Men’s Study & Coffee | April 17, 2018 | 2 Kings, Week Fourteen (*notes from “Be Distinct” by Warren Wiersbe) 2 Kings 14 | Kings and Assassinations Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young,” wrote poet W. H. Auden. Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, defined history as “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” The history recorded in these five chapters seems to agree with Auden and Gibbon, for it reeks of selfish intrigue, bloodshed, moral decay, and repeated rebellion against the law of the Lord. Ancient Israel wasn’t much different from society today. Not one king of Israel encouraged his people to repent and seek the Lord; and in Judah, Amaziah and both committed acts of arrogant ambition that brought judgment from God. When Jeroboam II became king of Israel in 782 B.C., little did the people realize that in sixty years, the kingdom would be no more. As we look at nine rulers, we can gain some practical insights into the will and ways of God as well as the terrible wages of sin. 1. Amaziah, a presumptuous king (2 Kings 14:1–20; 2 Chron. 25) Amaziah was the ninth king of Judah. and the son of Joash (Jehoash), the “boy king,” who in his later years turned away from the Lord, killed God’s prophet, and was himself assassinated (2 Chron. 24:15–26). Amaziah made an excellent beginning, but he later abandoned the Lord and was also assassinated (14:17–20). He saw to it that the men were executed who had killed his father, and he obeyed Deuteronomy 24:16 by judging only the offenders and not their families. Had he continued to obey God’s Word, his life and reign would have been much different. Consider some of his sins. Unbelief (14:7; 25:5–13). Amaziah decided to attack and regain territory that had been lost (8:20–22). The venture was a good one, but the way he went about it was definitely wrong. He took a census and found he had 300,000 men, but instead of trusting the Lord to use these men, he hired 100,000 mercenaries from Israel to increase his forces. His faith was in numbers and not in the Lord (Ps. 20:7), but even worse, the soldiers he hired came from apostate Israel where the people worshiped the golden calves. God sent a prophet to rebuke the king and warn him that the Lord was not with the kingdom of Israel, so the hired soldiers would only bring defeat. “But if you go, be gone! Be strong in battle! Even so, God shall make you fall before the enemy; for God has power to help and to overthrow” (25:8). The prophet was a bit sarcastic, but he made his point. One of the recurring themes in Israel’s history is their sin of forming alliances with the ungodly because they didn’t have faith in the Lord. Solomon married heathen wives and by this entered into treaties with his neighbors, but his wives influenced him to worship idols (1 Kings 11). King married , a Phoenician princess and a worshiper of Baal (1 Kings 16:30–33), and this brought Baal worship into the kingdom. King allied with Ahab to fight the Syrians and was almost killed. Jehoshaphat also entered into a business partnership with King Ahaziah, but the Lord broke it up by destroying Jehoshaphat’s fleet. “Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers” (2 Cor. 6:14) is an admonition that needs to be heard and heeded by the church today. It’s not by imitating the world and uniting with the world, but by being different from the world that we manifest the power and grace of God and accomplish His will. According to 2 Chron. 25:2, Amaziah was not wholehearted in his relationship to the Lord (see NIV), and this revealed itself in the way he argued with the prophet about the will of God (25:9). The king was unwilling to send the mercenaries home because it would have meant forfeiting the one hundred talents of silver he had paid to the king of Israel. This amounted to nearly four tons of silver. Amaziah was “counting the cost” and adjusting his priorities, hoping he could change God’s mind. The prophet wisely replied that God could give him much more if he would only trust Him and obey His will (Matt. 6:33). If we would seek the Lord’s will before we rush into disobedience, we would avoid a great deal of trouble; but even after we change our minds and decide to obey the Lord, often there are still painful consequences to endure. The soldiers returned to Israel very angry because of the way they had been treated. Why were they angry? For one thing, they lost an opportunity to profit from the spoils of battle. Furthermore, who was the king of Judah to say that God thought more highly of Judah’s soldiers than He did the army of ? What an embarrassment for these brave mercenaries to be sent home empty-handed, having never fought the battle! How could they explain to the king and their friends back home that the army had been declared unclean and rejected? Their solution was to give vent to their anger by attacking some of the border cities in northern Judah. They killed three thousand people and took the spoils as their compensation (25:13). Because he finally obeyed the Lord, Amaziah’s army defeated the Edomites. They killed ten thousand men in the Valley of Salt, where David had won a great victory (1 Chron. 18:12). Then they destroyed ten thousand prisoners of war by casting them down from the heights of the city of Sela (Petra) that was cut right out of the mountain (Obad. 1–4). So elated was Amaziah with his achievement that he renamed the city “Joktheel,” which means “God destroys” (14:7). Idolatry (25:14–16). The saintly Scottish minister Andrew Bonar said, “Let us be as watchful after the victory as before the battle,” an admonition that King Amaziah desperately needed to hear and heed. The Lord Jehovah had given His servant an outstanding victory over a strong enemy in a difficult place, and yet Amaziah took back to Judah the gods of the defeated enemy (2 Chron. 