Today, I am reading and commenting on  2 Kings 5-7.

I want to look at the lessons we should learn from three of the accounts in today’s passage.  First, we have the story of Naaman, a commander in the army of Aram.  Naaman was an enemy of Israel and had wrought significant damage against it and its people.  Yet, when he came to Elisha for healing, Elisha healed him.  However, that is not the lesson I want to focus on.  Elisha told Naaman that in order to be healed he needed to wash in the Jordan River.  Naaman was angry about this, but his aides asked him if he would not have undertaken some “great quest” in order to be healed.  In the same way, we often look for the great deeds we can do in order to serve God, when what God is asking us to do is more mundane.  Are we willing to do the mundane tasks to which God calls us?

Second, we have the story of the king of Aram sending an army to capture Elisha because God revealed the king of Aram’s plans to him and Elisha passed that knowledge on to the king of Israel.  When the forces of Aram surrounded the city in which Elisha was living, Elisha’s servant panicked.  Elisha told his servant that there were more on their side than those mustered against them.  Some translations render what Elisha said as, “Greater are those who are for us than those who are against us.”  Elisha then asked God to open his servant’s eyes to those who supported them.  In the same way today, we often think there are more opposing us in our attempts to serve God than there are supporting us.  However, not only are there more supporting us than we realize, since one of those supporting us is God, they are greater than those opposing us.

Finally, we have the story about the famine in Samaria caused by Samaria being besieged by the armies of Aram.  When Elisha told the king of Israel that by the same time the next day, the prices for food would go from being completely unaffordable to practically free, one of the king’s officers said that even if God opened the floodgates of heaven, that was not possible.  Elisha told him that he would see it happen, but not get to eat any of the food.  When the residents of the city discovered the next day that the army of Aram had fled in the night, the officer in questioned was trampled by the crowds.  The officer’s sin was not in his failure to believe what Elisha said.  His sin was in thinking that God was unable to do it.  I struggle with having faith that God will do miraculous things in my life, but I pray that I never doubt that He can do them.  Let us never doubt that anything is possible for God, and pray that we have the faith to believe, and to act on that belief, that He will perform miracles around us.

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 3-4.

Today’s passage contains various accounts which relate how God will provide when we turn to Him.  In the first account, when Joram, son of Ahab, attacked Moab along with Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, and the king of Edom, he led the armies through the desert.  Joram had planned badly and the armies ran out of water.  At Jehoshaphat’s recommendation, Joram sought Elisha’s counsel.  Through Elisha’s counsel, Joram and his allies found victory over Moab from a disastrous start.  In the second account, a widow under overwhelming debt comes to Elisha out of desperation.  God provides a way out of that debt with sufficient left over to support her family.  Then there was the woman of Shunem who provided Elisha with a room to stay in when he travelled through.  She wanted nothing from Elisha in return, but Elisha prayed to God to give her a son.  Then after the son was born, the boy died and the woman came to Elisha and said that the grief of losing the child was why she had asked for nothing.  Elisha came and prayed for God to raise the child and the child was raised.  We have two more stories, one where Elisha makes an accidentally poisoned stew edible and another where God caused a few loaves of bread to stretch to feed a large number of people with leftovers.  When Jesus fed the five thousand and the four thousand it would have reminded his followers of this last account.   All of these stories remind us that God will provide for our needs, if we do His will.

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.

When King Ahaziah, Ahab’s son, fell and injured himself, he sent messengers to the god of Ekron, Baal-Zebub to find out if he would get better.  I did a little searching to see what information we had from other sources about Baal-Zebub and there wasn’t much.  However, scholars believe from the etymology of Baal-Zebub and a few other ancient references that Baal-Zebub was a god of healing.  Which explains why Ahaziah sent messengers to Ekron rather than just consulting the prophets of Baal in his own court.  I’ve mentioned before that I see evidence that the worshipers of Baal in Israel tried to present Baal worship as worshiping God, just with different worship practices.  Ahaziah sending to the Baal of Ekron runs counter to that idea, because God was clearly God of healing (as well as being God of everything).  Then, after Elijah intercepts his messengers and sends them back to him, Ahaziah orders Elijah brought to him.  The first two captains, along with their troop of fifty men, call Elijah a “man of God” and order him, under the king’s authority, to come with them.  Both of them discovered that, in a dispute between the government and God, they had taken the wrong side.  The third captain also called Elijah a “man of God”, but this third captain recognized that Elijah’s authority as an agent of God exceeded his authority as an agent of the king.

