https://vimeo.com/418664239

I hear noises from the critters. Hi guys. Tuesday morning, we're back for, what are we doing? The Jesus story. The Jesus story. Remember the little bookmarks I gave you guys a while back? Do you have those in front of you? Yeah? Wow, somebody's got really fancy there, didn't they? We have one here for folks that don't remember. That's the bookmark that we made for everybody. Watch that for me in a moment. Well, I'm gonna go actually do it on a different page, but I want you to see the same thing on your bookmark that I'm gonna show you here. Do you remember this map? This little storyline here, right? What are these up here? Trees, the trees and the like. They're great vines. They're not trees, they're great vines, all right? We've done Adam, right? Abraham and Moses, we did last week. So this is Israel. This is a man getting lost, God coming to Abraham and saying, hey, I'd like to help you out. Moses giving us more about who God is and the things God likes and wants us to live. And now we've moved from, okay, Abraham 2100 years before Christ, Moses 1440 years before Christ. And now we're gonna move ahead 500 years and we're gonna get to David today. This is David right here, okay? This is David's little tree. And he's one of the kings of Israel. And the books that we're gonna cover, okay, we've already done Genesis and Job, Exodus through Deuteronomy, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Now from Moses to David, we've got these three books right here. Joshua, Judges and Ruth. This tells us more of the story of Israel coming into the Promised Land and establishing themselves. So we've moved from Abraham as a person to Abraham's family, right? Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, all the kids. So they became tribes and now they get into Canaan and they actually become a nation. And so we've had them growing this whole time to become a nation. I wanna show you a map, okay? This one I sent to you so you could have a look at it earlier. Where is it? There it is. Here's the map of Israel. This is the little piece of that bigger map that we showed you for a long time. Here's Israel, here's Shechem. Here's around where the kingdom was established. Abraham lived down here, okay? Then they went to Egypt, remember? They came back in here and they took over this land again all the way from Israel. Both of these, the green and the purple. This is known as the Golden Age of Israel because this is when everything got to be really good. They got settled in their land and they got used to living there and they started cause God did a lot of miracles to get them through the wilderness into Canaan. There was even when they came across the Jordan River God stopped the river just like he did the first, when they crossed the Red Sea, stopped the river so they could all walk through and come into the land and yeah, they had to do a lot of war and they had to kill some people, take the land for themselves. And so now they're living in Israel. Let's go back to that little screen cause I wanna show you the kind of trouble they had around them. So around Israel, okay? You've got the kingdom of Aram, Ammon, Moab, Eden. You can hear a lot about these guys right here, the Philistines, which is in modern day Gaza. There's also a Phoenicia up here. So Israel is surrounded by all these other kingdoms. And remember when I told you on the Big Map, you've also got people coming from Babylon to trade with people from Egypt to trade with people from Greece. All of that goes on here too. All that trading, all that economy is going on in the land of Israel. And Israel's trying to hold on to its little space there. And there's all these wars, all these people are attacking them to try and take it over. Now there's three things I want you to, as we come through this time, there's three key people in the land, okay? You've got prophets, people who listen to God and tell the people what God wants them to know. You've got judges in the first part of this. You've got, there's just lots of judges in all over Israel. So when people have got a problem, like if you and maybe one of your siblings is fighting over something, who do you go to to resolve the fight? Who? Mom or dad, if dad's home? Okay, those are the, they're like judges. They're kind of, okay, there's a dispute. Somebody wise has to make a decision. You don't always like the decision, but they make a decision, right? That's what Israel is about, judges. And there's a great story about Ruth. Ruth is not a Jewish woman, but she falls in love with the Jewish man. And there's a great love story. You want to read Ruth someday. You don't want to miss that. And she's also David's father. But once Israel gets settled in the land, they want to be like all the other nations. They don't want to have prophets and priests and judges. Instead, they want a king because everybody else has got a king. You think God wants them to have a king? You don't think so? Actually, he did, but he wanted to be their king. God said, I'll be your king. I will take care of you. I'll watch over you. I will lead you out. And they said, no, we want to be like everybody else. We want a human king. And they asked Samuel to give him a king. And God said, when you asked for a king, they were rejecting him. They didn't want to follow God anymore. They wanted another human to follow. And so God says, go ahead, Samuel. Give him