Ahaz was twenty years old when he began to reign, and he reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem. He didn’t do that which was right in Yahweh’s eyes, like David his father, but he walked in the ways of the kings of Israel, and also made molten images for the Baals. Moreover he burned incense in the valley of the son of Hinnom, and burned his children in the fire, according to the abominations of the nations whom Yahweh cast out before the children of Israel. He sacrificed and burned incense in the high places, and on the hills, and under every green tree.
Therefore Yahweh his God delivered him into the hand of the king of Syria. They struck him, and carried away from him a great multitude of captives, and brought them to Damascus. He was also delivered into the hand of the king of Israel, who struck him with a great slaughter. For Pekah the son of Remaliah killed in Judah one hundred twenty thousand in one day, all of them valiant men, because they had forsaken Yahweh, the God of their fathers. Zichri, a mighty man of Ephraim, killed Maaseiah the king’s son, Azrikam the ruler of the house, and Elkanah who was next to the king. The children of Israel carried away captive of their brothers two hundred thousand women, sons, and daughters, and also took away much plunder from them, and brought the plunder to Samaria. But a prophet of Yahweh was there, whose name was Oded; and he went out to meet the army that came to Samaria, and said to them, “Behold, because Yahweh, the God of your fathers, was angry with Judah, he has delivered them into your hand, and you have slain them in a rage which has reached up to heaven. Now you intend to degrade the children of Judah and Jerusalem as male and female slaves for yourselves. Aren’t there even with you trespasses of your own against Yahweh your God? Now hear me therefore, and send back the captives that you have taken captive from your brothers, for the fierce wrath of Yahweh is on you.” Then some of the heads of the children of Ephraim, Azariah the son of Johanan, Berechiah the son of Meshillemoth, Jehizkiah the son of Shallum, and Amasa the son of Hadlai, stood up against those who came from the war, and said to them, “You must not bring in the captives here, for you intend that which will bring on us a trespass against Yahweh, to add to our sins and to our guilt; for our guilt is great, and there is fierce wrath against Israel.”
So the armed men left the captives and the plunder before the princes and all the assembly. The men who have been mentioned by name rose up and took the captives, and with the plunder clothed all who were naked among them, dressed them, gave them sandals, and gave them something to eat and to drink, anointed them, carried all the feeble of them on donkeys, and brought them to Jericho, the city of palm trees, to their brothers. Then they returned to Samaria.
At that time king Ahaz sent to the kings of Assyria to help him. For again the Edomites had come and struck Judah, and carried away captives. The Philistines also had invaded the cities of the lowland, and of the South of Judah, and had taken Beth Shemesh, Aijalon, Gederoth, Soco with its villages, Timnah with its villages, and also Gimzo and its villages; and they lived there. For Yahweh brought Judah low because of Ahaz king of Israel, because he acted without restraint in Judah and trespassed severely against Yahweh. Tilgath Pilneser king of Assyria came to him, and gave him trouble, but didn’t strengthen him. For Ahaz took away a portion out of Yahweh’s house, and out of the house of the king and of the princes, and gave it to the king of Assyria; but it didn’t help him.
In the time of his distress, he trespassed yet more against Yahweh, this same king Ahaz. For he sacrificed to the gods of Damascus, which struck him. He said, “Because the gods of the kings of Syria helped them, so I will sacrifice to them, that they may help me.” But they were the ruin of him, and of all Israel. Ahaz gathered together the vessels of God’s house, and cut the vessels of God’s house in pieces, and shut up the doors of Yahweh’s house; and he made himself altars in every corner of Jerusalem. In every city of Judah he made high places to burn incense to other gods, and provoked Yahweh, the God of his fathers, to anger.
Now the rest of his acts, and all his ways, first and last, behold, they are written in the book of the kings of Judah and Israel. Ahaz slept with his fathers, and they buried him in the city, even in Jerusalem, because they didn’t bring him into the tombs of the kings of Israel; and Hezekiah his son reigned in his place.
Geneva Bible translators 1599 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 19, 21, 23, 27 Or, predecessor.
Or, predecessor.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain On vv1–27 2Ch 28:1 Ahaz [was] twenty years old when he…
2Ch 28:1 Ahaz [was] twenty years old when he began to reign, and he reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem: but he did not [that which was] right in the sight of the LORD, like David his father:
Ver. 1. Ahaz was twenty years old.] And reigned but sixteen years; and yet when he died, Hezekiah his son was twenty-five years old. {2Ch 29:1} Some {a} say this was extraordinary, and render this reason: Ahaz so young a father, as Elizabeth an old mother, should have hoped in Emmanuel, born of a virgin. Others {b} solve it thus: The beginning of that reign, when Ahaz was but twenty years old, is to be referred to Jotham, his father; for Ahaz was twenty years old when he - namely Jotham - began to reign: as Jehoiachin was eight years old when he - namely Jehoiakim his father - began to reign: for Jehoiachin was eighteen when he himself began to reign. {2Ch 36:9 2Ki 24:8}
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Like David his father.] No, nor like either Jotham, his immediate father, or Hezekiah, his son and successor; betwixt which two Ahaz standeth here in the history, as a thorn between two lilies, or as a collier between a couple of fullers, himself being so much the worse and more wicked, by how much better they were, and more virtuous.
{a} Brought. Consent.
{b} Dr Gouge.
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain On vv2, 5, 9, 10, 15, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23 To worship his Baalim, or false gods, in and…
To worship his Baalim, or false gods, in and by them.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Matthew Henry 1710 · Public Domain On vv1, 6, 16 Never surely had a man greater opportunity of doing…
Never surely had a man greater opportunity of doing well than Ahaz had, finding things in a good posture, the kingdom rich and strong and religion established; and yet here we have him in these few verses, 1. Wretchedly corrupted and debauched. He had had a good education given him and a good example set him: but parents cannot give grace to their children. All the instructions he had were lost upon him: He did not that which was right in the sight of the Lord (Ch2 28:1), nay, he did a great deal that was wrong, a wrong to God, to his own soul, and to his people; he walked in the way of the revolted Israelites and the devoted Canaanites, made molten images and worshipped them, contrary to the second commandment; nay, he made them for Baalim, contrary to the first commandment. he forsook the temple of the Lord and sacrificed and burnt incense on the hills, as if they would place him nearer heaven, and under every green tree, as if they would signify the protection and influence of heaven by their shade and dropping. To complete his wickedness, as one perfectly divested of all natural affection as well as religion and perfectly devoted to the service and interest of the great enemy of mankind, he burnt his children in the fire to Moloch (Ch2 28:3), not thinking it enough to dedicate them to that infernal fiend by causing them to pass through the fire. See what an absolute sway the prince of the power of the air bears among the children of disobedience. 2. Wretchedly spoiled and made a prey of. When he forsook God, and at a vast expense put himself under the protection of false gods, God, who of right was his God, delivered him into the hands of his enemies, Ch2 28:5. (1.) The Syrians insulted him and triumphed over him, beat him in the field and carried away a great many of his people into captivity. (2.) The king of Israel, though an idolater too, was made a scourge to him, and smote him with a great slaughter. The people suffered by these judgments: their blood was shed, their country wasted, their families ruined; for when they had a good king, though they did corruptly (Ch2 27:2), yet then his goodness sheltered them; but now that they had a bad one all the defence had departed from them and an inundation of judgments broke in upon them. Those that knew not their happiness in the foregoing reign were taught to value it by the miseries of this reign.
Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible (1708–1710) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain On vv5–23 Wherefore the Lord his God delivered him into the…
Wherefore the Lord his God delivered him into the hand of the king of Syria,.... Whose name was Rezin, Kg2 16:5, though that is an after expedition to this, which is there related. The Lord is called the God of Ahaz, because he was so of right; he had dominion over him, and ought to have been worshipped by him; and, besides, he was so by virtue of the national covenant between God and the people Ahaz was king of; and moreover, Ahaz professed he was his God, though in an hypocritical manner, and he forsook the true worship of him:
and they smote him, and carried away a great multitude of them captives, and brought them to Damascus; whereas in a later expedition, related in Kg2 16:5, they did not succeed:
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and he was also delivered into the hand of the king of Israel; whose name was Pekah:
who smote him with a great slaughter; as is next related.
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley 1765 · Public Domain On vv1, 5, 6, 9, 10, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20, 22 Ahaz reigns ill, ver. 1-4. Is smitten by the…
Ahaz reigns ill, ver. 1-4. Is smitten by the Syrians and Israelites, ver. 5-8. who send back the captives they had taken, ver. 9-15. Ahaz sends for help to the king of Asyria, but in vain, ver. 16-21. Yet he continues in idolatry, ver. 22-25. and dies, ver. 26, 27.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain On vv1, 3, 5, 6, 9, 16, 21, 23, 24, 27 Ahaz succeeds his father Jotham, and reigns wickedly for
CHAPTER XXVIII
Ahaz succeeds his father Jotham, and reigns wickedly for
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sixteen years, 1.
He restores idolatry in its grossest forms, 2-4;
and is delivered Into the hands of the kings of Israel and
Syria, 5.
Pekah slays one hundred and twenty thousand Jews in one day,
and carries away captive two hundred thousand of the people,
whom, at the instance of Oded the prophet, they restore to
liberty, and send home, clothed and fed, 6-15.
Ahaz sends to the king of Assyria for help against the
Edomites, Philistines, c., from whom he receives no effectual
succour, 16-21.
He sins yet more, spoils and shuts up the temple of God, and
propagates idolatry throughout the land, 22-25.
A reference to has acts, his death, and burial, 26, 27.
NOTES ON CHAP. XXVIII
Verse 1. Ahaz was twenty years old] For the difficulties in this chronology, 2Kg 16:1.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson 1811 · Public Domain On vv1, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 14, 15, 16, 20, 22, 23 2Ch 28:1-4. He did not that which was right…
2Ch 28:1-4. He did not that which was right in the sight of the Lord —
Nay, he did a great deal that was wrong, very wrong, and that toward God, toward his own soul, and toward his people. He walked in the way of the revolted Israelites, and the devoted Canaanites; made molten images and worshipped them, contrary to the second commandment; nay, he made them for Baalim, contrary to the first. He forsook the temple of the Lord, and sacrificed, and burned incense on the hills, and under every green tree, in imitation of the neighbouring idolaters. And, to complete his wickedness, as one perfectly divested of all natural affection, as well as of all religion, and perfectly devoted to the service and interest of the great enemy of mankind, he burned his children in the fire to Moloch — Not thinking it enough to dedicate them to that infernal fiend, by causing them to pass through the fire. Such is the absolute sway which the prince of the power of the air sometimes exercises over the children of disobedience! But of his true character and complicated wickedness, see notes on 2Ki 16:1-4; 2Ki 16:10-18.
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A.M. 3263. — B.C. 741.
Ahaz reigns ill, 2Ch 28:1-4. Is smitten by the Syrians and Israelites, 2Ch 28:5-8; who send back the captives they had taken, 2Ch 28:9-15. Ahaz sends for help to the king of Assyria, but in vain, 2Ch 28:16-21. Yet he continues in idolatry, 2Ch 28:22-25; and dies, 2Ch 28:26, 2Ch 28:27.
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Albert Barnes 1834 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 23, 24 This chapter is supplemental in character, The writer seems…
This chapter is supplemental in character, The writer seems to assume that the narrative of Kings (marginal reference) is known, and is mainly anxious to add points which the author of that narrative has omitted.
Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary 1859 · Public Domain On vv3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 27 Benennon, "the son of Ennom," 4 K. xvi. ---…
Benennon, "the son of Ennom," 4 K. xvi. --- Consecrated. Heb. "burnt." H.
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown 1871 · Public Domain On vv5, 7, 8, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 22 the Lord . . . delivered him into the…
the Lord . . . delivered him into the hand of the king of Syria . . . he was also delivered into the hand of the King of Israel--These verses, without alluding to the formation of a confederacy between the Syrian and Israelitish kings to invade the kingdom of Judah, or relating the commencement of the war in the close of Jotham's reign (Kg2 15:37), give the issue only of some battles that were fought in the early part of the campaign.
delivered him . . . smote him . . . he was also delivered--that is, his army, for Ahaz was not personally included in the number either of the slain or the captives. The slaughter of one hundred twenty thousand in one day was a terrible calamity, which, it is (Ch2 28:6) expressly said, was inflicted as a judgment on Judah, "because they had forsaken the Lord God of their fathers." Among the slain were some persons of distinction:
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Daniel D. Whedon 1874 · Public Domain On vv23–24 23. He sacrificed unto the gods of Damascus —…
23. He sacrificed unto the gods of Damascus — This occurred during the progress of the Syrian wars, and before the fall of Damascus. Compare note on 2Ki_16:10. Among the gods of Damascus which Ahaz worshipped were Rimmon (2Ki_5:18) and Hadad.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27 Ch. 2Ch_28:1-4 (= 2Ki_16:1-4). Ahaz succeeds and practises Idolatry
Ch. 2Ch_28:1-4 (= 2Ki_16:1-4). Ahaz succeeds and practises Idolatry
1. Ahaz] The full form of the name is Jehoahaz, the “Ja-u-ḥa-zi” of an inscription of Tiglath-pileser III.
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twenty years old] As he died sixteen years later leaving a son of twenty-five (2Ch_29:1), the reading of Pesh. “twenty-five years old” is more suitable and may be right, but the coincidence would be strange if three kings in succession ascended the throne at twenty-five years of age (cp. 2Ch_27:1 and 2Ch_29:1).
he did not that which was right] It is not said of Ahaz as of Manasseh, “he did that which was evil” (2Ch_33:2).
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers 1878 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 THE REIGN OF AHAZ. (Comp. 2 Kings 16)
XXVIII.
THE REIGN OF AHAZ. (Comp. 2 Kings 16)
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PRELIMINARY NOTICES OF THE LENGTH AND CHARACTER OF THE REIGN (2Ch_28:1-4).
(1) Ahaz was twenty years old.—The verse is identical with 2Ki_16:2; LXX., Syriac, and Arabic, “twenty and five.” (See 2Ch_29:1.)
The Lord.—Add his God. So some MSS. and Syriac; also Kings. The Assyrian monuments call Ahaz Yahuhazi, i.e., Jehoahaz, of which Ahaz may be a familiar abridgment. (Comp. Nathan, Jonathan.)
