You have power? That means you have responsibility. Let's talk about it on this edition of Key Life. This is Key Life with Steve Brown, an honest and refreshing look at Bible doctrine as it applies to daily living. If you have a Bible, get it. And here's Steve Brown, the teacher. Thanks, Mike. Hope you had a great weekend, and I hope your pastor's sermon was as meaningful and as helpful as my pastor's sermon was. If you're just joining us, we're in the process of a rather long Old Testament survey. Now, obviously, I'm not going to do this verse by verse. But I became aware, in fact, this has been years ago, that most Christians do not have a proper appreciation and understanding of the Old Testament. Now, you need to know that that is God's Word too. And as a friend of mine says, the New Testament is God's Addendum to His Word. At any rate, we're taking the time to go through the Old Testament. With each book, I will be giving you some handles on the particular book, some of the major themes in a particular book. And then I'll become sort of tour directories. We go through the book, and I'll point out some of the sites as we go along. And if you've been with us, you know that this week we're going to begin first and second kings. Before we do that, let's go before the throne. Father, we're glad for your Word, we're glad that you wrote it down. Father, we don't always live it, but it's there, and it's truth, and we can measure ourselves by it, and come to you and ask forgiveness or give you praise for the things that you've changed and made real in our lives. Thank you for your Word. Thank you that when you spoke, you told us the truth, and there so few places we can go, except to you. Father, you know everybody who's listening to this broadcast, you know the bad stuff that we're going through, there's some who are lonely, and they need a friend, there's some who are afraid, and they need courage, there's some who have sinned, and they need forgiveness, there's some who are drowning, and they need meaning. Father, we are your people, and you are our resource, and you are adequate, and so we're here. Meet us at the point of our needs, heal and cleanse and change and empower, be our friend, be our king, be our guide, be what we need as you define our need. Father, we praise you, not just because of the good stuff that you've done for us, you sent your son, we live in a country where we're free, you've given us plenty on our table, father you've been so kind, but if you had never done that, you're still God and worthy of our praise, and we get it. And now Father, on key life, as we study your word, as always, we pray for the one who teaches, they call him Reverend, and he's not, we want to see Jesus in him only, and we pray in Jesus' name, I mean, all right, if you're in a place where you can open your Bible, open it to first and second kings, as we continue with our study of the Old Testament. Now this week, and next week, and probably the week after, we're going to look at two books which in the original constituted only one book, the books are first and second kings. Now we've seen before that both first and second Samuel and first and second kings were combined, in other words, Samuel was one book, and King was another book. As a point of interest, the books of Chronicles, first and second, are in the Hebrew only one book also. Now when these books were translated into Greek, and if you ever asked this on some kind of quiz, you win some money, tie that and send 10% to King like, or you can send it to me personally, if you would like, that's a joke, don't send me letters. When these books were translated into Greek, the amount of paper required was one third more in the Greek than in the Hebrew, and therefore the books were divided. Now in the Latin Vulgate, as the subtitles in the King James version, that's where they come from, you will see that first and second Samuel and first and second kings are called first, second, third and the fourth book of kings. Now tradition has said that Jeremiah was the writer of first and second kings, but they don't know, nobody does. While that's possible, and while the book of King was written during the time of Jeremiah, there's nothing certain about the authorship of first and second kings, other than the tradition to which I have just referred first and second kings, it covers a period of history from 965 BC to 561 BC. That's a period of a little over 400 years. A very quick overview will show you that first kings that opens with the end of David's reign, the age of 70 and the passing of the crown to his son Solomon. After the death of Solomon, the kingdom was divided in the north, Israel and the south, Judah. All the first and second kings deals with the reign of 39 kings. Now I know, wake up, you're going to be tested on this material. 20 in the south and 19 in the north. In first kings, we're introduced to one of the greatest men in the Bible, the prophet Elijah. You remember who's going to come and pass over if you have Jewish friends, and you remember the chair that's left at the table at Passover, that's for Elijah. He's given a cup of wine and he's expected before Messiah comes. And in second kings, we're introduced to his disciple, Elijah. Now the history found in first and second kings is basically, well, it's a downer. In fact, of the 39 kings whose stories are told only two kings as a guy and Josiah are really commended when second kings comes to an end, things are not really up for the people of God. Israel is captive in Assyria, Samaria's fallen in 922 BC when the Assyrian king Sargon had attacked. Judah in the south was captive to Babylonia, Jerusalem having fallen before Nebuchadiseir, king of Babylonia in 586 BC. I know this is boring, but this is good stuff to remember, or at least keep in mind when we're studying books of the Older Testament. Now, if nothing else, as you read first and second kings at Auditalia and reminds you that we don't live in Disney World, we live in a bad world and we have bad leaders and bad things happen, so deal with it. Christians absolutely amaze me. You know, we sit around, we found out our leaders did bad things and we go, how in the world of all the people in the world, Christians ought to be people who recognize the fallen nature of human beings and shouldn't be surprised, never pleased, but shouldn't be surprised with the fallen nature of human beings. Now the dangerous thing is to talk about them as being fallen and to forget that we also are fallen. We muddle in the muddle because God is God, He is sovereign over it all and eventually we will have one king. Every knee will bow before that king and every tongue will confess Him, Paul said in Philippians, but meanwhile we got a muddle in the muddle with leaders who are as fallen, who are as sinful as you are. Leaders who, by the way, maybe if you had their power and their money and their prestige, you wouldn't do any better than they're doing. One of the things always amazes me and by the way, I agree with the issues of the religious right, scares me to death that people in our family are going to get a lot of power. You know why that is? Because I'm afraid we'll do the same stuff they did and we'll do it in the name of Jesus and that's kind of scary. When the path between Washington and the church gets well-worn, you've got to start watching it because as my friend Fred Smith says every time the government hugs the church, the church always hugs back, so you've got to be careful. Living a fallen world, I've just been reading a great book and I would recommend it to you highly. I don't even know the author, he's a little bit liberal for my taste politically and theologically. He teaches at Yale and what do you expect at Yale Law School? His name is Stephen Carter and the book is called, it's about the third commandment taking the name of God in vain, the rights and wrongs of political involvement. It is an absolutely profound book and I've read through that book and read about and he's not prejudice in terms of he's a believer, a very clear and definite believer, but he's worried sometimes and he ought to be worried. So we ought to be very careful, we ought to remember and not be surprised when our leaders are something less than what we expected. Now there are three great themes that run throughout the book of First and Second Kings and I'm going to start the first one tomorrow, I'll give you the second one, maybe the third one, and then we're going to go back to the beginning and we're going to do a tour of these two books and I'll be pointing out the wonderful sites as we go along. The first great theme in First and Second Kings from my position is this, position, power, and authority carry very great responsibility. Do you know what they did after they did what Jesus told them to do in the first chapter of Acts? Now the first thing he told them to do is don't do anything. That bothers Americans and you Canadians aren't far behind. I mean, if there's a problem, we want to get it fixed and we want to get it fixed yesterday and it's interesting to note that the first instruction Jesus gave as disciples was, don't do anything, just be still and wait, don't you hate it. Maybe we need to do more of that in our lives, but the problem they dealt with first once they did something was the problem of leadership and why is that? Because when you got leaders, you vest in them authority and with the authority and power comes tremendous responsibility. So if you have any power at all, be careful. You've got a lot of responsibility too. Do you think about that? 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