Hello, and welcome to the Westside Church's special Monday Morning Coffee podcast. On this podcast, our preacher, Mark Roberts, will help you get your week started right with a look back at yesterday's sermon so that we can think through it further and better work the applications into our daily lives. Mark will then look forward into this week's Bible reading so that we can know what to expect and watch for. And he may have some extra bonus thoughts from time to time. So grab a cup of coffee as we start the week together on Monday Morning Coffee with Mark.

Good morning, good morning. Welcome to the Monday Morning Coffee podcast for Monday... June the 30th. June the 30th. How about that? July 4th is on the horizon. Lots of us will have some holiday time, maybe some time with family. I know you're looking forward to that. I know that you're still thinking about yesterday's sermon. I promised a bonus note today, and I know that you're eager to be about this business in the Word of God in 1 Kings as we continue daily Bible reading. All of that and much more. Let's get ready. Let's get set. Let's go. Let's go. Yesterday in the 1040, because it's the fifth Sunday of the month, I did Q&A, and I answered an important question about the state of Israel, the modern nation of Israel, and are Christians obligated to support that nation politically? Is that something the Bible mandates for us to do? And of course, I think if you polled most people on the streets, they would say absolutely. Senator Ted Cruz, I've I quoted him yesterday. He just reflects the popular belief that that nation is still somehow the people of God, and God owes them something. It is going to do something for them. All of that is very, very prevalent, especially here in the South. I don't know the reaction you'd get if you were talking to people in Canada or maybe in Minnesota or Maine, but in Texas... I see lots of bumper stickers, support Israel. I see the bumper sticker with the word Jerusalem and the USA in the middle of the word Jerusalem is in red, white, and blue. Lots of support politically for the state of Israel. Now, where does all that come from? How does that just seep into public consciousness where everybody just buys it without even thinking about it? And the answer to that is it comes from the Schofield Study Bible. Cyrus Schofield was a Civil War veteran. He became a believer as an adult. He pastored churches in Dallas and Massachusetts. He was closely affiliated with D.L. Moody. And Schofield began to work on this reference Bible with his notes in the margins, the study Bible system. And part of that was he wanted to popularize a new way of interpreting the end times. This had been put together by an Anglo-Irish man named John Nelson Darby, and it was called dispensationalism. And when that Bible was published with all of those dispensational notes in 1909, there was a time of great expectation about the end of the world. Lots of people were thinking everything was about to wrap up. And so this idea of reading the Bible through that lens was, that quickly made this one of the best-selling Bibles in history. And it is the Schofield Reference Bible that created Hal Lindsey and the late great planet Earth and Christian Zionism and the idea of the rapture and Jesus will return and they'll rebuild the temple and Jews will convert in mass to Jesus. That whole left-behind book series and movies, it's all from the Schofield Bible. That Bible has dominated history. what believers in the Bible think about the end times for the last hundred years. And it is a terrible Bible. Schofield changed the text of the King James Version in several places. He allegorized a lot of stuff. His notes in the margins are just dreadful. And of course, his premillennial dispensational theology The rapture, Jesus will return to set up his kingdom. The kingdom is not in existence now. He has to come back and try again. The thousand-year reign of Christ, all of that comes from the Schofield Study Bible, and it It explicitly supports the modern-day nation of Israel. In fact, the New Schofield Study Bible, which came out in 1984, intensifies some of this. Even it adds, for a nation to commit the sin of anti-Semitism brings inevitable judgment. That's it. That's it. This is the idea that has a huge influence on American foreign policy and on the way Americans perceive and think of the modern nation of Israel. Hand in hand with that, we now have the Ryrie Study Bible. Ryrie was a professor at Dallas Theological Seminary, which is just the seat of premillennial thinking in this country. He is more contemporary than Schofield. Ryrie passed away in 2016, and he put out the Ryrie Study Bible. It has thousands of his notes. It sold more than two million copies, and he is a huge proponent of classic dispensational premillennialism. So, for example, from the Ryrie Study Bible, the crucial issue in relation to premillennialism are twofold. Does