a king. But this is what the king will do. And if you notice, this is what powerful people do. You make somebody king over everybody, they're going to want to get rich. And to get rich, they're going to make you slaves. They're going to make your sons. They're going to take Austin and send him to war. So he's got to fight the Philistines and the Moabites and the Edomites. And he's going to take your daughters. That's you, Amy and you, Lindsay. And he's going to take them to be his wives. So they'll have like lots of wives and they'll make slaves of everybody and they'll build fancy palaces because people who have power always take it for privilege. Always take it for, I get to have the biggest home. I get to have the best stuff. You guys, I don't care about you. I don't care if you're hungry and you can't eat because it's all about me and I'm going to have lots of horses and I'm going to have lots of palaces. And that's what the kings did, just like all the kings that rule over the world. They always think they're better than everybody else. They always take everybody's stuff. They make people go to war and they kill them and they die. And that's just part of being a kingdom and God didn't want them to have a king, but they wanted ones. We said, okay, I'll give you Saul. So he gives them Saul as the first king. He didn't last very long. He started to disobey God and God said, that's it. I'm done with Saul. Let's find a better king. So he goes and finds David. Now, David Austin, you're going to like this. David is the last kid born. Okay, he's the eighth son of eight different sons. And so when Samuel, who's a big prophet in Israel, he's got three books named after him. If you go back to your little bookmark that you're going to see, these books right here, oops, I didn't mean to do that button dog, got it. There we go. Get to this one, okay? Samuel, there's two books of Samuel. First and second Samuel, first and second kings, first and second chronicles. This is the history of the kingdoms of Israel right here. This is about Samuel the prophet. He writes a story and then it's about Saul and David and Solomon and then it splits off into other kings. I'm going to talk to you about in just a moment, but that's the heart of the history story that we're telling you right now. Saul is replaced by David. David's the last boy born, but when Saul comes to see him, he sees probably the older kid. He's a big kid and nope, not him. Finally, it's the last son. God says, I want David to be king and David's a king. You know what, David was a man after God's heart. That's what the New Testament says about David. He followed God in so many things, but he also had a few problems. He stole a guy's wife and murdered him, had him killed in battle, he's the king. He can do whatever he wants. So he does those things. So he makes some mistakes, but he still keeps coming back to God. He's keeps coming back saying, God, I love you and I want you. And so David is probably the biggest king, not probably he was, he was the biggest king in Israel. He's the one that he's most revered and he had, but he had lots of palaces. And then he was also a musician. He wrote songs and poetry and that's why we have the book of Psalms. Psalms is a book of poetry and hymns that Israel sang and David wrote and some other people wrote too. David wrote all the Psalms. Do you know grandpa reads the Psalms every Sunday morning I read from the Psalms. They're great poems about who God is and what he's come to do in the world. And there's also some really mean Psalms where Dave just really mad and wants to kill everybody. There's those Psalms too, but these Psalms really help us to know who God is. And then David at the end of his life, he wants to build a temple for God. God's been in this tabernacle, this tent that they built when they were moving in the wilderness. So David wants to build this big temple for God, but God says, no, no, you've killed too many people, too many wars you've been in. Let Solomon build the temple. So David doesn't get to build it. When he dies, he gives the kingdom to Solomon. And Solomon, among other things he does, he get, oh, that's the wrong picture. Sorry about that. Solomon gets to build the temple. There we go. There's the temple. Solomon got to build that. This is a picture of what it looked, this is the model of what it looked like in Jerusalem. Your mommy and I stood right there and looked at this. This is the temple right here on this mountain. And this is the courtyard for the temple all around here. And this is the city of Jerusalem behind. This is how the people lived. Some spaces are kind of spaced out. Some of them are kind of close together. This is the temple. And behind here in the very back of the temple is where the holy of holy was. As God would come into the holy of holies, one day a year, they would make sacrifices and they would go in there and the priests would be scared to death because man, if God, if he wasn't pleased with their sacrifices, the priests would die. He would come in the presence of God and he would die. And that was scary stuff. So we find out if Solomon gets to build the temple, but then Solomon doesn't stay true to God. He's a very wise God. He asked God for wisdom and God gives it to him, but he hasn't used it very well. And he gets into lots of trouble and he gets lots of wives and he goes out and he just is unfaithful to God. And so