Meanwhile in Israel…

The end has come.

While Ahaz is leading Judah further into idolatry, a man named Hoshea becomes the last king of Israel. He isn’t descended from any of Israel’s previous kings. He formed a conspiracy and assassinated the previous king Pekah (boo… Drat. I can’t unthink that now); who Josephus says was “a friend of his.” Josephus also says that Hoshea was “a despiser of the divine worship.”

Ironically, the name Hoshea means “deliverer.”

We previously saw how Tiglath-pileser III, king of Assyria, had invaded parts of Israel because king Ahaz of Judah paid him to do so. His son, Shalmaneser V turns Israel into a vassal-state of Assyria- which means, “pay me lots of money or I kill you.” The ancient world was basically uncontrolled thug-life.

Hoshea goes along with collecting taxes to pay off Assyria for a while. Then he decides to write to the king of Egypt…

“To King So…”

🤔 So… what?

No. That’s his name. So.

😐 So what?

The name of the king of Egypt is So.

🤨 Is so WHAT?!?

Who’s on first.

😯 I thought you were describing the king of Egypt.

Forget it.

There is an interesting challenge with the name of this King.

😒 So?

Yes. So. There aren’t any kings or Pharaohs of Egypt with this name.

🤔 What name?

So.

🤨 I’m askin’ you a question.

And I’m giving you an answer.

😖 You haven’t given me anything! I asked you what his name was and you said “so.”

That’s right.

🤨 Gaahh! So’s the king dead?

Yes.

🤨 Well… Why didn’t you say so?

I did. I said the king of Egypt is So.

😡 Is so what?!

(Sigh) he is SO very challenging to identify. And this article will help.

So…Hoshea writes to… this king of Egypt and asks for backup when he rebels against paying tribute to Assyria. But Shalmaneser finds out about it and invades Israel. He lays siege to the capital of Samaria for 3 years and it finally falls. Hoshea is taken prisoner.

Here is a key text in the whole OT narrative:

“And this occurred because the people of Israel had sinned against the Lord their God, who had brought them up out of the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and had feared other gods and walked in the customs of the nations whom the Lord drove out before the people of Israel, and in the customs that the kings of Israel had practiced.”
‭‭2 Kings‬ ‭17‬:‭7‬-‭8‬ ‭ESV‬‬

Make no mistake; the geo-political machinations may have been the HOW and the WHAT but the WHY was spiritual. The underlying reality of all of this political upheaval was because the people had sinned. 2 Kings 17 lists their many occult practices that extended even to horrific forms of child sacrifice. God sent them prophets and they refused to listen.

So the people of Israel are forcibly removed from the land (just like the wicked nations who lived there before them), and that are resettled far away in various provinces of the Assyrian Empire.

In a kind of foreign-exchange program, Shalmaneser moves other people groups from an area called Cuthah into the land of Israel. They particularly settle around the capital of Samaria.

Josephus had this to say about them:

“But now the Cutheans, who removed into Samaria (for that is the name they been called by to this time because they were brought out of the country called Cuthah, which is a country of Persia, and there is a river of the same name in it), each of them, according to their nations, which were in number five…

And when they see the Jews in prosperity, they pretend that they are changed and allied to them, and call them kinsmen, as though they were derived from Joseph, and had by that means an original alliance with them; but when they see them falling into a low condition, they say they are in no way related to them, and that the Jews have no right to expect any kindness or marks of kindred from them, but they declare they are sojourners that come from other countries.” – Antiquities, 9.14.3.

They are the original “fair weather friends.” They are Jewish when it’s convenient and Gentiles when it’s more convenient to be Gentiles.

Oh, and Josephus says, that they “are called in the Hebrew tongue Cutheans, but in the Greek Samaritans.”

Now you know why the Jews in the New Testament hated the Samaritans so much.

These people brought with them their pagan gods which angered Yahweh so he sent a plague of lion attacks. These ancient people were at least spiritually astute enough to recognize that this had come about because they did not know how to properly honor the God of the land. The idea that every land had an established deity or deities was widespread in the ancient world. This concept (as Dr. Heiser unpacks in his books Unseen Realm and Reversing Hermon) is connected to the Tower of Babel as described in Deuteronomy 32:8-

“When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God.” Deuteronomy‬ ‭32‬:‭8‬ ‭ESV‬‬

So the king of Assyria sends some Israelite “priests” back to Israel to teach the Cutheans about how to worship Yahweh. These were probably a few Levites not of the priestly line of Aaron. But rather than convert these people to the exclusive worship of Yahweh, the result was a “the-more-the-merrier,” “I’m-ok-you’re-ok,” “everyone’s truth is equal” relativistic, pluralistic society that most of us would recognize.

“So they feared the Lord but also served their own gods, after the manner of the nations from among whom they had been carried away.”
‭‭2 Kings‬ ‭17‬:‭33‬ ‭ESV‬‬

This verse could be written about much of the so-called “Church” today. There are many self-proclaimed “Christians” who “love Jesus” but they also serve the many other gods of this word – the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life (1 Jn. 2:16). Their lives and practices are often indistinguishable from non-Christians.

Look- sinners gonna sin. But nowhere in scripture are we exhorted to “support their right” to do so. Rather, we’re called to call them to repent– to leave their life of sin and renounce all other allegiances to self and sin and be converted. Changed. Transformed.

And then, we are called by Christ Himself to take up our cross and follow Him. Exclusively.

One thing should be VERY clear by this point in the Bible – Yahweh, the Creator and Most High God expects exclusive loyalty of His people. This isn’t a corporate business deal, it’s a marriage. And it’s not some free-love, hippie marriage threesome.

He wants loyalty. Faithfulness. Fidelity.

The FIRST commandment is “You shall have NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME.”

What part of this is hard to understand?

The one characteristic shared by all of God’s “favorite” people in the Bible is not moral perfection. It’s EXCLUSIVE LOYALTY.

Go ahead. Think through the list of people we’ve encountered so far that Yahweh has really been pleased with:

• Abel
• Noah
• Abraham
• Isaac
• Jacob
• Joseph
• Moses
• Joshua
• Samuel
• David
• Elijah
• Elisha

I’ve left some out. And we’ll meet more of them. Not once did they turn to any other god. They did not always worship Yahweh perfectly, but Yahweh was the ONLY God they worshiped. That is the crucial point.

And that’s harder than it sounds; especially when the culture is mixing in all kinds of other worldviews and practices and hinting that your exclusive reliance on the Bible is narrow-minded and antiquated.

If you’re going to withstand the pressure, you must know where your worth as a person lies.

If you expect the world around you to affirm you as having worth, then you are set up to jump through the hoops it will demand of you before they confer that affirmation.

And you WILL be expected to compromise. You WILL be expected to bend to the powers of this world; to deny the authority and reliability of scripture and concede that Christ is not THE way but A way. In short, you will be pressured to “fear the Lord but also serve other gods.”

“And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” Joshua‬ ‭24‬:‭15‬ ‭ESV‬‬