This Reading Mama

Ep 19: Israel's Divided Kingdom Bible Reading Plan

• Becky • Episode 19

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Today, we're sharing our next printable Bible reading plan, which covers Israel's divided kingdom from Solomon to the captivity of the Northern Kingdom of Israel (by Assyria) and the Southern Kingdom of Judah (by Babylon). 

The history of Israel from this episode can be found in 1st Kings and 1st & 2nd Chronicles.

Note: This printable Bible reading plan {as well as all past Bible reading plans} can be accessed as a Podcast+ Member. You can join HERE or login HERE.


We're picking up where we left off in Episode 15 in the storyline of the Bible. If you're new to our podcast, it may be helpful to listen to the previous episodes where we go through the storyline of the Bible.

Previous Bible Reading Plans:


The printable Bible reading plan from this episode and the past episodes can all be accessed as a Podcast+ Member. Join our Podcast+ Membership or login to your membership to download the transcript, guided notes, and study tools from this episode!

Let's Connect!


SPEAKER_00

Welcome back to this Reading Mamas Podcast. I am Becky. This is Amy. Thank you all for joining us again. And as you may have already noticed, we have skipped, I think it's at this point a couple of weeks we've skipped. Um, it's because I am going through cross-examined instructors academy, and it's pretty intense for the next seven or eight weeks. And so we got together brainstormed in thought. We'll do every other week podcast or episodes until the end of May. So just so that you're aware, that's what we're doing.

SPEAKER_01

And I'd also like to remind you all that we have a podcast plus membership. That membership gives you access to the guided notes that you can use as you go through the podcast. It will help you engage in the material. Um, it can help also help you take notes so that you can use them if you are a teacher for a Sunday school class or just a Bible study. There are resources to help you understand the flow of the history and the overarching story of the Bible as we go through each of these episodes. Um, it also provides for you a monthly Bible reading plan. And we now have Bible reading plans from January through April, and we will be releasing this one in this episode, episode 19, for the month of May. June. Yes, May. I was like, wait, what was my last month again? I was like, wow. She's doing great. Yes. So if we go to the Old Testament timeline that we've been through from the beginning of our podcast, we now have the Bible reading plan that is labeled the beginning. The next one, that is episode two. The next one is Slavery, Freedom, and Wanderings. You can find the walkthrough of that Bible reading plan in episode five. Then we have the Promised Land. If you go to episode 10, you can go through the quick walkthrough of what that Bible reading plan includes. The last one we did in episode 15 was the United Kingdom. And the one that we will go through today is the divided kingdom.

SPEAKER_00

So today we want to walk you through Israel's Divided Kingdom, as Amy just said, and there is in the podcast plus membership a calendar form of a Bible reading plan specifically for the 31 days of the divided kingdom. So we have a visual here to help you and just to remind you that Samuel Kings and Chronicles, the stories and the accounts in those books of the Bible overlap each other quite a bit. The ones we're going to be going through today in this reading plan are on the second half of the chart. You have 1st and 2nd Kings, and they overlap with 2nd Chronicles. So we may mention 2 Kings or we may mention 2 Chronicles, but there is a lot of overlap in those books.

SPEAKER_01

So the last Bible reading plan ended on Solomon being king. That is when the kingdom of Israel is still united. You can go to 1 Kings 1 through 10. You will see that Solomon asks for wisdom, he's given riches, and he builds the temple.

SPEAKER_00

And then we see in 1 Kings 11 that Solomon has lots of marriages and extra women. Just crazy to me. Many of these women are foreign wives, meaning they come from other countries. They're not from Israel. And they are worshiping foreign gods, which leads Solomon to also worship these foreign gods and practice idolatry.

SPEAKER_01

In 1 Kings 11 through 12, we go through the Civil War era per se of the nation of Israel. God sends a prophecy to a man named Jeroboam, and he tells him that he is going to be the next king. Solomon tries to kill him, and so he flees, he being Jeroboam, flees to Egypt. Then Solomon dies, and his son Rehoboam becomes king of Israel. Rehoboam unfortunately rebels against what is right and good in the eyes of God. He follows the counsel of men who do not follow what God says. As Becky would say, he follows some stupid, how did you say that? Some what did you say? Stupid advice. Stupid advice, not godly advice. Ten tribes of Israel decide to no longer follow Rehoboam because he's not going to follow the Lord, and they follow Jeroboam. They become what is part of the northern kingdom, which is referred to in this section of the Bible as Israel. You may see it sometimes as Ephraim in some of the prophetic books. Then we have Rehoboam who remains king, but he is king of Judah, which is a southern kingdom, and it includes the tribes of Judah and Benjamin.