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27 This chapter is paralleled by 2Ki 16. There is…
This chapter is paralleled by 2Ki 16. There is a great deal gained in this case by addition on the two accounts, however. Our chapter contains the wickedness by idolatry of Ahaz, the severe punishment thereof by the King of Syria, the Syrian captivity of Judah, and the release of the latter so unexpectedly (vers. 1-15); other punishments by war of Ahaz, his hardened heart, greater sins, and end (vers. 16-27). The united unsuccessful "attacks of Syria and Israel, under Rezin and Pekah respectively, on Jerusalem, and attempt at the siege of Ahaz there; the Syrian recovery of Elath, and expulsion of the Jews thence, and the Assyrian taking of Damascus, (2Ki_16:5-9) are, though so full of interest, all omitted from our chapter.
Ahaz. The signification of this word is "graspng." Isaiah, (Isa_7:1 Isa_38:8) Hosea, and Micah were contemporaries of Ahaz, whoso reign may be set down at B.C. 744-728. His name shows in the Assyrian tablets, Jahukhazi, or Jehoahaz.
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HOMILETICS.
Vers. 1-27.
This King Ahaz:" the "progress" of a king literally devoid of religion.
In such words, the significance of which no one can mistake, is the royal person who is the chief subject of this chapter pointed to (ver. 22). Ahaz is the bad son of a good father. He is a type of those who begin badly, who are untaught by experience, who grow worse by suffering and adversity, and who end by maddening themselves, to their own destruction! The career of his father Jotham is written, apparently, without a fault, and without a reflection to be cast on him; the career of this son is written, apparently, without one redeeming feature to be put to his account. The contents of this chapter look like a series of pictures, marking a royal progress in wrongness, and which, in the issue, led to a very insanity of irreligion! In this progress notice how the king
I FORSOOK THE RIGHT MODEL. To be not "like his father David" was at once to want the stamp of a true royalty. To be "like the kings of Israel," the schismatic line, was to be stamped with the stamp of a base and ungenuine royalty. This description (ver. 2) of "the ways" in which Judah"s king "walked" was, indeed, on the other hand, a fearful characterization for that same schismatic line of Israel. For Ahaz, however, thus to be, and be described, as at the beginning of his reign, when he was already arrived at the twenty-fifth year of his age, was an evil, anyway, of that worst calamity, viz. hope for an altered future almost hopelessly shut out! The augury proved too true. Ahaz counts for nothing Moses, as well as "his father David." He systematically "framed mischief by" his own "law," and the law of heathendom. He flagrantly breaks, and teaches the breaking of, the first two of the ever-venerable ten commandments that vital Heaven-graven foundation-code of legislation of his kingdom. Sacrilege, idolatry, and each most heathenish practice and rite of un-"natural religion" he honours and follows. He gets as far as it is possible to get from "fearing" and "loving" and "serving" the Lord God of his fathers "with all the heart, and mind, and soul, and strength." For a young man, for any man to forsake the right model, the one Example, is to leave himself to pick among many, uncertain in every direction, except in the one certainty of all being wrong! One only safe right rule is ours to follow; "If the Lord be God, follow him". (1Ki_18:21) Examples abound, but absolute safety and rightness can be found in one only.
II NEGLECTED WARNING. The warning which Ahaz neglected, with a long succession, to say nothing of all those who may have gone before, was not merely warning written, preached loudly and earnestly and with prophet s voice proclaimed, but it was that practical warning, the ultimatum of all, the warning of consequences. Defeat, and the captivity of many of his people at the hand of the King of Syria; defeat, and the captivity of many of his people at the hand of the King of Israel; the slaying of his son, of the governor of his house, and of the man that was "the second to him in the kingdom; all these judgments, offering to bring closer and closer home to him and to his conscience the facts of the case, of his own sins, and of the consequences of those sins, he is blind to, or, not blind, he nevertheless disregards them to the very point of infatuation. But, again, not only are the practical warnings of "wrath" thus set at nought. Providences of mercy compete with those of "wrath" In one of the most remarkable and pathetic passages of all history, startling us by its lifelike and more than dramatic reality a very monograph of pathos seven verses (9-15) here record this providence. They tell us how, by the side of Judah"s king, who refuses to give ear, to repent, or to learn, "certain of the heads of the children of Ephraim in Samaria," listen attentively to the remonstrance and teaching of the Prophet Oded, are open to the impression of the justness of what he says, see in a moment the truth of things for themselves, and reason without delay with the people, producing salutary convictions in them; and then, even with the atoning addition of all tenderest ministrations (ver. 15), lead back their captives of Judah to Jericho, to the shade of that "city of palm trees," and to the yet kinder shelter of "their brethren." What a practical message that was for a hardened heart like that of Ahaz! What an appeal and suggestion for the better feelings, if any, of Judah"s king! But this too, this species of warning was in vain!
III IMPROVED ADVERSITY TO THE GREATER INIQUITY, AND TO THE REAPING OF GREATER PUNISHMENT AND DEEPER DEGRADATION FOR HIMSELF AND NATION, The Edomites have successfully "smitten" him; the harrying incursions of the Philistines are ever on him; they take village after village, and also so take them, that they are safe in taking up their abode in them, for they dwelt there (ver. 18), Ahaz does not repent, and does not for a moment "seek to the Lord." The strickennees of sin is on him; the persistence in evil is his disease; the fatal aggravation of folly and infatuation of obstinacy cloud his brain, eclipse his reason, "make gross" his heart. He seeks to the King of Assyria, and bribes him with the sacred things of the house of the Lord, with the precious things of his own palace, with the robbed things of his princes. And that king takes all, but gives no help helped him not" (ver. 21); mocks his defencelessness; makes sport of his supplications to him! To one deeper depth, in his deafened despair, he descends. Ahaz vows for his own the gods of those who "smote him" (ver. 23). His logic is that the house too of "the gods of the kings of Syria" may possibly prove a house divided against itself! It was a last, cruel, hapless resort! The refuge was the refuge of ruin ruin of him, and of all Israel" (ver. 23), He ends all by entreatingfor his memory loathing unqualified. He hacks to pieces the collected "vessels of the house of God;" but shuts up (by just so much too late) "the doors of the house" itself; rears every wild altar; profanes with "high places every several city of Judah" to burn there the "incense of abomination;" excludes his own bones from the sepulchres of the best of his ancestors; and leaves us one more fearful lesson, that none and nothing make so sure a mock as sin itself makes of the "fool, who makes a mock" at it!
HOMILIES BY W. CLARKSON Vers. 1-4.
Spiritual rebound.
From Jotham to Ahaz, from the king who "made his ways firm before Jehovah" to the king who "made molten images for Baalim," and "burnt incense in the valley of the son of Hinnom, and burnt his children in the fire, after the abominations of the heathen," what a terrible rebound, what a deplorable reaction! We may regard this as
I AN EVENT WHICH FREQUENTLY OCCURS.
1. Sometimes to the nation. We have a notable instance of this in the reaction from the Puritan strictness of the Commonwealth to the unbounded licence of the Restoration.
2. Sometimes to the Church. A sudden passing from the ardour of some fervent enthusiasm to the rigour of utter indifference and inactivity.
3. Sometimes to the family. When a godly, devoted, and useful parent is succeeded by a dissolute and mischief-working son (as in the text).
4. Sometimes in the individual. A man is led to the appearance (if not the reality) of piety and zeal; he worships regularly in the house of the Lord, and takes a prominent part in the activities of the Church; then with more or less of suddenness he declines; he abandons his religious convictions and his moral principles, and stands before society as a spiritual renegade, living to injure and destroy all he had appeared to love and had busied himself to promote.
II ITS EXPLANATION.
1. Not in any law of human change. It may be contended that there is in themind and in the history of man a constant ebb and flow as in the tides of the sea; that when a mental or moral movement has proceeded long and far in one direction, the time has come for a counter-movement in the opposite direction. But there is no reason, in the nature of things, why we should not move steadily on in the direction of wisdom and virtue. Such a tendency as this is not properly a law; it is only a generalization from a comparatively small number of particulars. Hence we also say:
2. Not in any inherent human fickleness. Man is more or less fickle; i.e. many men are very fickle, and some men are seriously so, and others slightly so. But other men are constant, faithful, loyal to the last. Man, as man, is under no necessity to change his course, to reverse his direction, to pursue what he has shunned, to pull down what he has built up. We find the explanation we seek:
3. Partly in the unwisdom of the good. Possibly Jotham may have been an unwise father in some material respects; he may have so acted, so ruled his royal household, as to present to his son an unattractive aspect of godliness; he may have failed to distinguish between the requirements of manhood and of youth. Certainly, if he did not, very many parents do, and this their folly is the account of the departure and defection of their sons. It is clear that the unwise austerity of the Puritans had much to do with the excesses of the following generation. Very often, indeed, the intemperate heats of some body of Christian or philanthropic men account, in a large degree, for the repugnance and retrogression of the community. Unwisdom in the good may be as mischievous in its results as the very transgressions of the wicked.
4. Partly in the shallowness of the piety or morality in question. When thisis nothing more than mere habit, especially when that habit is of the body rather than of the mind, is fleshly rather than spiritual, it is not to be expected that loyalty will last; it is to be expected that the first strong wind of inclination, or of worldly interest, or of social pressure, will carry such a one away and bear him whithersoever it wills. The great lesson for parents, teachers, pastors, reformers, patriots, is this dig deep if you would have your house stand. If you would not see your sons and daughters, your fellow-members or fellow-citizens swept round with the current, facing the wrong goal, exerting their influence for evil instead of for good, then do not be content with scattering seed anyhow and anywhere. Dig the deep furrow, sow the seed well; plant living convictions in the judgment and in the conscience of men. Get the whole nature on the side of truth and righteousness. If the man himself, and not only his external habits, not only his feelings and inclinations he himself, through his whole spiritual nature, gives himself to the service of Christ and of man, you need not fear the coming of an adverse tide; you need not fret about the fickleness of our kind; you will witness no painful and pitiable reaction; the path of those you serve will be one of continuous ascent; it will be "the path of the just, shining brighter and brighter unto the perfect day. C.
HOMILIES BY T. WHITELAW Vers. 1-27.
This is that King Ahaz.
I A DEGENERATE SON. Aliaz, "Grasper" or "Possessor." In the Tigiath-Plleser inscriptions, which probably confounded him with the son of Jehoram, (2Ch_21:17) he is called Jehoahaz, "Whom Jehovah grasps," though the Scripture writers may have dropped the prefix "Jeho-" on account of his wickedness (Schrader, "Die Keillnschriften," p. 264).
1. He possessed his father"s nature. Of necessity, as his father"s son. (Gen_5:3) Yet he improved not upon that nature, but rather deteriorated and corrupted it. Heredity in him took a downward direction. Some knowledge of who his mother was might shed important light upon the question of how he came by his peculiarities of character and disposition,
2. He enjoyed his fathers example. Jotham "prepared his ways before the Lord his God", (2Ch_27:6) yet his pious conduct seemingly exerted no beneficial influence upon his son. Ahaz followed not his father"s footsteps, but carved out a path of his own. Example, especially when good, may be potent, but is not omnipotent.
3. He obtained his fathers throne. Yet he rather tarnished it than added to its lustre. New dignities do not give new hearts or new powers. At the age of twenty five years younger than his father, (2Ch_27:1) and only four years older than his grandfather (2Ch_26:1) he assumed the crown of Judah. If the reading "twenty-five "years (Vatican text of the LXX, Arabic, Syriac) be preferred (Ewald, Thenius, Bertheau, Keil, Bahr), on the ground that otherwise he must have married in his tenth or eleventh year, in order, after sixteen years, to be succeeded by a son as old as Hezekiah, who was twenty-five on ascending the throne (ch. 29:1), he was still but a youth when crowned, which may suggest that early promotion is not the same thing as early conversion.
4. He lacked, i.e. did not possess, his father"s goodness. Grace runs not in the blood, (Joh_1:13) though corruption does. (Job_14:4; Psa_51:5) A man may communicate to his son wealth, learning, fame, power; be cannot, certainly, impart either grace or goodness.
5. He attained not to his fathers grave. When he died his people buried him in Jerusalem, but not in the sepulchres of the kings of Israel. He who in his lifetime had been no true Israelite, though he wore a crown, must not in his death be laid among the sovereigns who were Israelites indeed. Death, which destroys all time"s distinctions between man and man (Job_3:19; Ecc_8:8) nevertheless effectually distinguishes between the righteous and the wicked (Pro_14:32; Rev_14:13)
II AN APOSTATE KING. Immediately he reached the crown, Ahaz discovered what manner of spirit he was of. With a perfect passion for idolatry mania for foreign religious practices" (Stanley) he soon outstripped his people, if not the heathen themselves, in his misdevotion, becoming their Coryphaeus in superstitious rites, showing himself to be the idolater par excellence in Judah, and by his regal example leading his subjects down into unknown depths of infamy (ver. 19).
1. He renounced the true religion of Jehovah. Not merely as it had been practised by David (ver. 1), Asa, (2Ch_15:17) and Jehoshaphat, (2Ch_17:3) but as it had been observed by his immediate predecessors, Jotham, Uzziah, and Amaziah. If not discontinued at once as to outward form, it was kept up for a season merely as a form; it was from the first abandoned in heart. He began his reign by practising the arts of a hypocrite.
2. He adopted the false worship of Baal, which had long held sway in the northern kingdom (ver. 2). Whether he introduced the calf-worship of Jeroboam (Keil), or restricted himself to the manufacture of images of Baal (Bahr), in either case he followed in the way of the Israelitish kings (1Ki_12:28 1Ki_16:32; 2Ki_3:2) "It is hard not to be infected by a contagious neighbourhood: whoever read that the kingdom of Israel was seasoned with the vicinity of the true religion of Judah?" (Bishop Hall).
3. He utilized all the idol-sanctuaries already existing in the land. "He sacrificed and burnt incense in the high places, and on the hills, and under every green tree" (ver. 4). In so doing he copied bad masters, reproducing the slate of matters which had existed in Judah under Rehoboam, (1Ki_14:23) and at the moment flourished in Samaria under Hoshea (2Ki_17:10) a state of matters which from the first had prevailed among the heathen inhabitants of the land, (Deu_12:2) but which they had been commanded ruthlessly to destroy. On the nature of this worship consult the Exposition.
