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Hendersonville Seventh-day Adventist Church, NC

Brian Hindman

My God is Jehovah

Is it your desire today to walk with God?

To walk with God is to conduct your life in such a way as to be in harmony with everything that Jesus does, everything that he says, and to live in his presence at all times.

Well, I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills.

My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.

The Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand.

The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.

The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil.

The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth and even forevermore.

The scriptures, it is our spiritual food, it is our spiritual life, it is the building blocks, the substance upon which our spiritual lives are based upon.

And so I hope you are hungry this morning as we're gonna study a subject entitled, My God is Jehovah.

But I wanna share something with you that I read several years ago.

The archeology is the study of man-made objects.

Anthropology is the study of people in terms of human remains, people remains, people parts.

Archeology studies things that have been made by a person, a human being.

And this archeology magazine in 2007 from when this article was, 10 years ago, they had a list of the top 10 discoveries of the whole year.

And something that they noted here as a top 10 discovery of the year, and this is not a religious publication, really grabbed me.

What it was that grabbed me is if you look at the little picture there of a little clay tablet, that is a cuneiform tablet that dates back to the time of Jeremiah.

I'll just give you a quick rundown on this, and there's a reason why I'm telling you this.

There's a person at the British Museum in London, England, who's a researcher, and his name is Michael Jersa.

And since 1991, for 16 years, he had been going through these small tablets that had been gathered and collected from over in what is today Iraq and Iran, and just translating them.

Cuneiform is a type of script where you take a wet tablet, and while it's wet or impressionable, they take a little wedge and they'll make impressions on it in such a way as to make characters and it's readable.

And so, anyway, he's been doing that for 16 years and 1 day in 2007, he was reading this clay tablet and he ran across a name that was on there that gave him pause.

Nebo Sarsikim, does that sound familiar to anyone?

Well, it's actually mentioned in the Bible.

And it's mentioned 1 time in the book of Jeremiah, chapter 39, and it records there that Nebo Sarsikim was 1 of the chief eunuchs there in Babylon and that Jeremiah was given into the care of this person and this person who was translating this had enough Bible knowledge that he said, that sounds familiar, that sounds familiar.

And so he went back, I read that in the Bible, looked it up, found it, and it was a perfect match.

I don't know if you understand the significance of that, but a perfect match on an obscure name that you and I have probably never heard of, even though it's in the scriptures, gives us a validation that what is found in the Bible is true.

The archeological evidence, this is what is called extra-biblical information.

It's found outside the Bible, that yet it points back and verifies the details that we find in the Bible.

So as Peter says, we have not followed cunningly devised fables, but these are true stories that God had inspired to be written down and recorded for us.

I don't know about you, but that is very exciting.

There is evidence and proof for the people and characters that we read about in the scriptures.

And so I want you to know God's Word is true.

There's nothing more certain and true than the Word of God.

And so this is our theme and our study that we want to know about.

Well, is the Old Testament relevant in 2017?

There's a verse where Jesus is talking to his disciples and he says to them, therefore every scribe which is instructed into the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is a what?

And it says that householder that studies the scriptures, that's ascribed, that understands the word of God, brings forth out of his treasure things new and old.

We have 2 testaments, we cannot fully understand the New Testament without the Old Testament because it is explaining and fulfilling many of the things in the Old Testament and the New Testament without the Old Testament because it is explaining and fulfilling many of the things in the Old Testament, and the New Testament without the Old Testament would not have the foundation for what is fulfilled in the New Testament.

And so they both go together in an equal harmony, and so I would just submit to you, the Old Testament is very relevant in 2017, and we're gonna look at a story that is found today, a simple message entitled, My God is Jehovah.

1 of the greatest prophets in the Bible record.

You can see here is a picture on a fiery chariot.

His name actually means, my God is Jehovah.

Elijah, the Tishbite, his name means, my God is Jehovah.

And he was sent on a mission to God's people, who had become confused and assimilated and were rapidly losing sight of the character and the true worship of God.

Well, a little bit of background to our story today.

The King of Israel at the time was King Ahab.

Ahab was king of the northern kingdom of Israel after there was a division under Solomon's son Rehoboam.

He reigned for about 21-22 years from 875 to 853 BC.

He was the first king of Israel to come into conflict with the Assyrian Empire.

And in fact, if you fast forward a little over 100 years, it is the Assyrians who take away the northern kingdom of Israel, the 10 tribes, and scatter them, and they cease to exist as a nation in 722 BC.

But that hasn't happened yet in our story, but it's on the horizon.

The Assyrians are looming around the area.

Well, Ahab forged very close ties with Phoenicia, And Phoenicia is a region located along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea.

And Ahab married the daughter of the king of Sidon, 1 of the principal cities of Phoenicia.

And her name, you probably might know, was Jezebel.

Well, with the influence of Jezebel, Ahab, using his authority as king, helped set up Baal worship on account of his wife.

His wife had a strong personality and he had kind of a weak, vacillating personality, and she heavily exercised her influence over him.

He used his influence and money to build himself a palace of ivory, we're told in scripture, and we're also told in scripture that he did more to provoke the anger of the Lord than all the kings before him.

And under the northern kingdom of Israel, just a small point here, but it's significant to our story, the first king of the northern tribes of Israel, Jeroboam I, he set up 2 altars, 1 up here in the northern part of his territory in what is called Dan.

I know you probably can't read that on your screen.

And then another 1 down here in Bethel, he set up golden calves and claimed that it was to the worship of the true God.

So although it was claiming to represent the true God, it was a confusion and a violation of God's commandment not to make any graven images because you cannot make an image that can capture and represent God properly.

And so by doing this, Jeroboam, the first king of Israel, was hoping to prevent the northern kingdom of Israel from coming down and going to where?

The main city that God instructed them to worship was in Jerusalem, and Jerusalem is in Judah.

He set up false worship, and it continued to be a snare throughout the entire history of the northern kingdom of Israel.

You can see it's right here along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea.

And 1 of the main cities, it's not listed on here, but Sidon, that is the daughter of the king of Sidon, Ethbal, was Jezebel.

And that's who Ahab married and who led him even further into idolatry.

I really only want you to notice 1 thing, looking at Ahab, he is the eighth king in the list of kings of Israel, and you can see there's a pretty consistent trend there, they're all evil.

Based on setting up from Jeroboam I and setting up the false worship, the idolatry and the mixture of pagan and heathen worship with what was supposed to be the true worship, mixing it together does not work.

It must be a pure worship that God accepts.

Ahab continued in this line of evil and wicked Kings all the way through to the very end, Hosea, who was the last king that was taken away by the Assyrians.

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My God is Jehovah

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