Chapter 24: From Promise to Exile
How the kingdom of Judah failed to bring about God's promise
The story of Israel is the story of God working out His threefold promise to Abram: to give him a land, to make him into a great people, and to bless the whole world through him and his descendants. This promise is the outworking of God’s earlier promise to Adam and Eve that He would one day send someone who would crush the head of the serpent – a promise that the effect of the curse of sin would one day be undone.
As we have travelled with Israel through this story, we have seen time and again how God has remained faithful and has consistently worked out His promise. Out of Abram, He brought about the people of Israel. Israel then became the bearer of the promise – one day the whole world would be blessed through them as a nation. As Israel inhabits the promised land, they are to be a light to the nations around them, shining forth the glory of God to their neighbours.
Eventually, Israel gets kings to rule her as a nation, and as we have seen, the kings themselves reject God in various ways, with Solomon turning away from God and rejecting God’s rules for how kings are to rule. As we saw in the previous chapter, as a result of this sin, Israel is split in two. The northern kingdom retains the name Israel but remains steadfastly rebellious against God. Not a single one of Israel’s kings uses their authority to promote the true worship of God. At last, God’s patience with Israel runs out, and He sends the Assyrian empire to conquer Israel. This showed once and for all that God rejected the nation of Israel, and the promise that God would bless the whole world through Abraham’s offspring now passes to the southern kingdom of Judah. So can Judah be a kingdom good enough to be God’s blessing to the world? Let’s have a look at some of Judah’s kings to help us find out. We jump into the story at the third of Judah’s kings, Asa, the first king who is regarded as good.
Asa: He banished the pagan priests from the land and removed false idols from the land. He also deposed his grandmother, Maacah, and destroyed the idol she made for the false god Asherah, and burned it. The Bible says his “heart was entirely with the Lord as long as he lived,” and yet, we also read that the “high places did not disappear.” (1 Kings 15:14) This was a way of saying Asa could not completely rid Judah of idolatry.
Jehoshaphat: He was the son of Asa, and he too followed the Lord “Unceasingly” (1 Kings 22:43). But he too failed to turn people’s hearts back to God, and the people continued to offer sacrifices on the high places – the places where other gods were worshipped.
Joash: Even though Joash was only 7 years old when he became king, he wholeheartedly served the Lord. The Bible tells us that this was because the priest Jehoiada guided him. (There is a lesson here about the influence godly adults have on the faith formation of children.) He also enacted reforms to make sure that the temple priests did not abuse their positions of power and ensured that the temple in Jerusalem would be repaired. But even during his reign, the high places did not disappear, and people continued to offer sacrifices to false gods.
Amaziah: Amaziah was the son of Joash, and he too is regarded as a good king in Judah. However, when Amaziah is introduced in 2 Kings 14:3, the author adds this note “He did what was right in the Lord’s eyes, though not like David his father did.” Here we see that there is a decline even in the good kings of Judah. Amaziah seems to have been an arrogant king, and sadly, the only thing Amaziah seems to be known for in 2 Kings 14 is that he made war with the king of Israel (confusingly called Joash). Amaziah lost the battle and as a result Jerusalem’s defensive wall was torn down, and the treasures held in the palace and in the Temple were taken away.
Uzziah (also known as Azariah): He followed his father Amaziah as king and he too did right in the Lord’s eyes, just like his father. However, 2 Kings 15:4 tells us that the people still continued to sacrifice to other gods. Uzziah had the notable distinction that the Lord afflicted him with leprosy and as a result for much of his reign his son Jotham served as regent in his place. This gives us a hint that even though Israel now had 3 good kings in a row, just like the judges before them, they get progressively worse as time goes on.
Jotham: Jotham too worshipped the Lord, but still the high places were not destroyed. The author of Kings adds this haunting note toward the end of Jotham’s story: “It was at that time that the Lord began to unleash Rezin, the king of Aram, and Pekah, son of Remaliah, against Judah.” This foreshadows that the “good times” in Judah were about to end, trouble was on the horizon and things were about to change.
Ahaz: Ahaz was Jotham’s son and he was an evil king. He did everything that God’s kings were not to do. The first thing we learn about him is that he offered his own child as a burnt offering to the gods of the land. This is exactly the practice the people of Canaan were guilty of that led to the Lord using Israel to drive them out. Even the king of Judah now looked no different from the people of Canaan. Ahaz also used the offerings given to God in the temple to pay the king of Assyria to protect Judah during a war against Israel. Thankfully, Ahaz’ reign was short and his son Hezekiah replaced him as king.