4. He introduced the worship of Moloch, "the savage god of the Ammonites" (Stanley), as Solomon had done before him, (1Ki_11:7) in open defiance of Divine Law (Lev_18:21; Deu_18:10) setting up an image of that idol a human figure with a bull"s head and outstretched arms in the valley of Hinnom, a "narrow waterless ravine bounding the site of Jerusalem, and commencing on the west as a shallow dell" (Conder, "Handbook to the Bible," p. 330), and even sacrificing to it one (2Ki_16:3) or more (2Ch_28:3) of his own sons, as Manasseh afterwards did. (2Ch_33:6) "The image of metal was made hot by a fire kindled within it, and the children, laid in its arms, rolled from thence into the fiery lap below. Voluntary offering on the part of the parents was essential to the success of the sacrifice. Even the firstborn, nay, the only child of the family, was given up. The parents stopped the cries of their children by fondling and kissing them, for the victim ought not to weep, and the sound of complaint was drowned in the din of flutes and kettledrums" (Dr. Dollinger, "Heidenthum und Judenthum," quoted by Rawlinson, "Story of Phoenicia," pp. 112-114). That the children were not merely passed through the fire as an act of purgation, but actually burned, seems indisputable; it is not certain that the children were thrown alive into the idol"s glowing arms, the opinion that they were first slain (Keil, Bahr, Schurer) appearing to be warranted by certain passages in Scripture (Eze_16:20, 21 23:39; Isa_57:5; Jer_7:31 Jer_19:5; cf. 2Ki_3:27)
5. He sacrificed to the gods of Damascus.
(1) He did this when the Syrians were inflicting on him military reverses, i.e. in the time of his distress (Keil), not after it (Bertheau). Strange that just then, when men most need the help of God, in the hour of affliction and season of calamity, they usually manifest a tendency to run from him, looking for assistance from every quarter blot the right one (Jer_3:23) exemplified in Ahaziah. (2Ki_1:2, 2Ki_1:3)
(2) The reason of his doing this was that he imagined his ill success upon the field of battle had been due, not at all to the hand of God who thereby punished his wickedness, but to the assistance derived by the Syrians from their divinities (ver. 23), and conceived that, by paying them respect in sacrificing to them, he would win their favour to himself instead of them. (2Ch_25:14) Wicked men seldom ascribe their misfortunes or adversities to the right cause, their own ill deserts and God"s hand in punishing the same, but mostly attribute them to the "scientific idols," called "chance," "circumstances," "ill luck," etc., which deities they hope to propitiate in a manner hardly less foolish than that of Ahaz, by sacrificing at their unhallowed shrines.
(3) The specific mode in which he served the Syrian gods is not stated, as the divinities themselves are not named, and indeed in Scripture never are. (Jud_1:10:6) The incident of the altar seen by Ahaz at Damascus, and reproduced in Jerusalem, (2Ki_16:10-16) is not referred to by the Chronicler. The altar incident occurred when Ahaz was attending Tiglath-Pileser"s durbar at Damascus; "the sacrifices" were performed while Ahaz was fighting with the Syrians.
(4) The result of his appeal to the gods of Syria was ruin to himself and to all Israel. So all that forsake God shall be ashamed, (Jer_17:13) while "their sorrows shall be multiplied that hasten after other gods", (Psa_16:4) and "they that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercies"; for "idolaters shall have their part in the lake," etc. (Rev_21:8)
1. He shut up the doors of the house of the Lord. (Ver. 24.) It was high time. The man who could displace the brazen altar made by Solomon after patterns furnished by Jehovah (Exo_25:40 Exo_26:30 Exo_27:1; 1Ch_28:19) to make room for a new shrine, no matter of what costly material, copied from a heathen temple at Damascus, and fashioned by a servile priest in Jerusalem; the monster who could erect an image of Moloch in his capital and sacrifice to it his own child; the devotee who was so mad upon foreign gods, that the very sight of a heathen temple, altar, or idol caused him to fall a-worshipping; had obviously no excuse for longer affecting to be a worshipper of Jehovah. Accordingly, he smashed up the vessels and closed the doors of the temple. There should be no more worshipping of Jehovah, if he could help it. It was horrible sacrilege, but it was at least honest.
2. He did his utmost to provoke Jehovah to anger. Building altars in every corner of Jerusalem, till, like Athens in the days of Paul, it was wholly given to idolatry, literally stuffed full of idols, (Act_17:16) and erecting besides in every city of Judah high places to burn incense unto other gods (vers. 24, 25); he did his best to pour contempt upon the God of his fathers; in his outrageous, fanatical, and senseless idolatry eclipsing all his predecessors, leaving behind him in the race to perdition experts in heathen worship like Rehoboam and Jehoram in Judah, like Jeroboam and Ahab in Israel. It was no wonder that Jehovah at length bestirred himself to take vengeance on this nonpareil idolater.
III AN UNSUCCESSFUL WARNING. For the wickedness of himself and people, he and they were "brought low," diminished in numbers, weakened in power, humbled in spirit, by Jehovah, who raised up against them three foreign foes.
1. The Syrians and Israelites. (Vers. 5-7.)
(1) The leaders of the allied forces were of the Syrians, Rezin, or Rezon in the inscriptions, Razinu, King of Syria, whose capital was Damascus; of the Israelites, Pekah, the son of Remaliah in the inscriptions, Pakaha, a usurper; whose metropolis was Samaria ("Records," etc., 5:48-52).
(2) The time selected for their assault upon Judah was the beginning of the reign of Ahaz, although for some years previous to Jotham"s death similar attacks had not been wanting. (2Ki_15:37)
(3) The object contemplated by the expedition was to overturn the Davidie dynasty, and place upon the throne of Judah "a vassal king, whose father"s name, Tabeel, shows that he must have been a Syrian" (Sayce); the Hauran inscriptions exhibiting several names, like Tab"el, compounded with el, and the Syrian Tab"-rimmon forming an exact parallel. (Delitzsch, on Isa_7:6) It is supposed that a party in Jerusalem favoured the contemplated revolution. (Isa_8:6)
(4) The plan of campaign appears to have been that Rezin should invade Judah from the south, capturing Eloth on the Red Sea, which Uzziah had restored to Judah, (2Ch_26:2) that Pekah should send a force directly from the north across the borders of the southern kingdom, and that both armies should meet in front of Jerusalem, to reduce it, if possible, by a siege.
(5) The result of the invasion, so far as Ahaz and his people were concerned, was disastrous in the extreme. The capital, as Isaiah had predicted, was not taken. It may be questioned if the programme was carried out to the extent of besieging the city. There is ground for thinking this was prevented by the appearance upon the scene of Tiglath-Pileser II of Assyria; (ver. 16 2Ki_16:7) But
(a) Rezin of Damascus, besides recovering Eloth, (2Ki_16:6) defeated Ahaz m a pitched battle, and carried away a multitude of his subjects captive to Damascus.
(b) Pekah also routed him with great slaughter in one day"s fight, slaying a hundred and twenty thousand of his veteran troops. In particular, Zichri, an Ephraimite hero, struck down three warriors closely related to Ahaz Maaseiah the king"s son, i.e. cousin or uncle, as in 2Ch_18:25 2Ch_22:11, since Ahaz could hardly at the commencement of his reign have had a son capable of bearing arms; Azrikam, the ruler of the house, not of the temple (2Ch_31:13; 1Ch_9:11) but of the palace, hence a high official in the royal household; and Elkanah, that was next or second to the king, i.e. his prime minister. In addition, two hundred thousand women, sons and daughters, with much spoil, were carried captive to Samaria. The great number of the slain and of the captives may be accounted for by remembering that it was practically a war for the existence of the southern kingdom, which would require Ahaz to call out all his able-bodied population; that the Israelites were accustomed to act with great cruelty in war, (2Ki_15:16) and probably did so on this occasion (ver. 9); and that Jehovah had delivered Ahaz and his people into the hands of their enemies on account of their apostasy, as by the lips of (Lev_26:17, Lev_26:37) he had threatened he would in such cases do.
2. The Edomites. These, whom Uzziah had reduced to subjection, (2Ch_26:2) were probably emboldened by Rezin"s successful attack upon Eloth (2Ki_16:6) to throw off the yoke of Judah, and even attempt reprisals in the shape of an invasion of Judaean territory. This they executed with such military skill, that they carried off, as the Syrians and Israelites had done, a number of prisoners.
3. The Philistines. During the previous reign these also had been conquered, and their country occupied by garrisons of Judaean soldiers; (2Ch_26:6) but, embracing the opportunity afforded by the simultaneous attacks directed upon their ancient enemy and present suzerain, they asserted their independence, made an irruption into the low land and south country of Judah, captured and occupied a number of cities, with their dependent villages: Beth-shemesh; (see on 2Ch_25:21) Ajalon, the modem Jalo; (2Ch_11:10) Gederoth, in the hill country of Judah; (Jos_15:36) "the Gedor of the "Onomasticon," ten miles from Eleutheropolis, on the road to Diospolis, now the ruin Jedireh" (Conder, "Handbook," p. 411); Shocho, (2Ch_11:7) the Shuweike of to-day; Timnah, the present Tibneh, on the frontier of Judah three quarters of an hour from Ain-shems; Gimzo, now Jimsu, a large village between Lydda and Jerusalem.
LESSONS.
1. The degeneracy of human nature a good Jotham begets a wicked Ahaz.
2. The madness of idolatry, exemplified in the career of Ahaz.
3. The certainty of retribution, illustrated by the "bringing low" of Judah. W.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator 1887 · Public Domain On vv2, 9, 10, 14, 19, 22, 23 For he walked in the ways of the kings…
2Ch_28:2
For he walked in the ways of the kings of Israel.
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The ways of the kings of Israel
Israel was for the most part more powerful, wealthy, and cultured than Judah. When Ahaz came to the throne as a mere youth, Pekah was apparently in the prime of life and the zenith of power. He is no inapt symbol of what the modern tempter at any rate desires to appear: the showy, pretentious man of the world, who parades his knowledge of life, and impresses the inexperienced youth with his shrewdness and success, and makes his victim eager to imitate him, to walk in the ways of the kings of Israel. (W. H. Bennett, M.A)
Molten images for Baalim.--
Molten images for the Baals
The prospect of making images for the Baals is an insidious temptation. Ahaz perhaps had found the decorous worship of the one God dull and monotonous. Baals meant new gods and new rites, with all the excitement of novelty and variety. Jotham may not have realised that this youth of twenty was a man; he may have been treated as a child and left too much to the women of the harem. Responsible activity might have saved him. The Church needs to recognise that healthy, vigorous youth craves interesting occupation, and even excitement. If a father wishes to send his son to the devil, he cannot do better than make that sons life, both secular and religious, a routine of monotonous drudgery. Then any pinchbeck king of Israel will seem a marvel of wit and good fellowship, and the making of molten images a most pleasing diversion. A molten image is something solid, permanent, and conspicuous, a standing advertisement of the enterprise and artistic taste of the maker; he engraves his name on the pedestal, and is proud of the honourable distinction. Many of our modern molten images are duly set forth in popular works; for instance, the reputation for impure life, or hard drinking, or reckless gambling, to achieve which some men have spent their time and money and toil. Other molten images are dedicated to another class of Baals: Mammon the respectable and Belial the polite. (W. H. Bennett, M.A.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Expositor's Bible 1887 · Public Domain On v1 2 Chronicles 28, Etc.
THE WICKED KINGS
2 Chronicles 28, Etc.
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THE type of the wicked king is not worked out with any fullness in Chronicles. There are wicked kings, but no one is raised to the "bad eminence" of an evil counterpart to David; there is no anti-David, so to speak, no prototype of antichrist. The story of Ahaz, for instance, is not given at the same length and with the same wealth of detail as that of David. The subject was not so congenial to the kindly heart of the chronicler. He was not imbued with the unhappy spirit of modern realism, which loves to dwell on all that is foul and ghastly in life and character; he lingered affectionately over his heroes, and contented himself with brief notices of his villains. In so doing he was largely following his main authority: the books of Samuel and Kings. There too the stories of David and Solomon, of Elijah and Elisha, are told much more fully than those of Jeroboam and Ahab.
But the mention of these names reminds us that the chroniclers limitation of his subject to the history of Judah excludes much of the material that might have been drawn from the earlier history for a picture of the wicked king. If it had been part of the chroniclers plan to tell the story of Ahab, he might have been led to develop his material and moralize upon the kings career till the narrative assumed proportions that would have rivaled the history of David. Over against the great scene that closed Davids life might have been set another, summing up in one dramatic moment the guilt and ruin of Ahab.
But these schismatic kings were "alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of the promise, having no hope and without God in the world." {Eph_2:12} The disobedient sons of the house of David were still children within the home, who might be rebuked and punished; but the Samaritan kings, as the chronicler might style them, were outcasts, left to the tender mercies of the dogs, and sorcerers, and murderers that were without the Holy City, Cains without any protecting mark upon their forehead.
Hence the wicked kings in Chronicles are of the house of David. Therefore the chronicler has a certain tenderness for them, partly for the sake of their great ancestor, partly because they are kings of Judah, partly because of the sanctity and religious significance of the Messianic dynasty. These kings are not Esaus, for whom there is no place of repentance. The chronicler is happy in being able to discover and record the conversion, as we should term it, of some kings whose reigns began in rebellion and apostasy. By a curious compensation, the kings who begin well end badly, and those who begin badly end well; they all tend to about the same average. We read of Rehoboam that "when he humbled himself the wrath of the Lord turned from him, that he would not destroy him altogether; and, moreover, in Judah there were good things found"; the wickedness of Abijah, which is plainly set forth in the book of Kings, {1Ki_15:3} is ignored in Chronicles; Manasseh "humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers," and turned altogether from the error of his ways; the unfavorable judgment on Jehoahaz recorded in the book of Kings, "And he did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, according to all that his fathers had done," {2Ki_23:32} is omitted in Chronicles.
There remain seven wicked kings of whom nothing but evil is recorded: Jehoram, Ahaziah, Ahaz, Amon, Jehoiakim, Jehoiachin, and Zedekiah. Of these we may take Ahaz as the most typical instance. As in the cases of David and Solomon, we will first see how the chronicler has dealt with the material derived from the book of Kings; then we will give his account of the career of Ahaz; and finally, by a brief comparison of what is told of Ahaz with the history of the other wicked kings, we will try to construct the chroniclers idea of the wicked king and to deduce its lessons.
The importance of the additions made by the chronicler to the history in the book of Kings will appear later on. In his account of the attack made upon Ahaz by Rezin, king of Damascus, and Pekah, king of Israel, he emphasizes the incidents most discreditable to Ahaz. The book of Kings simply states that the two allies "came up to Jerusalem to war; and they besieged Ahaz, but could not overcome him"; {2Ki_16:5} Chronicles dwells upon the sufferings and losses inflicted on Judah by this invasion. The book of Kings might have conveyed the impression that the wicked king had been allowed to triumph over his enemies; Chronicles guards against this dangerous error by detailing the disasters that Ahaz brought upon his country.
The book of Kings also contains an interesting account of alterations made by Ahaz in the Temple and its furniture. By his orders the high-priest Urijah made a new brazen altar for the Temple after the pattern of an altar that Ahaz had seen in Damascus. As Chronicles narrates the closing of the Temple by Ahaz, it naturally omits these previous alterations. Moreover, Urijah appears in the book of Isaiah as a friend of the prophet, and is referred to by him as a "faithful witness." {Isa_8:2} The chronicler would not wish to perplexs his readers with the problem, How could the high-priest, whom Isaiah trusted as a faithful witness, become the agent of a wicked king, and construct an altar for Jehovah after a heathen pattern?
