Join us in this episode as we delve into the intriguing reign of King Jehoash, the youthful monarch under the mentorship of Jehoiada, the high priest. Discover how the spiritual and political landscape of Judah was shaped under their guidance. Despite promising beginnings, Jehoash’s administration is challenged by the enduring presence of Canaanite worship practices and the complacency of the temple priests. We explore the complexities and struggles faced by Jehoash as he attempts to assert control, reform religious practices, and preserve the house of the Lord.
00:00:02 Introduction and Overview of Jehoash’s Reign
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
SPEAKER 02 :
It’s a sobering thought to consider that the kingdom of Israel was once ruled by a woman. And not a very good woman at that. To secure her throne, she had all the royal children murdered. Killed them. The priest at the time, his name was Jehoiada, hid one of the boys, about a year old. And thereby hangs a story. Athaliah was the queen. She ruled for six years until the boy, Jehoash, was seven. As one of the confusing things about Hebrew names in the Bible is that they really have to do with meaning, not with sound. And Jehoash comes out Joash in some of the sections of this passage of the Bible. Then the priest in the army conspired to dispose of Athaliah, and I imagine she was a hated figure. and to place Jehoash or Joash on the throne. It was a good choice. The idealism of youth served Israel well for many years. Jehoiada made a covenant between the Lord and the king and the people. The story is told in 2 Kings 11. He made a covenant between the Lord, the king, and the people that they should be the Lord’s people. and also between the king and the people. Now, mind you, what’s going on here is they’re not going to be the people of Baal. They’re not going to be the people of no God, or they’re not going to be the people of a nameless, generic God. They are Jehovah’s people. It turns out it was none too soon, because the worship of Baal was already gaining a strong foothold in Judah. Well, all the people of the land went into the house of Baal and broke it down. They broke down his altar. His images they broke in pieces thoroughly. They slew Matan, the priest of Baal, before the altars. Right in front of the altars they took him down. And the priest appointed officers over the house of the Lord. And he took the rulers over hundreds and the captains and the guard and all the people of the land, and they brought down the king from the house of the Lord and came by the way of the gate of the guard to the king’s house. And he sat on the throne of the kings. All the people of the land rejoiced, and the city was in quiet. They slew Athaliah with the sword beside the king’s house. Seven years old was Jehoash when he began to reign. And it’s really interesting, this is really a regency of the high priest at the time, that the people of the land rejoiced and the city was quiet. Everyone quit fighting. All the struggle, all the politics, at least for a while, began to be quiet under the rule, the regency, if you will, of the high priest. 2 Kings 12. In the seventh year of Jehu, Jehoash began to reign. Now, we’re in the southern kingdom of the house of Judah. And it identifies the timing of this by pointing at the reigning monarch of the house of Israel, whose name was Jehu. So he began to reign. He reigned for 40 years, which means he died when he was 47 years old. His mother’s name was Zebiah of Beersheba. Well, he did that which was right in the sight of the Lord all his days when Jehoiada the priest instructed him. Now, this in itself is interesting. As long as he had Jehoiada the high priest for his mentor, he served God consistently all those days. Unfortunately, the high places were not taken away. The people still sacrificed and burnt incense in the high places. And I think I should probably pause for a moment to tell you about these high places. These had originally been places of Canaanite worship. They tended to go to high ground. They built their little sanctuaries up there. They set up altars. And they set up Asherah poles in those places. And they had a form of… prostitution, male and female. And not long ago, I learned something that I hadn’t focused on, and I really, you know, it’s one of those things you slap yourself up beside the head and say, why didn’t I see that? That these prostitutes that turned up in these shrines were not adults that went in there and decided, I’ll earn my living this way. They were temple slaves, and they’d been sold into that condition when they were children. And that’s why the condemnation that you read here about these high places is so strong. Joash said to the priests, “…all the money of the dedicated things that is brought into the house of the Lord, even the money of everyone that passes the account, the money