August 11-15
[M] 2 Kings 15-16; Matthew 21
[T] Isaiah 1-3; Psalm 9; Matthew 22
[W] Isaiah 4-6; Matthew 23
[T] Micah 1-4; Psalm 10; Matthew 24
[F] Micah 5-7; Matthew 25
Dwell Plan Day 161-165 | CSB | Digital PDF | Printable PDF
Notes from Jon & Chris
Monday
2 Kings 15-16 | One of the most striking things about this part of Israel’s history is the constant turnover. There’s no stability in the leadership, as one dynasty comes after another in quick and violent succession. This kind of upheaval is a part of God’s judgment on them: as they abandon true worship and faithful obedience, you’ll see the disintegration of their authority structures and their communities. This is what Moses warned them about in Deuteronomy 28, that if they didn’t follow God, then He would give them over to their enemies and to their own social and moral decay—specifically God promises “curses, confusion, and frustration in everything you do.” This cycle of unbelief is also described in Romans 1; as unbelief worsens into more and more irrational worship and immorality, God hands disobedient people and nations over to their sins. You will see this happen in your own lifetime with churches and communities and individuals. The cautionary tale is in the book of Kings, and it can give us comfort to know how and why we see so much disaster in the world at times, for our God is also a God of mercy who we can cry out to for mercy.
2 Kings 16:10 | What a horror. Ahaz visits Damascus to meet the power broker of that age, the king of Assyria. Assyria was the up and coming empire, expanding rapidly through their own extreme violence. Ahaz is using the Assyrians to deal with his own enemies, delivering a fat bribe, hoping the gold and silver will pay the Assyrian king off. So while Ahaz is visiting, he sees a really cool altar. It must have impressed him. It can’t be an altar to our God, the God of the Bible, it’s a pagan altar up in Damascus. So he gets the exact pattern and details of this altar so he can recreate it back in Jerusalem. But here’s the problem. We were told in Exodus that the temple and the altar were the “exact pattern” of what Moses saw in heaven. So this is a complete rejection of God’s worship done in God’s way. We might think that rejecting the architecture of the original isn’t that big of a sin. Why not have a remodeling job? It was probably a bit outdated by this point! But this signals a deeper apostasy, a more profound rejection of God. The outward rejection of God’s architectural commands was also a rejection of God Himself and His morality. Ahaz is so wicked he actually sacrifices his own son as an offering. There’s nothing innocent about this temple remodel at all. When we discover that all of the construction details about the temple, the altar, and God’s worship were meant to reveal Jesus, that’s when we see the enormity of this crime. It’s a rejection of God’s rescue of sinners. It’s turning to false gods that bring their own certain destruction.
Matthew 21:15 | This happens all of the time in churches, and these stories repeat themselves over and over again. A ministry will take off, reaching new folks for Jesus with power and success. There’s a new excitement about worship and transformed lives. The most unlikely people start coming to faith and having spiritual victory in their lives. Then, the folks who have been faithful to God for a long time will be suspicious of this new excitement, fervor, and success. They become envious of this new ministry and its joyful results. They begin to criticize and judge what’s going on. It isn’t doing things properly according to the religious folks, and they begin to sabotage the new work. It’s uncomfortable for them, and doesn’t celebrate their longstanding religious practices. This creates conflict and crisis in that ministry, and there’s usually a strong effort to stamp out this new development.
What’s happening to Jesus here is meant to prepare us for this kind of thing, to see it as it happens, and understand how it works out. Don’t be shocked by it or discouraged. It’s always been like this, and we can’t expect our experiences to be better than what Jesus got. And we also need the other warning, that we don’t become the religious stick-in-the-muds ourselves. Jesus invites us to be self aware about this in verse 43, warning us that “the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits.” That can happen to us in our churches in the same way it happened to the Jewish people.
