Transcription of the Video: The Wages of Sin

Ray Vander Laan: The ancient land of Israel is a testimony and evidence, if you will, of the greatness of what God did in that country, a testimony to the truth of the words that we find in the pages of the Bible. 

The original stones may not be in the original location. What's below it was standing here when Hezekiah was king. Can you imagine that? If you walk over and touch that, you're looking at the actual - I mean nothing changed from that Iron Age 2 Hezekiah time; 750 - 700 BC.

The street would have been up at that level see. You're way down. They've dug way down below the street. Look at how small the stones are in the house wall. That almost tells you that's after that Babylonian destruction.

When a culture violates the standards that are revealed in God's Word, the results can often be disastrous. Lachish, one of the great ancient cities has a very sad history, a history that records the result of a civilization that refused to follow the ways of the Lord. 

I think you'll appreciate what an awesome, huge mound this was compared to some of the ones we've been on in terms of size. Eighteen acres on this one. And this begins to protect the approach to Jerusalem particularly from the South. There's a wadi in the area that would take you up somewhere near Hebron and get you up to the ridge route that then goes on up to Jerusalem. So the main focus of this tell is the defense of the southern flank of the kingdom of Israel. Anything that comes from the South - in Old Testament times - the Egyptians or the people out of the desert. So the city stands here then as the defensive frontier of Jerusalem, and that's why its size is what it is.

Now you see a lot of ruins around you, and I'm going to try and fill in some biblical stories as to some of those ruins. What you're looking at here is the chamber of a gate. In fact, the opening to the gate is right here behind me. And you can see the channel that goes down the middle of the street and over there under the tent, you can even see in the one area the cobblestones of the street itself. 

The gate room then is where you're sitting. You're sitting in one half in compartments like we saw at Tel Gezer. And if you look over here, across from you, you recognize the three compartments of the inner gate. Then you go out through this gateway here and now you're in a large outer gate room which is basically the same thing, but it simply forms a second gate. 

Then you come to the inner gate and you enter through the inner gate and you got through these chambers, and then finally you're into the interior of the city. So this is an awesome main gate structure. It's the largest gate structure that's been found anywhere in Israel. It's a huge, huge massive gate and again, gives you some sense of the importance or the significance that this city held in this particular location. 

So that's more or less the structure of what we have here. There's an outer gate coming up. You enter it into the gate room, the sewer channel down the middle, the inner gate through the gate chambers and then on to the main street of the city. Then there would be another defensive approach up there for the palace itself. 

In the year 920 [B.C.] approximately, the country split in half. The northern 10 tribes became Israel or the North. The southern tribe of Judah became this area called the South or Judah. So we have two countries in one. During that time and just before that time and during the time after the split, the Israelite people became very much involved in the culture they lived in, particularly the religion of the culture. And I'd like to read just a short part of 2 Kings 17, which is written primarily about the North, but gives you information that's happening about the South also. 

It says, "The Israelites had sinned against the Lord, their God, who had brought them up out of Egypt from under the power of Pharaoh. They worshiped other gods and followed the practices of the nations the Lord had driven out before them as well as the practices which the kings of Israel had introduced. The Israelites secretly did things against the Lord, their God, that were not right. From watch tower to fortified cities, they built themselves high places in all their towns." Every town had one.

"They set up sacred stones and Asherah poles on every high hill and under every spreading tree. At every high place, they burned incense as the nations whom the Lord had driven out before them had done. They did wicked things that provoked the Lord to anger. They worshiped idols, though the Lord had said, 'You shall not do this.' The Lord warned Israel and Judah through all his prophets and seers, 'Turn away from your evil ways. Observe my commands and decrees in accordance with the entire law that I commanded your fathers to obey and that I delivered to you through my servants, the prophets.' But they would not listen and were as stiff necked as their fathers, who did not trust in their God."

Now that's the stage. So from the prophet's point of view in the Bible, you have to imagine that the people of Israel had become so much caught up into the religion of their culture and of their time, particularly the fertility cult that we refer to as the Baal cult, that on every hill (and that may simply be an editorial way of saying a lot). But on every hill, there's a high place to Baal and to Asherah. Because of that, the Bible says, God allowed - or God sent - foreign oppressors to come to this place to create punishment or suffering for those people who had worshiped idols. 

The first nation to come was the nation of Assyria. It's located to the east. You probably know it as in the area of Iraq. And the Assyrians came here, one of the most brutal armies that's ever been known in the history of the world. They came here first to the North and they decimated the northern 10 tribes so that in 722 B.C., those northern 10 tribes disappeared from history. 

