1 and 2 Kings - Lesson 15

Dr. John Oswalt
1 & 2 Kings
th630-15
Completion of Elijah/Elisha Ministry
Lesson Transcript

We come now to the end. The completion of the Elijah-Elisha ministry. The end begins with the anointing of Hazael in chapter 8:7 and following. This is the second step in the commissioning that Elijah received from the Lord back in 1 Kings 19. I say second step in the way the list was given to Elijah. It was Hazael is to be anointed, Jehu is to be anointed, and Elijah, his successor is to be anointed. But in terms of order here, Elisha was anointed first and now comes the anointing of Hazael. Once again, we see the power of the narrative. Elisha traveled all the way up to Damascus, where the king, Ben-Hadad is ill. You may have noticed that we have had several Ben Hay dads, and this is a throne name. Sort of a switch between Ben-Hadad and Hazael, Hazael, Ben-Hadad as throne names. So it is Ben-Hadad who is ill. And when he hears the word that this famous prophet from Israel has come up to Damascus, he immediately sends his second in command, Hazael, to see this prophet and to find out if he, Ben-Hadad, will recover or not.

Elisha says to Hazael, "You can tell him he's going to recover, but he isn't." And then he begins to weep. Hazael says, "What are you weeping for?" "Because I have seen what you are going to do to the people of Israel." Hazael says, "My goodness, am I a dead dog that I would do such things?" And of course he would and did, but that's the appropriate thing to say in this moment. So what's going to happen next? The king is going to recover or he's not going to recover? And the answer is, of course, he's not going to recover because Hazael is going to go and put the pillow over his face and suffocate him.

Notice again, as we talked about the Moabite rebellion, this is not something that Elisha is predicting must happen. "You must go and slaughter many Judeans." But it is simply, again, prophetic second sight. "I see, I see what you're going to do. Not that I want you to do this, not that I'd like you to do this, but I see what you're going to do." So we see in the narrative, the interesting twists and turns, the tension, and Hazael does indeed go and suffocate the king. And he becomes then... as the Lord told Elijah would be the case, he's going to be a scourge of both Israel and Judah during the coming days of dynastic upheaval.

I think he's going to serve in some ways as a catalyst for the various things that happen, and as a judgment upon them for again, those long years of Baal worship. Of course, both Israel and Judah are engaged in Baal worship. As we'll see, when we come to what's going on in Judah, there is a Baal temple in Jerusalem. So Hazael in a real sense, is both a catalyst and a punishment for what is going on in the land. That's the beginning of the end. Then we have a kind of parenthesis. Again, narrative power. We say, okay, let's get on with the story. What's going to happen next? Well, what's going to happen next is we're going to talk about the kings of Judah.

What we're doing here of course, is keeping the synchronism working. Okay? We've got to introduce you to the kings in Judah, while these next events are going on so you know who they are and how it fits. And there it is. Who are these two kings? Chapter eight, verses 16 to 29. First, Jehoram. I remind you, again, the same names Jehoram, and Joram are kings in Judah and in Israel, and they're actually the same name. In our English versions, we try to distinguish between them, but both could be called Joram, both could be called Jehoram. Here is the intermingling that has been occurring at least since the time of Jehoshaphat and maybe in the final years of Asa, as going all the way back to Omri, trying to put together this situation where he can stop fighting the Judeans and get on to building a Kingdom.

Chronicles tells us that when Jehu, the son of Jehoshaphat came to the throne, he killed all his brothers. He is married to Ahab's daughter and perhaps Jezebel's daughter, or the Bible doesn't tell us that, but to Ahab's daughter, Athaliah. So we've got a situation where not only do we have a man who is operating on the principle of kingship in the ancient world, we've also got a man who is under the heavy influence of a woman whom we recognize is extremely strong-minded. And this makes us think that she may have been the daughter of Jezebel, because she certainly mirrors Jezebel's attitudes. "We're going to worship Baal and we're going to do it with the heaviest hand possible." And that's the man that we see here. A man who ruled for eight years from the fifth to the 12th years of Joram, the son of Ahab in the north.