The chroniclers story of Ahaz runs thus. This wicked king had been preceded by three good kings: Amaziah, Uzziah, and Jotham. Amaziah indeed had turned away from following Jehovah at the end of his reign, but Uzziah had been zealous for Jehovah throughout, not wisely, but too well; and Jotham shares with Solomon the honor of a blameless record. Without counting Amaziahs reign, king and people had been loyal to Jehovah for sixty or seventy years. The court of the good kings would be the center of piety and devotion. Ahaz, no doubt, had been carefully trained in obedience to the law of Jehovah, and had grown up in the atmosphere of true religion. Possibly he had known his grandfather Uzziah in the days of his power and glory; but at any rate, while Ahaz was a child, Uzziah was living as a leper in his "several house," and Ahaz must have been familiar with this melancholy warning against presumptuous interference with the Divine ordinances of worship.
Ahaz was twenty years old when he came to the throne, so that he had time to profit by a complete education, and should scarcely have found opportunity to break away from its influence. His mothers name is not mentioned, so that we cannot say whether, as may have been the case with Rehoboam, some Ammonite woman led him astray from the God of his fathers. As far as we can learn from our author, Ahaz sinned against light and knowledge; with every opportunity and incentive to keep in the right path, he yet went astray.
This is a common feature in the careers of the wicked kings. It has often been remarked that the first great specialist on education failed utterly in the application of his theories to his own son. Jehoshaphat, Hezekiah, and Josiah were the most distinguished and the most virtuous of the reforming kings, yet Jehoshaphat was succeeded by Jehoram, who was almost as wicked as Ahaz; Hezekiahs son "Manasseh made Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to err, so that they did evil more than did the nations whom the Lord destroyed before the children of Israel" {2Ch_33:9} Josiahs son and grandsons "did evil in the sight of the Lord." {2Ch_36:5; 2Ch_36:8; 2Ch_36:11}
Many reasons may be suggested for this too familiar spectacle: the impious son of a godly father, the bad successor of a good king. Heirs-apparent have always been inclined to head an opposition to their fathers policy, and sometimes on their accession they have reversed that policy. When the father himself has been a zealous reformer, the interests that have been harassed by reform are eager to encourage his successor in a retrograde policy; and reforming zeal is often tinged with an inconsiderate harshness that provokes the opposition of younger and brighter spirits. But, after all, this atavism in kings is chiefly an illustration of the slow growth of the higher nature in man. Practically each generation starts afresh with an unregenerate nature of its own, and often nature is too strong for education.
Moreover, a young king of Judah was subject to the evil influence of his northern neighbor. Judah was often politically subservient to Samaria, and politics and religion have always been very intimately associated. At the accession of Ahaz the throne of Samaria was filled by Pekah, whose twenty years tenure of authority indicates ability and strength of character. It is not difficult to understand how Ahaz was led "to walk in the ways of the kings of Israel" and "to make molten images for the Baals."
Nothing is told us of the actual circumstances of these innovations. The new reign was probably inaugurated by the dismissal of Jothams ministers and the appointment of the personal favorites of the new king. The restoration of old idolatrous cults would be a natural advertisement of a new departure in the government. So when the establishment of Christianity was a novelty in the empire, and men were not assured of its permanence, Julians accession was accompanied by an apostasy to paganism; and later aspirants to the purple promised to follow his example. But the worship of Jehovah was not at once suppressed. He was not deposed from His throne as the Divine King of Judah; He was only called upon to share His royal authority with the Baals of the neighboring peoples.
But although the Temple services might still be performed, the king was mainly interested in introducing and observing a variety of heathen rites. The priesthood of the Temple saw their exclusive privileges disregarded and the rival sanctuaries of the high places and the sacred trees taken under royal patronage. But the kings apostasy was not confined to the milder forms of idolatry. His weak mind was irresistibly attracted by the morbid fascination of the cruel rites of Moloch: "He burnt incense in the valley of the son of Hinnom, and burnt his children in the fire, according to the abominations of the heathen, whom the Lord cast out before the children of Israel."
The kings devotions to his new gods were rudely interrupted. The insulted majesty of Jehovah was vindicated by two disastrous invasions. First, Ahaz was defeated by Rezin, king of Syria, who carried away a great multitude of captives to Damascus; the next enemy was one of those kings of Israel in whose idolatrous ways Ahaz had chosen to walk. The delicate flattery implied by Ahaz becoming Pekahs proselyte failed to conciliate that monarch. He too defeated the Jews with great slaughter. Amongst his warriors was a certain Zichri, whose achievements recalled the prowess of Davids mighty men: he slew Maaseiah the kings son and Azrikam, the ruler of the house, the Lord High Chamberlain, and Elkanah, that was next unto the king, the Prime Minister. With these notables, there perished in a single day a hundred and twenty thousand Jews, all of them valiant men. Their wives and children, to the number of two hundred thousand, were carried captive to Samaria. All these misfortunes happened to Judah "because they had forsaken Jehovah, the God of their fathers."
And yet Jehovah in wrath remembered mercy. The Israelite army approached Samaria with their endless train of miserable captives, women and children, ragged and barefoot, some even naked, filthy, and footsore with forced marches, left hungry and thirsty after prisoners scanty rations. Multiply a thousandfold the scenes depicted on Egyptian and Assyrian monuments, and you have the picture of this great slave caravan. The captives probably had no reason to fear the barbarities which the Assyrians loved to inflict upon their prisoners, but yet their prospects were sufficiently gloomy. Before them lay a life of drudgery and degradation in Samaria. The more wealthy might hope to be ransomed by their friends; others, again might be sold to the Phoenician traders, to be carried by them to the great slave marts of Nineveh and Babylon or even over sea to Greece. But in a moment all was changed. "There was a prophet of Jehovah, whose name was Oded, and he went out to meet the army and said unto them, Behold, because Jehovah, the God of your fathers, was wroth with Judah, He hath delivered them into your hand; and ye have slain them in a rage which hath reached up unto heaven, And now ye purpose to keep the children of Judah and of Jerusalem for male and female slaves; but are there not even with you trespasses of your own against Jehovah your God? Now hear me therefore, and send back the captives, for the fierce wrath of Jehovah is upon you."
Meanwhile "the princes and all the congregation of Samaria" were waiting to welcome their victorious army, possibly in "the void place at the entering in of the gate of Samaria." Odeds words, at any rate, had been uttered in their presence. The army did not at once respond to the appeal; the two hundred thousand slaves were the most valuable part of their spoil, and they were not eager to make so great a sacrifice. But the princes made Odeds message their own. Four heads of the children of Ephraim are mentioned by name as the spokesmen of the "congregation," the king being apparently absent on some other warlike expedition. These four were Azariah the son of Johanan, Berechiah the son of Meshillemoth, Jehizkiah the son of Shallum, and Amasa the son of Hadlai. Possibly among the children of Ephraim who dwelt in Jerusalem after the Return there were descendants of these men, from whom the chronicler obtained the particulars of this incident. The princes "stood up against them that came from the war," and forbade their bringing the captives into the city. They repeated and expanded the words of the prophet: "Ye purpose that which will bring upon us a trespass against Jehovah, to add unto our sins and to our trespass, for our trespass is great, and there is fierce wrath against Israel." The army were either convinced by the eloquence or overawed by the authority of the prophet and the princes: "They left the captives and the spoil before all the princes and the congregation." And the four princes "rose up, and took the captives, and with the spoil clothed all that were naked among them, and arrayed them, and shod them, and gave them to eat and to drink, and anointed them, and carried all the feeble of them upon asses, and brought them to Jericho, the city of palm trees, unto their brethren; then they returned to Samaria."
Apart from incidental allusions, this is the last reference in Chronicles to the Northern Kingdom. The long history of division and hostility closes with this humane recognition of the brotherhood of Israel and Judah. The sun, so to speak, did not go down upon their wrath. But the king of Israel had no personal share in this gracious act. At the first it was Jeroboam that made Israel to sin; throughout the history the responsibility for the continued division would specially rest upon the kings, and at the last there is no sign of Pekahs repentance and no prospect of his pardon. The various incidents of the invasions of Rezin and Pekah were alike a solemn warning and an impressive appeal to the apostate king of Judah. He had multiplied to himself gods of the nations round about, and yet had been left without an ally, at the mercy of a hostile confederation, against whom his new gods either could not or would not defend him. The wrath of Jehovah had brought upon Ahaz one crushing defeat after another, and yet the only mitigation of the sufferings of Judah had also been the work of Jehovah. The returning captives would tell Ahaz and his princes how in schismatic and idolatrous Samaria a prophet of Jehovah had stood forth to secure their release and obtain for them permission to return home. The princes and people of Samaria had hearkened to his message, and the two hundred thousand captives stood there as the monument of Jehovahs compassion and of the obedient piety of Israel. Sin was to bring punishment; and yet Jehovah waited to be gracious. Wherever there was room for mercy, He would show mercy. His wrath and His compassion had alike been displayed before Ahaz. Other gods could not protect their worshippers against him; He only could deliver and restore His people. He had not even waited for Ahaz to repent before He had given him proof of His willingness to forgive. Such Divine goodness was thrown away upon Ahaz; there was no token of repentance, no promise of amendment; and so Jehovah sent further judgments upon the king and his unhappy people. The Edomites came and smote Judah, and carried away captives; the Philistines also invaded the cities of the lowland and of the south of Judah, and took Beth-shemesh, Aijalon, Gederoth, Soco, Timnah, Gimzo, and their dependent villages, and dwelt in them; and Jehovah brought Judah low because of Ahaz. And the king hardened his heart yet more against Jehovah, and cast away all restraint, and trespassed sore against Jehovah. Instead of submitting himself, he sought the aid of the kings of Assyria, only to receive another proof of the vanity of all earthly help so long as he remained unreconciled to Heaven. Tilgath-pilneser, king of Assyria, welcomed this opportunity of interfering in the affairs of Western Asia, and saw attractive prospects of levying blackmail impartially on his ally and his enemies. He came unto Ahaz, "and distressed him, but strengthened him not." These new troubles were the occasion of fresh wickedness on the part of the king: to pay the price of this worse than useless intervention, he took away a portion not only from his own treasury and from the princes, but also from the treasury of the Temple, and gave it to the king of Assyria.
Thus betrayed and plundered by his new ally, he trespassed "yet more against Jehovah, this same king Ahaz." It is almost incredible that one man could be guilty of so much sin; the chronicler is anxious that his readers should appreciate the extraordinary wickedness of this man, this same king Ahaz. In him the chastening of the Lord yielded no peaceable fruit of righteousness; he would not see that his misfortunes were sent from the offended God of Israel. With perverse ingenuity, he found in them an incentive to yet further wickedness. His pantheon was not large enough.
He had omitted to worship the gods of Damascus. These must be powerful deities, whom it would be worth while to conciliate, because they had enabled the kings of Syria to overrun and pillage Judah. Therefore Ahaz sacrificed to the gods of Syria, that they might help him. "But," says the chronicler, "they were the ruin of him and of all Israel." Still Ahaz went on consistently with his policy of comprehensive eclecticism. He made Jerusalem a very Athens for altars, which were set up at every street corner; he discovered yet other gods whom it might be advisable to adore: "And in every several city of Judah he made high places to burn incense unto other gods."
Hitherto Jehovah had still received some share of the worship of this most religious king, but apparently Ahaz came to regard Him as the least powerful of his many supernatural allies. He attributed his misfortunes, not to the anger, but to the helplessness, of Jehovah. Jehovah was specially the God of Israel; if disaster after disaster fell upon His people, He was evidently less potent than Baal, or Moloch, or Rimmon. It was a useless expense to maintain the worship of so impotent a deity. Perhaps the apostate king was acting in the blasphemous spirit of the savage who flogs his idol when his prayers are not answered. Jehovah, he thought, should be punished for His neglect of the interests of Judah. "Ahaz gathered together the vessels of the house of God, and cut in pieces the vessels of the house of God, and shut up the doors of the house of Jehovah"; he had filled up the measure of his iniquities.
And thus it came to pass that in the Holy City, "which Jehovah had chosen to cause His name to dwell there," almost the only deity who was not worshipped was Jehovah. Ahaz did homage to the gods of all the nations before whom he had been humiliated; the royal sacrifices smoked upon a hundred altars, but no sweet savor of burnt offering ascended to Jehovah. The fragrance of the perpetual incense no longer filled the holy place morning and evening; the seven lamps of the golden candlestick were put out, and the Temple was given up to darkness and desolation. Ahaz had contented himself with stripping the sanctuary of its treasures; but the building itself, though closed, suffered no serious injury. A stranger visiting the city, and finding it full of idols, could not fail to notice the great pile of the Temple and to inquire what image, splendid above all others, occupied that magnificent shrine. Like Pompey, he would learn with surprise that it was not the dwelling-place of any image, but the symbol of an almighty and invisible presence. Even if the stranger were some Moabite worshipper of Chemosh, he would feel dismay at the wanton profanity with which Ahaz had abjured the God of his fathers and desecrated the temple built by his great ancestors. The annals of Egypt and Babylon told of the misfortunes which had befallen those monarchs who were unfaithful to their national gods. The pious heathen would anticipate disaster as the punishment of Ahazs apostasy.
Meanwhile the ministers of the Temple shared its ruin and degradation; but they could feel the assurance that Jehovah would yet recall His people to their allegiance and manifest Himself once more in the Temple. The house of Aaron and the tribe of Levi possessed their souls in patience till the final judgment of Jehovah should fall upon the apostate. They had not long to wait: after a reign of only sixteen years, Ahaz died at the early age of thirty-six. We are not told that he died in battle or by the visitation of God. His health may have been broken by his many misfortunes, or by vicious practices that would naturally accompany his manifold idolatries; but in any case his early death would be regarded as a Divine judgment. The breath was scarcely out of his body before his religious innovations were swept away by a violent reaction. The people at once passed sentence of condemnation on his memory: "They brought him not into the sepulchers of the kings of Israel." His successor inaugurated his reign by reopening the Temple, and brought back Judah to the obedience of Jehovah. The monuments of the impious worship of the wicked king, his multitudinous idols, and their ritual passed away like an evil dream, like "the track of a ship in the sea or a bird in the air."