the Abrahamic covenant promise Israel a permanent existence as a nation? If it does, then the church is not fulfilling Israel's promises. And secondly, does the Abrahamic covenant promise Israel permanent possession of the promised land? If it does, then Israel must yet come into possession of the promised land, for she has never fully possessed it in her history. These two Bibles, the Schofield Study Bible, the Ryrie Study Bible, have influenced so many people's thinking. And all of that, I think, serves to warn us it's a cautionary tale about the value of study Bibles. Because when the note is just right there in the margin of your Bible, it is hard for us to think past that, to see the text clearly. on our own. It colors our view, and if the writer of those study notes holds a false view of the kingdom of God, then that can distort how we read the Bible, and we may not even realize it. We think we're reading the Bible. What we're really doing is we're reading those notes in the margin into the Bible. So sometimes people ask me, what study Bible do you recommend? And the answer to that is, I don't. Get yourself a Bible with a clean text. Get yourself a Bible that doesn't have some man's opinions written in the margins right there close to the text so that it just starts sliding into your thinking. Get yourself a Bible. Do your own study. Draw your own conclusions. Don't let someone tell you what to believe or think. Make sure you're studying your Bible for yourself. Make sure you're studying your Bible for yourself. There's the bonus note to get us started this week. Now, let's get those Bibles open, hopefully not Schofield or Ryrie study Bibles.

Oh, my.

Hopefully, just a good standard word-for-word literal translation, an English Standard Bible, New American Standard Bible. Get your Bible open. Let's get over to 1 Kings 12, and let's talk about daily Bible reading. It is Monday, and today's reading is 1 Kings chapter 12, verses 16 to 33. The kingdom formally divides here in our reading today. Israel will never be a united kingdom again. Let me give you a time frame here, see if I can help out a little bit with where we are. The exodus from Egypt would be dated, should be dated, about 1440 AD. 1,440 years before the birth of Christ. Now, there's some give or take in there. The calendar gets a little wonky with Roman Caesars moving things around, but I'm going 1,440 is a good date, which means Saul becomes king in 1050. David becomes king in 1010. Solomon becomes king in 970. And today, we're reading in 930. Notice each of those guys reign 40 years. Saul, 1050, reign 40 years. That puts David on the throne in 1010. David reigned 40 years. Solomon becomes king after David's 40-year reign, so that puts him on the throne in 970. Solomon reigned 40 years, 930. We're 930 years away from the birth of Jesus, like I said, give or take. And I should just say this. The northern kingdom, the northern ten tribes, will come to an end and be carried away into Assyrian captivity in 722. So there are some dates. You might write that in the margin of your Bible. Good thing to hold on to right there. So, what happens today in 1 Kings chapter 12? Well, the northern ten tribes secede from the rest of Israel, and from now on, we'll have Israel, which is the northern ten tribes, that's how they'll be referred to, and Judah in the south. Northern ten tribes, southern tribe is Judah, and you get that clear, clear business of We don't need you, Judah. To your tents, verse 16, O Israel. And that echoes the words, by the way, of Sheba during that second rebellion after Absalom's rebellion in 2 Samuel chapter 20. We're not part of them. They're not part of us. They don't like us. And you know what? We don't care much for them either. We're out of here. We're going to do our own thing. And it is important, I think, here to notice that David's name occurs four times in verses 16 to 20. David is the ideal king. David is the one that everyone is measured by. It's still all about David. And there is that emphasis then in verse 20 about the word of the Lord coming to pass exactly as God had said it would. Verse 20, Israel heard that Jeroboam had returned. They sent and called him to the assembly, and they made him king over all Israel. This is exactly what the prophet had told Jeremiah would happen. Here it is actually happening. We almost have a civil war here. But then God calls that off, and amazingly, Rehoboam listens to the Lord. Maybe he still has some sensitivity to God, and he is badly outnumbered here. Ten tribes versus one tribe, he's got no shot here. So, Lord says, we're not doing this. And we decide not to do that, although later on we'll see that there's still some issues about that and how all of that is playing out and working with all of that. In fact, chapter 14 and verse 30, you might as well make a note in your margin here, there were some skirmishes, some border war still going on. Then