Today, I am reading and commenting on 2 Kings 13-14.

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The writer tells us that Jehoash (which is can alternatively be written as Joash) the grandson of Jehu did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, but he also tells us that he visited Elisha when he was sick on his deathbed.  Further, the writer tells us that Jehoash wept about Elisha’s pending death, demonstrating a love for Elisha, a man of God.  When it comes to what Jehoash did which was evil in the sight of the Lord, the writer tells us that “he did not depart from all of the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, which he made Israel to sin.”  Which I understand to be worshiping the calves which Jeroboam had built, one in Bethel and one in Dan, and the appointment of non-Levites to the priesthood which served those calves.  Compare that to what the writer says about Amaziah, the king who began to rule over Judah in the second year of Jehoash.  The writer says that Amaziah “did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, yet not like David his father.”  He tells us that Amaziah failed to remove the high places where people made sacrifices.

So, when I compare the two, Jehoash king of Israel and Amaziah king of Judah, it seems that the writer tells us that Jehoash did evil because he encouraged, and perhaps joined, his people in following worship practices which God condemned, while Amaziah failed to stop his people from worship practices which God condemned.  In both cases, the people were applying these worship practices towards God, but they were not practices which truly honored God.  Both kings were held accountable for falling short of what God asked of them.  Both kings were also blessed by God to some extent for the ways in which they served Him.  We should strive to do better than either.  We should seek to root out the ways in which we represent God of which He does not approve.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on 2 Kings 10-12.

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Yesterday, I wrote about how Jehu was a worshiper of the God of Israel when he took the throne of Israel.  The writer makes that even more clear in today’s passage when he gathers all the worshipers of Baal and has them executed.  in order to illustrate how dedicated to serving the Lord Jehu was, the writer tells us that Jehonadab the son of Rechab allied with him.  I find that interesting because the only reason we know  anything about Jehonadab other than his alliance with Jehu is because Jeremiah (in Jeremiah 35) uses his descendants to illustrate the message which God gave him.  This seems to me to be an undesigned coincidence which lends support to the idea that this book is historically accurate.

Let me explain what I mean.  The writer here includes the alliance between Jehu and Jehonadab as evidence of Jehu’s dedication to the Lord when he first took the throne.  The writer took Jehonadab’s dedication to God as a given which everyone would know.  Yet we only know anything about Jehonadab’s dedication to God because of what Jeremiah wrote about his descendants.  On the other hand, Jeremiah in no way references this passage when he refers to Jehonadab.

I want to end by noting that despite Jehu wiping out Ahab’s entire household and wiping out the worship of Baal in Israel the passage tells us that he was not careful to walk in the Law of God with all his heart.  This tells us that a ruler can do much to honor and serve God without being someone whom we should emulate.  Of course, we can apply that standard to ourselves as well.  We, also, can honor and serve God in one part of our lives while falling short of what He truly desires for us.  After we do the things to which we clearly see God calling us we need to examine our lives to see where we are doing something similar to what Jehu did when he “did not turn from the sins of Jeroboam”.  What sins have we fallen into because we think it is expedient to do so?

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on 2 Kings 1-2.

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Two points are expressed with the account here about what happens when Ahaziah sends messengers to inquire of the god of Ekron.  The first is that by doing so Ahaziah took the sin of his father, Ahab, one step further.  Ahab at least pretended that he thought that Baal was just another name for the God of Israel.  Ahaziah abandoned all pretense of worshiping the God of Israel in favor of worshiping foreign gods.  I will also note that Ahaziah knew of the God of Israel because when his messengers described Elijah to him he immediately knew that they had been confronted by Elijah.  So, Ahaziah was intentionally choosing another god over the God of Israel.  Which leads directly into the second point expressed in this account which comes up when Ahaziah sent soldiers to bring Elijah to him.  When each of the first two captains of fifty came to Elijah they assumed that the king had the authority to order Elijah, whom they acknowledged as a man of God, to do as the king directed.  By calling down fire from heaven on them, Elijah was demonstrating that God’s authority over him superseded that of the king.  The third captain recognized that he had no authority, and neither did the king, to order Elijah to act unless God granted them that authority.  The third captain begged Elijah to spare his life by coming with him to see the king.  He knew that he could not compel Elijah to come with him, but he also knew that if Elijah failed to come with him the king would have him, the captain, killed.    I want to tie this back to Ahaziah sending messengers to inquire of Baal-zebub.  By doing so, Ahaziah was saying that Baal-zebub had more authority over his life, and his people, than did the God of Israel.

