, on the other hand, you know, you can't drive, I was told there's, if you plot it out, there's a dollar general every 50 miles in the United States, where you can, you know, find an abundance of terrible processed food, which will kill you eventually, but available for, even though food prices are climbing with inflation, still abundantly available all over the place. But do you acknowledge that? Do you acknowledge the abundance that you have? Do you acknowledge that everything that you have comes from the hand of the Lord? When you sit down to eat, do you thank the Lord for this? Do you say, I didn't deserve this, but you've put it in my hands? There is a reason that when the disciples asked Jesus, teach us how to pray, one of the things that he included in there, one of the supplications is, give us this day our daily bread. We depend upon him, whether or not we see it, upon him to provide us with what we eat. And when it comes to famine, I know that Americans, I know, and just a little while, I'll be able to say, I hope, we, I know we think, but at the moment, I know you Americans, think, well, that could never happen to us. We will never. Are you crazy? We'll never be at the point where there's a famine. Well, let me tell you about another country. I'm not going to talk about the northern country of Israel. I'm going to talk about a country that at one time was the most prosperous, the most rich nation in all of South America. Does anybody know which one that was? Venezuela, you do. Venezuela was literally floating on a sea of oil. and the people were prosperous, the stores were full, and then they elected Hugo Chavez. They elected a socialist and they embraced the false gospel of socialism. And incidentally, I am not the first preacher in history to reckon socialism, what it is, a false gospel. Spurgeon, believe it or not, warned against it in his time again and again. Let me give you a Spurgeon quote. For many a year, by the grand old truce of the gospel, sinners were converted and saints were edified and the world was made to know that there is a God in Israel. but these are too antiquated for the present cultured race of superior beings. They are going to regenerate the world by democratic socialism and set up a kingdom for Christ without the new birth or the pardon of sin. Truly the Lord has not taken away the 7,000 that have not bowed the knee to Baal, but they are in most cases hidden away even as Obadiah hid the prophets in a cave. He saw how socialism and Christianity were actually opposing worldviews, opposing religions. It's interesting, Friedrich Engels, who was of course the co-author of the Communist Manifesto, when he was asked to list the people in England, he hated he had one name. Does anybody know what it was? Spurgeon. He said, I hate Spurgeon. Why? Because he was trying to preach this gospel of envy, this false utopian gospel to the common men and women of England, hoping to spark a revolution. And Spurgeon was preaching the truth. He was preaching the gospel. And men and women were coming to faith in droves and turning away from that false gospel and turning instead to preaching the true one. Well, the Venezuelans turned to Chavez, a false and murderous prophet of a false religion. And they brought want and famine down upon themselves. Their stores went from fully stocked with abundant food to bare shelves with people literally picking over garbage dumps, seeking to find the offscourings of what the oligarchs in the nation have thrown away. And do not think that if we as a nation, to quote Spurgeon, that is you as a nation, hopefully me, we as a nation in a little while, quote, to quote Spurgeon, exchange the gold of individual Christianity for the base metal of Christian socialism, we won't end up in the same place. Idolatry, and you need to learn this from the word and from history, idolatry always destroys its adherence, whether it's ball worship or calf worship or Marx worship. Ultimately, it always destroys its nations because it isn't true worship. It does not lead you to salvation. It does not change your morals and manners. It does not make you an ethical creature. It just, they breed hatred, they breed bloodshed. They breed envy and every vice under the sun. It's only Christianity that offers hope for mankind. And note this, we may accumulate money, but remember that in a time of famine, it becomes worthless. The Bedouin had a saying, in the desert, a cup of water is more valuable than a cup of diamonds. And it really is. Diamonds aren't gonna save your life when you're dying of thirst. Water will. Scarcity, as Matthew Henry pointed out, sometimes follows upon great plenty. We cannot be sure that tomorrow shall be as this day. He acknowledges himself thereby disabled to help unless God would help them. And then he says, note, creatures are helpless things without God. For every creature is that, all that, and only that which he makes it to be. You depend entirely upon God. If you turn away from him, if you spurn him, and if you say, I will not have the true God to reign over me, and you turn to the worship of whatever the calves, the golden calves are of our time, it will not go well with you. And we, even evangelicals, did you know that the average evangelical at this point in time is not in church on a Sunday? They call themselves evangelicals. It's the box they tick, but they can't explain the religion once received by the saints, and they're not attending on communal worship. That's not evangelicalism. There's no evangel there. It's just a name that we're calling ourselves. The number of Christians who actually are worshiping faithfully and who know the