And what happened is after Jehoshaphat died, Edom revolted, much in the same manner that Moab revolted after Ahab died. When the king who has been in power for quite a while dies, this is your opportunity. Maybe it won't work, but let's at least try it. And so Edom revolted broke away from that Vassalage, which had existed really from the time of David for more than 100 years. Edom now breaks away. And in what turns out to have been a very misguided attempt, Jehoram seeks to drag them back into vassalage, and in fact is terribly defeated, and only himself survives by breaking out of an encirclement and getting away. And the army of Judah is essentially broken up. They go to their tents, as is the phrase that we find.

When we compare Joram's failure to bring Moab under control again, and Jehoram's failure to bring Edom under control, again, we have an impression of a general decline in the leadership capabilities in both kingdoms. Ahab and Ahaz, as well as Jehoshaphat, seem to have been capable leaders. These two men, their sons seem not to be. Following Jehoram's death, he has succeeded by his son, Ahaziah. Here again is this thing we've talked about again and again. It says he ruled for a year, very possibly only a few months before things came apart in the north, and he got caught up in the results of it. But we're told this is a Judean king. He walked in the ways of Ahab.

Over and over again, the Judean kings were challenged to walk in the ways of David. And the good kings like Asa are recognized as having walked in the ways of David. But Ahaziah has gone completely to the other extreme. He walks to the ways of Ahab. And it's evident from the reporting that we have here in verse 18 and again in verse 27, that Athaliah was a significant influence on both her husband Jehoram and on her son Ahaziah. In this time then, during that year, when Ahaziah was on the throne, Hazael begins his depredations on Israel and Judah. So it begins. And that's going to continue throughout this whole thing, as the two kingdoms are weakened in the dynastic struggles, Hazael is there to take advantage wherever he can of that weakness. And once again, the results of those years of turning away from Yahweh, and the discovery that that's the way of death, not the way of life.

We see here, that Hazael is working at Ramoth-Gilead. We've had opportunity to talk about this before. The literal meaning is the heights of Gilead, where the highway of the kings comes up to the heights overlooking now this plane where Damascus lies, and this key crossroads where the road out to the coast meets the king's highway. So that this place became again and again, a key crossroads and a key battleground. So here are the armies of Israel, and at least the king of Judah, Joram is injured. And he comes back home to the summer palace at Jezreel to recover, and a Ahaziah comes from Jerusalem to visit his friend and brother-in-law. It's at that point that the flashpoint occurs.

We do not have a conclusion to the regnal summary. Ahaziah did this and this. He slept with his fathers and was buried with them. We don't have that because what's coming next in the revolt of Jehu is going to interrupt all of that. The parenthesis is over, and we come now to what I'm calling nemesis. Here is the end. Here is the result of all of those years of Baal worship, of the suppression of Yahweh worship. It's all coming to a head right here. This is the climax of the Elijah-Elisha ministry

Here, the possibility that Baal might replace Yahweh as the principle God of Israel is finally forever laid to rest. But it's a somewhat equivocal victory. As we'll see, Jehu is commended for having served God and gotten rid of the Omride dynasty, but he did not get rid of the bull idols. He did not break away from that path that Jeroboam had set. And we think, ah, what might've been. What might've been. But at least Baal is not going to supplant Yahweh. But when we turn to Hosea 1:4, he talks about Israel's final demise in part being for the blood of Jezreel.

Jehu began to wipe out the Omride dynasty in Jezreel. Well, he was serving God. He was doing what he had been anointed to do. But as we will see, as we look at chapter 10 especially, we will see how... I said chapter 10, I should say chapters 9 and 10. We will see how what takes place seems to be more of a bloodbath than a carefully organized removal of one dynasty and replacement by another dynasty. Is it possible to do God's will but not in God's way? It does seem as though Jehu gets caught up in bloodlust. And not only is the Omride dynasty brought to an end, but anybody associated with it is killed as well. So once again, we see here the inspiration of scripture. You don't have simply broad strokes whitewashing the good guys and absolutely blackballing the bad guys. No, life is never quite that neat.

And the Bible is going to report life as it is, not as it ought to be, not as it might be, but as it is. And that's what we're going to see here. Was Jehu doing God's will? Yes, he was. Was he doing it in God's way? And again, our narrator is not going to tell us, "Well, yes, he was doing good here, but he was doing bad there." He's just going to tell the story and say, "What do you think, reader? How do you understand this? How does the Spirit speak to you as you read this text?" Now the story begins in an odd way. Elisha sends one of his students, one of his mentees, as they say in these days, to anoint Jehu.

