The Bible Recap - July Reflections and Corrections - Year 5
Episode Date: July 31, 2023SHOW NOTES: - All the info you need to START is on our website! Seriously, go there. - Join our PATREON community for bonus perks! - Get your TBR merch - Show credits SOCIALS: The Bible Recap: I...nstagram | Facebook | Twitter D-Group: Instagram | Facebook | Twitter TLC: Instagram | Facebook | Twitter D-GROUP: The Bible Recap is brought to you by D-Group - an international network of discipleship and accountability groups that meet weekly in homes and churches: Find or start one near you today! DISCLAIMER: The Bible Recap, Tara-Leigh Cobble, and affiliates are not a church, pastor, spiritual authority, or counseling service. Listeners and viewers consume this content on a voluntary basis and assume all responsibility for the resulting consequences and impact.
Transcript
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Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble and I'm your host for the Bible recap.
Welcome to our July Reflections and Corrections episode.
Let's start with the reflections.
Tomorrow, we will finish our 22nd book of the Bible, and we're currently working our way
through three others. So let's get the 30,000-foot view on where we are in the chronnd book of the Bible, and we're currently working our way through three others.
So let's get the 30,000th of you on where we are in the chronological timeline of the
Bible's overall meta-narrative.
The Bible is one unified story.
Way back in Genesis, God set out to build a relationship with one particular family,
but things go terribly wrong when they fracture the relationship through sin.
But their sin doesn't surprise God.
He already had a plan in place to restore this relationship even before it was broken,
and he continues working out that plan immediately, undeterred and unhindered by their rebellion.
He sets apart a man named Abraham to be the patriarch of the family God calls the Israelites.
They're a bunch of busted people who lie, cheat, and steal. God blesses them despite
their sin, but sin still has its consequences. One of the long storylines of consequence is of the
400 years they spent enslaved in Egypt. God sends a man named Moses to demonstrate his power to
the Egyptian ruler, who reluctantly agrees to let the Israelites slaves go. They flee to the desert,
led by God and His servant Moses,
and then little by little, God gives these people
the basic rules of how to have a stable society.
There are a bunch of uncivilized, ungrateful people
who have only just met God and Moses,
and they're not keen on obeying either of them.
But in the midst of their sin and stubbornness and foolishness,
God knows that what their hearts need is Him. So He sets up camp among them in the midst of their sin and stubbornness and foolishness, God knows that what their hearts need is Him,
so He sets up camp among them in the desert.
More than anything, He wants them to remember who He is to them,
the God who rescued them out of slavery.
But they keep forgetting, and every time they forget,
they either get fearful in disobey
or they get prideful in disobey.
40 years after He rescues them from Egypt,
God raises up a new leader, Joshua, to lead them into the Promised Land, and commands them to eradicate
the enemies who live there, the Canaanites. But this new life of luxury and ease makes them forget,
God, so they never fully conquer the land completely. There are still pockets of Canaanites all around.
God has warned them repeatedly about the consequences of that, which are,
their enemies, the canonites, will become a snare and lead them away into apostasy.
And that's exactly what happens. After Joshua dies, God raises up military leaders or judges
to drive out the enemies who are leading the mistree. But this doesn't deal with the problem of
their hearts leading the Mastray.
These Israelites do whatever they want, which results in near-and-arkey at times,
and things grow continually worse in the Promised Land.
Despite this, there are pockets of faithfulness among the Israelites,
and even among foreigners whose hearts have turned toward Yahweh,
people like Rahab and Ruth,
pagans who turn to follow God and His people
and abandon their lifestyles that may fit with the cultural norms
but that are actually unrighteous.
God has been telling us all along that He's going to build His people
from among every nation, and we're starting to see more and more evidence
of that coming to pass.
Next, God raises up a prophet named Samuel to lead the people.
But what they really want is a king.
So God tells Samuel to give the people what they want, but that it's not going to go
well for them.
Their first king is Saul, a fearful man who makes rash decisions without consulting God.
After Saul dies in battle, a shepherd named David is positioned as Israel's second
king.
He is a man after God's own heart, but he's still deeply flawed.
He makes a few wicked decisions that mark him for life, but they don't mark him for eternity.
God shows him astonishing amounts of mercy and grace.
David is succeeded on the throne by his son Solomon. He's known as the wisest man who
ever lived, but he has a little bit of a problem with womanizing and worshiping other
gods. Yahweh is generous to him nonetheless, and gives him the distinguished assignment
of building Israel's first temple, the place where God will come to dwell among the people
in the midst of the Promised Land. Despite having such a wavy role, he still also builds worship sites
to pagan gods and has a divided heart.
And God says, there will be consequences for this sin.
After Solomon dies, his son, Rehoboam, we call him Re,
takes over his throne.
But King Reh is harsh toward the people
and lots of them don't want to follow him.
And that's how this nation-state of Israel
is divided into two separate kingdoms,
which is the consequence God promised to Solomon for his sins.
Since Solomon's heart was divided,
his kingdom would be divided as well.
Into the southern kingdom of Judah, ruled by King Ray,
and the northern kingdom of Israel, ruled by Jeroboam.
We call him Jerry, who had been one of Solomon's servants
before all this happened.
Because God had promised to continue the line of kings through the tribe of Judah,
he always seems to be on their side, especially. But he takes good care of the northern kingdom of Israel as well.
The northern kingdom has a string of exclusively bad kings, but God still sends the prophet Elijah
to help set things straight. Elijah has a pretty lonely life of speaking hard truths
to the kings and the people,
but he has a rich intimacy with God
that sustains him nonetheless.
Over the 350-ish years of the divided kingdom,
God sends several prophets to warn both Northern Israel
and southern Judah about what's going to happen.
Both of them will be overcome by other nations.
A serial will defeat Northern Israel
and Babylon will defeat Southern Judah
and take them into captivity.
This is called the Babylonian captivity.
But God also promises them that there's a timeline
on all of this.
He's not casting them off, he's refining them.
And he will bring them back into the land in 70 years.
God's prophets keep reminding his people
that his character has remained the same
through all the generations, through all their sins,
through all their wanderings,
and that he's always aiming to bring his people back to himself.
Not only that, but he keeps giving us glimpses
of the coming Messiah,
the servant King who will first come and die,
and then return to establish an
eternal kingdom of peace on Earth.
Okay, that's all for the reflections part of this episode, and thank God, so grateful that
there are no corrections so far to report in July.
So that's all for this episode.
From day one until now, I hope you're seeing more and more that he's where the joy is.
Most dads feel undervalued, misunderstood, and that no matter what they do, it isn't
enough.
It seems like fatherhood is often undervalued and heavily criticized, but what if you could
be encouraged to real conversations about the value of Christian fatherhood. Text grow to 67101 to grow in your confidence as a Christian father, or tell the dad in your
life about this great study from way nation.
Text grow to 67101.
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