gospel in this nation is declining precipitously. We go abroad to teach pastors to teach the gospel, but we need seminaries. And in a little while, incidentally, on November the 10th, one of the seminaries we've been supporting since we got started here, Granville Presbyterian Theological Seminary is gonna come and they're gonna do a presentation on why pastoral training is so very needful in our day and age. But brothers and sisters, note this, false religion will always be here as long as the devil is around. As long as your three great enemies, the world, the flesh, and the devil are doing their dirty work, we're always going to be dealing with false religions. Don't give into it. I'm sure the Samaritans would have said, and that is the inhabitants of Samaria, would have said, God bless Samaria, even put the bumper sticker on the back of their chariot. But if the God that you claim to be worshiping is a false God of your own devising, and the worship that you're offering up to him is not according to the instructions that he has given you through his word, what is that? It's just empty sloganeering. Nationalism never got anybody to heaven, not one. Now, I want you also to note how again and again, how in situations like this, it makes no sense. We're not the ones who failed to repent. We're not the ones who failed to worship the Lord according to his instructions. We're not the ones who are going over idols, and yet it's believers, true believers like Elisha, who are made the scapegoats for what is going on. They're the ones who are hated. You remember who Nero blamed for the great fire there. It was the Christians, when in fact it was probably Nero clearing room for his new Rome that he envisaged. But it certainly was not the Christians who set Rome on fire, but again and again. One early apologist said, you know, whether the Tiber floods or the Tiber fails to reach the proper level, it's always Christians to the lions. They are to blame for what's going on rather than the people for not repenting. And it should not surprise us that that has continued onwards. It's always been Cain whenever the Lord didn't favor him. You remember Cain and Abel. The Lord respected Abel's sacrifice. Abel sacrificed a lamb. And he therefore gave the blood offering that pointed towards the Lamb of God in keeping with the instructions of God. But Cain offers up vegetables from his harvest and says, the Lord should respect this. When he doesn't, who does he hate? He hates Abel, the beloved of the Lord. That should not surprise you, brothers and sisters, that in times of calamity, you're going to be blamed for what's going on. Well, to finish up then, we're looking at a time when there was calamity. The people had violated every letter of God's law. Their man-made religion was doing nothing to help them. It was only accelerating their decline. Who could save them? And the answer is the Lord. And that's something we need to remember. Even to the very end, the Lord can and will save those who call upon him. He is gracious to the prodigal who returns, whose eyes are open, who sees what he has been doing and comes back to him. Even a Manasseh, one of the most wicked rulers of the kingdom of Judah, can repent and be restored. Second Peter 3.9, he reminds us, the Lord is not slack concerning his promises, some count slackness, but is long-suffering towards us, not willing that any should perish, but they should all come to repentance. Why does he restrain his hand and not judge us immediately? I mean, certainly, I hate to say this, I really do, but if any nation has ever deserved judgment, it's a nation that has slaughtered six, what am I talking about? I wish it was six million, 60 million innocents in the womb, legally. and then gleefully shouted it to the skies. The Carthaginians practiced child sacrifice, but I guarantee you, they never got through 60 million. They never were as devoted to death culture as unfortunately our nation has become as we've drifted away from God. And yet, I know this, if we will but repent and return just as surely as the Lord exercised mercy on the Ninevites, He will be merciful to us. That's why I pray all the time for another great awakening, that we would have done with all of these false isms, whether it be libertinism or socialism or whatever ism you dare to construct, Islamism and so on, all of these false, idolatrous religions. If we will just have done with them and return once again to the Lord, I know He will bless our nation. And so I pray for that, and I would encourage you to pray for that as well. But never, never be caught up in the siren song of anything that takes us away from Christ, anything that would create a system of salvation that doesn't require his perfect sacrifice. And let us be strong, no matter what we're called, what we're blamed for, let us be continuing courageously to proclaim the gospel wherever we are. Let's go before him now. We thank you, Lord, that you are the Savior that you are the only savior, the only one who can deliver us from our situation. I pray, oh Lord, that you would open our eyes before it is too late, that this nation would not go in the way of so many other nations onto the dust heap of history with the other nations that are shaking their heads against you and said, we will not obey, we will not follow. Lord, the inhabitants of Samaria brought down destruction upon themselves. But Lord, they would not see it. We pray that you would not let us do the same thing. Help us to see what we're doing and to be appalled by it, to run from it to Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world. And we pray this in Jesus' holy name.