verses 25 to 33 detail the sins of Jeroboam. And I want to say a couple things here. I've said a lot today for a Monday podcast. I gave you a bonus note about the Scofield Bible and the rivalry about it. So much stuff. So much stuff. More coffee is the answer. By now, you've got to be on your second cup. Notice verse 26, Jeroboam said in his heart, now the kingdom will turn back to the house of David. Jeroboam doesn't trust God. The prophet said, God's giving you these 10 tribes. You get them. They will not go back to the house of David. You will be the king of northern Israel, you get those tribes. He doesn't believe the Lord, so he puts in his own plan, which is to set up worship centers in the north so that people don't go back to Jerusalem to worship. And the emphasis in that is that it's man-made. Verse 31, he made temples. And the word appointed, verse 31, is the word made. Verse 32, Jeroboam appointed a feast. That's the word made. Sacrificing to the calves he made. He placed in Bethel the priest of the high places that he made. Verse 33, he made in Bethel. He instituted, verse 33, that's the word made. Went up to the altar to make offerings. All of that is made. All of that is man-made religion. And I will share this with you. When Dean and I were so blessed to get to go to Israel in 2023, you can go to Dan, and they have excavated that site, and there is a platform there where that altar was built. You can go and stand there. I'll try to post some pictures of that on Facebook, so watch for some of that. But it's just dreadful. It's just dreadful. The steps and the platform all point north. So that when you went up to the altar, you were literally turning your back on God, God's house in Jerusalem, and all things that were right. They were literally turning their back on the Lord. And the horrible thing about it is that the Northern Ten Tribes never recover from this. No northern king straightens them out, gets them back on the straight and narrow, and they serve God. Okay, we're serving God up here, and we're not part of the southern kingdom, but we're still worshiping. No, no. Idolatry is planted in their hearts here, and maybe Solomon gets a little blame for that too, but Jeroboam begins something here that will never be eradicated. The northern tribes worship God, worship false gods, I should say, their entire time. They turn their back on the Lord. And I remember being there. It was very striking. It was very, very sad. This is the place where those ten tribes jumped the tracks, and they never got back on track with God. Our reading today, our reading for Monday, is 1 Kings 12, verses 16-33. Welcome to Tuesday. Welcome to Tuesday and the month of July. Our reading today is 1 Kings 13, verses 1 to 10. And if our reading yesterday focused on the word man-made or manufactured, then our reading today focuses on the word of the Lord. Underline in your Bible, word of the Lord in chapter 13. It occurs nine times. And I think the tragedy here is that God can't find a faithful prophet in the north, and that's probably because all the faithful people migrate to the south when Jeroboam erects his own altars, his own And amazingly, in verse 2, he calls out the name of the king... who will fulfill this prophecy hundreds of years in advance. This will be fulfilled in 2 Kings 23, verses 15 to 20. I would also point you to verse 5. The ashes being poured out of the altar like this, there was a way to dispose of ashes, and this is not the way to do that. So this pouring out desecrates the altar and clearly shows that God's disapproval. God did not accept this worship. God will not accept this kind of worship. Finally then, the prophet reveals that he cannot stop and he can't eat bread. Verse 8, notice how important it is to eat with somebody. And I wonder here if Jeroboam was trying to say face with the crowd or maybe get the prophet to moderate his message by saying, giving him a big meal, some sort of banquet, treating him like he's a VIP. The prophet says, that's not going to happen. I can't eat with somebody like you. I'm going home, and I'm not even to go home the way that I came. That way, nobody can lay in wait for me to try to bring me back or ambush me. None of those things can happen. So our reading for Tuesday, 1 Kings chapter 13, verses 1 to 10, and I hope you notice after a really long episode yesterday, giving you a little bit more time to do your reading, maybe in two translations today. Westsiders, please be mindful, there is no Zoom call tonight. The elders meet on the first Tuesday of the month. No Zoom call tonight. Lots of people out with the holiday about to start anyway. We'll see you next week on the Zoom, and I'll see everybody on the podcast tomorrow. Welcome to Wednesday. Welcome to Wednesday. Ricky Jenkins will be with us tonight. He will be speaking on the prophetess Deborah and her time and place in the book of Judges. Before he does that, we need to give attention to our daily Bible reading. Our reading for Wednesday is 1 Kings 13, verses 11 to 34. And there, of course, is a lot of questions about what's going on here. First and foremost, verse 11, there's this old prophet still living in Bethel. What is he doing there? 