Ancient kings are cautionary stories

Jan. 28—Not much had been written about the kings in the Books of Kings and Chronicles outside the Bible, so Immanuel Baptist Church Ministers Landon Coleman and Corey Speer decided to write a book based on the Wednesday night series of sermons they gave last year.

The result, "The Kings of Israel and Judah: The Consequences of Sin and the King of Kings," is available on Amazon.com for $14.97 with all profits going to Immanuel Missions Pastor Chris Harrington's Nourishing the Nations program.

Aside from a few good kings in Judah, the southern kingdom, all the others fell into idolatry and other egregious errors and did great harm to their nations, said the Rev. Coleman, senior pastor.

"We wrote 13 chapters, each on one king, and then did the last four in rapid succession," he said. "They sinned in various ways, some of them flagrantly and unrepentantly and some in ways that seem small to us, but they were all sinful men.

"All the kings of Israel, the northern kingdom, were wicked, every last one of them."

Coleman said the stories, covering the period from 930 B.C. to the beginning of the Babylonian Exile in 586 B.C., point to Jesus Christ, the King of Kings.

"All their inadequacies are met in perfect fashion in the Lord Jesus," he said. "If we don't see how they found fulfillment in Jesus, we're just left with morality tales."

The relatively good kings, Asa, Josiah, Uzziah, Jehoshaphat and Hezekiah, still fell short of God's expectations in significant ways, Coleman said, but most of the others have little or nothing to their credit.

Those are Rehoboam, Jeroboam, Ahab, Jehu, Ahaz, Hoshea, Manasseh, Jehoahaz, Jehoiakim, Johoiachin and Zedekiah.

"There were consequences for their sins in every situation," Coleman said. "God is merciful to his people when they repent, but many times the consequences of our sins are still there."

The Rev. Speer, Immanuel's pastor of discipleship, said Coleman and he decided to write the book because there "were not a whole lot of books out there" to research their sermons with.

"Just because one guy was a good king didn't mean his son would be good and because a father was a bad king didn't mean the son would be bad," Speer said. "All of them had choices and those choices had consequences.

"God gave specific guidelines on what to do and what not to do. When they did what they were supposed to, God blessed the nation and when they didn't there were a lot of heartaches."