They laid siege to the city which they considered to be one of the major cities. In fact, it's safe to say that if this city stood, Jerusalem would stand. If this city fell, Jerusalem would fall. And they laid siege to it with an enormous army. Now what's fascinating about the story and helps us to add some detail to the story is that that was such a significant siege to the Assyrian king and the Assyrian army that when he got back home after the battle was over, he carved the history of his campaign on the wall of a large room in his palace - called a frieze - including as the main chapter, the thing you see as you walk into the main door of that room, the siege of Lachish. 

He talks about the fact that he cut off men's noses and ears and arms and hands. Prisoners are hung. Well actually the word in the Old Testament doesn't mean hung by the neck like we think of. It means to be impaled on the end of a sharp stake. In the book of Esther, you remember Haman was impaled on a gallows that was 90 feet high. So he was put on the end of the stake. And as the people watch, you have these captured prisoners all impaled around the outside of this city. In one tomb over here, they found 1500 bodies, all of which had been burned, all buried in a common tomb. I can't begin to tell you the terror that went on in this city gate that you're sitting in at the end of that battle.

Imagine the dying. Some people say maybe 30, 40, 50,000 people met their fate in the most unbelievably brutal way. The few prisoners he took, the king of Assyria said he pierced the lip of the prisoner and put a ring through the lip and led them off to Assyria with a ring in their lip.  And everybody else dies in some brutal way. I want you to feel in the wind that blows through here today, that sense of the terror of this place at that particular time right here in the gate. 

From here, the Assyrian army packs up and goes north-- the gate is now open-- and heads to Jerusalem. That's where the Bible picks up. "In the third year of Hoshea," King of Israel, "Hezekiah, king of Judah began to reign. He was 25 years old when he became king. He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord just as his father David had done. He removed the high places, smashed the sacred stones, cut down the Asherah poles, and he broke into pieces the bronze snake Moses had made, for up to that time, the Israelites had been burning incense to it."

"In the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah, Sennacherib, king of Assyria attacked all the fortified cities of Judah and captured them. The king sent his supreme commander and his field commander with a large army from Lachish to King Hezekiah at Jerusalem." So when the commander comes up to Hezekiah and wants to tell Hezekiah he's got no chance, he says, "Hezekiah, how can you depend on your God? Why should he protect you? And besides," he says, "he didn't protect anybody else either. All the nations I've been fighting against, they weren't protected by their gods. What makes you think your God is going to protect you?"

Then there's some dialogue back and forth. And Hezekiah goes back and the king comes back to Hezekiah, and he says, "I'll tell you what. I'm going to do the same thing to you that I've done to everyone else." In fact, the Bible says that the commander replied to Hezekiah through his servant, "I tell you today that the men sitting on this wall will have to eat their own filth and drink their own urine just in other words as I've done to everybody else. You're finished."

And then he writes a letter to Hezekiah and basically tells Hezekiah these same things. "Do not let the God on whom you depend deceive you when he says, 'Jerusalem will not be handed over to the Assyrians. Surely you have heard what the kings of Assyria have done to the other countries, destroying them completely. And will you be delivered? Did the gods of the nations that were destroyed by my forefathers deliver them?'"

Let me talk a little bit about Hezekiah. Because here, you have an example again of a person that's raised up at a particular time to meet a particular need who does what he's supposed to do, who really keeps God's plan of what he's doing by way of salvation going. But I'll also have you know something. We're going to go to Jerusalem. We're going to go down into a cave not much bigger than this little space in front of us, way underground. And on the far side of the cave is going to be a little tiny hole with water up to your stomach deep. And we're going to bend down and we're going to go down into this little tunnel waist deep in the cold water and we're going to walk for about 1500, 1700 feet underground in a little narrow skinny tunnel to discover how Hezekiah dug a tunnel to bring water from the outside the city spring to inside the city wall. 

And it strikes me that Hezekiah didn't just sit back and say, "Well, let's trust God on this one." But he did absolutely everything he could so that when the time came, he was ready to face that difficulty. And I think that's some insight into the character of Hezekiah that's appropriate for us in our faith lesson.

We need to be prepared. We need to be knowledgeable. We need to be aware. We need to do what we can do. But beyond that, what strikes me about Hezekiah is the same thing that struck me about David and about Sampson. And that is that his devotion to God is the heart of his being effective. The first thing he did was tear down ever high place and every shrine across the whole country and tried desperately to put an end to the moral decay that was going on in his culture. And then, God effectively defends it.

And I thought the last aspect of that faith lesson that I always feel here is just that awareness that somehow even through all of it, God finds a way to preserve what he's doing in history. And there's no way an Assyrian army or anybody else is going to end what God has going. 