That went longer than I expected, so I am going to skip over most of the rest of the passage and touch upon what is recounted at the end of today’s passage.  It says that while Elisha was on the way to Bethel from Jericho after Elijah’s death some “small boys” came out of the city and jeered at him.  Every commentary I have read on this passage says that the Hebrew word which is translated as “small boys” here refers to what we would politely call “young men”.  That is males between the ages of fourteen and twenty.  The passage says that Elisha cursed them after they jeered at him and two she-bears came out of the woods and tore forty-two of them.  So, this was not a few bad apples who were jeering at a traveler who looked funny.  This was a large group who were working up the courage to attack what they thought was a vulnerable traveler.  Think about that, even if the group was younger than fourteen, there were enough of them that two bears were able to maul forty-two of them.  Also, the passage does not say that the bears killed any of them, just that they tore forty-two of them.  Most generous interpretation of this incident was that it was a large group of boys acting in a threatening manner towards strangers with no adult supervision.  Think about being confronted by forty-two boys in a remote area.  Even if they were all only five years old, they present a significant threat to a single individual.  And it is worth noting that the wording of the passage suggests that there were more than forty-two of them.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on 1 Kings 20-22.

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When Ben-hadad first came against King Ahab, he demanded a set amount of tribute, which Ahab was willing to pay him in order to avoid war.  However, when Ahab agreed, Ben-hadad decided to demand that Ahab allow him to sack and loot the city.  Ahab saw no benefit in not fighting if Ben-hadad was going to sack the city anyway.  Ahab defeated Ben-hadad in the battle which followed.  However, rather than accepting his defeat, Ben-hadad attacked Israel again the following year.  After defeating Ben-hadad a second time, Ahab saw himself as Ben-hadad’s brother, despite the fact that Ben-hadad had twice attempted to sack and loot Ahab’s country and people.  Ahab saw himself as closer to the hostile ruler of an enemy nation than to his own people.  Every time when I finish reading this passage I want to talk about how Ben-hadad was defeated and captured because he thought that God was geographically limited, but as I put my thoughts together I see the way in which Ahab betrayed the people he ruled over by trying to be accepted as part of the ruling class of the world rather than being seen as an Israelite.  When a prophet told Ahab that his willingness to put his own wants and desires ahead of the interests of the people over whom he ruled would cost him, Ahab threw a temper tantrum.  This whole exchange highlights the nature of Ahab’s evil.  Ahab looked down on the people over whom he ruled and considered himself to have more in common with the rulers of other nations than his own people.  This is a leadership flaw which leads many leaders, both political and religious, to do evil.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on 1 Kings 18-19.

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I am going to mention Obadiah, who was over King Ahab’s household, because he protected one hundred prophets of God from persecution.  Obadiah served King Ahab, who promoted Baal worship, but Obadiah feared the Lord.  We learn from Obadiah that not everyone is called to be an Elijah, not everyone is called to confront those who do evil.  Some of us are called to quietly support and protect those who serve the Lord.  Which brings me to what Ahab said when he met Elijah.  Ahab called Elijah a “troubler of Israel”.  I do not think this was just because Elijah called the drought down on Israel (although he actually merely told Ahab what God was going to do).  Rather, I think Ahab called Elijah a troubler because he had been calling Israel to worship and follow God rather than Baal even before the drought began, while Ahab, at the behest of his wife, Jezebel, was promoting Baal worship.  In fact, I think that Ahab was trying to convince the people that Baal was just another name for God and that the practices of Baal worship were just another way to worship God.  Elijah responded to Ahab by telling him that it was he, Ahab, who was troubling Israel by encouraging them to abandon God’s commands and instead follow Baal.  We see something similar today when those who call for people to not sin are called intolerant and hateful by those who violently attack them for expressing their views.