that every man is set at, and all the money that comes into any man’s heart to bring to the house of the Lord.” Let the priests take it to him, every man of his acquaintance, and let them repair the breaches of the house, wherever any breach shall be found. Problem? Well, in the 23rd year of King Jehoash, the priests hadn’t done a lick of work in the repairing of the temple. Well, Jehoash is 30 now, and he’s ready to assert himself. He calls for Jehoiada the priest and all the other priests, and he said this, Why have you not moved to repair the breaches of the house? Now, therefore, receive no more money of your acquaintance. Deliver it for the breaches of the house. Well, he was only partially successful with this. They did not begin to repair the breaches of the house. But Jehoiada, the priest, took a chest. He bored a hole in the lid of it, and he set it beside the altar on the right side as you come into the house of the Lord. And the priest that kept the door put all the money therein that was brought into the house of the Lord. So what they did, when they could tell there was a lot of money in the chest, the king’s scribe and the high priest came up. They put the money up in bags and tallied the money that was found in the house of the Lord. They then gave that money, being tallied, into the hands of them that did the work. that had the oversight of the house of the Lord, and they laid it out to the carpenters and the builders that worked on the house of the Lord. Finally, at long last, work is actually being done on God’s house. They gave money to masons and cutters of stone to buy timber and huge stone to repair the breaches of the house of the Lord. and for all that was laid out for the house to repair it. Now, you know, if you read this, it’s almost startling when you think about it. The temple had fallen into terrible disrepair. It’s almost as though worship had all but ceased in that temple. In any case, they needed big cut stones. They needed heavy timbers. They had a huge amount of rebuilding they had to do and of repairs in the temple. It had been in neglect now for generations. He went on to say there were not made for the house of the Lord bowls of silver and snuffers and basins and trumpets or any vessels of gold or vessels of silver of that money that was brought into the house of the Lord. They gave that money to the workmen and they repaired the house of the Lord. This was no time for gigols or for fancy things or Baroque decorations. This was the time to just get everything back in shape. Moreover, they didn’t even have to reckon with the men into whose hand they delivered the money. They dealt faithfully. They could give them the money with absolute confidence. It would be used for the purpose intended. Now, the trespass money, the sin money, was not brought into that. It was the priests. God had deliberately given some of the offerings to the priests for their service. It is likely that in that period of decay, that didn’t amount to much. Because truth to tell, if the people aren’t coming up to worship, if they are coming up but only because they have to, if there is no zeal for the house of God, there’s not going to be much money coming in for the priests. They weren’t going to get rich over all this. Some of them were probably barely making do. Well, about this time, Hazael, the king of Syria, went up and fought against Gath and took it down in the area of the Philistines. Hazael set his face to go up to Jerusalem. It was obvious what his intent was. So Jehoash, the king of Judah, took all the hallowed things that Jehoshaphat and Jehoram and Ahaziah, his fathers, had dedicated, and his own hallowed things, and all the gold he could find in the treasures of the house of the Lord, in the king’s house, and sent it to Hazael, king of Syria. He just bought him off. And, of course, it should be pretty plain by that time, there’s really nothing left up there. Why spend the time to besiege this miserable little city? Of course, from Joash’s point of view, he ransomed the city. They simply were not in a position to fight. The rest of the acts of Joash and all that he did are then outwritten in the book of the Chronicles of the king of Judah. His reign is about to come to an end. But it comes about in a very sad way. His servants rose up and made a conspiracy and killed him in the house of Milo that goes down toward Silla. Why did that happen? Well, we’ll explain that, but first, grab a pencil and a pad. I want to give you some information that you’ll want to keep.
SPEAKER 01 :
I’ll be right back. Most Christians have no idea how the greatest of Jewish holidays became the greatest of Christian holy days. Ronald Dart’s second book, The Thread, God’s Appointments with History, is now available from Amazon.com or directly from BornToWin.net. Write to BornToWin, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE-44.