Hezekiah: Hezekiah was a standout king. He returned to the pure worship of the Lord in the same way David did. (2 Kings 18:3). What made Hezekiah different from the previous good kings is that he removed the high places, he shattered the idols, and cut down the idolatrous Asherah poles. Interestingly, he also destroyed the bronze snake Moses made (see chapter 15). This snake had become an idol in Judah, and people started offering incense to it as a god. Hezekiah worshipped God and trusted God, and we are told that there was no one like him among all the kings of Judah (2 Kings 18:5). The most notable thing about Hezekiah is that unlike the kings before him, when Assyria comes to make war against Jerusalem, he does not write to the other kings around him to come to his aid. Instead, he trusts in the Lord. He sees the enemy army, and his immediate response is to pray to God. Remarkably, God answers and declares that He will save Jerusalem, and the angel of the Lord destroys the enemy army in the middle of the night.
Could it be that Hezekiah is the king of promise who would bring blessing to the whole world? Unfortunately not. Because as wonderful as Hezekiah was, as terrible was his son Manasseh.
Manasseh: From a spiritual perspective, Manasseh was by far the worst of Israel’s kings. He not only rebuilt all the high places and altars to Baal that his father had destroyed, but he also built altars and areas of worship inside the temple in Jerusalem. He offered his own child as a burnt offering, reintroduced the practice of divination and consulting spirits with a medium, and put an idol of Asherah in the temple. In 2 Kings 21:9, we are told that Manasseh misled Judah and provoked the Lord’s people into doing even more evil in God’s eyes than the Canaanites that lived there before the Lord. In a few years, Manasseh undid all that made God’s people distinct from the nations. Instead of being a blessing to the nations, Judah became spiritually worse than the nations. The light they were supposed to shine became a shadow instead.
As a result of all this evil, God declares that Judah too will be destroyed, just like Israel was. God delayed in sending this destruction for quite a number of years. After Manasseh, his son Amon reigned for 2 years, and after him, Josiah became king.
Josiah: Josiah is remarkable in that he came to be king as an 8-year-old, but started his reign in a period of extreme spiritual evil. Nevertheless, he did what was right in the Lord’s sight, following after David. As he starts his reign, he organizes for the Temple to be restored, and as the workmen start working, they discover the book of the Law. As the king hears the words of God’s law, he realizes how far Judah has turned from the Lord and institutes a number of religious reforms throughout Judah. He destroys the idols, removes the idolatrous priests, destroys the houses of the temple prostitutes that had used the temple as a place to ply their trade. He destroys all the places where the people worshipped the false gods, has the priests of the evil gods killed, and reinstates the Passover feast in Judah.
We are told:
Neither before nor after Josiah was there a king like him who turned to the Lord as he did – with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his strength, in accordance with the Law of Moses. (2 Kings 23:25).
But even though Judah’s king was dedicated to the Lord, it was, unfortunately, too late for Judah as a whole. In the very next verse, we read:
Nevertheless, the Lord did not turn away from the heat of his fierce anger, which burned against Judah because of all that Manasseh had done to arouse his anger. So the Lord said, ‘I will remove Judah also from my presence, as I removed Israel, and I will reject Jerusalem, the city I chose, and this temple about which I said, “My name shall be there.”’
After Josiah, the next four kings end up being bad kings, and in the end, Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, invades Jerusalem, defeats Judah, and carries off Jerusalem’s people into exile. During the battle, the temple is destroyed, the city wall is torn down, and Jerusalem is left in ruins. In the end, Judah, just like Israel, failed to be the vehicle of God’s blessing.
At this point, it is worth remembering the promise God made to Abraham: He promised to make Abraham into a great nation – the nation of Israel, he promised to give Israel the promised land of Canaan, and he promised to bless the whole world through Abraham’s offspring. God specifies that this would one day happen through someone from David’s line, a king who would sit forever on Israel’s throne. Now the nation of Israel had been carried off and displaced by Assyria, and the nation of Judah had been exiled and carried off into Babylon. The people had been ejected from the promised land, and there was no king on Israel’s throne.
How could God possibly fulfill his promises now? Had he changed his mind about blessing the whole world and undoing the curse of sin? Is he done with the line of David?
That is a story for next time.