The leading features of this career are common to most of the wicked kings and to the evil days of the good kings. "Walking in the ways of the kings of Israel" was the great crime of Jehoshaphat and his successors Jehoram and Ahaziah. Other kings, like Manasseh, built high places and followed after the abominations of the heathen whom Jehovah cast out before the children of Israel. Asas lapse into wickedness began by plundering the Temple treasury to purchase an alliance with a heathen king, the king of Syria, against whose successor Ahaz in his turn hired the king of Assyria. Amaziah adopted the gods of Edom, as Ahaz the gods of Syria, but with less excuse, for Amaziah had conquered Edom. Other crimes are recorded among the evil doings of the kings: Asa had recourse to physicians, that is, probably to magic; Jehoram slew his brethren; Joash murdered the son of his benefactor Jehoiada; but the supreme sin was disloyalty to Jehovah and the Temple, and of this sin the chroniclers brief history of Ahaz is the most striking illustration. Ahaz is the typical apostate; he hardens his heart alike against the mercy of Jehovah and against His repeated judgment. He is a very Pharaoh among the kings of Judah. The discipline that should have led to repentance is continually perverted to be the occasion of new sin, and at last the apostate dies in his iniquity. The effect of the picture is heightened by its insistence on this one sin of apostasy; other sins are illustrated and condemned elsewhere, but here the chronicler would have us concentrate our attention on the rise, progress, and ruin of the apostate. Indeed, this one sin implied and involved all others; the man who suppressed the worship of Jehovah, and reveled in the obscene superstitions of heathen cults, was obviously capable of any enormity. The chronicler is not indifferent to morality as compared with ritual, and he sees in the neglect of Divinely appointed ritual an indication of a character rotten through and through. In his time neglect of ritual on the part of the average man or the average king implied neglect of religion, or rather adherence to an alien and immoral faith.
Thus the supreme sin of the wicked kings naturally contrasts with the highest virtue of the good kings. The standing of both is determined by their attitude towards Jehovah. The character of the good kings is developed in greater detail than that of their wicked brethren; but we should not misrepresent the chroniclers views, if we ascribed to the wicked kings all the vices antithetic to the virtues of his royal ideal. Nevertheless the picture actually drawn fixes our attention upon their impious denial of the God of Israel. Much Church history has been written on the same principle: Constantine is a saint because he established Christianity; Julian is an incarnation of wickedness because he became an apostate; we praise the orthodox Theodosius, and blame the Arian Valens. Protestant historians have canonized Henry VIII and Elizabeth, and have prefixed an unholy epithet to the name of their kinswoman, while Romanist writers interchange these verdicts. But underlying even such opposite judgments there is the same valid principle, the principle that was in the mind of the chronicler: that the kings relation to the highest and purest truth accessible to him, whatever that truth may be, is a just criterion of his whole character. The historian may err in applying the criterion, but its general principle is none the less sound.
For the character of the wicked nation we are not left to the general suggestions that may be derived from the wicked king. The prophets show us that it was by no vicarious condemnation that priests and people shared the ruin of their sovereign. In their pages the subject is treated from many points of view: Israel and Judah, Edom and Tyre, Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon, serve in their turn as models for the picture of the wicked nation.
In the Apocalypse the ancient picture is adapted to new circumstances, and the City of the Seven Hills takes the place of Babylon. Modern prophets have further adapted the treatment of the subject to their own times, and for the most part to their own people. With stern and uncompromising patriotism, Carlyle and Ruskin have sought righteousness for England even at the expense of its reputation; they have emphasized its sin and selfishness in order to produce repentance and reform. For other teachers the history of foreign peoples has furnished the picture of the wicked nation, and the France of the Revolution or the "unspeakable" Turk has been held up as an example of all that is abominable in national life.
Any detailed treatment of this theme in Scripture would need an exposition, not merely of Chronicles, but of the whole Bible. We may, however, make one general application of the chroniclers principle that the wicked nation is the nation that forgets God. We do not now measure a peoples religion by the number and magnificence of its priests and churches, or by the amount of money devoted to the maintenance of public worship. The most fatal symptoms of national depravity are the absence of a healthy public opinion, indifference to character in politics, neglect of education as a means of developing character, and the stifling of the spirit of brotherhood in a desperate struggle for existence. When God is thus forgotten, and the gracious influences of His Spirit are no longer recognized in public and private life, a country may well be degraded into the ranks of the wicked nations.
The perfectly general terms in which the doings and experiences of Ahaz are described facilitate the application of their warnings to the ordinary individual. His royal station only appears in the form and scale of his wickedness, which in its essence is common to him with the humblest sinner. Every young man enters, like Ahaz, upon a royal inheritance; character and career are as all-important to a peasant or a shop-girl as they are to an emperor or a queen. When a girl of seventeen or a youth of twenty succeeds to some historic throne, we are moved to think of the heavy burden of responsibility laid upon inexperienced shoulders and of the grave issues that must be determined during the swiftly passing years of their early manhood and womanhood. Alas, this heavy burden and these grave issues are but the common lot. The young sovereign is happy in the fierce light that beats upon his throne, for he is not allowed to forget the dignity and importance of life. History, with its stories of good and wicked kings, has obviously been written for his instruction; if the time be out of joint, as it mostly is, he has been born to set it right. It is all true, yet it is equally true forevery one of his subjects. His lot is only the common lot set upon a hill, in the full sunlight, to illustrate, interpret, and influence lower and obscurer lives. People take such eager interest in the doings of royal families, their christenings, weddings, and funerals, because therein the common experience is, as it were, glorified into adequate dignity and importance.
"Ahaz was twenty years old when he began to reign, and he reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem"; but most men and women begin to reign before they are twenty. The history of Judah for those sixteen years was really determined long before Ahaz was invested with crown and scepter. Men should all be educated to reign, to respect themselves and appreciate their opportunities. We do in some measure adopt this principle with promising lads. Their energies are stimulated by the prospect of making a fortune or a name, or the more soaring imagination dreams of a seat on the woolsack or on one of the Front Benches. Gifted girls are also encouraged, as becomes their gifts, to achieve a brilliant marriage or a popular novel. We need to apply the principle more consistently and to recognize the royal dignity of the average life and of those whom the superior person is pleased to call commonplace people. It may then be possible to induce the ordinary young man to take a serious interest in his own future. The stress laid on the sanctity and supreme value of the individual soul has always been a vital element of evangelical teaching; like most other evangelical truths, it is capable of deeper meaning and wider application than are commonly recognized in systematic theology.
We have kept our sovereign waiting too long on the threshold of his kingdom; his courtiers and his people are impatient to know the character and intentions of their new master. So with every heir who succeeds to his royal inheritance. The fortunes of millions may depend upon the will of some young Czar or Kaiser; the happiness of a hundred tenants or of a thousand workmen may rest on the disposition of the youthful inheritor of a wide estate or a huge factory; but none the less in the poorest cottage mother and father and friends wait with trembling anxiety to see how the boy or girl will "turn out" when they take their destinies into their own hands and begin to reign. Already perhaps some tender maiden watches in hope and fear, in mingled pride and misgiving, the rapidly unfolding character of the youth to whom she has promised to commit all the happiness of a life-time.
And to each one in turn there comes the choice of Hercules; according to the chroniclers phrase, the young king may either "do right in the eyes of Jehovah, like David his father," or he may walk "in the ways of the kings of Israel, and make molten images for the Baals."
The "right doings of David his father" may point to family traditions, which set a high standard of noble conduct for each succeeding generation. The teaching and influence of the pious Jotham are represented by the example of godliness set in many a Christian home, by the wise and loving counsel of parents and friends. And Ahaz has many modern parallels, sons and daughters upon whom every good influence seems spent in vain. They are led astray into the ways of the kings of Israel, and make molten images for the Baals. There were several dynasties of the kings of Israel, and the Baals were many and various; there are many tempters who deliberately or unconsciously lay snares for souls, and they serve different powers of evil. Israel was for the most part more powerful, wealthy, and cultured than Judah. When Ahaz came to the throne as a mere youth, Pekah was apparently in the prime of life and the zenith of power. He is no inapt symbol of what the modern tempter at any rate desires to appear: the showy, pretentious man of the world who parades his knowledge of life, and impresses the inexperienced youth with his shrewdness and success, and makes his victim eager to imitate him, to walk in the ways of the kings of Israel.
Moreover, the prospect of making molten images for the Baals is an insidious temptation. Ahaz perhaps found the decorous worship of the one God dull and monotonous. Baals meant new gods and new rites, with all the excitement of novelty and variety. Jotham may not have realized that this youth of twenty was a man: the heir-apparent may have been treated as a child and left too much to the women of the harem. Responsible activity might have saved Ahaz. The Church needs to recognize that healthy, vigorous youth craves interesting occupation and even excitement. If a father wishes to send his son to the devil, he cannot do better than make that sons life, both secular and religious, a routine of monotonous drudgery. Then any pinchbeck king of Israel will seem a marvel of wit and good fellowship, and the making of molten images a most pleasing diversion. A molten image is something solid, permanent, and conspicuous, a standing advertisement of the enterprise and artistic taste of the maker; he engraves his name on the pedestal, and is proud of the honorable distinction. Many of our modern molten images are duly set forth in popular works, for instance the reputation for impure life, or hard drinking, or reckless gambling, to achieve which some men have spent their time, and money, and toil. Other molten images are dedicated to another class of Baals: Mammon the respectable and Belial the polite.
The next step in the history of Ahaz is also typical of many a rakes progress. The king of Israel, in whose ways he has walked, turns upon him and plunders him; the experienced man of the world gives his pupil painful proof of his superiority, and calls in his confederates to share the spoil. Now surely the victims eyes will be opened to the life he is leading and the character of his associates. By no means. Ahaz has been conquered by Syria, and therefore he will worship the gods of Syria, and he will have a confederate of his own in the Assyrian king. The victim tries to master the arts by which he has been robbed and ill-treated; he will become as unscrupulous as his masters in wickedness. He seeks the profit and distinction of being the accomplice of bold and daring sinners, men as preeminent in evil as Tilgath-pilneser in Western Asia; and they, like the Assyrian king, take his money and accept his flattery: they use him and then cast him off more humiliated and desperate than ever. He sinks into a prey of meaner scoundrels: the Edomites and Philistines of fast life; and then, in his extremity, he builds new high places and sacrifices to more new gods; he has recourse to all the shifty expedients and sordid superstitions of the devotees of luck and chance.
All this while he has still paid some external homage to religion; he has observed the conventions of honor and good breeding. There have been services, as it were, in the temple of Jehovah. Now he begins to feel that this deference has not met with an adequate reward; he has been no better treated than the flagrantly disreputable: indeed, these men have often got the better of him. "It is vain to serve God; what profit is there in keeping His charge and in walking mournfully before the Lord of hosts? The proud are called happy; they that work wickedness are built up: they tempt God, and are delivered." His moods vary; and, with reckless inconsistency, he sometimes derides religion as worthless and unmeaning, and sometimes seeks to make God responsible for his sins and misfortunes. At one time he says he knows all about religion and has seen through it; he was brought up to pious ways, and his mature judgment has shown him that piety is a delusion; he will no longer countenance its hypocrisy and cant: at another time he complains that he has been exposed to special temptations and has not been provided with special safeguards; the road that leads to life has been made too steep and narrow, and he has been allowed without warning and remonstrance to tread "the primrose path that leads to the everlasting bonfire"; he will cast off altogether the dull formalities and irksome restraints of religion; he will work wickedness with a proud heart and a high hand. His happiness and success have been hindered by pedantic scruples; now he will be built up and delivered from his troubles. He gets rid of the few surviving relics of the old honorable life. The service of prayer and praise ceases; the lamp of truth is put out; the incense of holy thought no longer perfumes the soul; and the temple of the Spirit is left empty, and dark, and desolate.
At last, in what should be the prime of manhood, the sinner, brokenhearted, worn out in mind and body, sinks into a dishonored grave.
The career and fate of Ahaz may have other parallels besides this, but it is sufficiently clear that the chroniclers picture of the wicked king is no mere antiquarian study of a vanished past. It lends itself with startling facility to illustrate the fatal downward course of any man who, entering on the royal inheritance of human life, allies himself with the powers of darkness and finally becomes their slave.
William Robertson Nicoll, ed., The Expositor's Bible (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1887–1910) — public domain. 65 of 66 books (1 Corinthians is not separately keyed, as that volume carries no machine-parseable verse references); section-level commentary keyed to the opening verse. Introductory and overview sections not keyed to a specific passage are excluded.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary 1892 · Public Domain On v1 CRITICAL NOTES.] This chapter corresponds with 2 Kings 16,…
CRITICAL NOTES.] This chapter corresponds with 2 Kings 16, and gives chief events in same order. Narrative fuller in military affairs, yet an omission of two or three facts. Idolatry of A. and its consequences (2Ch_28:1-8); release of captives (2Ch_28:9-15); Assyrian help sought (2Ch_28:16-21); continued trespass and distress (2Ch_28:22-25); end of A. (2Ch_28:26-27).
2Ch_28:1-8.—Idolatry of A. and its consequences. 2Ch_28:2. Molten, i.e., representatives of different forms or characters of the chief Phœnician deity. Return to superstition of Northern kingdom, from which Judah had been clear since days of Joash. 2Ch_28:3. Burnt, restored worship of Moloch, savage god of Ammon. Heathen, Canaanites. 2Ch_28:4. Tree, great extremes (cf. 2Ki_16:4). 2Ch_28:5. Two battles with Rezin and Pekah not in Kings. 2Ch_28:7. Azrik., governor, chief officer of royal palace (cf. 1Ki_4:6; 1Ki_18:3; 2Ki_18:18).
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2Ch_28:9-15.—Release of captives. Oded, possibly same as Iddo. Samaria, where Elijah, Elisha, and other prophets exercised their vocation. Rage, great, violent, and displeasing to God; reacheth, where God hears. 2Ch_28:10. Purpose, in heart. Sins, with you greater than in Judah, therefore oppress not erring brothers. 2Ch_28:11. Deliver, send back. Fierce, law forbade Israel to make bondmen (Lev_25:39-46). 2Ch_28:12. Heads, patriarchal chiefs who formed king’s counsel. 2Ch_28:13. Forbade captives to be brought into Samaria. Offended, remembered, confessed their own sins, and felt ashamed. 2Ch_28:14. Remonstrance successful. 2Ch_28:15. Name, the four in 2Ch_28:12, acting with general consent of whole body of princes and people. 2Ch_28:15. Prisoners released, fed with spoil, and conveyed to Jericho on their way home. Palm (Deu_34:3).
2Ch_28:16-21.—Assyrian help sought. Time, after disastrous war with Ephraim and Aram. Kings, more than one in succession or in conjunction; other versions give singular instead of plural. 2Ch_28:17-18. Assign reason for seeking help. Invasion (2Ch_28:18) and refractoriness of Judah (2Ch_28:19). Naked, lit., “had caused licentiousness in Judah”. Had allowed Judah to break loose from religious restraint. 2Ch_28:20. Distressed by heavy tribute, and no help rendered.
