Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Fourth Wave podcast. This episode, I want to go over a couple of chapters in second Chronicles fifteen and sixteen. And they describe a really interesting chapter in Israel's history where Shalom rests on the nation for a long period. And it follows king Asa. He was king of the southern tribe of Judah.

And it's largely because of his actions and his, decisions that, shalom comes. But then, ultimately, shalom leaves due to the same king's actions and mindsets. So, yeah, it's an interesting study, I think, for us to see if we can draw draw out some of what makes and undoes peace for a nation. Chapter 15 starts with a bold prophecy from Azaria. At this time, Judah was in a state of unshalom.

So Azaria powerfully proclaims what that unshalom is and its consequences. So Judah at this time was without God, without a teaching priest, and without law, And there were great disturbances that afflicted all inhabitants. They were broken into pieces. Nation was crushed by nation and city by city, and God troubled them with every sort of distress. So this shows both what causes the shalom and also the the effects of that shalom or what the shalom looks like.

Now when king Asa heard the prophet's words, he surprisingly unhesitatingly heeds his words. And he works to set about making things right. And he does so by doing numerous things. So they turn to God. They put away idols.

They repair the altar of the Lord in order to restore proper worship. There's the inclusion of individuals from the northern tribes in Israel who those who remained faithful. So when first King tells the same story, we don't get this detail. It's just assumed that the northern tribes are too too far gone to be interested in what's going on down in Judah. But in second Chronicles, they reach out to those in the northern tribes, and they successfully rally at least a few to re to recommit themselves to God.

There's also the emphasis on the condition of the heart of committing oneself to God. Now this is done in a way which should disturb us. They kill everyone who does not follow God, young, old, man, woman. For the purposes of our discussion here, it's not quite as important exactly how they did it, whether or not that was appropriate, whether it was appropriate for them and maybe not for us. These were very different situations and what we're going to do here is pull out some of the broader ideas, really the deeper meanings maybe is a better way of putting that rather than try to copy them.

Exactly. So for that, it we need to focus at the heart of the matter here is that it's the entire community rather than just some who give this whole attention to God. It's not just a small community with inside. It's not just the king making this decision. It's a community working together.

And that brings us to this last point, which is the democratization of leadership. In the book of kings, the king almost always acts entirely alone. But in Chronicles, the good kings work in tandem with the people. So he doesn't work unilaterally, but he consults and works collaboratively with other leaders of people as a whole when making these decisions. So these are the responses that they give.

And as a result, they have peace for for, a number of years. It says that God gives them rest and war doesn't touch them anymore. I think it's fair to assume that all the other issues that was brought up in the prophecy were resolved as well. Unfortunately, trouble starts again in chapter 16. The fall begins when king Asa fears Basha, who is the king of Israel, and he was building up a fortress to control that region.

So this fear of Basha apparently trumps Asa's trust in God at this point, so he takes gold that was meant for the Lord and uses it to join forces with the king of Syria. In fact, he actually makes a covenant with him. And what happens after Assad trusts Syria and the military rather than God? Well, unshalom, of course. There are wars.

Assa at one point well, it seems to be his new kind of state is he becomes controlled by his anger and he imprisons those who speaks against him. In fact, there's another prophet that comes up to tell him what he's doing is wrong and instead of listening like he did the first time, throws him in prison. He inflicts cruelty on others and in the end he becomes diseased and he becomes hardened of heart. It says that he refused to change his ways basically. So that's the story.

Now what do we learn from this? Well, we learn that Shalom is worked for and it's hard continuous work, but Shalom is also a gift. They did not earn nor create Shalom. They simply brought themselves into right worship with Yahweh and trusted fully in him. They had put themselves into a state in which they were able to accept God Shalom.