25:14–16)! Surely the king of Judah didn’t think that by taking these idols he would paralyze the Edomites and prevent future wars! Every Jew was taught that the Lord Jehovah was one God and the only true and living God, and therefore the gods of the nations were nothing (Deut. 6:4–5; Ps. 115). Worshiping idols was a direct violation of the Law of Moses (Ex. 20:1–6), and worshiping the gods of a defeated enemy was simply unreasonable. After all, what did those gods accomplish for the Edomites? Yet Amaziah began to worship the gods of Edom, offer them sacrifices, and consult them. When the Lord sent His messenger to the king to warn him, Amaziah interrupted the prophet and threatened to kill him if he continued to speak. But the prophet had one last word: God would destroy the king for his sin. In fact, God would permit the king to destroy himself! The greatest judgment God can send to people is to let them have their own way. Pride (14:8–14; 25:17–24). Amaziah defeated the Edomites because he obeyed the Lord, but then the Edomites defeated Amaziah when he took their gods home with him. Inflated by his great success and unconcerned about his great sin, Amaziah looked for other worlds to conquer and decided to challenge Joash (Jehoash), king of Israel. He not only ignored the warning of the prophet God sent, but he forgot the words of his ancestor Solomon, “Before destruction the heart of man is haughty, and before honor is humility” (Prov. 18:12). Even King Jehoash warned him that his pride would ruin him (14:10), but Amaziah was bent on defeating Israel and becoming the ruler of a united kingdom. Jehoash’s reply (14:9; 25:18) reminds us of the parable Jotham spoke (Judg. 9:7–20), and both of them deal with pride and judgment. Amaziah’s problem was pride: he saw himself as a strong cedar, when in reality he was only a weak thistle that could be crushed by a passing wild beast. The truly humble person sees things as God sees them and doesn’t live on illusions. Pride blinds the mind, distorts the vision, and so inflates the ego that the person can’t tell truth from fiction. Rejecting a second warning from the Lord, Amaziah invaded Israel where his army was soundly defeated. He was taken captive fifteen miles from and went from the palace to the prison. The army of Israel invaded Judah and destroyed six hundred feet of the wall of Jerusalem, leaving the city vulnerable to future attacks. They also took treasures from the palace and from the temple of the Lord, and they even took some of the leaders as hostages. King Amaziah was in exile in Samaria for fifteen years (14:17) and then returned to Jerusalem briefly as coregent with his son (14:21; 26:1, 3). But his idolatry disturbed some of the leaders and they formed a conspiracy to assassinate him. He fled to Lachish where he was captured and killed (14:18–20; 25:27). Amaziah is a tragic figure in Jewish history. He was presented with great opportunities and experienced great help from the Lord, but he was a double-minded man who didn’t wholeheartedly serve the Lord. He had his own agenda and didn’t take time to seek the mind of the Lord. “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall” (Prov. 16:18). 2. Jeroboam, a prosperous king (14:23–29) The record now turns from Judah to Israel and to Jeroboam II who had the longest reign of any of Israel’s kings, forty-one years. He was not a good king when it came to spiritual matters, but he brought prosperity to the nation and delivered it from its enemies. Even back in those ancient days, the average citizen didn’t care about the character of the nation’s leaders so long as the people had food on their tables, money in their purses, and no fear of being invaded by their enemies. Thanks to Assyria’s victories over Syria, both Israel and Judah were finally relieved of the bondage of that persistent enemy and both had opportunity to use their wealth and manpower for building instead of battling. Israel was able to drive the Syrians out of the border outposts and Jeroboam also recovered the territory that had been lost to Syria. The kingdom of Israel reached the dimensions achieved in the days of Solomon (vv. 25 and 28; 1 Kings 8:65). The Lord permitted these victories, not because the people or their king deserved them, but because He had pity on His people who were suffering under the rule of Syria (14:26; see Ex. 2:23–25). The prosperity of Israel was only a veneer that covered sins and crimes that were an abomination in the sight of the Lord. The Prophets Amos (1:1) and Hosea (1:1) ministered during Jeroboam’s reign and warned that judgment was coming. Judgment did come in 722 B.C., when the Assyrians invaded Israel, deported many of the Jewish people, and imported Gentiles from other conquered nations to mix with the Israelites. This policy eventually produced a mixed race, part Jew and part Gentile, as well as a hybrid religion with its own temple and priesthood on Mount Gerizim (John 4:20–22). After the , the orthodox Jews who returned to Judah would have nothing to do with the Samaritans (Ezra 4:1–4; Neh. 2:19–20; see John 4:9). What were the sins of this prosperous kingdom? For one thing, the rich were getting richer at the expense of the poor, who were exploited and abused. The wealthy landowners barely cared for their slaves, and the courts disobeyed the law and decided cases in favor of the rich and not in fairness to the poor. In the midst of this corruption, the leaders practiced their “religion,” attended services, and brought their sacrifices (Amos 2:1–8; 4:1–5). While the wealthy men and their wives lived in luxury, the poor were downtrodden and robbed of their civil rights (Amos 6:1–7; Hos. 12:8). The “religious” crowd longed for “the day of the Lord” to come, thinking that this momentous event would bring even greater glory to Israel (Amos 5:18–27). The people didn’t realize that “the day of the Lord” actually meant divine judgment on the nation, for God’s judgment begins with His own people (1 Peter 4:17). Israel was given to idolatry, which led to moral decay and worldly corruption (Hos. 6:4; 7:8; 9:9; 11:7; 13:2). Jeroboam II ruled from 793 to 753, and in 722 B.C. the Assyrians invaded Israel and brought to an end the nation of Israel.

2 Kings 14 | Study Questions: 1. What happened when Amaziah, king of Judah, picked a fight with Israel under king Jehoash? (2Kings 14:11-14)

2. Who was the prophet who prophesied that the boundaries of Israel from Leo Hamath to the Sea of the Arabah would be restored to Israel? (2Kings 14:25; see 1:1 and compare!)

Discussion Questions: 1. What is the most important thing, the Big Idea?

2. What is a central truth I need to know?

3. Why do I need to know it?

4. What do I need to do?

5. Why do I need to do it?

6. How can I remember it?