at the end of his life, Samuel dies and he gives it to one of his kids. He gives it to Rehoboam was one of his kids. He gives the kingdom to him, but the rest of the people aren't happy. They don't like Rehoboam. At the end of his reign, even though Solomon was very wise, he tortured the people. He made them work hard, give him lots of things so he could grow his influence and power. And the people were angry. And when he died, they came to his son and said, treat us better, please treat us better. And Rehoboam said, no, my father was, I'm gonna be worse than my father. I'm gonna treat you even worse. And so one of Rehoboam's brothers, named Jeroboam, he said, I will take the kingdom. And so he takes 10 of the tribes. Remember this map I showed you a little bit earlier, this map right here. This shows those tribes and how they changed. 10 of the tribes stay in the North up here with Jeroboam. And a few of the tribes, two of the tribes stay in the South down there with Rehoboam. And so the kingdom, which was one nation all getting along, now they're not getting along anymore. So there's two different kingdoms and it becomes really a mess. And for the next 500 years, Israel has all of these different kings following it. You know, somebody would die and the next person would become king and they'd be fighting to who would be king. And most of the kings, only a few kings, only like three or four really wanted to follow God. The rest of them didn't wanna follow God. They just wanted to go off on their own ways. So instead of the kings being people who led for God, the prophets came back. Elijah and Elisha, two big prophets you'll wanna read about. Elijah and Elisha come along, their prophets, Samuel used to be a prophet. Now he's died, so there's other prophets that come. And we're gonna look at these in the next few weeks, in the next week that we come. We're gonna talk about the prophets that were between Solomon and between the exile, which we talk about as part of history. So the kingdom splits into two. This is Israel, 10 tribes in the North, okay? Capital was in Samaria, these are all the kings. Austin, can you memorize these kings for me by Friday? I want you to have all the names and when they rained, okay? And Lindsay, I want you to memorize all these kings. I'm kidding, I don't really want you to memorize all these kings. I don't even remember, I don't even know who they are. But as I said, there were two tribes in the South and we follow this story pretty closely in the scripture. This story too, we follow the story on this side of the ledger too. But notice what's happening here, these kings, most of them being unfaithful to God. During this time, Israel follows other gods and down at the bottom of this, look what happens. They're conquered in 722 BC, 700 years before Christ. The Northern kingdom gets conquered. We'll talk about that next week. The two tribes here in Judah called Judah, this is their capitals in Jerusalem in 586. So they last a little bit longer but not a whole lot longer and they're conquered too. So Babylon comes to get them. And so what we have during this time is what I want you to think about during this time because here's what's changing. Israel becomes a big nation and they've got a king now and they can be really powerful for God. But instead the kings go their own way, the people have false gods, they go their own way. So remember when I told you God was gonna put them in this place so they could learn to trust him but they didn't learn to trust him. They didn't follow him. And because of that, both kingdoms walk in the darkness and all kinds of bad things happen. And you get to read about that story because Israel wasn't faithful to God when they had this great opportunity to listen to God, to follow him, they didn't. And they gave in to prestige and they got famous and they had a big fight and they broke up and oh my gosh, people were only concerned about their power, people only concerned about their money, people were only concerned about how big of a deal they could be and you know what, that destroyed them. Does that happen in our day too? People get rich and famous, they get to be a big deal and they're not even fun to be around anymore. People, you'll find this as you get old, you have young friends and they're fun and they're neat and then they get to be somebody and then they don't have time for you anymore and you're not very important. That's how God felt. God felt like yeah, he wasn't very important to Israel. Instead of following him, they followed their own ways because you know it, right? Temptation's pretty strong. Sometimes you just wanna have your way even if it's not a good thing and that's the story of Israel. So Solomon wrote three books. He wrote the song of Solomon which is a love story to his wife. Someday you may wanna read that when you're older but it's a love poem to the woman he loved and then he wrote a book called Ecclesiastes toward the end of his life where Solomon now, he had all the money, he had all the wives, he had all the power and what he says at the end, what does it matter? None of it matters. It's all futile, you die, you can't take it with you. Nothing matters, everything's worthless except God. He keeps coming back to God. The God he ignored most of his life. God's the only one that makes sense out of life because you can be powerful and rich and famous but you're still gonna die and