bad, bad kings: a study of 2 kings until the exile
It's always easy to sugar-coat things or whitewash history. It's much harder to soberly contemplate the worst parts of history—filled with the atrocities that societies can do, the darkness that can infect hearts, and the hopelessness that can fill the air. In the Bible, the Assyrian and Babylonian exiles are the worst part of Old Testament history. It was the time when foreign empires invaded their land, destroyed their homes, and shipped them off to exile. How did this happen? How could God allow this to happen? This study will look at the good, the bad, and the ugly—and especially the ugly. We owe it to our secular society to see the worst that God's people are capable of. We also owe it to ourselves to examine this decisive historical event of the Bible and find applications to our lives today.