2Ch_28:22-25.—Continued trespass and affliction. Yet more, “trespassed still more”. Spoliation (2Ch_28:21) of no avail. 2Ch_28:23. Sacrificed, superstition led him to believe that he might receive aid from the gods of D., Hadad, Rimmon, &c. (2Ki_16:10-16). 2Ch_28:24. Cut, demolished; shut up, suspended worship, and made altars after models at Damascus. Several, separate.
2Ch_28:26-27.—End and burial of A. Written, &c. (2 Kings 16). 2Ch_28:27. Brought not, buried with his fathers (2Ki_16:20), but not in sepulchres of the kings. Not an honourable burial.
HOMILETICS
THE EVIL REIGN OF AHAZ.—2Ch_28:1-7
A. forgot principles and example of his father. Soon apparent by what unhappy influences he was surrounded, and to what degeneracy the people had fallen. Increase of worldly wealth and luxury in reigns of Azariah and Jotham introduced corruptions which, by the example of Ahaz, prevailed in idolatrous practices of every kind (2Ch_28:24).
I. The unmitigated wickedness of Ahaz. A. one of the stupendous examples of Israel, one of the few men in history of whom not one good thing is recorded. His wickedness uniform, unmitigated and extraordinary development.
1. He patronised symbolic worship of Israel. “Walked in the ways of Israel” (2Ki_16:3) at beginning of reign. All forms and practices of heathenism among Israelites he adopted.
2. He practised gross idolatry of Canaan. Not content with paganism, he imported fresh modes of worship. He restored idolatry of Moloch, and fixed it under the very walls of the city, “the valley of Hinnom.” He gave personal sanction to cruel rites, by causing his sons to pass through fire, to burn them to death, or purify them and dedicate them to heathen gods. A custom in Persia for the king to send his son, seated on a black horse, to ride through the flames, to prove sacredness of character and to show the people fire will not hurt. This practice forbidden by law (Lev_18:21; Lev_20:2; Deu_18:10).
II. The fearful consequences of this wickedness. Having left God, God forsook him, and a series of calamities happen.
1. Deliverance unto the Syrians. This the issue of a confederate invasion. False dependence, heathen gods could not protect.
2. Fearful slaughter. Smitten by kings of Assyria and of Israel “with a great slaughter,” a complete panic and rout result. Defeat bereft them of defence, and they allowed themselves to be slaughtered like sheep.
3. Disgraceful captivity. “A great multitude of them captives” (2Ch_28:5). Made prisoners, they were divided between allies, sent off under military escort to capitals of Syria and Israel.
4. National calamity. Persons of distinction among captured or slain (2Ch_28:7). The king’s (probably Jotham’s) son, governor of Royal Palace and Prime Minister. Loss of these chief officers a national calamity. “How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle?” Thus blood shed, country wasted, and families ruined through sin. A good king may shelter a corrupt people; a bad king may bring judgments like a flood. The happiness of one reign may be valued by miseries of another.
THE RELEASE OF CAPTIVES.—2Ch_28:8-15
Report of “brethren” led captive excited indignation in better disposed. Oded, a prophet, went out, accompanied with princes, to meet the escort and to prevent disgrace of introducing such prisoners into the city.
I. Released through stern rebuke of the prophet. O. did not applaud their valour and congratulate them on their victory—in God’s name declared their faults and warned them of judgment.
1. Rebuked pride of victory. Not by superiority in numbers, arms, and valour had they overcome; but in consequence of Divine judgments against Israel. Not for the righteousness of victors (Deu_9:5), but for the wickedness of the vanquished; therefore boast not, “be not high-minded, but fear” (Rom_11:20-21).
2. Rebuked abuse of power. Victory gave no authority for cruelty. Offensive to keep “brethren” as slaves in war. Might not always right. They had “slain them in a rage,” and they further “purposed to keep them under” and sell them as “bondmen and bondwomen.” “The wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God.”
3. Rebuked forgetfulness of personal guilt. “Are there not with you, even with you, sins against the Lord your God?” (2Ch_28:10). Ten tribes not innocent, fallen away more completely, more hopelessly, than the two. Severity would add to their guilt and aggravate their punishment. “Thinkest thou this, O man, that judgest them which do such things and doest the same, that thou shalt escape the judgment of God?”
II. Released through the humanity of the people. Spirited remonstrance not in vain—chiefs, soldiers, and people touched.
1. Displayed in the opposition of chiefs (2Ch_28:12). Conscience-stricken when reminded of their own sins. Men of character and high position, remarkable for benevolent feeling, forbade entrance of captives into Samaria—took lead in difficult task of restoring them, and gained themselves a name.
2. Displayed in compliance of soldiers. Soldiers only obeying orders, might have defended what they gained by sword; but yielded, left captives and spoil at disposal of “the princes” (2Ch_28:14). Right to give up what is wrong to retain—more generous to yield to reason and religion than to stick at self-interest.
3. Displayed in the kindness of the people. Under benevolent superintendence the captives clothed and fed from the spoils; assisted in their weakness and conveyed on their way home (2Ch_28:15). A beautiful incident, and full of interest. A proof of loyalty to law amid national decline, of generosity in scenes of cruelty, and a type of a greater deliverance in the Gospel.
HOMILETIC HINTS AND SUGGESTIONS
2Ch_28:1-5. Like son, like father. In A. we have—I. A son who rebelled against the maxims of his father. Instead of carrying on improvements inaugurated by his father, we find that he initiated altogether a new state of things. II. A father who was devoid of natural affection towards his children. “He burnt his children in the fire.” III. The wicked sons of good fathers may sometimes be fathers themselves, and the evil they have done will be repaid to them again [Bib. Mus.].
2Ch_28:9-11. Oded went out—
1. In courageous spirit. Defying risk to meet face to face.
2. In faithfulness to God, for whom he acted, and from whom received help.
3. In benevolent design. Hear me. Here we have the picture of a good preacher. Oded teacheth, reproveth, exhorteth, turneth himself into all shapes, of spirit and of speech, that he may work upon his hearers; and he had his desire. See Timothy’s task (2Ti_4:2-3) [Trapp]. Reacheth up to heaven. Sins of violence—
1. Seen by God;
2. Provoke God;
3. Will be punished by God. “Our iniquities are increased over our head, and our trespass (guiltiness) is grown up unto the heavens” (Eze_9:6).
2Ch_28:10. Personal guilt, a sense of our own sins should check—
1. In the pride of triumph.
2. In the control of passion.
3. In the neglect of charity. Know self, moderate resentment, and imitate God’s compassion. Or learn—
1. Man’s readiness to judge others.
2. By judging, treating others harshly, we condemn ourselves. “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”
“We do pray for mercy,
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy” [Shakes.].
2Ch_28:15. Primitive charity. Clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, helping the weak, &c. “We can scarcely find a parallel to this in the universal history of the wars which savage man has carried on against his fellows from the foundation of the world” [A. Clarke]. That which happened in the time of Ahaz, was to occur again, as Isa_43:5-6; Isa_60:3, and other similar passages show on a much larger, more glorious scale at the time of the great redemption. We see at once from the words themselves with what pleasure the historian dwells upon this event [Keil].
HOMILETICS
APPEAL FOR ASSYRIAN HELP.—2Ch_28:16-21
Invasion of Judah by Rezin and Pekah not mere predatory expedition, but designed to reduce the country, upset the royal family, and establish another tributary prince. Extirpation of dynasties common in East. The older and more venerated the dynasty, the more needful to destroy it. The unconditional promise to David prevented change, and occasioned defeat of allies.
I. Appeal in imminent danger. Kingdom reduced to great distress—
1. By Invasions of the enemy. After succession of defeats, retreated within walls of Jerusalem, and besieged. Country infested north and south, and cities captured.
2. By Providential disaster. “For the Lord brought Judah low.” Bereft of wealth and power, humbled and helpless for defence. As despicable as they had been formidable.
3. By Internal disorder. “For he made Judah naked,” caused licentiousness in Judah. Bonds of government loosened, restraints of religion thrown off, and idolatry of every degree practised.
II. Appeal which cost immense sacrifice. “A. took away a portion of the house of the Lord, &c.” (2Ch_28:21).
1. Self independence. “I am thy servant and thy son” (2Ki_16:7). A plain acknowledgment of his dependent position, and the submission of a vassal.
2. Enormous treasure. To procure adequate sum for protection the palace and the temple ransacked. Costly is the price of sin and departure from God.
III. Appeal which ended in disappointment. Relief only temporary. Assyria prepared for the advantage. The end worse than the beginning. “The King of Assyria came unto him and distressed him, but strengthened him not.” Distressed—
1. By occupying the land. Hostile inroads of the enemy devasted the kingdom. Invaders, like Saxons invited by Britons against Picts and Scots, remained masters of the land.
2. By exacting heavy tribute. Payments exhausting, impoverished and weakened. The submission of Judah, proffered by Ahaz, pleasing and of utmost importance to projects of conquest. Money demanded in return for help.
3. By withholding help desired. Nothing but disappointment at last: “But he helped him not” (2Ch_28:21). Ahaz not placed in a safe and independent position; an actual for a threatened subjection resulted. It led to further idolatry and risk, which provoked God’s anger and tended to ruin the nation. Sin no “help” nor “strength,” but a cause of “distress.” Confidence in men, the world, and false ways, create disappointment and pierce the hand like a broken reed. “If ye will not believe, surely ye shall not be established.” Be firm in faith, or ye will not be made firm in fact [Speak. Com., Isa_7:9].
AHAZ’S DEEPER SINS AND MISERIES.—2Ch_28:22-25
The infatuated king unchastened by distress, surrendered himself to slavish fear and pursued his course “yet more against the Lord.” Notice—
I. The wilful obstinacy displayed in his evil course. He exerted royal authority to extend idolatry; suspended the worship of Jehovah in the temple; committed gross sacrilege, and superseded the altar of God by one from Damascus. He discarded the doctrine of one true God and affected polytheism. His religion was a kind of diplomacy. The Temple, the residence of Jehovah, by the help of the priesthood, was turned into a shelter for idols, and in the streets of Jerusalem were erected altars to foreign gods.
II. The fearful consequences of this obstinacy. “He sacrificed unto the gods of Damascus which smote him.”
1. God provoked to anger (2Ch_28:25). “The wrath of a king is as messengers of death; but a wise man will pacify it,” by proofs of penitence and amendment of life.
2. Ruin brought upon himself and kingdom. “They were the ruin of him and of all Israel.” The gods of Syria befriended him no more than the kings of Assyria. He was cut off in the midst of his days. Pernicious influence of idolatry lasted through the reforms of next reign, and only destroyed after Babylonian captivity.
III. The awful Stigma which rested upon him through this obstinate course. “This is that king Ahaz.” Like “Jeroboam who made Israel to sin,” and Judas who betrayed the Saviour, he is branded by the spirit of God. If ever a man is to be held up as a warning, this is the man. Mark him, shun his ways. Not one good thing in his life and no hope in his death!
ABUSE OF JUDGMENT.—2Ch_28:22
“Trespassed more and more” in utterly forsaking God and selling himself to sin.
I. Judgment abused by mistaking it. He thought because Syrian gods helped them, they would be of service to him. Jehovah had smitten him and helped his enemies, but he could or would not see it. He therefore sacrificed to idols. This a vulgar conception of God, and leads to abuse of devotion and into greater risk.
II. Judgment abused by defying it. There is still a lofty imperial spirit in Ahaz. Neither judgment nor mercy opens his eyes. When overthrown he must still fight against God, be master of his own condition and destiny. He abused the house of God, the altar of God, and the judgments of God. His heart was more fully set to do evil, and he “provoked to anger the Lord God of his fathers.”
LESSONS FROM THE LIFE OF KING AHAZ
I. That a course of sin is continually downward. This is a fundamental law of character, the natural working of sin. It propagates itself, but is not self-reformatory. One kind of sin produces another kind, and the law of habit applies to physical, mental, and moral actions. Character becomes fixed. “His own iniquities shall take the wicked himself, and he shall be holden with the cords of his sin.”
II. That God is faithful in checking men in this downward course. “The Lord brought Judah low because of Ahaz, King of Israel” (2Ch_28:19). Disappointed in alliances, overcome in war, captives taken by thousands, and nothing going well. God contended with him, but was despised by him; persevered in efforts to check him, but was defied and resisted. God ever seeks by his providence and spirit to turn men from an evil course which will end in ruin. “That he may withdraw man from his purpose (marg., work) and hide pride from man. He keepeth back his soul from the pit and his life from perishing by the sword.”
III. That if men will not be checked in a downward course they may become notable examples of punishment. “This is that king Ahaz” (2Ch_28:22). The end is come, but not the end of life. Chastised, but not corrected, given to idols and let alone, “he did trespass yet more.” What possibilities of human guilt! What distinctions in human shame! “Is not destruction to the wicked and a strange punishment to the workers of iniquity?”
HOMILETIC HINTS AND SUGGESTIONS
2Ch_28:16. Send in spite of promise given by Isaiah (2Ch_7:14; 2Ch_8:4), the one immediate and the other remote, that confederate kings should not prevail over him. This—
1. A forgetfulness, wilful rejection of divine assurance. Ahaz by his unbelief had not only disestablished himself (2Ch_28:9), he mortgaged the hope of Israel. He had a policy of his own, and was determined to pursue it. He betrayed the Messiah and deliverer of his people. The assurance of this betrayal is the sign of his obduracy, a signal and terrible proof of his irretrievable sin in calling upon the Assyrians. The king has been found wanting” (cf. Smith’s Bk. of Isa., p. 118).
2. An unworthy acknowledgment of human dependence. God would have been his help, but he foolishly turned to those who ruined him. This proved by Scripture and by Assyrian monuments, which record payment of tribute by tribes of Israel. “His heart was moved, and the heart of his people, as the trees of the wood are moved with the wind,” in craven fear (Isa_7:2).
2Ch_28:19. Israel low. The influence of the ruler upon the nation’s welfare and condition. Nakedness or abundance, internal anarchy or prevalent order. The higher the rank the more aggravated the sin. A corrupt king a corrupt court (like that of Charles II.). “Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child.”
2Ch_28:21 (cf. 2Ki_16:8). Sacrilege upon the House of God.
1. The king’s self-willed assault on established institutions. II. The high priest’s concessions. See in this a clear picture of the lack of Christian spirit in the two highest ranks. The State desires to see everything arranged according to its whims: the Church yields for the sake of temporal advantage [Bib. Mus.].
2Ch_28:22. This king Ahaz. The stigma fixed.