Ahaziah claimed that in worshiping Baal he was worshiping God.  Yet when he sought healing, he did not ask for healing from either the Baal he worshiped or from God.  Instead he sent to a foreign god, a Baal other than the one he worshiped.  Since God claimed dominion over the whole earth, this put the lie to Ahaziah’s claim that Baal was just another name for God.

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 22-25.

Josiah is probably my favorite of the kings of Judah.  He was eight years old when he was put on the throne after his father was assassinated by some of his officials.  Josiah’s father and grandfather had done great evil as king, but Josiah “did what was right in the eyes of the Lord and followed completely the ways of his father David,…”  When those he had set to renovating the temple found and brought to him the Book of the Law, he tore his clothes and sent an inquiry to a prophetess as to what he should do.  Josiah recognized that the people of Judah, including himself, had violated the covenant which God had made with them.  God responded that disaster would surely come, but not in Josiah’s lifetime.  Josiah then dedicated himself to eradicating the evil in the land.  Josiah’s reforms were extensive, and they extended throughout all of Israel, not just the part we know as Judah.  It is here where the writer lists the various forms of idolatry which Josiah eliminated from the land that we can a true picture of the extent of the evil committed by his predecessors.  Perhaps the biggest lesson we learn from Josiah is that no sooner had he died then the people reverted to the idolatry and sin which had preceded his reign.  That should remind us that each generation must choose for themselves if they will do good or evil.

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 19-21.

I usually write about Sennacherib and Hezekiah when I read this passage, but today I want to write about Hezekiah’s son and heir, Manasseh.   The writer tells us that he did detestable things and gives us a summary of those things.  He erected altars to Baal.  He constructed and Asherah pole and placed it in the temple of God.  Further, he built altars to the “starry host” in the temple of God. He worshiped at all of these shrines and even sacrificed his own son in the fire.  Manasseh did all of these things, but even worse, he led the people astray, so that they did more evil than the people whom God had driven out of the land ahead of them.  The writer finally tells us that Manasseh filled Jerusalem with the blood of the innocent.  I have always read that as Manasseh had many innocent people killed for his own pleasure.  While that may be true, I have come to wonder if perhaps it mean that Manasseh allowed crime to run rampant.  Manasseh’s son, Amon, followed in his father’s footsteps.  He committed the same sins that Manasseh had, until things became so bad that some of his officials assassinated him and put his son, Josiah on the throne.  Despite having seen Hezekiah, who held fast to the Lord his entire life, the people of Judah chose to follow Manasseh into doing evil.  They could have chosen to refuse to worship at the altars he built and to join him in sacrificing their children, but they chose otherwise.  They chose to follow their king, rather than their God.

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 17-18.

King Hoshea was the last king of Israel, the Northern Kingdom.  The writer tells us that he did evil in the sight of the Lord, but not as bad as the kings who preceded him.  But God did not exile the Israelites of the Northern Kingdom because of the sins of Hoshea, or even because of the sins of the kings which preceded him.  God exiled them because of their own sins.  The writer condemns them for following the practices of the people they had displaced in the land, practices which God had explicitly told them not to follow.  He condemned them for imitating the peoples around them, which God had explicitly told them not to do.  The the writer gets into more specific complaints about their behavior.  He writes that they forsook all of God’s commands, embracing various kinds of idolatry.  They crafted two golden calves to represent God, they built an Asherah pole.  It is worth noting that Asherah was viewed as the wife of and co-creator with the male god of creation in Canaanite mythology (there are today those who want to introduce a female creator alongside God into Christianity).  They bowed down to the starry hosts and worshiped Baal.  I have always understood the worship of the starry hosts to be a form of nature worship which focuses on the splendor of the night sky.  The writer goes on to tell us that they sacrificed their children, their sons and daughters.  And he finishes off their list of sins by saying that they sold themselves to do evil.  I was going to comment on those sins, but I will allow you to think about how the writer’s condemnation of the Israelites may, or may not, apply to our society today.

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 15-16.