2 Chronicles 11, beginning in verse 13, tells us that the real worshipers of God, the faithful people, they all evacuated and moved south. They can't be part of this idolatrous regime in the north, super suspicious of this guy, particularly because, as I said yesterday, in verse 1, God had to get someone from the south to be a faithful prophet. I don't like this guy. I don't like anything about this guy. And in fact, his sons are at the false worship that Jeroboam offers. Well, they tell the story of what happened, and they track down the young prophet. I'm wondering here if maybe the young prophet was going home the way that he came, which made it easier. Has he already made that mistake? And he is sitting down, verse 14. Need to be careful here. It's a long walk. Don't know exactly where this man was from in Judah and how long he'd been on the road. I'm trying not to say that sitting down is a mistake, especially since I am, yes, I'm sitting down as I record the podcast, drinking coffee with you. So, sitting down, not bad, but if sitting down is delaying when we need to be doing what God says and going home, just don't know. Just don't know. It just doesn't taste right, does it? And the prophet lies to him and brings him home, and in fact, it is a lie, and the next thing you know, He is told that this was a lie. Now, of course, why did this prophet lie to him like this? This is terrible. I wonder if he was stricken with a bad conscience at his own failures. Is he trying to get closer to this young prophet who has done a notable sign and everybody's saying, you're the man, you really are with God, and I'm all buddy-buddy with him, so that's going to make people think more of me. But in verses 21 to 22, the old prophet speaks the truth. God uses this wicked man to speak the truth. And of course, the question then comes, wow, what a harsh sentence on the young man that he's put to death. He dies in a terrible way. This lion kills him. What's up with that? And there are a lot of possible explanations for that, but it seems to me that the death of the young prophet confirms the word of the Lord and shows that he was a true prophet. He said, I can't go back home the way that I came. He said, I can't eat or drink. So if he defies his own word, then that naturally diminishes all the other word that he spoke. Oh, it must be okay not to listen to this guy. He didn't really mean it. No, it's not okay to not listen to this prophet. He speaks the word of the Lord for you, Jeroboam, the nation. And his word applies to himself as well. What a powerful warning for those of us who are preaching and teaching the word of God. We are not exempt from the warnings of the word of God. You need to apply that to yourself, young prophet. Don't listen to this man who's lying. And he is a prophet. When the old man says, hey, thus and so and thus and so, just check with God. God would have said, you're being lied to. He could have looked at the old prophet and said, you're a liar. I'm not going to go back with you. He fails to do that. He's deceived by the old prophet, and he pays with his life. Verse 32, for the saying that he called out by the word of the Lord against the altar in Bethel and against all the houses of the high places of Samaria shall surely come to pass. His death confirms this is the word of the Lord. But Jeroboam... does not turn back and do what's right. Our reading for Wednesday, 1 Kings 13, verses 11 to 34. Welcome to Thursday. It's 1 Kings 14, 1 to 20 that is our reading for today. The reading for Thursday, 1 Kings 14, 1 to 20. And once again, a prophet dominates the scene. This is the prophet Ahijah. We saw him back in 1 Kings chapter 11. Jeroboam has not paid much attention to what Ahijah told him and is not doing what's right, but his son gets sick, verse 1, and now we need to get a word from the prophet. One writer said, here is the king then with his magical view of the words of Jehovah. If only Only he can weasel a positive pronouncement out of the prophet, his son will surely recover. And that seems to be what Jeroboam's thinking. Notice he sends his wife. Maybe he feels convicted because he hasn't done what Ahijah told him to do. Maybe he's trying to trick. It seems like he's trying to trick the prophet in some way. Or maybe even verse 3, buy him off with a gift. But of course, verse 6, I love this. When Ahijah heard the sound of her feet, he said, Come in, wife of Jeroboam. Why do you pretend to be another? Now there's what a real prophet can do. You can't fool God, and you can't fool God's true servant. prophets. And so, verse 9, as the prophet begins to delineate why judgment would come and all the