Hey, this is Shelby and Paul. We're in the book of Second Kings. We're going to talk through

chapters seven through nine today and hopefully help you understand these chapters and also

give you a little bit of guidance on how to apply them to your lives. So Paul, can you take us through these chapters?

Yeah, yesterday in our reading at the end of chapter six, we concluded with the capital of

the northern kingdom, Samaria, being sieged by a foreign nation, Aram. And we didn't mention it

on the podcast, but that's what was going on. And their starvation from this siege

became so bad that they began to cannibalize. And we even have this really difficult narrative

of these two mothers eating their own children even. But Elisha sees with heavenly vision that there are chariots in the spiritual

realm surrounding the army of Aram. And so we kind of get this idea that God's going to

deliver them, right? So chapter seven opens with Elisha prophesying that there's going to be a

miraculous provision of food. And so God makes it come to pass that the Arameans kind of hear sounds of chariots and this army,

this spiritual army, and causes them to flee.

And so we have these two diseased men that decide, okay, I'm just going to go surrender,

because then at least I can maybe have food if I'm a prisoner of war, right war right but when they go out to the armen camp they find that it's empty because they had fled so they come back to the camp and they're like hey there's no one there and they're kind of for a second they're like is it a trap but they go out there and there's no one there so they plunder the camp and they have food and then then in chapter eight, we get some foreign political

shifts as well as descriptions of two judahite kings, both of which were evil, unfortunately.

And then in chapter nine is in a fulfillment of a prophecy of Elijah from a while ago, that

Ahab's house would fall and that Jezebel would die. Jehu is appointed as Israel's king, and he goes on this destructive campaign to make that

come to pass to wipe out Ahab's house.

Yeah, so we're seeing starvation.

We're seeing some really unfortunate circumstances.

We're seeing bloodshed in these chapters.

And, you know, we've talked about this several times because this isn't the first time we've seen bloodshed in these chapters. And, you know, we've talked about this several times

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