you can't take it with you. So it's really how you live your life, how you treat people which is what Proverbs is all about. I told you, I read the Psalms every Sunday. Every Sunday is my Psalm day. I love reading the Psalms. I read other stuff during the week. Proverbs, I read it twice a year. I read the book of Proverbs. Proverbs is just full of these little sayings about wisdom, about the way to live your life, about how integrity is such a good thing. If people can trust what you say, your life will go well and if you lie to this person and that person and that person talk to that person and finds out you're a liar, your life goes very bad. It talks about how to have money, how to treat money with generosity, giving it to other people, helping others along. Not money just for me and I get to be powerful and build me bigger houses and bigger castles and palaces but I actually have money so that I can be generous with people who are hurting and who are in need and need help. Does that make sense? And Proverbs is a great book. Read Proverbs sometime. Just read a proverb down there. Maybe have your mom read you one. There's a great story in the first part about wisdom being like, I guess you guys didn't all watch it, but wisdom being like a woman who invites you to come to her house and learn her ways and evil is like a wicked woman who's always trying to tempt you to do the wrong thing. Well, Solomon wrote that great book and yet he ended up following the wayward woman, the false wisdom that is all about, I get what I want and I can have what I want. The other thing that Israel learned during this time and this is probably one of the important parts in the Jesus story. Remember I told you Moses gave them burnt offerings and sacrifices so when you sin, you offer God a cow or a goat or a sheep and you burn it on an altar and then God forgives sins. You remember that? Remember that story? Remember Abraham taking his son to offer him to God as a sacrifice because he thought that's what God wanted him to do. Do you remember Abraham doing that and God stopping him saying, no, I don't want that. Well, then Moses gives them sacrifices and so now they're burning animals and they're doing all that. And then David, remember I told you David sinned. He took someone's wife for himself and had the husband murdered in battle. That's pretty serious stuff, huh? And Psalm 51 is the song he wrote, the poem he wrote after he got, after his sin was uncovered, there was a prophet called Nathan and he came to David and he said, David, you've done wrong. You had everything you wanted and you took this one sheep. Not really a sheep, it was his wife. You took this one little sheep from this guy who only had one sheep and then you murdered him and David repents. But in this poem, Psalm 51, when David talks about, here's what he says. He says, God against you only have I sinned. And it's not sacrifices that you want. You don't want cows and bulls and goats. What you want is a broken and a repentant heart, a heart that says, God, I'm sorry, I've gone my own way. Will you forgive me? And will you teach me how to walk in your ways? There's no more important prayer you can pray than that one. Now your grandpa, he prays that prayer almost every day. God forgive me for where I haven't followed you and make my heart soft and pliable so I can know you and follow your ways because it's not sacrifices you want. You don't want me doing great things for you. You just want me to listen and follow you every day. So it makes sense? And Psalm 78, this is a Psalm not written by David. It's written by a man named Asaph. But this is what he wrote. And this is important from all the Old Testament that we've read. I want this to be in your minds. And maybe your mom and dads can read this to you sometime, the first part of Psalm 78. It's a long Psalm. I'll warn you, it's a long Psalm, but it says this. We have heard and known what our fathers have told us and we will not hide from their children. We will not hide it from their children. We will tell the next generation the praise worthy deeds of the Lord, his power and the wonders he's done. So he said, look, tell your children like we're telling you, God is a great God. He does marvelous things. He made the world and he put us here and he's got a way to lead us even through a pandemic with a coronavirus. He said, so the next generation would know him. Even the children yet to be born and that they would turn and tell their children so that they would put their trust in God and not forget his deeds. And they would not be like their forefathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation whose hearts were not loyal to God and whose spirits were not faithful to him. The story of humanity is God does loving things for us. Humanity sees it, loves it and then goes their own way and forgets him and then comes back and says, God, we've forgotten you. Can we follow you again? And God always, always says, yeah, I'll take you back. I'll always take you back. You can always come follow me. And I think the life best lived. We'll talk about it next week as some of this continues to unravel and they go into captivity. But the best way to live is to follow God and know him and the story that's unfolding from David now through all the other kings, people who didn't follow God helping Curry just to learn to, okay? Okay, kids, love you. Like always, you take care.