1. An expression of the writer’s feelings.
2. An example of the force of sin.
3. A providential warning to all. “Learn wisdom by the folly of others.”
2Ch_28:23. I. The true God forsaken.
1. From wrong views of his character.
2. From false confidence in his rivals. II. The certain ruin which results from this course. “The ruin of him.” Ruin personal and national, physical and moral, present and future. Gods of heathen, gods of sectarianism, gods of gold, or gods of learning will bring ruin. Mistake to seek inspiration, to covet relief, and implore deliverance from wrong sources. “Turn ye unto him from whom the children of Israel have deeply revolted.”
2Ch_28:26-27. Acts of Ahaz, which may be thus summed up:
1. His proud and faithless refusal of a sign by the mouth of Isaiah (2Ch_7:10-13);
2. His discontinuance of temple worship by closing the temple itself;
3. His desecration of the sacred vessels;
4. His erection of altars to the false gods in every corner of Jerusalem, and in every several city of Judah;
5. His sacrificing to the gods of Damascus that they might help him. The first and last of these offences belonged to the early part of his reign, the others were among the latest practices, and to be reversed by his successor in the kingdom (2Ki_18:4; 2Ch_29:3; 2Ch_29:19) [Speak. Com.].
I. The Character of Ahaz.
1. He was one of those whose iniquity is enhanced by the contempt of spiritual privileges;
2. His downward career was rapidly progressive;
3. He reached the lowest point of human obduracy. II. The illustration he affords of the appalling power of sin.
1. Evil habits strengthen by indulgence;
2. The world increases its power over its votaries as they advance in life;
3. Sinners in mature years lose the perception of religious truth;
4. There is a limit to divine endurance, and hardened transgressors are often left to perish in their sin [Bib. Mus.].
ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 28
2Ch_28:1-5 Did not right. How many a son of godly parents is destroyed by evil communications. Companions first known at school, by near residence, or picked up casually at a friend’s house, often blight the most promising young life. It would be mere affectation to suppose that the history of Ahaz is unconnected with the prevalent corruption in Judah during his father’s reign. Pharaoh himself was not a more signal instance of forbearance of judgment than he. He had a godly example and godly counsel in his father. But other mercies were given to him, and though some were severe chastisements, yet were they mercies nevertheless, and should have been for his good [Ed. Walker, Ser. O. T. Subjects].
2Ch_28:3-5. Children in fire. The king seems to have had a mania for foreign religions. The worship of Moloch was now established in the valley of Hinnom, in a spot known by the name of Tophet, close under the walls of Jerusalem. There the brazen statue of the god was erected, with the furnace within, or at its feet, into which the children were thrown. To this dreadful form of human sacrifice Ahaz gave the highest sanction by the devotion of one or more of his sons [Stanley].
2Ch_28:9-15. Clemency. The record of this act of compassion of these Israelites towards the captives of Judah is to be noted as affording a refutation of the allegation of some modern critics that the writer of Chronicles was swayed by partiality for Judah and by prejudice against Israel [Wordsworth].
2Ch_28:22-25. Continued sin. The way of sin is down hill, a man cannot stop where he would, and he that will be tampering with dangerous occasions in confidence of his resolution, shall often find himself carried beyond his purpose [Abp. Leighton].
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary (gen. ed. Joseph S. Exell; Funk & Wagnalls, c. 1892) — public domain (pre-1929). A full-Bible homiletical/sermon-outline anthology covering 65 of 66 books (2 John is absent from the source module). Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Sermon Bible 1900 · Public Domain On v1 2Ch 28:19, 2Ch 28:22-23, 2Ch 28:25
2Ch 28:19, 2Ch 28:22-23, 2Ch 28:25
I. The career of Ahaz illustrates that law of character by which the wickedness of a man is proportioned to the amount of holy influence which he has conquered. We find a reason for his extreme depravity in the extreme facilities which he had for being a saint. The worst of men are apostates from the best of faiths.
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II. The career of Ahaz illustrates also the faithfulness of God in chastising wicked men for their good. "The Lord brought Judah low because of Ahaz." From the beginning to the end of his reign he experienced the truth that the way of transgressors is hard. Nothing went well with him. His public life was one long career of defying God, yet of God’s persistent efforts to save him by chastising him.
III. The life of Ahaz illustrates the extreme which sin reaches when men fight successfully against God’s chastisements. Few things are so truthful a touchstone to the character of men as the way in which they treat the suffering which God sends as chastisement. One man turns at its bidding, and becomes an heir of glory; another defies it, and becomes a monument of perdition.
IV. The reign of Ahaz illustrates the disappointments which wicked men experience in their hopes of happiness in sin.
V. The reign of Ahaz illustrates the distinction which it is possible for a man to gain in this world as a monument of guilt. "He did trespass more against the Lord. This is that king Ahaz!" Such is the reflection of the annalist after enumerating the monarch’s crimes. Look at him; mark him; let him stand in history as a monster of iniquity; let the world stand aghast at him.
A. Phelps, The Old Testament a Living Book, p. 101.
The Sermon Bible, ed. William Robertson Nicoll (1888–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Alexander MacLaren 1905 · Public Domain On v23 2 Chronicles
2 Chronicles
COSTLY AND FATAL HELP
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2Ch 28:23.
Ahaz came to the throne when a youth of twenty. From the beginning he reversed the policy of his father, and threw himself into the arms of the heathen party. In a comparatively short reign of sixteen years he stamped out the worship of God, and nearly ruined the kingdom.
He did not plunge into idolatry for want of good advice. The greatest of the prophets stood beside him. Isaiah addressed to him remonstrances which might have made the most reckless pause, and promises which might have kindled hope and courage in the bosom of despair. Hosea in the northern kingdom, Micah in Judah, and other less brilliant names were amongst the stars which shone even in that dark night. But their light was all in vain. The foolish lad had got the bit between his teeth, and, like many another young man, thought to show his ‘breadth’ and his ‘spirit’ by neglecting his father’s counsellors, and abandoning his father’s faith. He was ready to worship anything that called itself a god, always excepting Jehovah. He welcomed Baal, Moloch, Rimmon, and many more with an indiscriminate eagerness that would have been ludicrous if it had not been tragical. The more he multiplied his gods the more he multiplied his sorrows, and the more he multiplied his sorrows the more he multiplied his gods.
From all sides the invaders came. From north, northeast, east, south-east, south, they swarmed in upon him. They tore away the fringes of his kingdom; and hostile armies flaunted their banners beneath the very walls of Jerusalem.
And then, in his despair, like a scorpion in a circle of fire, he inflicted a deadly wound on himself by calling in the fatal help of Assyria. Nothing loth, that warlike power responded, scattered his less formidable foes, and then swallowed the prey which it had dragged from between the teeth of the Israelites and Syrians. The result of Ahaz’s frantic appeals to false gods and faithless men may still be read on the cuneiform inscriptions, where, amidst a long list of unknown tributary kings, stands, with a Philistine on one side of him and an Ammonite on the other, the shameful record, ‘Ahaz of Judah.’
That was what came of forsaking the God of his fathers. It is a type of what always has come, and always must come, of a godless life. That is the point of view from which I wish to look at the story, and at these words of my text which gather the whole spirit of it into one sentence.
I. First, then, let me ask you to notice how this narrative illustrates for us the crowd of vain helpers to which a man has to take when he turns his back upon God.
If we compare the narrative in our chapter with the parallel in the Second Book of Kings, we get a very vivid picture of the strange medley of idolatries which they introduced. Amongst Ahaz’s new gods are, for instance, the golden calves of Israel and the ferocious Moloch of Ammon, to whom he sacrificed, passing through the fire at least one of his own children. The ancient sacred places of the Canaanites, on every high hill and beneath every conspicuous tree, again smoked with incense to half-forgotten local deities. In every open space in Jerusalem he planted a brand-new altar with a brand-new worship attendant upon it. In the Temple, he brushed aside the altar that Solomon had made and put up a new one, copied from one which he had seen at Damascus. The importation of the Damascene altar, I suppose, meant, as our text tells us, the importation of the Damascene gods along with it.
Side by side with that multiplication of false deities went the almost entire neglect of the worship of Jehovah, until at last, as his reign advanced and he floundered deeper into his troubles, the Temple was spoiled, everything in it that could be laid hands upon was sent to the melting-pot, to pay the Assyrian tribute; and then the doors were shut, the lamps extinguished, the fire quenched on the cold altars, and the silent Temple left to the bats and-the Shekinah; for God still abode in the deserted house.
Further, side by side with this appealing all round the horizon to whatsoever obscene and foul shape seemed to promise some help, there went the foolish appeal to the northern invaders to come and aid him, which they did, to his destruction. His whole career is that of a godless and desperate man who will grasp at anything that offers deliverance, and will worship any god or devil who will extricate him from his troubles.
Is the breed extinct, think you? Is there any one among us who, if he cannot get what he wants by fair ways, will try to get it by foul? Do none of you ever bow down to Satan for a slice of the kingdoms of this world? Ahaz has still plenty of brothers and sisters in all our churches and chapels.
This story illustrates for us what, alas! is only too true, both on the broad scale, as to the generation in which we live, and on the narrower field of our own individual lives. Look at the so-called cultured classes of Europe to-day; turning away, as so many of them are, from the Lord God of their fathers; what sort of gods are they worshipping instead? Scraps from Buddhism, the Vedas, any sacred books but the Bible; quackeries, and charlatanism, arid dreams, and fragmentary philosophies all pieced together, to try and make up a whole, instead of the old-fashioned whole that they have left behind them. There are men and women in many congregations who, in modern fashion, are doing precisely the thing that Ahaz did-having abandoned Christianity, they are trying to make up for it by hastily stitching together shreds and patches that they have found in other systems. ‘The garment is narrower than that a man can wrap himself in it,’ and a creed patched together so will never make a seamless whole which can be trusted not to rend.
But look, further, how the same thing is true as to the individual lives of godless men.
Many of us are trying to make up for not having the One by seeking to stay our hearts on the many. But no accumulation of insufficiencies will ever make a sufficiency. You may fill the heaven all over with stars, bright and thickly set as those in the whitest spot in the galaxy, and it will be night still. Day needs the sun, and the sun is one, and when it comes the twinkling lights are forgotten. You cannot make up for God by any extended series of creatures, any more than a row of figures that stretched from here to Sirius and back again would approximate to infinitude.
The very fact of the multitude of helpers is a sign that none of them is sufficient. There is no end of ‘cures’ for toothache, that is to say there is none. There is no end of helps for men that have abandoned God, that is to say, every one in turn when it is tried, and the stress of the soul rests upon it, gives, and is found to be a broken staff that pierces the hand that leans upon it.
Consult your own experience. What is the meaning of the unrest and distraction that mark the lives of most of the men in this generation? Why is it that you hurry from business to pleasure, from pleasure to business, until it is scarcely possible to get a quiet breathing time for thought at all? Why is it but because one after another of your gods have proved insufficient, and so fresh altars must be built for fresh idolatries, and new experiments made, of which we can safely prophesy the result will be the old one. We have not got beyond St. Augustine’s saying:-’Oh, God! my heart was made for Thee, and in Thee only doth it find repose.’ The many idols, though you multiply them beyond count, all put together will never make the One God. You are seeking what you will never find. The many pearls that you seek will never be enough for you. The true wealth is One, ‘One pearl of great price.’
II. So notice again how this story teaches the heavy cost of these helpers’ help.
Ahaz had, as he thought, two strings to his bow. He had the gods of Damascus and of other lands on one hand, he had the king of Assyria on another. They both of them exacted onerous terms before they would stir a foot to his aid. As for the northern conqueror, all the wealth of the king and of the princes and of the Temple was sent to Assyria as the price of his hurtful help. As for the gods, his helpers, one of his sons at least went into the furnace to secure their favour; and what other sacrifices he may have made besides the sacrifice of his conscience and his soul, history does not tell us. These were considerable subsidies to have to be paid down before any aid was granted.
Do you buy this world’s help any cheaper, my brother? You get nothing for nothing in that market. It is a big price that you have to pay before these mercenaries will come to fight on your side. Here is a man that ‘succeeds in life,’ as we call it. What does it cost him? Well! it has cost him the suppression, the atrophy by disuse, of many capacities in his soul which were far higher and nobler than those that have been exercised in his success. It has cost him all his days; it has possibly cost him the dying out of generous sympathies and the stimulating of unwholesome selfishness. Ah! he has bought his prosperity very dear. Political economists have much to say about the ‘appreciation of gold.’ I think if people would estimate what they pay for it, in an immense majority of cases, in treasure that cannot be weighed and stamped, they would find it to be about the dearest thing in God’s universe; and that there are few men who make worse bargains than the men who give themselves for worldly success, even when they receive what they give themselves for.
There are some of you who know how much what you call enjoyment has cost you. Some of us have bought pleasure at the price of innocence, of moral dignity, of stained memories, of polluted imaginations, of an incapacity to rise above the flesh: and some of us have bought it at the price of health. The world has a way of getting more out of you than it gives to you.
At the best, if you are not Christian men and women, whether you are men of business, votaries of pleasure, seekers after culture and refinement or anything else, you have given Heaven to get earth. Is that a good bargain? Is it much wiser than that of a horde of naked savages that sell a great tract of fair country, with gold-bearing reefs in it, for a bottle of rum, and a yard or two of calico? What is the difference? You have been fooled out of the inheritance which God meant for you; and you have got for it transient satisfaction, and partial as it is transient. If you are not Christian people, you have to buy this world’s wealth and goods at the price of God and of your own souls. And I ask you if that is an investment which recommends itself to your common sense. Oh! my brother; ‘what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose himself?’ Answer the question.
III. Lastly, we may gather from this story an illustration of the fatal falsehood of the world’s help.
Ahaz pauperised himself to buy the hireling swords of Assyria, and he got them; but, as it says in the narrative, ‘the king came unto him, and distressed him, but strengthened him not.’ He helped Ahaz at first. He scattered the armies of which the king of Judah was afraid like chaff, with his fierce and disciplined onset. And then, having driven them off the bleeding prey, he put his own paw upon it, and growled ‘Mine!’ And where he struck his claws there was little more hope of life for the prostrate creature below him.
Ay! and that is what this world always does. In the case before us there was providential guidance of the politics of the Eastern nations in order to bring about these results; and we do not look for anything of that sort. No! But there are natural laws at work today which are God’s laws, and which ensure the worthlessness of the help bought so dear.
A godless life has at the best only partial satisfaction, and that partial satisfaction soon diminishes. ‘Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is heaviness.’