Tuesday
Isaiah 1:11 | This is such a frightening warning: the idea that God is tired of our worship. That we could be serving and sacrificing, but it’s just an empty abomination. So your hopes and joys in worship are just a sham. What’s the problem here? There’s no real obedience. They’re not caring for the poor or the defenseless in verse 23, but are trusting in their wealth through bribes. Their use of power has made them murderers, and their abundance has seduced them. God says His own people have become His enemies in verse 24. In verse 29 we discover that they will be ashamed of their trees. What does that mean? A part of their hardness of heart is that they’re also dabbling in worshiping nature, the most common worship of the ancient world. Like our beautiful redwood groves in California were used by native Americans for their own pagan worship, so the ancient people of Palestine used their oak trees. These “people of God” were compromised by their idols, which led their hearts into bankruptcy and hardness. Given over to their false worship, they used their wealth for themselves, abandoning the poor. And the whole time they’re still doing their Sunday best to look like respectable religious types.
But there’s still hope! This is where we also see God’s most precious statements about His kind of forgiveness—forgiveness even of this kind of hypocrisy and double mindedness. “Though your sins are like a terrible red stain, you can be cleaned and washed completely.” This promise in verse 18 is for these sorts of folks, if they will turn from their compromise and run to the amazing mercy of God. This back and forth, an announcement of judgment with mercy alongside it, will happen over and over again in Isaiah.
Isaiah 2:1, 11, 12, 20 | All of these verses refer to a “day” or “days” that are coming. The singular word “day” can refer to a period of time; Hebrew had the same sort of usage of the word “day” as we do in English. Someone might say “back in my day” and we all know they’re referring to the days when that person was young, to a time that typifies their early life. The prophets talk about God’s “day” in the same way. Sometimes it might be actually referring to a particular moment of God’s judgment, sometimes it’s about a duration of time. But the point is this: a day is coming when God will act. That action might be mercy and it might be judgment, but it’s definitely coming. In verses 1-4 it’s the transformation of the world through God’s word. That is a day we've been living in since Christ ascended into heaven. God is creating peace in the world through the preaching of the gospel. It isn’t completely fulfilled yet—there’s still war. But that full day is coming. In verse 12 we also discover there's a day coming when everything gets reordered, when everything proud and exalted is brought low. This might be the same day as the transformation of the world in verses 1-4, just seen from a different perspective. Or it might be a different day altogether. The point is this: God has His day coming when He reveals Himself, and the open question is, are you ready for that day?
Wednesday
Matthew 23 | If you ever wondered why the religious leaders of Jesus’ day hated Him so much, tried to kill Him, and wanted to get rid of Him at all costs, here’s your text. Jesus lays them out with a series of warning statements about their hypocrisy and false religion. His words here are some of the harshest in all the Scripture, and the amazing thing is that His severest judgments are for the “religious” and not for sex workers and addicts and idolaters. That isn’t at all to say that Jesus doesn’t teach moral truth or its application. He made clear that adultery happens with a lustful look, condemning all men of history in one command. No, Jesus doesn’t lessen the call to holiness. But folks broken by sin in their lives often know how messed up they are. Not always, but they often do. But outwardly religious folks rarely see how their religious activities can be a mask. Jesus saves His harshest condemnation for them. Self-righteousness is as wicked as any murder or hate or theft, it just doesn’t feel like it. Read this chapter to seek conviction about your own tendency to put your hope in outward religious observances. No one is exempt from this danger.
Isaiah 4:5 | Isaiah is referring to how God led His people in the wilderness. As the people of God wandered in the desert, living in tents, God would lead them with a pillar of fire at night and a pillar of smoke by day. Wherever that pillar went, the people of God would follow. When it stopped, they would stop and set up camp. Why is the prophet promising that this will happen again? Are we going to go back to Egypt, through the Red Sea again as His people, and be camping for Jesus when He sends us the miracle pillars? No! God doesn’t move backwards! Even those events from Exodus and Deuteronomy weren’t just about God doing fantastic things for His people, so they would see His power and glory. No, they were signs of things to come, of how God Himself would lead His people. We have something much better than that: we have the Holy Spirit Himself, who is described as a fire in His appearing! God is promising His faithful presence for us, made real in Jesus coming to live with us and become a human like us. God is predicting the fullness of His word, which would be a guide to our feet and light to our path. It’s the same God and it’s the same path, but it’s more personal and intimate than we ever dared hope or imagine. It’s Him inside of us, animating us and directing us. It’s Him speaking to us in and through His words and worship. We enjoy the fulfillment of this prophecy in Isaiah 4 today, every time we open our Bibles or go to church. Praise Him!
