1-2 Samuel Book 2 Intro

This study guide can be used for individual Bible study, small group curriculum, or family studies.

Small Group Leaders Note:
The purpose of this study guide is to draw you and your group into conversation about God’s Word and its application to our lives. The questions are posed in an intentional order and each of the questions has a specific purpose. As you are familiar with the purpose of each question, this will help guide the flow of the discussion.

A high-level view of the five basic questions and their functions:

1. Introduction (lean in). The goal of this first question is to get everyone in the group to “lean in” and get involved. It is normally easy to answer, fun, and creates a sense of energy—so much so that you’ll sometimes see group members physically lean in as they engage with the discussion.
2. Observation (look down). This is an observation question. It is designed to help group members “look down” at the text of scripture and see the relevant details and facts in the Bible passage being studied. This question establishes a solid foundation for the rest of the study. Regardless of how much time someone has spent studying God’s Word in their life, everyone in the group can get involved simply by taking an observant look at what the passage says.
3. Evaluation (look up). What do we learn about God from this passage? This is the ultimate goal of every Bible study—to get a clearer picture of the God we worship so that we can serve and love Him better.
4. Understanding (look out). This question helps group members “look out” and see the principles of the Bible passage through the lens of the world today. It builds a bridge between the facts of the passage and our understanding of the passage, and how it relates to our lives and culture.
5. Application (look in). Here is where group members begin to “look in” and see what God might be nudging them to change in their lives. During this part of the study, group members move from simply “knowing” God’s Word, to actually “doing” what God’s Word says. It’s the final step of all study of the Bible: life change—transformation into the likeness of Christ.

(Adapted from the Liquid Curriculum series)

Five Transformational Activities

An important part of discipleship is putting into practice what God reveals to you through your study. In our study guides, we are highlighting five transformational activities that can deepen and enrich your time with God—in whatever Bible study setting you find yourself. These activities serve as opportunities for you to take additional steps in growing deeper in your faith and drawing closer to your Creator. They are also great practices that we are asking each of our small groups to incorporate into the life of their groups.

At the end of each week, we are recommending one of these activities for you to integrate into your study and devotional time—be it with your family, small group, or any other place you might engage with these study guides. Here is a list of these transformational activities, as well as a brief description of each. We pray that these activities may deepen and enrich your time with God and help draw you closer to the God you love.

1. Bible Study — We seek to learn more about the triune God with the goal of knowing Him better and applying His will to our lives.
2. Prayer — We seek to learn how to have a deeper and richer prayer life that is consistent and meaningful. We will practice this both individually and corporately.
3. Community — We grow more when we are together than when we are in isolation. We want to have a place to love and support each other and encourage one another in the faith. “From Jesus, the whole body joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work” (Eph 4:16).
4. Worship — We always seek to incorporate an element of worship into our study of God. Knowing about God is different than knowing and worshipping God. This worship may or may not include music. Worship is a response to all that God is with all that we are. All of life is worship.
5. Outreach — We seek to be healthy in our spiritual growth by avoiding insulation and isolation—which comes from a loss of vision and passion for reaching out and ministering to those around us.

Introduction

In our first study guide of 1st & 2nd Samuel, we set out on a pretty ambitious quest—to explore the meaning and purpose of the nation of Israel. Why? The books of 1st & 2nd Samuel lay out the early history of Israel as they entered the United Kingdom period. But history is just a bunch of facts and figures without the context to help it make sense. Thus, our quest in the introductions to these study guides is to explore and describe that context. There are many questions that help us fill out that context. What, indeed, is the nation of Israel all about? Why did God create this very unique people? What does it mean to be the chosen people of God? Why would God choose to spend the entire Old Testament focusing our attention on Israel? What role does Israel play in God mediating salvation to the world? And perhaps even more pointedly, what false ideas have crept into the church’s understanding of Israel—and thus our understanding of God? Answering these kinds of questions will help us see the overarching plan of God with much more clarity and help the story of the Bible as a whole make more sense—thus making 1st & 2nd Samuel really come alive.