That is the experience of all men, and I need not dwell upon the threadbare commonplaces which have survived from generation to generation, because each generation in turn has found them so piteously true, about the incompleteness and the fleetingness of all the joys and treasures of this life. The awful power of habit, if there were no other reason, takes the edge off all gratification except in so far as God is in it. Nothing fully retains its power to satisfy. Nothing has that power absolutely at any moment; but even what measure of it any of our possessions or pursuits may have for a time, soon, or at all events by degrees, passes away. The greater part of life is but like drinking out of empty cups, and the cups drop from our hands. What one of our purest and peacefullest poets said in his haste about all his kind is true in spirit of all godless lives:-
‘We poets, in our youth, begin in gladness,
But thereof cometh, in the end, despondency and madness.’
‘Vanity of vanities! saith’-not the Preacher only, but the inmost heart of every godless man and woman-’vanity of vanities! all is vanity!’
And do not forget that, partial and transient as these satisfactions of which I have been speaking are, they derive what power of helping and satisfying is in them only from the silence of our consciences, and our success in being able to shut out realities. One word, they say, spoken too loud, brings down the avalanche, and beneath its white, cold death, the active form is motionless and the beating heart lies still. One word from conscience, one touch of an awakened reflectiveness, one glance at the end-the coffin and the shroud and what comes after these-slay your worldly satisfactions as surely as that falling snow would crush some light-winged, gauzy butterfly that had been dancing at the cliff’s foot. Your jewellery is all imitation. It is well enough for candle-light. Would you like to try the testing acid upon it? Here is a drop of it. ‘Know thou that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment.’ Does it smoke? or does it stand the test? Here is another drop. ‘This night thy soul shall be required of thee.’ Does it stand that test? My brother! do not be afraid to take in all the facts of your earthly life, and do not pretend to satisfy yourselves with satisfactions which dare not face realities, and shrivel up at their presence.
These fatal helpers come as friends and allies, and they remain as masters. Ahaz and a hundred other weak princes have tried the policy of sending for a strong foreign power to scatter their enemies, and it has always turned out one way. The foreigner has come and he has stopped. The auxiliary has become the lord, and he that called him to his aid becomes his tributary. Ay! and so it is with all the things of this world. Here is some pleasant indulgence that I call to my help lightly and thoughtlessly. It is very agreeable and does what I wanted with it, and I try it again. Still it answers to my call. And then after a while I say, ‘I am going to give that up,’ and I cannot, I have brought in a master when I thought I was only bringing in an ally that I could dismiss when I liked. The sides of the pit are very slippery; it is gay travelling down them, but when the animal is trapped at the bottom there is no possibility of getting up again. So some of you, dear friends! have got masters in your delights, masters in your pursuits, masters in your habits. These are your gods, these are your tyrants, and you will find out that they are so, if ever, in your own strength, you try to break away from them.
So let me plead with you. With some of you, perhaps, my voice, as a familiar voice, that in some measure, however undeservedly, you trust, may have influence. Let me plead with you-do not run after these will-o’-the-wisps that will only lure you into destruction, but follow the light of life which is Jesus Christ Himself. Do not take these tyrants for your helpers, who will master you under pretence of aiding you; and work their will of you instead of lightening your burden. The same unwise and hopeless mode of life, which we have been describing this evening by one symbolic illustration, as calling vain helpers to our aid, was presented by Ahaz’s great contemporary Isaiah, in words which Ahaz himself may have heard, as ‘striking a covenant with death, and making lies our refuge.’ Some of us, alas! have been doing that all our lives. Let such hearken to the solemn words which may have rung in the ears of this unworthy king. ‘Judgment also will I lay to the line, and righteousness to the plummet, and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies.’ I come to you, dear friends! to press on your acceptance the true Guide and Helper-even Jesus Christ your Brother, in whose single Self you will find all that you have vainly sought dispersed ‘at sundry times and in divers manners’-among creatures. Take Him for your Saviour by trusting your whole selves to Him. He is the Sacrifice by whose blood all our sins are washed away, and the Indweller, by whose Spirit all our spirits are ennobled and gladdened. I ask you to take Him for your Helper, who will never deceive you; to call whom to our aid is to be secure and victorious for ever. ‘Behold! I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious cornerstone, a sure foundation: he that believeth shall not make haste.’
Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture (1904–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
J. R. Dummelow 1909 · Public Domain On v1 The Reign of Ahaz
The Reign of Ahaz
This chapter recounts how the idolatry of Ahaz was punished by the attacks of Syria and Israel; how the captives taken by the Israelites were restored; and how Ahaz in his distress appealed to Assyria.
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This chapter corresponds to 2 Kings 16, but it omits many facts related there, whilst expanding the account of the war with Israel.
5. The king of Syria] i.e. Rezin, who, with Pekah of Israel, wished to depose Ahaz: see Isaiah 7.
7. Maaseiah, the king's son] perhaps a son of Jotham and brother of Ahaz, since Ahaz himself was only 20 at his accession and 36 at his death (2Ch_28:1). Next to the king] i.e. the principal counsellor of state: cp. Est_10:3.
9. That reacheth, etc.] i.e. immoderate and excessive: cp. Ezr_9:6.
16. The kings] The LXX, more appropriately, has 'the king,' the allusion being to Tiglath-pileser (2Ch_28:20). But Chronicles frequently uses the plural where the singular would be more accurate: see 2Ch_28:23, also 2Chronicles 2Ch_32:4, 2Ch_32:31; 2Ch_30:6
17. The Edomites] Rezin had previously captured Elath and returned it to the Edomites (2Ki_16:6), and this doubtless encouraged them to retaliate upon the Judæans, who had withheld it from them for so long.
18. The Philistines] These had suffered at the hands of Judah during the reign of Uzziah (2Ch_26:6-7), and now took the opportunity to seek revenge.
19. Made Judah naked] RV 'dealt wantonly in Judah.'
20. Distressed him, etc.] The intervention of Assyria not only imposed the burden of tribute upon Judah, but also awoke the jealousy of Egypt, with evil results to the small kingdom placed between the two empires; yet for a time at least the Assyrians delivered Judah from Syria and Israel: 2Ki_16:9; 2Ki_15:29.
23. Because the gods, etc.] i.e. as shown by the successes of Rezin (2Ch_28:5).
J. R. Dummelow, A Commentary on the Holy Bible (Macmillan, 1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Arno C. Gaebelein 1922 · Public Domain On v1 CHAPTER 28 The Reign of Ahaz
CHAPTER 28 The Reign of Ahaz
1. The record of his reign (2Ch 28:1-4)
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2. The punishment of Ahaz (2Ch 28:5-8)
3. The message of Oded and its results (2Ch 28:9-15)
4. Further punishments of Ahaz (2Ch 28:16-25)
5. Death of Ahaz (2Ch 28:26-27)
On Ahaz his wicked reign and apostasy, as well as the war with Syria and the invasion of Judah by Israel, see our annotations on 2 Kings 16. It was at that time that Isaiah ministered in Judah (Isa. 7). Pekah, the son of Remaliah, slew in one day 120,000 men “because they had forsaken the LORD their God.” it was a terrible punishment which fell upon Ahaz. Zichri, a mighty man of Ephraim, slew the son of Ahaz, Maaseiah, also the governor and Elkanah, who was next to the king. A still larger number of Jews were taken captive. The interesting record of the prophet Oded is only given here in Chronicles. Who Oded was we do not know. He was a true and courageous prophet of Jehovah in the midst of idolatrous Samaria nearing so rapidly its predicted doom. Only a true prophet clothed with the Spirit of power could utter such a daring message, which in a time of victory and enthusiasm was calculated to humble the people. And he made the demand, “deliver the captives again, which ye have taken captive of your brethren, for the fierce wrath of the LORD is upon you.” It was the Word of the Lord, and they knew only too well that every word spoken was true, and the heads of Ephraim (the northern kingdom) were deeply impressed and convicted. They said, “Ye shall not bring the captives hither.” They acknowledged that Israel had transgressed. “For our trespass is great, and there is fierce wrath against Israel.” Then follows one of the beautiful scenes in Chronicles. This dark chapter is relieved by the mercy which was shown. “And the men which were expressed by name rose up, and took the captives, and with the spoil clothed all that were naked among them, and arrayed them, and gave them to eat and to drink, and anointed them, and carried all the feeble of them upon asses and brought them to Jericho, the city of palm trees, to their brethren.” it reminds us of two passages in the New Testament: Luk 10:30-37, the parable of the good Samaritan, and Mat 25:31-40. We leave the application which can be made with the reader. Ahaz and his alliance with Assyria as well as Ahaz’s further idolatry are commented upon in Second Kings.
Arno C. Gaebelein, The Annotated Bible (1913–1922) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Paul E. Kretzmann 1924 · Public Domain On vv1, 16 Ahaz Defeated by the Syrians and by Israel
Ahaz Defeated by the Syrians and by Israel
v. 1. Ahaz was twenty years old when he began to reign, and he reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem; but he did not that which was right, in accordance with the Law of God, in the sight of the Lord, like David, his father. In spite of the fact that he had the great prophet Isaiah in his kingdom, he was given to idolatry and to other forms of wickedness, all of which he refused to forsake.
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v. 2. For he walked in the ways of the kings of Israel, whose defection from the worship of Jehovah was notorious, and made also molten images for Baalim, the idols of the heathen Canaanites.
v. 3. Moreover, he burnt incense in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, southwest of Jerusalem, the Valley Ben-hinnom, and burnt his children in the fire, sacrificing them to Moloch, the idol of the Moabites, after the abominations of the heathen whom the Lord had cast out before the children of Israel. This was not only base ingratitude, but was equivalent to a challenge to the Lord.
v. 4. He sacrificed also and burned incense in the high places and on the hills and under every green tree, deliberately indulging in every abomination which the Lord had so emphatically forbidden time and again.
v. 5. Wherefore the Lord, his God, still his God and ready to accept him if he would but turn to Him in true repentance, delivered him into the hand of the king of Syria, who had shown a hostile attitude even in the days of Jotham; and they, the Syrians, smote him, and carried away a great multitude of them captives, and brought them to Damascus. That was the result of the first part of the campaign, briefly summarized. And he was also delivered into the hand of the king of Israel, who smote him with a great slaughter, by defeating his army and cutting them down with the usual bitterness existing between related nations in case of war.
v. 6. For Pekah, the son of Remaliah, slew in Judah an hundred and twenty thousand in one day, in a slaughter which was a terrible calamity, which were all valiant men, the flower of the nation, because they had forsaken the Lord God of their fathers; it was a direct punishment.
v. 7. And Zichri, a mighty man of Ephraim, slew Maaseiah, the king’s son, probably a royal prince of an older generation, and Azrikam, the governor of the house, a high officer of the royal palace, perhaps chief chamberlain, and Elkanah, that was next to the king, his minister or chancellor.
v. 8. And the children of Israel carried away captive of their brethren (note the feature of civil war brought out) two hundred thousand, women, sons, and daughters, whom they probably captured by a raid upon the cities of Judah, and took also away much spoil from them, and brought the spoil to Samaria. This was a terrible blow for the southern kingdom, and showed the character of the war as a barbarous strife between brother nations.
v. 9. But a prophet of the Lord was there, whose name was Oded, he still maintained his position in the midst of the idolatrous nation; and he went out before the host that came to Samaria, before they had reached the capital and said unto them, Behold, because the Lord God of your fathers was wroth with Judah, He hath delivered them into your hand, not on account of the superiority of Israel’s arms and valor, and ye have slain them in a rage that reacheth up unto heaven, in a frantic slaughter, in an unprovoked carnage, whereby they had abused their victory.
v. 10. And now ye purpose to keep under the children of Judah and Jerusalem for bondmen and bondwomen unto you, treating them as slaves of heathen nations, such as were captured in rightful war; but are there not with you, even with you, sins against the Lord, your God? Their own national sins were of such a nature that they could hardly set themselves up as judges of their brethren, to punish them with such unexampled harshness and barbarous cruelty.
v. 11. Now, hear me therefore, and deliver the captives again, set them at liberty, which ye have taken captive of your brethren; for the fierce wrath of the Lord is upon you, they would add to their guilt by this unnatural and sinful cruelty. Cf Lev 25:39-46.
v. 12. Then certain of the heads of the children of Ephraim, some of the princes of Israel themselves, Azariah, the son of Johanan, Berechiah, the son of Meshillemoth, and Jehizkiah, the son of Shallum, and Amasa, the son of Hadlai, stood up against them that came from the war, adding their indignant protest to that of Oded,
v. 13. and said unto them, Ye shall not bring in the captives hither, into the city; for whereas we have offended against the Lord already, ye intend to add more to our sins and to our trespass; for our trespass is great, and there is fierce wrath against Israel, their debt was even then so great that a further increase would bring the Lord’s punishment upon them in unendurable measure.
v. 14. So the armed men, overcome by the earnestness of the remonstrances, left the captives and the spoil before the princes and all the congregation.
v. 15. And the men which were expressed by name, very likely the same princes of Ephraim who had exhibited the fine measure of courage in stopping the procession of the captives with their armed escort, rose up and took the captives, and with the spoil clothed all that were naked among them, and arrayed them, in a decent outfit of clothes, and shod them, and gave them to eat and to drink, and anointed them, because they should return home happy and cheerful, and carried all the feeble of them, literally, "the stumblers," such as stumbled for weariness, upon asses, and brought them to Jericho, the city of palm-trees, on their southeastern border, to their brethren. Then they returned to Samaria. It was a fine example of brotherly love, expressed in a beautiful manner, a refreshing incident in the midst of a history full of unpleasant narratives, a lesson also for our day, when true charity has become almost unknown, in spite of all boasting.
Paul E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible (1921–1924) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes 2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 12, 14, 16, 19, 22, 24, 26 twenty years old ... sixteen years
twenty years old ... sixteen years
"20 years old ... 16 years" (See: Numbers)
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what was right in the eyes of Yahweh
The eyes here represent seeing, and seeing represents judgment. Yahweh saw and did not approve of Ahaz's actions. See how you translated this in 2 Chronicles 14:2. AT: "what Yahweh judged to be right" or "what Yahweh considered to be right" (See: Metaphor)
he walked in the ways of the kings of Israel
Walking represents behavior and actions. AT: "he acted the same way that the kings of Israel had acted" or "he did the things that the kings of Israel had done" (See: Metaphor)
translationWords
Ahaz
reign
Jerusalem
Yahweh
David
walk
kingdom of Israel
image
Baal
unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.
Tyndale Open Study Notes 2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv1, 3, 9, 11, 16, 17, 22, 24, 26 28:1 After a co-regency with his father, Jotham, Ahaz…
28:1 After a co-regency with his father, Jotham, Ahaz became king in his own right and reigned . . . sixteen years, from 731 to 715 BC.
Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.