Why didn't he go himself? The text does not answer it. And in my mind, this is one more indication of the inspiration of the text. If you were simply writing this as an exciting fictional narrative, of course, you would have Elisha going to do this. And the confrontation between the prophet and the upcoming king would be a good part of your narrative. No. Elisha didn't go. And a standin is sent.

Interestingly, he tells the standin, "Go do your job and get out of there." Reminds us of that man of Judah who was sent to Gerald Boa many, many years before. "Go speak your message. Say what you're supposed to say. Get out of there." I think that saying; don't become a part of the coup. Don't lend your prophetic authority to this thing any more than you need to. I don't know that that's the case, but I think it might be. And so he goes. And again, the details are so interesting. He calls Jehu out of the meeting where he's meeting with his officers at Ramoth-Gilead. Joram has gone back to Jezreel to recover. Jehu is the man on the spot. The prophet calls him out. He anoints him.

"This is what the Lord, the God of Israel says, I anoint you king over the Lord's people, Israel. You are to destroy the house of Ahab, your master, and I will avenge the blood of my servants, the prophets and the blood of all the Lord's servants shed by Jezebel." Isn't it interesting that the immediate explanation for this event is what Jezebel had done to the prophets? All those faithful servants of the Lord, God has not forgotten them. There will be retribution. And we think of the book of Revelation. The martyrs crying out to God, "How long? How long?" And in the end, retribution falls on a world which destroys the men and the women of God.

So here, it's not because of this thing that Ahab has done, or that thing that Jezebel has done. Now certainly all those are not excluded, but it's interesting. It's not because you worship Baal, it's because of what you did to the prophets of God. "The whole house of Ahab will perish. I will cut off from Ahab, every last male in Israel, slave or free. I will make the house of Ahab, like the house of Jeroboam of Nebat and like the house of Baasha son of Ahijah." Remember? "Jeroboam, those who die in the city from your family will be eaten by dogs. Those who die in the country will be eaten by vultures. Baasha, those of your family who die in the city will be eaten by dogs. Those who die in the country will be eaten by vultures." Same words are going to be said here.

Three important powerful dynasties. Jeroboam the first ruled 28 years. That's a long time in the ancient world. Baasha ruled 24 years. Ahab, 22 years. These are powerful men, strong men who from a human point of view, who accomplished a great deal, but they systematically broke their covenant with God and they will be eaten by dogs. So Jehu went back to his fellow officers, and one of them said to him, "Is everything all right? Why did this maniac come to you?" Being a prophet did not give you high social standing. You were just a nut. "You know the man and the sort of things he says," Jehu replies, "That's not true." They said, "Tell us!" Jehu said, "Here's what he told me, "This is what the Lord says. I anoint you king over Israel." And they quickly took their cloaks, spread them under him on the bare steps. Then they blew the trumpet and shouted, "Jehu is king."

Their immediate acclaim, and then the fact that as we'll see in a moment, the joining of the royal messengers when they come to question him suggests that there must have been some dissatisfaction with Joram's reign. Something that immediately people turn to Jehu and say, "You are the man. You're the man." The story continues with interest. Jehu mounts his chariot and starts back down the road across the Jordan, past the great city of Bethshan to the summer palace at Jezreel. Joram is looking down the road and sees this cloud of dust and says, "Who's that?" And the messenger says, "Well, it must be Jehu. He drives furiously." Someone has said that Jehu is the patron saint of all preachers, those who drive furiously.

But here he comes. "Okay, send a messenger out. Find out if he comes in peace." "Sir, the messenger has turned and is following him." "Another messenger." "Sir, this messenger has turned and following him." "Ahaziah, better get in your chariot. We better go out and meet this fella." When he came to them, this is what the king says. "Have you come in peace, Jehu." "How can there be peace?" Jehu replied, "As long as all the idolatry and witchcraft of your mother, Jezebel abound." Oops. Oops. Joram turned about and fled, calling out to Ahaziah, "Treachery, Ahaziah." And Jeroboam drew his bow shot, Joram.

This is verse 25 of chapter nine. Jehu said to Bidcar, his chariot officer, "Pick him up and throw him on the field that belonged to Naboth the Jereelite. Remember how you and I were riding together in chariots behind Ahab, his father, when the Lord spoke this prophecy against him? "Yesterday, I saw the blood of Naboth and the blood of his sons," declares the Lord, "And I will surely make you pay for it on this plot of ground." Why did Ahab die? Oh, well, because the Syrians shot an arrow in the air and it accidentally found him. No, he died because of Naboth vineyard.