We mentioned briefly in previous weeks that one of the most beloved terms that God uses for Israel is His chosen people. But what does it mean to be the chosen people? That idea carries with it a variety of connotations for different folks. But at its root, the idea of God choosing one particular nation is that they were chosen for a purpose, to carry out a task. If I were to ask you, at the end of our Bible study, to make sure the lights are turned off and the doors are locked, I, then, have given you a task. I have chosen you and given you a purpose. Out of all the people in the Bible study, you were the chosen one. The same idea applies to the people of Israel. They were chosen by God and commissioned with the responsibility of being stewards of His message and conduits of God’s blessing to the world. That is their purpose. To put it in theological language, Israel’s purpose is to mediate God’s redemptive blessings to a fallen world. But the question is, how did that come to be? How did this privilege fall upon Israel and not upon other nations? If we are to understand Israel at all, this is a crucial question to explore.

To answer this question, we must rewind back to the beginning, to the dawn of civilization, where we see the stage being set for the coming drama that will unfold throughout the rest of the pages of scripture. God had created mankind and all that there is and declared it to be good. But then that first inevitable plot twist happened within the first few chapters of the story. Mankind rebelled against God at the prompting of Satan, and humanity was left separated from their creator. In response, God previewed a plan that He would put in place over time to fix that which was broken (Gen 3:15). But in doing so, God also fired a warning shot across the bow of the devil revealing that one day the “seed of the woman”—an offspring of a human—would be Satan’s demise. But as we continue to make our way through those early chapters of Genesis, we encounter a problem: what nation, what people group, could God possibly use to bring forth his Messiah, His champion?

For we see that after mankind’s rebellion against God, things went from bad to worse. In those first few chapters, we soon see the first murder, and later in the same chapter, another murder where the perpetrator is so unashamed that he actually boasts about the murder to his wives. Things got so bad that God chose to cleanse the world of all the filth and begin fresh. After this worldwide flood, this rebellious attitude surfaced again, and this time, it manifested as open defiance of God. God had commanded mankind to “fill the earth” (Gen 9:1). Yet men gathered together instead in the land of Shinar to prevent from being scattered over the face of the earth (Gen 11:4). They built a tower they thought could reach up to the Heavens. Perhaps they were trying to hedge their bets on another flood coming. If their tower was high enough, they thought, then maybe they could protect themselves from God’s judgment. They could insulate themselves and isolate themselves from God. This Tower of Babel was the ultimate act of defiance against God, and the collective efforts of mankind were being strategically marshaled by Satan to actively oppose God.

God put a stop to their plans by introducing new languages to the people. Until this point in history, everyone spoke the same language (Gen 11:1). But God scattered the people over the face of the earth. And, to ensure that they would not come back together, He caused them to speak different languages. This solidified these early peoples into distinct nations. Yet all these nations and cultures had a common origin at the tower of Babel. And this common origin is the crux of the problem.

According to Dr. Andy Woods, from whom much of this detail comes, the events of Genesis 11 set the stage for God putting His plan of salvation into motion in Genesis 12. As Dr. Woods highlights, “The sin that was taking place in Genesis 11 was exported into every culture, and every nation, and every ethnicity, because all cultures owe their heritage ultimately to the tower of Babel.” We mentioned earlier Satan’s long war against God. This war involved more than just attacking the people of God physically to prevent the coming of Messiah. It also involved infecting cultures with anti-God systems of worship, assimilating God’s people into these pagan practices, and normalizing a polytheistic worldview.

Genesis 11 is a seminal passage that illustrates what the world was like immediately before God set His plan into motion in Genesis 12. Historically, at the Tower of Babel, we see the origin of what was called the “mother-child” worship system. According to the classic work The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop, who drew upon Eusebius—one of the most often quoted ancient biblical historians—as well as many other Greek sources, there was a mighty ruler in Babel named Nimrod, the great-grandson of Noah (Gen 10:8-12). Nimrod was married to Semiramis. This first “power couple” was responsible for not only the founding of Babylon but also Nineveh, two of the most important cities in history. Nimrod was the architect of this “mother-child” pagan religious system that was bent on defying God. The first-century historian Josephus cites a source quoting Nimrod as saying that he wanted revenge on God for flooding the earth and destroying his ancestors (Antiquities of the Jews, Book 1, ch. 4).

While there are various versions of this, the story is that Nimrod and Semiramis had a child named Tammuz who was killed by a wild animal, and then miraculously brought back to life through satanic means. Other versions of the story have the child being the reincarnation of Nimrod after he died. People began to worship Semiramis and Tammuz, which then grew into this “mother-child” cult. This system of worship is the source of all ancient pagan religious practices and worship we read about in scripture and in history. After his death, Nimrod was revered as the god Marduk, also known as Baal, the sun god. Semiramis was revered as the Moon Goddess, Great Mother, Divine Mother, and Virgin Mother.

