Ep 381 | 1-2 Chronicles, Come Follow Me 2026 (July 20-26)

**Bryce Dunford** (0:03)
Hey everybody, welcome to Talking Scripture, a podcast where we illustrate relevance and application of the scriptures in Come Follow Me.

**Mike Day** (0:10)
We also dive into the history and cultures of the text.

**Bryce Dunford** (0:13)
Thanks for taking the time to share and subscribe to this podcast.

**Mike Day** (0:16)
For show notes, head over to our website, talkingscripture.org. Welcome to Talking Scripture, I'm Mike.

**Bryce Dunford** (0:26)
And I'm Bryce.

**Mike Day** (0:27)
And today, we're going to be covering 1st and 2nd Chronicles. Really, we're going to be looking at specifically 2nd Chronicles 14-20, 26 and 30

**Bryce Dunford** (0:37)
Now, if you remember, the two books of Kings cover the same history as the two books of Chronicles. And so, those two poor books of Chronicles often get left out because they're seen as repetitive and we kind of push them aside.

**Mike Day** (0:54)
By the way, Bryce, what you just said, Peter ends in his book, Bible Tells Me So, says that the original title for the books of Chronicles was the stuff left over. So literally, what you're saying is how some people really looked at this stuff. It's like, well, we already said this, but this is like leftover stuff.

**Bryce Dunford** (1:09)
Yeah, let's just repeat it. Now, the truth is Chronicles is very much worth studying because it's written by a different group of people with a different perspective and that perspective is worth studying. So Mike, what I'd love to do is would you just kind of tell us the difference between Kings and Chronicles and give us the best why study Chronicles argument?

**Mike Day** (1:33)
Big picture.
They're answering different questions. So we talked about this earlier when we talked about First and Second Kings, and there's a lot of biblical scholars that look at First and Second Kings and they say, okay, what is First and Second Kings? What are these books trying to deal with? What question are they answering?
And oftentimes, they use this phrase, the Deuteronomistic history, and that's a mouthful. But one of the ways that this is understood is that there was an author or a group of authors or what's called the Deuteronomistic school that took the Book of Deuteronomy and tried to answer the question, why did the temple get wrecked? Or why did the temple get destroyed? David Carr wrote a really great book about this, about the traumatic origins of the Bible. We'll put a link in the show notes about this book. It's a really great book. He talks about this, that when you come out of trauma, you kind of look back and say, okay, why did this happen? So for example, if you have a heart attack, and if you live through it, first of all, it will dramatically influence how you view the rest of your life, how you view time. You might even look back and say, okay, what contributed to this heart attack?

**Bryce Dunford** (2:42)
You're going to go back and say, let me go back 10 years ago. What habits did I develop 10 years ago that led to the heart attack?

**Mike Day** (2:49)
Yes, absolutely. And so, it is very traumatic. And so, out of trauma, we reframe our reality. We actually reshape how we view things, and everybody goes through trauma. And the Bible had traumatic origins. And the traumatic origin that these people are dealing with is the destruction of the temple.

**Bryce Dunford** (3:06)
Now, to put that in perspective, Mike, imagine Latter-day Saints, if every temple we owned burned to the ground, tell me the Latter-day Saints wouldn't be taken back, shake their heads and say, what happened? And maybe go back over our very own history and say, did we miss something? I thought this was going to stand forever. Now, I testify the restoration won't fall into apostasy, but imagine how deeply shook they were when the destruction of the temple came and everything seemed to have fallen apart. Temple worship is gone now.
They were shook to their core and it caused them to go back and rethink all that history.

**Mike Day** (3:48)
Yeah, so that's really what the Deuteronomy historians doing is answering that question. Now their answer to the question is, well, we didn't do religion the right way. And that's really if you study 1st and 2nd Kings and you look at the kings list, Israel had 19 kings from 9 dynasties and Judah had 20 Nearly every ruler in the Davidic dynasty in Judah's line, nearly every one of them was wicked. Now every king, according to the Deuteronomistic historian, the person who wrote 1st and 2nd Samuel, 1st and 2nd Kings and maybe parts of Deuteronomy, the person who wrote that said, hey, listen, everybody in Israel was bad. Now Jehu kind of gets a mixed bit where Jehu is kind of like, he's good in the beginning, maybe bad at the end, but I'm going to call it out, 19 kings, all bad.