Why does his son Joram die? Well, because there was a coup d'etat. The general decided he wanted to be king. No, he died because of Naboth's vineyard. As we talked when we were looking at that chapter 21 of 1 Kings, the possession of the land was a, in some ways, climactic recognition of Yahweh as covenant Lord. Yahweh owns the land. You don't have a right to sell it. You hold it as a gift from Him. And because Ahab allowed his wife Jezebel to simply run roughshod over that, he died. It is God with whom we have to do, not the various political or military forces of the world. This coup is not a coup. This coup is retribution for covenant breaking.

So then, the bloodletting continues. And in some ways, the first question is Ahaziah. When Ahaziah, King of Judah saw what had happened, he fled up the road toward Beth Haggan. Jehu chased him, shouting, "Kill him too!" They wounded him in his chariot on the way up to Gur near Ibleam, but he escaped to Megiddo and died there. God hadn't said anything about killing Ahaziah. God hadn't said anything about removing the dynasty of David. But Jehu is in a killing mood. And so we wonder. They return back to Jezreel, and Jezebel, brazens it out. I don't think there's any thought in her mind that she's going to escape, but she's going to go down fighting. "Is it Zimri?" She calls out.

She knows her history, doesn't she? She knows about that colonel of the chariotry, who tried to make himself king and how Omri, her father-in-law replaced him. "Is that what we have here, Jehu? Some military man deciding he's going to be king?" And Jehu says, "Anybody up there for the Lord?" And one of the eunuch sticks his head out. "Throw her out." And they do. And some of her blood spattered the wall and the horses as they trampled her underfoot. Jehu went in and ate and drank. "Let's have some lunch. Take care of that cursed woman," he said, "And bury her for she was a king's daughter." But when they went out to bury her, they found nothing except her skull, her feet and her hands.

When you counted corpses, you counted heads, or you counted hands or you counted feet. These are the vanquished. These are the conquered. And that's the picture here. For all that she accomplished, for all that she did, for all of the strength of her personality, she is defeated. And Jehu said, "This is the word of the Lord that he spoke through his servant, Elijah, the Tishbite, on the plot of ground at Jezreel. "Dogs will devour Jezebel's flesh. Jezebel's body will be like dung on the ground in the plot at Jezreel, so that no one will be able to say, this is Jezebel. No corpse to bury nothing Left."

Making yourself the enemy of Yahweh is not a wise thing, never has been, never will be. So the deaths at Jezreel have come. Joram, Ahaziah, Jezebel. But Jehu is not very well established. Jezreel is not the capital city. The capital city is Samaria. And in Samaria is the whole family, the rest of the family of Ahab. Children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren probably. What about them? How are we going to deal with that? Are we going to go down the road from Jezreel to Samaria and frontally attack that city? Well, it is a marvelously defensible position. It is a conical hill standing at the head of its valley, and Samaria is the walled crown around the top of that hill. There's no easy way to besiege that city. So what's he going to do? And you see the nerve of Jehu, as he sends the message and says, "Okay, you've got the family of Ahab there. Choose yourself a king from Ahab's descendants and send him out to fight me."

So it's a question of a contest of nerve. Is there anybody in Samaria who has nerve willing to confront Jehu's nerve? And the answer of course was no. They say, "Well, if two kings couldn't resist him, how can we?" So the palace administrator, you remember, I've argued that that's the prime minister, the city governor, the elders, the guardian sent this message. "We are your servants and we will do anything you say. We will not appoint anyone as king. You do whatever you think best." In the contest of nerves, Jehu is the runaway winner. And having them on the run like that, his message is, "If you're on my side and will obey me, take the heads of your master's sons and come to me in Jezreel by this time tomorrow."

Having got them down, he puts his foot on their necks and makes them knuckle under to him. And then when they arrive with these heads and this pile of heads build up there in Jezreel, he says to the people, "No, look, this is not your fault. This is my fault. I did this. I'll take the consequences." Again, a man with a lot of nerve. So in the 10th chapter, we're told that God honored Jehu because of what he'd done. Is it possible to do God's will in ways that are not God's ways? So, no problem in Samaria now. And he mounts his chariot. He probably has at least part of his army with him, maybe all of his army and heads for Samaria. Along the way, he meets some of Ahaziah's hapless relatives, kills them too.