And once they lost it they said, oh, we'll just build our own Shalom. Asa worked hard to maintain the Shalom at the end of his life but through his own means this time And he wasn't the one who had created the state of Shalom before so he wasn't able to maintain nor recreate it later on. Now we are not Israel and believers are not a country, but we can glean a whole lot of good insight from this story. Within our Christian communities, we need to staunchly oppose idols, whether they be our being influenced by celebrities, our own comfort, the importance of our own comfort in our lives, or simply just mammon. It's never easy to see our own idols because, well, partly because worship of them doesn't look like it does when we see this in pop culture.

When we see idols, see evil people laughing evilly as they do evil things, but when we do it, it's something that it feels natural. It feels good and it doesn't feel like we're doing, you know, that we're putting thing anything in place of God. So it's something that we really need to focus on. We need to constantly probe ourselves and communities for. We also need to have devotion among every member.

And perhaps this is one reason why Christendom and its errors like the quote unquote Christian nation of America have been followed by such little shalom. I'm not looking around at all the evil people not being good enough and blaming the evildoers for heaping wrath of God on us or anything like that, but I'm noting that most within these so called Christian nations don't even have a desire to be committed. It's little more than culture for them. Now that's their choice. But when they become the majority of our Christian communities or even any numbers at all according to this account in second Chronicles, then we will always attract states of unshalom.

Now even living as separate Christian communities within a non Christian world, we're going to attract unshalom. In some ways, even more so. But when we do it this way, that is having our own Christian community set apart rather than just accepting everybody else kind of by default, then this rather than being overcome, this committed community stands resilient to these attacks and slowly it's able to spread Shalom from the inside out. Restoration of proper worship here is a bit hard to address due to the huge diversity that this could entail, but I think that perhaps some of the biggest areas for me personally would be to get involved in a Christian community for various reasons, all probably less legitimate than I would like to believe. I've never really been part of a Christian community here in Singapore, which is where I've lived for the past seven or so years.

Now private worship I have done, but truly worshiping God with others is something I've sorely been lacking in. Willard Swartley here has done some really good work in this regard. The creators too, both the husband and wife, have done a lot of good work here to show how worship services and liturgical services for many Christian communities throughout history, how they've really contributed largely to their peaceful lives. Worship of God realigns us and cannot be overstated, but worship and community links both together and cannot be overstated. But worship and community, it links both of the two most important commandments together.

And that's why it's so important to have this real community element here in that segues into the next point, inclusion. This may look like something that may come from the ecumenical movement and it may be part of that. But, really, what I'm looking at here, something sort of parallel is denominations reaching out to other denominations where there's been previous conflict or maybe even just an assumption that they wouldn't have any interested in what they were doing, in what their churches are doing. But what would happen if more social justice oriented churches ask more conservative churches to help them in their pursuits or even help them organize their own projects? What would happen if more conservative churches reached out to more liberal ones to help with biblical literacy programs, for example.

We've avoided this cross contamination, I think, because we often have just assumed that conservative churches aren't interested in helping the poor or that liberal churches just don't care all that much about the Bible or whatever groups were involved with or have contact with. But even if only a fraction of the members join our cause or join together with us, our reaching out is important. And this has also been avoided, I think, because, frankly, we refuse to reach out to the enemy. Those humanist relativizers or those bigoted bible thumpers, whatever it is. The fact of the matter is though, peace won't come until we reach out to our enemies in love.

Now before we close out, I want you to notice here that it took everyone together to build this shalom. It was a whole lot of work, and it was very holistic. It affected all aspects of their lives, affected the entire community, and even at times required cutting ties from the past. And the fall was not the fault of the entire nation, but of one person who turn who turn to worldly protection. It is a whole lot of work to build shalom, and it must be maintained.

And it must be maintained. It's not just doing our own private worship sessions anymore. It's not just doing our own private worship sessions anymore than it's doing reconciliation and community work alone. It requires worship together so we can serve together. And once we reach it, we can lose it.

So perseverance is a must. I hope this story was a little bit helpful. And next episode, I'm actually going to use this basic framework for a little bit more specific details of what I think we can do ourselves to help build peace within our own communities. And that's all for now. So peace.

And because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.