Kings: Blessing and Cursing - Audio
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- Well, we are coming near the ends of our series in Kings, subtitled "Manual for Distant"s. And the premise of the series has been that the culture that we're a part of is becoming increasingly increasingly divorced from who God is and what God is like. And as a result, the church has to operate in a different way. Fortunately for us, we have an example of that. And in First and Second Kings, God's people were in the same situation. The leaders were corrupt, they were following other gods, and they had to figure out how to operate in that situation. Now, this week, we're gonna be talking specifically about mission. Typically when we talk about mission, we talk about things like spreading the gospel, right? Things are a little bit different in a culture like this. So if our culture is becoming more and more like the culture that Elijah and Elisha experienced, this is a road map for how we evangelize. So let's take a look at these are two of my favorite texts in the book of Kings. We fast forward a little bit. We're now with Elisha, not Elijah. Elijah, his name means Yahweh is God. His ministry was to proclaim, remind Israel who the real God is. It's not Baal, it's not in Ashtrath, it's Yahweh. Ellie, Yah, God is Yahweh. Elisha's ministry is gonna be a little different. His name is Ellie Yahshah, which is the Hebrew for God rescues or God saves, okay? And so what we're gonna see in this text, we're gonna begin to see God saving through the ministry of Elisha. We know who God is, now we're gonna see how God saves. So the people of Jericho said to Elisha, look, our Lord, this town is well situated, as you can see, but the water is bad and the land is unproductive. It's a, the Hebrew there is ambiguous. Unproductive also means childless. So it could be that there's something that's gone on the water that causes problems with birth, or it could be that it's like metaphorical and we're not able to grow crops because the water's bad. And we'll see how it's bad in a second. Bring me a new bowl, he said, have been put salt in it. So they brought it to him.
Transcription truncated.
Blessing and Cursing are the two modes in which the church is called to evangelize, to do mission, in light of a culture that is antichrist in every way that it can be. This text is a roadmap for how we evangelize and we will see how God saves.