SPEAKER_00

And just to be fair, Jeroboam and Rehoboam are both evil kings. They both do wicked things.

SPEAKER_01

Yes, and they actually fight against one another through their entire reign as kings. In 1 Kings 14, 30, you can see that.

SPEAKER_00

One of the kings of the north, King Ahab, he gets married to a woman named Jezebel. She's not a good, she's not a good guy, and she's not a good gal. So we have Elijah the prophet. This is in 1 Kings 16 through 19. Elijah goes and prophesies to him that there will be no rain for three years. And because of this, there's a famine. God takes care of Elijah. He feeds him by the brook. The ravens bring him food. He goes to a widow's house and he gets fed there. And then we have this really cool showdown that happens on Mount Carmel between God and 850 prophets. And I really love this passage of scripture. I love how Elijah is portrayed as being sarcastic when their gods, quote unquote gods, are not answering them. He's like, oh, maybe you should dance a little harder and shout a little louder, or maybe he's relieving himself in the bathroom. I just love his sarcasm there. So then God shows up in a big way and he strikes down with lightning, fire, and he consumes not only the sacrifice that's soaked in water, but he consumes the rocks. He consumes it all. It's pretty awesome how God shows up. Well, then after this happened, we see Elijah falling into despair. And this is where we have that passage in scripture where we talk about God's still small voice, which I do believe has been twisted and used in wrong ways. But I do love how Stephen Armstrong of verse by verse says, in Elijah's despair, it says that this shows us that God is not just the God of the showdown, he is also the God of the valley and the God of the downtrodden. And I love how he shows up for Elijah.

SPEAKER_01

Next, we'll walk through the life of Elijah. Elisha is found in 1 Kings 19, also in 2 Kings 2 through 6. He becomes Elijah, Elijah's attendant with a J. He actually knows that Elijah is going to be taken away. And so he follows Elijah, and Elijah keeps telling him, Let me be. God is going to take me. And he says, Nope, I'm not going to let you be. And so Elijah asks Elijah, what is it that he can do for him? And he says, Give me a double portion of your spirit. And so Elijah tells him that if he sees him being taken away, he will surely get it. And so Elisha does not leave Elijah's side. And he sees him being taken up to heaven in a whirlwind. He picks up the cloak of Elijah's that falls on the ground and he hits the water of Jordan with it and it splits. And so all the prophets that were there from Jericho, they witness this and they follow him. Then we have miracles of Elisha. He heals water. He actually pronounces a curse on some young people that are jeering at him. And he sends two bears to Maul, 42 of them. So don't mess with the prophets. Nope. Then we have the widow whose husband had passed. He loved the Lord. She says that to Elisha. And so she is struggling, making ends meet. She feels she's gonna have to sell her sons into slavery. And he says, Take oil and fill up the jars. So she goes and collects all these empty jars with her children. She continues to use this oil that just never ends until the last jar is filled. She tells Elisha, and Elisha says, Now go sell it. And from those proceeds, she's able to keep her children and continue to live. Then we have a barren woman who becomes pregnant. She was barren. He tells her she's gonna have a son. She has a son. Later, the son dies and she's distraught. Like, why did you give me the son to take him away? And Elisha brings him back to life. We have 20 loaves of bread that feed hundreds. I love that. It makes me think of when Jesus did it. So I love how God's word just continues to point us to Jesus. Then we have Naaman, who is a commander of the army of the king of Aram, who was the king of Syria. He gets leprosy. He is told about Elisha and the miracles that he can do, that he is a man of God. So it's not just miracles, but these are from God Himself. He goes to Elisha and he follows his instructions after a bit of a hissy fit, and then he is healed.

SPEAKER_00

A hissy fit, is that in the message? Yes, he has a little hissy fit. Then we have good kings and evil kings. Now these are all over 2 Kings, they're all over 2 Chronicles, really chapters 13 through 35, lots of chapters here. In these, we see that idol worship is rampant in the north and in the southern kingdom. Israel, the northern kingdom, has zero good kings. In Judah, the southern kingdom, we have eight good kings. Although I would say that most of the good kings do not get rid of all idol worship. They still allow some of it.

SPEAKER_01

As you go through the reading plan, you will read about the different prophets that speak to Israel. Those are some of those, these are not all of the prophets, but some of them are Elijah, Elisha, which we just spoke about, Amos and Hosea. Now Elijah and Elisha are prophets that God uses to show his power. Amos and Hosea, their words are a calling of repentance to the northern kingdom, which is Israel. They prophesy, they give warnings of pro of future prophecy, things that are going to happen in the near future, and also pointing to prophecies that will come to be in the end time.

