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

The passage begins by telling us that Jehu’s son, Jehoahaz, “did evil in the eyes of the Lord by following the sins of Jeroboam.”  It goes on to tell us that Jehoahaz, in the face of the terrible suffering Israel experienced at the hands of Hazael, king of Aram, sought the Lord’s favor.  And that God answered his pleading.  It tells us that God provided a deliverer for the people of Israel.  It follows that by telling us that, despite what God had done for them, the people of Israel did not turn from the sins of the house of Jeroboam.  Then later when discussing Amaziah becoming king of Judah, it says that he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, but “not as his father David.”  It then tells us that the high places were not removed and the people offered sacrifices and burned incense at them.  In both of these places it seems to indicate that it was the people who were at fault for the sin.  The only blame given to Amaziah appears to be that he did not lead the people away from their idolatry.  I would also say that it appears as if the writer is implying that Jehoahaz turned from the sins of Jeroboam, but failed to lead the people to do the same.  Whether or not my interpretation about the actions of the rulers is correct, the passage clearly tells us that, at the time being recounted, the people sinned because they chose to sin, not because their leaders led them into sin.

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.

Today’s passage begins with the acts Jehu took to consolidate his control over Israel, the Northern Kingdom.  One of the key things we learn about Jehu’s desire to serve God comes from his interaction with Jehonadab, whose descendants are later held up by Jeremiah as examples of faithfully following God.  The passage tells us that Jehu completely wiped out Baal worship in Israel.  Unfortunately, he was unwilling to get rid of the calf idols which Jeroboam had constructed and continued the practice of worshiping them.  Which suggests that, those who lived in the Northern Kingdom, Israel, considered that those who worshiped according to the practices established by Jeroboam thought they were following the covenant which God had established with their ancestors.  I suspect that leaders, such as Jehu, knew better, but convinced themselves otherwise out of political 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 am not quite sure what to make of the thought which struck me about today’s passage.  In today’s passage, Elisha instigates a coup in Aram, and one in Israel.  First, Elisha goes to Damascus, then the capital of Aram.  At the time, the king of Aram was Ben-Hadad (a name which multiple kings of Aram had), who was also ill.  When Ben-Hadad heard that Elisha had come to Damascus, he sent one of his top aides, Hazael, to ask if he would get better.  Elisha told Hazael to tell Ben-Hadad that he would get better, but that Ben-Hadad would not get better.  Then Elisha told Hazael that God had revealed to him that Hazael would be king of Aram.  Hazael returned to Ben-Hadad and killed him, making himself king.  Then later in today’s passage, Elisha sends a messenger from the company of prophets to anoint Jehu, one of the commanders of the Israelite army, king of Israel.  Jehu then launches a coup and kills Ahab’s son, who was at that point the king of Israel, and Ahab’s grandson, who was king of Judah.  The passage explains why God had Elisha have Jehu anointed.  Well, not why Jehu specifically, but why Elisha precipitated the overthrow of Ahab’s dynasty.  But it does not explain why Elisha precipitated the overthrow of the dynasty in Aram.  Perhaps these two accounts of coups are here to remind us that every king and every ruler is in their position because God put them there.  Hazael, who did terrible things to the people of Israel, and Jehu, who overthrew Ahab’s dynasty and destroyed the cult of Baal in Israel, were equally chosen by God to be in the positions of power they occupied.

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 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.