I really love the story of Elijah and his competition with the prophets of Baal, and I love the account of God speaking to Elijah in a low whisper on Mount Horeb.  But I am not going to write about them today, please read about them in the passage.  However, I want to make a comment on Elijah calling Elisha to become a prophet of God after himself.  It struck me today that when Elijah called Elisha that Elisha had a business.  Elisha had twelve yoke of oxen which he rented out to plow for other farmers.  Elisha immediately left that business to follow Elijah, asking only for time to bid his parents goodbye.  However, Elijah felt guilty over Elisha giving up his business to be a prophet, so he sent him back.  Elisha’s response to being sent back was to sacrifice his oxen by cooking them over fires made from the yokes that he used to have them pull plows.  In a manner of speaking, Elisha “burnt to the ground” his previous life to dedicate himself to serving God.  He left himself no way to return to that life, but he did so in a way which left no hard feelings with the people he had lived it among.  I will note that he only did so after someone, in this case Elijah, tried to convince him to return to that life.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on 1 Kings 15-17.

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I am going to look at what this passage says about the kings of Judah and Israel.  It says of Abijam, the son of Rehoboam, that his heart was not wholly true to the Lord his God.  That is interesting because this passage says that most of the kings of Israel in today’s passage did what was evil in the sight of the Lord (the exception being Elah the son of Baasha).  It is also interesting because the passage says that Asa, Abijam’s son, did what was right in the eyes of the Lord.  I want to come back to what it says about Abijam.  While he was not wholly true to the Lord, the Lord was his God.  On the other hand, the passage tells us that the kings of Israel followed in the sins of Jeroboam, which was to maintain the worship of the calves which Jeroboam had set up and to appoint men as priests who were not descendants of Levi.  Some of the kings of Israel went beyond Jeroboam’s sins by following the worship practices of the surrounding lands.  I read this to suggest that Jeroboam had set the worship of the calves he built to follow the same practices as at the temple in Jerusalem, just with the calves at the center of worship rather than God.

What does this have to do with what the passage says about Abijam?  Because Abijam kept the Lord as his God, the worship practices and morals of the people of Judah stayed grounded.  However, the kings of Israel separated their worship practices from the Lord and this left them without a true grounding for their worship and their morals.  Without that grounding later kings had no reason to not adopt the practices of the surrounding peoples when those practices seemed appealing for one reason or another.  In fact, we see in future chapters that they stopped seeing the difference between the Lord and Baal.  Today we see that when people try to keep the morals which are at the root of our laws without acknowledging God they begin losing the true understanding of what is right and lose sight of the distinction between the God of Christianity and Allah of Islam, or the gods of various other religions.

The passage ends with God calling Elijah to call the people of Israel back to Him.  Interestingly, while Elijah begins his ministry by announcing a drought to King Ahab, the first person he draws to God is not an Israelite.  It is the widow in Zarephath, who is a Sidonian.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on 1 Kings 13-14.

I have a Youtube video of me reading the Scripture passage and my comments. Please check it out and let me know your thoughts.

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When I was reading this passage my first thought when I read where the man of God from Judah said that the sign that the Lord had spoken was that “the altar shall be torn down” and then a little later it said that “The altar also was torn down” was that the translation was confusing.  The NIV says that the sign would be that “the altar will be split apart.”  However, when I thought about it some more I realized that while the NIV is closer to how we would understand what actually happened, the ESV is probably closer to what the people present would have understood the man of God to have said.  Then when they witnessed the altar split apart they would have interpreted that part of his prophecy as being fulfilled.  The symbolism of using the words “torn down” for the altar being split apart would not have been lost on those who heard the man of God say them.

I usually get caught up with wondering why the old prophet from Bethel lied to the man of God and thus do not write about that part of the passage.  However, I realized that even that is part of the lesson we should see in that part of the passage.  First, the lesson: we should not allow ourselves to be talked into going against what we know God has commanded us.  The man of God knew that God had commanded him not to eat or drink in Bethel, but when the old prophet told him that he was also a prophet and that an angel had told him that the Lord told him to bring the man of God back so that the man of God could eat, the man of God believed the old prophet.  Perhaps, the man of God thought to himself, “Why would this prophet lie to me?”  He should not have allowed himself to be convinced to go against what he knew that God had commanded him.  In the same way, we should not allow someone to convince us to go against what we know that God has commanded us.  I want to be clear that this does not mean that we should not listen to the counsel of other Believers.  However, the man of God did not know this prophet and had no reason to believe that God had spoken to him.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.