Isaiah 6:5-7 | Isaiah thinks he’s dead. He knows his Bible. He knows his theology. God said “no man sees My face and lives.” To look on God is to be judged and to die. On top of all that, Isaiah is honest enough to also know he’s not one of the good guys. He’s a man with a “dirty mouth” before God, just like the people he comes from. What will resolve the crisis? God has made His absolute holiness perfectly clear. That’s what the angels are saying endlessly before God. They can see it, but even they can’t look directly at God, they’re covering their eyes. What will resolve the crisis, what will fix this basic problem? God is so pure that even pure beings like the angels cannot look at Him. What hope is there for Isaiah or for anyone else? Who or what will resolve this predicament?
Then another angel brings a coal from the altar, from the place where animals were sacrificed for sinners and burned before God in His temple. He takes that burning coal and touches Isaiah’s mouth with it. But the sacrifice of animals doesn’t really do anything. It’s just an animal. How can a burning coal make a difference? Because of who and what that burning coal points to.
The entire sacrificial system is meant to teach humans that they need something to pay for their sins, to reveal vividly and visually that they needed a substitute, a stand-in for their own judgment. The whole sacrificial system was an advertisement and illustration of what Jesus would do as the Lamb of God. These stories and images from the prophets are all pointing to Jesus. That’s what they’re meant to do. And the wonderful thing here in Isaiah 6 is that this rescue from God is something personal too. It’s something applied and available to individuals, not just a whole people group. Praise Him.
Thursday
Micah 3:4 | No judgment in the Bible is as chilling as this. That our prayers and our cries to God would not be heard because of our hypocrisy, selfish evil, and indifference. Cry out now that this judgment will not come on us, because how can there be any hope if there’s no hope of answered prayer?
Matthew 24:36 | Don’t ever be ashamed of saying you don’t know something. Jesus didn’t know some stuff, and He’s quite open about it. It’s amazing how certain folks will be when they try to interpret this very chapter, not pausing to humble themselves before our Lord, who described His own ignorance as a way of warning us about ours. But the lesson is bigger than that, isn’t it? Deception about the end times is a core part of the demonic strategy itself, making claims again and again that Jesus is over here, or no, He’s over there. To make the expectations of God’s people into a sort of whack-a-mole game of hide and seek. That’s used by our enemy to discourage God’s people. Good and faithful believers have been caught up and deceived by folks who have claimed to “know the day” when these things would happen. You will hear folks make these claims in your lifetime, and you’ll be surprised how many fall for it. But if we walk in His humility the way that He does, we won’t be distracted or fooled. We don’t know when He will come, but we can count on this: we won’t be able to miss it.
Friday
Micah 6:6-8 | Verse 8 is one of those “summing it all up” kind of verses—teaching us what is most important in our walk with God. It’s personal and transformational. Justice is something done, not an abstract idea. Love is something loved, and constant dependence on God is the work of true humility. The Old Testament morality is the same as that in the New; you can’t divide them from one another. This verse describes Jesus Himself, as He fulfills it. It’s how He lived, and how He lives in us. But the only way to see this as His grace at work in us is to see verse 8 as it follows verses 6 and 7. There’s no worship or sacrifice or gift that can fix the “sin of my soul” he says. That’s how we know this is pointing towards Christ and His work in us—for us walking in the good deeds that have been prepared for us beforehand by the Holy Spirit.
Matthew 25:31-46 | Everyone is surprised at the judgment seat of God. The ones who get turned away are shocked, and the ones who get into heaven are shocked. The ones who think they’re good will be stunned to find out that their goodness didn’t have anything to do with Jesus and His people. The ones who can’t see why God is letting them in will also be stunned—they weren’t aware that they had been glorifying God in their love, generosity, and care for others. Everyone is surprised. Which surprise do you want to have?