SPEAKER 02 :
It seems such a sad end after 40 years of a prosperous reign overall, had a few bad spots in it, that this young man who was seven years old when he began to reign, served God, did very well all the years when his mentor, Jehoiada the high priest, was still there. But apparently, somehow, when Jehoiada was gone, he began to lose his grip. Here, we find in the end, his servants conspire against him and kill him. Now, there has to be more to this story than that, and there is. It’s told in 2 Chronicles 24. There’s a short passage beginning about verse 20. The Spirit of God came upon Zechariah, the son of Jehoiada the priest. So this is a boy, a young man by this time, obviously, and couldn’t possibly be very old. He was a son of Jehoiada who stood above the people. And he said to them, Thus saith God. Okay, the Spirit of God comes upon him. He’s got a message from God. Why do you transgress the commandments of the Lord that you cannot prosper? Why is it that things aren’t working here for us, folks? You’re not doing well. You’re not prospering. Something is wrong. Why? Because you have forsaken the Lord. He has forsaken you. It is such a simple formula. And I’ll tell you, this worries me more than a little about our own nation right here, right now. There is a great forsaking of God in the land. And the natural fallout of that is that God, in turn, forsakes us. And what are we going to do in the end thereof? He goes on to say, then they conspired against Zechariah. Well, look, the guy just stood up there and says, look, you’ve forsaken God. He’s forsaken you. That’s the reason why you people aren’t prospering. It’s why things aren’t working. It’s why you’re having bad weather. It’s why you’re having floods. It’s why you’re having droughts. Well, they conspired against Zechariah and stoned him with stones at the commandment of the king in the court of the house of the Lord. That king was Joash. Why on earth would they do that? The man, I mean, he’s only telling the truth. Well, maybe that’s why it was a problem. Because if he’d gotten up there and just been blathering on like some idiot and it had no relationship to what they were doing or how they were living their lives, they probably would have laughed at him. But it’s because he told them the truth that they killed him. King Joash, we’re told, did not remember the kindness of Zechariah’s father Jehoiada had shown to him He had killed his son, and the son, as he lay dying, said this, May the Lord see this and call you to account. And it came to pass, at the end of the year, the host of Syria came up against him. They came to Judah, to Jerusalem, destroyed all the princes of the people from among the people, and sent all the spoil back to the king of Damascus. A little different angle on this than we got from kings. For the army of the Syrians came with a small company of men, and the Lord delivered a very great host into their hand. Why? Because they had forsaken the Lord God of their fathers. So they executed judgment against Joash. And when they departed from him, for they left him in great diseases, which means he was very sick at the time, his own servants conspired against him for the blood of the sons of Jehoiada the priest, and they killed him on his bed. They buried him in the city of David, but they did not bury him in the sepulchers of the kings. You know, the lesson of this, it’s a sad story. Joash started out so well. But as the old saying goes, it’s not how you start that counts, it’s how you finish. Now the scene will shift north to the house of Israel. In the 23rd year of Joash, Jehoahaz, the son of Jehu, began to reign over Israel in Samaria. You kind of have these alternating kingdoms through the accounts of both Kings and Chronicles as they try to tell you what’s going on in both of these kingdoms. Jehoahaz reigned 17 years, and he did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and followed the sins of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, who made Israel sin. He did not depart from it. Now, the key element, and this is interesting because this expression turns up again and again. In fact, nearly every king of Israel does. It says they did not depart from the sins of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin. What did he do? Well, he told the people, look, it’s too much for you to go up to Jerusalem to worship God. So he made them two new sanctuaries, one in Bethel, one in Dan, and put up golden calves in both of those locations. And he set up his own set of festivals. The problem he had was he feared that if the children of Israel continued to observe God’s festivals, as outlined in Leviticus 23, all the seven holidays throughout the year, if they continued to go three times a year to Jerusalem to worship God, he was scared to death that their hearts would return to the king of Judah and they would kill him. And therefore, we’d have a united kingdom again. And so he changed the religion. He changed the worship. Hosea makes it clear. They set up a whole new holy day system in the north. And what they did by that, what they accomplished with that was to barricade, as it were, the way back to God. For it was in the observance of those holy days, year after year, that the people were reminded of who their God was. It wasn’t Baal. It wasn’t Dagon. It wasn’t Ashtaroth. It was Jehovah. But they didn’t want it that way. The kings of the north didn’t. And so they did everything they could to change