Hezekiah takes that letter and he brings it up to the Temple in Jerusalem, and he lays it out in front of God and he prays this prayer. "Oh Lord, God of Israel, enthroned between the cherubim, you alone are God over all the kingdoms of the earth. You have made heaven and earth. Give ear, oh Lord, and hear. Open your eyes, oh Lord and see. Listen to the insult of the words that Sennacherib has sent to insult the living God. It is true, oh Lord, that the Assyrian kings have laid waste to these nations and their land. They have thrown their gods into the fire and destroyed them, for they were not gods, only wood and stone fashioned by men's hands. Now, oh Lord, our God, deliver us from his hand so that all the kingdoms on the earth may know that you alone, oh Lord, are God." 

Does that sound familiar? You've got another David here. Hezekiah says, "God, show the world again through us that you alone are God." So God gets right into action. 

And he sends his prophet, whose name is Isaiah, and the prophet Isaiah comes with a message of hope. "This is what the Lord says concerning the king of Assyria. He will not enter this city or shoot an arrow here. He will not come up before it with a shield or build a siege ramp against it. By the way he came, he will return. 'He will not enter this city,' declares the Lord. 'I will defend this city and save it for my sake and for the sake of David, my servant.'" 

Listen to this verse. "That night, the angel of the Lord went out and put to death 185,000 men in the Assyrian camp. When the people got up the next morning, there were all the dead bodies. So Sennacherib, king of Assyria, broke camp and withdrew. He returned to Nineveh and stayed there. One day while he was worshiping in the temple of his god, two of his sons cut him down with a sword, and his son became the next king."

That's the conclusion of the battle that was so brutal here. He marches up to Jerusalem, his army disintegrates in some form before the Lord. What did he carve on his frieze? How do you go back home and carve all these great things you did and now have to write the last chapter, where your whole army is done? Well, this is basically the way it says. " I destroyed this city and slaughtered it entirely," with a list of captives and everything else. "I destroyed this city with pictures of all the brutal things I did, and when I got to Jerusalem," he says, "I shut up Hezekiah in Jerusalem like a bird in a cage." And that's the end. And that's as close as Sennacherib could come to describing what had actually happened up there in Jerusalem is to say, "I locked up Hezekiah in his city, and then I returned home." He was not about to carve what had actually happened there.

I think it has to be really clear to us as part of our faith lesson here that there are some things which finally try the patience of God to the point that there's no way to escape his judgement. And the prophets talk about how God will put up with a variety of sins, and he's patient with a variety of unbelief and disobedience. But the one thing the prophets are consistent about and that is that the shedding of innocent blood is, for God, the last straw. And so you're sitting, in a way, where the last straw happened, as far as the prophets were concerned, in God's anger, where God finally said, "Enough. I can handle so much. I can handle only so much." And when God's judgement comes, it comes in an incredibly brutal way in this particular place. 

Now what's interesting to me is that in some of the excavation, you find in homes from the Israelite period evidence that people worshiped Baal. So you'd say, "Well, I guess they deserved God's judgement. They participated in the fertility cult. Maybe they even sacrificed their sons or their daughters. We don't know. But what's also interesting to me is that there are people whose homes do not indicate Baal worship, people with what we call Yahwistic names - that is names who have the name of God in, indicating that they may have had an allegiance to God. They died too. 

And the powerful thing about this place is that when God judged a culture for its lack of moral standards and moral values, the whole culture went down the tubes, not only the people whose morality was reflective of disobedience. 

That to me, is a very compelling thing about this location. What happens here by way of the Assyrians is to the mind of the Bible writer the result of the moral situation of the Israelite culture at that time. And the thing you need to take home with you is not one of us will be spared whatever happens to a culture when it disintegrates, because God judges culture.

And the innocent mothers and babies and boys and girls and children and young people and old people died here and suffered here right along with the guilty ones. Does anybody have a comment or a question?

Participant 1: You said that when the Assyrians attacked, everyone died. But God still judged them individually in heaven, right?

Ray Vander Laan: That's a very important detail to keep in mind. And that is when God judges a culture, there is suffering that goes on. But each one of us has to answer individually to God in terms of our own personal salvation. And just because someone died in this gate brutally didn't mean that God rejected them forever eternally. But that is a good observation to make clear that they weren't all condemned to eternal destruction somehow because they died in this city.

You can't come here and say, "Well, I live in a fairly immoral society and the moral values of our country are on the decline. But I'm keeping myself fairly pure at least." To God, that isn't going to matter. When a culture, in my opinion, has failed to keep its God-centered direction and focus, however that's defined, and God judges a culture, this stands as a testimony that the whole culture is going to suffer - and you and me right with everyone else - which ought to then highlight that when we live out our command to be those who impact culture, it's not an option. Because if the culture is not impacted, I'm not going to escape whatever reaction God has to that situation. I think that's really a compelling lesson.