In today’s passage, we read of two kings of Judah who did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, which makes it four kings in a row who did so.  For the two mentioned today the writer gives a caveat to the fact that they did what was right in the eyes of the Lord.  That caveat was that the high places were not removed and that the people continued to offer sacrifices there.  In the past, I have always read that as a (mild) condemnation of these kings.  I realized today that this was actually a statement on the limits of the government to turn people away from sin.  Despite having a good ruler who led them to worship God, the people, at least, some of them, continued in their idolatry.  The good rulers in Jerusalem are in stark contrast to those in Samaria.  In Samaria, the kings outright encouraged the people to commit idolatry.  The end result being that the ruling house was overthrown by a violent result about every other generation, reflecting an ongoing breakdown of the rule of law.  This stands in stark contrast to the two kings of Judah mentioned in yesterday’s passage who were assassinated, but still succeeded on the throne by their sons.  And while the writer merely says that the kings in Samaria did evil in the eyes of the Lord by not turning away from the sins of Jeroboam I, he clearly implies they did much worse in what he says about King Ahaz of Jerusalem.  The writer tells us that King Ahaz followed the ways of the kings of Israel and even sacrificed his son in the fire.  And while the writer tells us that the people offered sacrifices at the high places under King Ahaz’s father and grandfather, here he tells us that King Ahaz did so as well.

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 13-14.

We tend to think of the kings of Israel, the Northern Kingdom, listed in this passage as evil kings because the passage tells us that each of them “did evil in the eyes of the Lord.”  However, I think that misses much of what the writer intends for us to understand about them.  The writer tells us that Jehoahaz son of Jehu sought the Lord’s favor after Israel had been oppressed by Aram for some extended number of years, and that God provided a deliverer in response to his prayer.  Then it tells us how Jehoahaz’s son, Jehoash, visited Elisha when Elisha was on his deathbed, and mourned the death of Elisha.  Finally, the writer tells us that God used Jeroboam son of Jehoash to save the people of Israel, the Northern Kingdom, from the bitter suffering which they had been experiencing.  We need to keep the way God used these deeply flawed leaders to care for His people.

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.

Once Jehu had killed King Joram and his mother Jezebel, he sent word to the officials acting as guardians for the remaining sons of the house of Ahab (I understand this to be sons and grandsons of Ahab).  It seems likely that at least some, and perhaps all, of them would have been adults.  Jehu had those officials kill them.  I find it interesting that the number of sons of the house of Ahab was seventy, the same number as the sons of Gideon killed by Gideon’s son, Abimelech.  In addition, Jehu killed some relatives of King Ahaziah of Judah, who had come to Israel on what was most likely “idolatry tourism”, and probably also with the intention of doing things which would have ruined their reputations if done in Jerusalem.  I think of those forty-two individuals as being similar to the various prestigious people who regularly visited Jeffrey Epstein’s island.

Having killed off the entire government structure associated with Ahab and his family, Jehu then entered into an alliance with Jehonadab to serve God.  This alliance suggests that Jehu sought to serve God, despite refusing to turn away from the worship of Jeroboam’s golden calves.  Jehonadab’s descendants were praised by Jeremiah during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem for their dedication to the teachings of Jehonadab and thus to God.  With Jehonadab, Jehu wiped out Baal worship in Israel.  The way that the writer of this passage writes it, I believe that Jehu wished to serve God, but felt that he needed to keep the worship of the golden calves for expediency.

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 8-9.

I don’t think that I ever noticed before that King Jehoshaphat’s grandson was named after King Ahab’s eldest son.  I doubt there is much significance to that fact, but it does tell you a bit about the influence of Ahab’s daughter over Judah.  When Ben-Hadad sent a messenger to ask Elisha if he would get better, Elisha tells the messenger to lie to Ben-Hadad.  The messenger’s name was Hazael, and it seems that Elisha’s purpose in travelling to Damascus was to encourage Hazael to launch a coup.  In a similar way, Elisha sends a messenger to Jehu to encourage him to launch a coup against Ahab’s son.  I will note that Hazael becoming king in Damascus set the stage for Jehu to overthrow King Joram.  It took me many readings of this passage to realize that Elisha encouraged Jehu to overthrow Joram because of Jehu’s opposition to the idolatry of the House of Omri (Ahab’s father).  And it was only today that I realized that the support for Jehu among the army was for the same reason.  Which leads me to realize that despite the support of the crown, Baal worship was unpopular among the people of Israel, the Northern Kingdom.

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