Hislop goes on to explain how together, Nimrod and Semiramis created this polytheistic religious system focused on the stars to lure God’s chosen people away from true worship. Shortly after Nimrod died, Semiramis earned the title Queen of Heaven when she claimed that Nimrod was a god and that her newborn son Tammuz was Nimrod, reincarnated. Hislop explains, “So began the worship of Semiramis and the child-god, and the whole paraphernalia of the Babylonian religious system.”

Semiramis was worshipped as the pagan goddesses Ishtar, Astarte, or Ashtoreth in various cultures, which we see reflected in scripture. Jeremiah highlights the role she played in the pagan worship in his time:

Then all the men who knew that their wives were burning incense to other gods, along with all the women who were present—a large assembly—and all the people living in Lower and Upper Egypt, said to Jeremiah, “We will not listen to the message you have spoken to us in the name of the Lord! We will certainly do everything we said we would: We will burn incense to the Queen of Heaven and will pour out drink offerings to her just as we and our ancestors, our kings, and our officials did in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem.” (Jer 44:15-19, emphasis added)

The “Queen of Heaven” is mentioned several times in that passage and in several other passages as well.

The point of all this background is that when the people were scattered by God after the Tower of Babel, they brought with them into their various new nations this “mother-child” worship. Every ancient civilization was tainted by, and thoroughly engrained in, this satanically inspired pagan worship. Hislop documents how you can see remnants of this mother-child cult all over the world and in all subsequent religious systems: In Assyria (Ishtar and Tammuz); in Phoenicia (Astarte and Baal); in Egypt (Isis and Osiris); in Greece (Aphrodite and Eros); in Rome (Venus and Cupid); in Asia (Cybele and Desius); and in India (Isi and Iswara).

Which brings us back to the question, what nation could God use to mediate his redemption to the world? Through what nation would He be able to send Messiah? The answer is: none of them. They were all thoroughly steeped in this pagan worldview and worship. They were all disqualified and tainted by this idolatry. So, as Dr Woods describes, what God does is to create a brand-new nation—a nation started independent of—and outside the impact of—this universally accepted mother-child worship system that originated at the Tower of Babel. And He started it through Abraham.

This is the answer to the question we posed earlier. Why Israel? Why did God even need a chosen people? It’s because Satan is always at work opposing God and doing everything possible to prevent the worship of Him. And he did so, in this case, by infecting all known nations with his perversions. That’s why God created Israel. It was designed to be different—to be untainted by this idolatrous mother-child paganism. This is why we consistently see God insist that Israel remain separate and distinct from the nations around it, who were all practicing this idolatry. God created a new nation—a new people—who would be holy, separate, distinct, and untainted by the foul work of Satan and the paganism he spawned.

We must begin to view the world and history itself—especially biblical history—through the lens of Satan’s attempts to undermine and oppose God’s work in the world. When we do, so much of what we see starts to make sense. As God initiated His plan of redemption through the choice of one man, Abraham, Satan parried by using one man, Nimrod, to tap into and muddy the religious impulses we all have, crafting a false, cheap imitation of God’s creation and design. God had revealed that through the seed (son) of the woman, redemption would come. Thus, Satan created a narrative around a woman and her son that would be the focal point of his false religious system, and then infused that counterfeit storyline into the worship of every culture that spread out from Babel.

The way Andy Woods describes it is that at Babel, we see man’s first attempt at a one-world government. They were trying to build what we, today, might call a “new world order,” a system of politics, economics, and religion that excludes God, and that controls every facet of a person. At its core, this event involved Satan recognizing and attempting to manipulate the inner ache we all have to worship something greater than ourselves. This was an integral part of Satan’s overall strategy of opposing God and attempting to undermine His plan at every turn. If he could corrupt the outlet for our religious impulses, he would block any meaningful relationship we could possibly have with God.

All the background and prologue we see in Genesis chapters 1-11 sets the stage for what God begins to do in Genesis 12. We cannot properly understand what God is doing in Genesis 12 without first understanding what was happening in Genesis 11. Our next task will be to unpack the unfathomable riches Genesis 12:1-3 contains. In this study guide, we will continue our exploration of the purpose, role, and destiny of Israel in the plan of God. And in doing so, God Himself will more clearly come into focus, our role in His unfolding plan will become clearer, and thus, 1st & 2nd Samuel will make more sense.