And then he meets Jehonadab the Rechabite. We meet Jehonadab's descendants, a generation or two later in the book of Jeremiah. Jehonadab seems to have been a true conservative. He and his descendants did not live in cities. They did not drink alcohol. They were covenant keepers to the particular covenant that Jehonadab, the ancestor had demanded of them. And Jeremiah using them in a symbolic way, brings some of them into Jerusalem, sits them down and offers them alcohol.

And they say, "No, we wouldn't do that." "Why not?" "Because we entered into a covenant, a covenant that our father, Jehonadab gave to us. We wouldn't break the covenant." Jeremiah in effect says to Jehoachim, the king, "See, these people are keeping a covenant that their grandfather caused them to enter into. What about Israel and our covenant?" So Jehu meets Jehonadab. He says, "Is your heart is mine?" Jehonadab says, "Yeah, I don't like Baal any better than anybody else. Let's go." So they go. And again, the story is so interesting in the way in which Jehu is able to use a minority position, as it were. It's just him and his guards. But they get all the people into the temple of Baal because Jehu is going to show them what a real Baal worshiper looks like. They haven't a clue. They haven't a clue.

And in the temple of Baal, they're all murdered. Again, we say, did that have to happen? Maybe it did. But here's the issue. And again, forgive me, you're going to be glad to see the end of this course and not hear me say this anymore, but here is the power of this narrative. The narrator doesn't say, "Well, that was right or that was wrong." He just tells us the story and he says, "What do you think?" In many ways, this is the power of scripture. It forces us to moral reflection. It forces us to face difficult questions, uncertain questions, and to reason our way through. And your conclusion might not be the same as my conclusion, but we are both better people, because we've been forced to reflect morally on; is that a good thing to do or is that not a good thing to do? Hey, who cares? It's expedient. Just do it. No, let's think about this. Let's think about this.

And so the Baal temple is destroyed and turned into a latrine. Ai, ai, ai. They're not going to use that ground for a temple anymore, which is reminiscent of Moses as he smashed the golden calf to dust and poured the gold dust on water and made the people of Israel drink that gold dust water. That gold dust is not going to ever be used to make idols anymore. God's pretty thorough in His attack upon the gods of this world, because they're deadly. It is a matter of life and death. But he didn't destroy the bull idols. He destroyed Baal and his idols, but he did not destroy the Yahweh idols. Here again, these fine lines that we talk about. Well, they're Yahweh idols. They're okay. No, they're idols. And as idols, they're not okay because they tie Yahweh into this world as though he were someone who could be manipulated through this world. You can't do that. You can't do that.

So in chapter 10:30, the Lord said to Jehu, "Because you have done well in accomplishing what is right in my eyes and have done to the house of Ahab, all I had in mind for you to do, your descendants will sit on the throne of Israel to the fourth generation. No other dynasty in Israel lasted for four generations." Jehu's would and did. Yet Jehu was not careful to keep the law of God. That's a Hebrew phrase. To carefully do, to carefully keep. He was not careful to keep the law of the Lord the God of Israel with all his heart. Why not? He did not turn away from the sins of Jeroboam, which he had caused Israel to commit. And in those days, the Lord began to reduce the size of Israel. Hazael overpowered the Israelites throughout their territory. I think it's unquestionable that Hazael saw the weakness of a nation which is undergoing these kinds of upheavals and took his chance and experienced victory as a result.

It's always been interesting to me that a king would get rid of some of the idols, but not all of the idols. You would think that if he was going to incur the wrath of the other gods or incur the wrath of some of the people, that he would get rid of all of them. And I know you don't know what's in the heart, but is there any indication in that text as to why they weren't complete? If they're going go to go through the trouble of getting rid of 9/10 of the gods, they why not get rid of all of them, or idols, I should say?

Well, I think that's it. I think they're seeing the idol and the God as identical. "Whoa, we want to get rid of Baal, so we got to get rid of Baal idols. Whoa, we want to get rid of Asherah, so we got to get rid of Asherah's. Do we want to get rid of Yahweh? No." They have not made that distinction. Yahweh is different from all the rest. You cannot represent him as an idol. And I think for most of them, that thought was just right beyond them. Well, why? "So yeah, this is a battle of personalities and we're going to get rid of all those gods and their idols, but we're not going to get rid of Yahweh and His idol."