So That You May Know

2 Kings 19: 14-19

 

 

          People like to look up to someone. That’s our culture. We start out looking up to our parents or to that person or persons who act in their place.. As our world gets bigger, we are exposed to school teachers and Sunday school teachers and aunts and uncles and siblings. As we grow, we begin to notice others, like nurses or firemen or sports figures. We look for heroes. They represent something that we want to be. We want to be like them. Usually, along the way, we temporarily discard our parents as our role models. Usually, further along the way, we re-establish our parents or someone in that role as our top role models. We do that so often because, for most of us, we discover that they give us unconditional love. They don’t abandon us. They usually don’t coddle us either. If we have done something wrong, there will be a price to pay. Most parents will make sure we face the music. But they don’t leave. They are always there. We know that they will be our parents through thick and thin. That’s why for most who are asked, a parent is their favorite role model. We know who they are.

          The Old Testament is a whole series of books…thirty nine books…designed in part to tell us one simple thing. It tells us who God is. Now I know that sounds sort of silly. After all, we know who God is! We have the Bible. We have the church. We have Jesus. We know who God is.

          Well, that may be true. But even if it is, think about this: In the days of Noah and Abraham and Jacob and Joseph and Moses, who was God? Was he the same God we know now? Was he different? Who is God? There was no Bible. The church was an outgrowth of Jesus and he wasn’t due for another 1600 years or so. So how did the slaves of Egypt, the descendants of Abraham, the nation of Israel, come to know God? You might say one step, or one miracle, at a time.

            In Exodus 6, God tells an eighty year old Moses to liberate the people enslaved in Egypt. He makes a promise to deliver the people from the bondage of slavery and he tells Moses to tell the nation of Israel. His reason? To tell Israel this: “And you shall know that I am the Lord.” This same language is used at least seven more times in the book of Exodus. Each time, it is used during one of the plagues. It is used for both punishment and protection. God turns the waters of the Nile to blood to send Pharaoh a message that he is the Lord. God delivers Egypt from the plague of frogs, saying “so you may know that there is no one like the Lord our God.” God sends a plague of flies, but not to the land of Goshen where the nation of Israel lives, saying “so you may know that I am the Lord in the midst of the earth.” He sends thunder, fire and hail, destroying crops and trees, but again not in Goshen and he says “so that you may know that there is none like you in all the earth.”  Then he delivers Egypt from the hail, saying “so that you may know that the earth is the Lord’s.”  When the people grumble for food to Moses, God delivers them from their hunger, sending manna from heaven saying “Then you shall know that I am the Lord your God.” As the people of Israel commission the tabernacle they have built for God, he promises to live in it among the people, saying “And they shall know that I am the Lord their God.”

          Eight times in the book of Exodus alone, the Bible reports that God is saying something to the effect that they shall know who God is, how powerful he is, where he is.  There are at least fifteen additional passages spread throughout the Old Testament in the books of Leviticus, Joshua, 1 and 2 Kings, Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Joel. Not only did the nation of Israel and the nations of the known world not know who God was, apparently even if they did, they didn’t give God the respect he was due. And God makes it abundantly clear over the history of the Old Testament that it a mistake not to know who God is. God really wants us to know who he is.

          In ancient Egypt, where the nation of Israel was in captivity for 430 years according to Scripture, there were about forty different gods. There was Isis, the goddess of magic, marriage, motherhood and healing. There was Ra, the son god, who was king of the Egyptian gods, until Osiris, god of the underworld and the afterlife, took over. Pharaoh himself was thought of as divine. Pharaoh was unimpressed with this God that Moses carried on about. He was unimpressed even after a series of plagues beset the country. After all, wouldn’t one plague lead to another? But then, there were those plagues that didn’t come to the land of Goshen. And there was the plague of death to the firstborn. Whoever this God of Israel was, he was powerful….more powerful than the gods of Egypt.

          And yet, God’s people were slow to be convinced of the real identity of God. He was still the God with no name who claimed his people and delivered them from bondage. Was he just for the nation of Israel? Hardly! The book of Joshua records three more instances of the same phrase. God promises to exalt Joshua, the new leader, saying that he will be with him. In another instance, he calls himself the living God. When Jericho falls, a memorial of stones is erected and Joshua says it is so that “all the peoples of the world may know that the hand of the Lord is mighty.”

          The phrase is used twice more in the books of 1^st and 2^nd Kings. Although Ahab may have been the worst king in the history of Israel, he was handed a victory over the Syrian army. The deliverance comes from God, who says “I will give all the great multitude into your hand, and you shall know that I am the Lord.” Later, King Hezekiah, one of the few good kings of Israel, is besieged by the great Assyrian armies. Like all the cultures of those ancient times, the Assyrians practiced polytheism. They had about thirty gods, including Ishum, the god of fire and Ashur, the god of war. Hezekiah  prays to God for deliverance. His famous prayer is later quoted by the prophet Isaiah. Hezekiah prays “save us…that all the kingdoms of the world may know that you, O Lord, are God alone.” Hezekiah understands that the gods of Assyria are constructs. They are not real. There is only one God.

          All through the Old Testament, God goes to a lot of trouble to tell us who he is. He uses men and women and disaster and war and nations and kings and prophets to tell us that he is Lord. Throughout history, God judges. Throughout history, God forgives and restores. When Israel is judged, so are the nations. When Israel is restored, so are the nations. These sequences of judgment and restoration are intertwined with one another. As God reveals himself to his children through both judgment and restoration, the aim for all is the outworking of God’s covenants with us. The aim is redemption. God is not a Sunday morning God. He is a 24/7 God who walks with us, cares for us. God wants us to know who he is…and who we are to him. As David prayed so long ago, “Be still, and know that I am God.”

          If we can manage to be still in this environment of living on a schedule, we might improve on the record of the nation of Israel.  When God came knocking as a man, he was mostly ignored. The story of the life of Jesus is the story of yet one more rejection. Do you know who God is? He certainly has been patient with you. Be still. Listen. He’s still revealing himself…every single day.