SPEAKER_00

And because Israel was so evil, they fall. And we see that in 2 Kings 17. So they are in rebellion and they are actually in outright rejection of God. Idol worship is rampant. So the Assyrian army for three years lays siege on Samaria, and Samaria is the capital of Israel. So under King Hoshea, Israel is captured and they're taken into exile. And one of the things I think is really cool to see God's sovereignty over all of this is Jonah, in the timeline of history, he actually was told to go and preach to Nineveh before Israel fell. So Jonah preaches to Nineveh. Why is Nineveh? Why does that matter? Well, Nineveh is the capital of Assyria. And Nineveh was doing some very evil and vile things to their people. I mean, it's disgusting what they were doing. But we're told in Jonah 3 that because of their repentance, God did not destroy them. So they repented of their evil acts. And I think you can really see God's protection over Israel in that when Assyria came in to take them captive, they didn't do all those evil and vile things to them because God had used Jonah and they repented before they were taken before Israel was taken.

SPEAKER_01

As you continue through the Bible reading plan, you will also read the prophecies made by those who prophesied to the southern kingdom of Judah. We have Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, which are known as the major prophets. Isaiah includes a lot of the history of the nation of Israel as a whole. He speaks to their false worship. And then he calls them to repentance and then turn their hearts to God. But ultimately his prophecies are of the destruction that's going to come to them because they're not going to repent as they should. Then we have Jeremiah. He warns a lot against the false prophets of his time. Don't listen to them. Follow what God is saying, follow the prophets of God because you will see the false prophets. What they say never comes to be. But the people like to hear what the false prophets say because it sounds good. It tickles their ears. It does. And they didn't want to be destroyed like the prophets were saying were gonna was gonna happen. And then we have Ezekiel who is telling Israel, stop mourning for Jerusalem because you need to focus on the future redemption that God is promising for you. Then we have the minor prophets because their books are smaller. We have Amos, Joel, and Micah. Amos focuses a lot on God's judgment. Joel speaks a lot to the future prophecies called the day of the Lord, and then we have Micah. He does a lot of mixing. He he prophesies a doom and he prophesies a lot of hope.

SPEAKER_00

And I don't think we all we have them all there because I think Zephaniah is one of them too, but there's probably others. And then Judah falls. We see this in 2 Kings 24 through 25. This is where the Babylonian army comes in under King Nebuchadnezzar, also known as King Nebi. He comes in and he he actually exiles the people, but it's in three waves. So in the first wave, he's gonna take, as any smart king would do, he's gonna take your fit young men who can who can be productive in his society or even serve in his army. And among those men is Daniel and his friends that went, and we see that in the book of Daniel, chapter one, where they are taken in this first wave. In the second wave, we see Ezekiel go. After Ezekiel goes, he is standing in exile, and he's telling the people that are with him, and telling the people back in Jerusalem, you have false prophets, like you were saying, that are saying, Jerusalem won't be destroyed. We're God's favorite, and there's no way God, God's gonna protect us. And he's telling them this third wave is coming, and Nebuchadnezzar is not done. And so there is a third wave, and this is where Nebuchadnezzar comes in, he destroys the temple, Jerusalem is destroyed, and he he leaves some of the people that he doesn't really care about that really aren't gonna help his kingdom at all, but he does take some of the leftovers back to Babylon.

SPEAKER_01

Jeremiah 29 speaks of a hope and a future for the nation of Israel. In episode 17, we actually review how context is so important to make the Bible less confusing, and we use the text in Jeremiah 29 that tells them about the plans that God has for them, but it is speaking to the nation of Israel and it's talking about what will happen, their promised restoration after the 70 years that they are in Babylon. So that while they are there, they should thrive, they should continue to marry and work and be productive and prosperous, as prosperous as they can, because God is going to bring them back. So Jeremiah 29 speaks to that plan to bring them back to their land. He actually, well, we see this happen through King Cyrus, who is actually prophesied about through Isaiah and Isaiah 44, which I think is really neat. Um, it's one of the things that we today can look back on and say, yes, it was said before it ever happened. And God says in his word, I'm gonna tell you these things before they happen. So when they do, you will know that I am God.

SPEAKER_00

We just want to remind you that we now have five Bible reading plans. 31 days of beginnings all the way through what we just went through, 31 days of the divided kingdom. And they are found in the podcast plus membership. So let's be determined as Ezra to read, do, and tell the word of the Lord. Amen.

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Becky Spence

Host