things that Jeroboam has done that's wrong, it's summed up well. Verse 9, you have cast me behind your back. Complete contempt. That's the very opposite of keeping God before your eyes, filling your heart with God's Word, being a person seeking after God's heart. Verse 9 should stand out for us as we think about being the kind of person David was, seeking the heart of God. And of course, I should say in verse 11, oh, this pains me. I hate saying this. Dogs aren't pets in the Bible. They're wild pack animals. They're terrible scavengers. And here they are the instrument of vigorous and vicious judgment. So the prophet just continues working down through this note of judgment. Verse 15 sounds an awful lot like what Moses had prophesied in Deuteronomy 29 and 27. And if you're wondering about the Asherah or the Asherim, she is the female consort of Baal. She is represented usually by a wooden pole. She's a fertility goddess. She is borrowed from Assyria, and the Philistines have integrated her into the worship of Baal, as have the Phoenicians and others. So Ahijah says, God exalted you, verses 7 and 8. You failed him, verse 9. Your house will be cut off, verses 10 and 11. The child is certain to die, verses 12 and 13. And Israel will be scattered, verses 15 to 16. What is truly frightening about this is in verse 17, the woman goes home. If you tell me you're a prophet of God, and you tell me when you enter the city, your child will die, I would never go to that city again. Not ever. Never, never, never. Don't want my child to die. But the child's death happens, and that is a sign that shows the rest of that prophecy will come to pass as well. Notice now we've had death twice to validate the word of the Lord. And I know some people are wondering about entering the city, and when she entered the threshold of the house, the child died. One writer noted, this statement seems at first to contradict that of verse 12, which says the child should die as she entered the city. The palace, however, may have been on the edge of the city, or in fact, the city may have been a little more than the palace. Our reading then for Thursday is 1 Kings 14 verses 1 to 20. Happy 4th of July. It's Friday, everyone. Happy birthday, America. Don't want to overdo our emphasis on our country. Our citizenship is in heaven. That's important. But we are grateful. We are grateful for all the good things that we enjoy, the blessings of peace and prosperity in this country. Happy birthday, America. And our reading today is Psalm 27. I'll just give you a couple of notes here. I think verse 4 is one of the most Just one of the most beautiful passages in all of the Bible. One thing I have asked of the Lord and that I will seek after, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life. This is a lament. This is a cry to God for help. And I think it's important to note here that too often people want the goodies that God offers, but they don't want to walk in God's ways. They don't want to let God lead them. They don't have any consistency in their relationship with God. They don't have any certainty of their relationship with God. They don't have any confidence in their relationship with God. Because they're not really walking with God. They don't really care about God. And if you watch this psalm carefully, you will see that David delights in the Lord in a consistent and continual kind of way. This verse just breathes, this passage, I should say, just breathes dependence upon the Lord all the way through. And I do love verse 14."'Wait for the Lord. Be strong and let your heart take courage. Wait for the Lord.'" I hope this psalm will be a blessing to you today. It's always good to read David's psalms as he just speaks of his certainty of God's goodness and his confidence in what God will do. Again, I hope you're having a great Fourth of July today, and I hope that you're safe and that wherever you are with family and friends, you're doing all kinds of wonderful Fourth of July things like eating hamburgers and eating watermelon and shooting off fireworks in a safe and legal fashion. How about that? Well, there you go. That's the podcast for the week. I certainly do appreciate you listening to the podcast. I'm glad it's a help to you. I know just putting it together is a help for me. So until next week, when we'll open our Bibles together again, I'm Mark Roberts, and I want to go to heaven, and I want you to come too. I'll see you on Monday then with a cup of coffee.

Thanks for listening to the Westside Church of Christ podcast, Monday Morning Coffee with Mark. For more information about Westside, you can connect with us through our website, justchristians.com, and our Facebook page. Our music is from upbeat.io. That's upbeat with two Ps, U-P-P-B-E-A-T, where creators can get free music. Please share our podcast with others, and we look forward to seeing you again, with a cup of coffee, of course, on next Monday.