that. So God was angry with them, and he didn’t help them. He delivered them into the hand of Hazael, the king of Syria, to the hand of Ben-Hadad, the son of Hazael, all their days. Well, Jehoahaz did beseech God, and God listened to him, for he saw the oppression of Israel, because the king of Syria oppressed them. And he gave Israel a savior, so that they went out from under the hand of the Syrians, and the children of Israel dwelt in their tents as before time. You know, he just felt sorry for them, and he’d made these promises to David, so yeah, well, let’s deliver them. Nevertheless, 2 Kings 13, verse 6 says, They departed not from the sins of the house of Jeroboam, who made Israel sin. They just kept right on doing that. And there remained the Asherah also in Samaria. And that in itself is a terrible thing to consider. The truth is that the Asherah was the female goddess. It was the feminine principle that people talk about these days. And it was one of the most evil things that existed in the ancient world because it was the oppressor of little girls and little boys. It was the worship of Asherah and the Asherah polls throughout Israel that focused on these shrines where temple prostitutes did their thing, temple slaves. who were prostitutes, and oftentimes were recruited as little boys and little girls. If you’d like to know more about that, just drop us a line or give us a call and ask for a sermon titled, The Asherah, and I’ll tell you what that’s all about. Also, he didn’t leave any of the people that Jehoahaz, but 50 horsemen, 10 chariots, 10,000 footmen, for the king of Syria had wiped them all out and made them like the dust of the threshing floor. Now the rest of the acts of Jehoahaz and all that he did and all of his might, all that’s written down in the book of the Chronicles of the kings of Israel. Finally, Jehoahaz sleeps with his fathers, they bury him in Samaria, and Joash, his son, reigns in his stead. Now, this can be awfully confusing to a reader, because now we’ve got another Joash, this one in the house of Israel in the north, compared to the one that was in the south. We’ll talk about the reign of this Joash, but first, once again, grab a pencil and a pad, I’ll have a free offer for you, and then I’ll be right back.
SPEAKER 01 :
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SPEAKER 02 :
In the 37th year of Joash, the king of Judah, who you recall reigned for 40 years, began Joash, the son of Jehoahaz, to reign over Israel in Samaria. He reigned 16 years. So you’ve got two Joashes at the same time. Now, I’ll just have to fess up, folks. The only way you’ll ever get all these kings straight in your mind is to sit down with a pad and a piece of paper and your Bible and and work your way through them all. You might be able to work out a reasonable chart, as it were, of the times of the kings. But if you do that, keep it to yourself. Other people tend to get cross-eyed when they look at charts like this. But he did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, did this second joash. He did not depart from the sins of Jeroboam. Here’s this formula again. The sins of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, who made Israel sin. He walked in them. He just kept right on doing the same thing. The rest of his acts and all that he did and his might wherewith he fought against Amaziah the king of Judah, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel? And that Joash slept with his father, and another Jeroboam sits upon his throne. Joash was buried in Samaria with the kings of Israel. Now we have Jeroboam II who comes upon the scene. Briefly, the scene shifts back to our old friend, the prophet Elisha, who is not dead yet, but he was sick. Elisha had fallen sick of his sickness, whereof he died. And Joash, the king of Israel, came down to him and wept over his face and said, Oh, my father, my father, the chariot of Israel and the horsemen thereof. Now, down through the years, I’ve often been asked, what in the world does this mean? And I think some commentators think, oh, this is a reference to the chariot that took away Elijah. I don’t think so. Chariots and horsemen formed the heart and core of an ancient army. They were where the real power lay. They were something like the armored cavalry. When the Germans came through with the blitzkrieg, they came through with tanks and fast-moving stuff, and only then with infantry. This is basically what the ancient world did as well. It was chariots and horsemen who were the armored cavalry. And so when he comes in and weeps over Elisha, what he’s doing is saying, we’re losing our tanks. We’re losing the armored cavalry right out of our heart. Because he knew, they all knew, over how many long years Elisha had been the thing that had saved their bacon again and again in a time of war. In other words, he knew that Elisha was their strongest weapon. So Elisha said to him, take a bow and arrows. And he took to him a bow and arrows. And the king said, put your hand on the bow. He put his hand on it. He put his hands on the king’s hands. And he said, now open the window eastward. He opened it. Elisha said, shoot. And he shot. And then he said, the arrow of the Lord’s deliverance and the arrow of deliverance from Syria. For you will smite the Syrians in Aphek till you have consumed them. There’ll be a battle and you’re going to win it. Then he said, take the arrows. And he took them in his hand. He said, now smite on the ground. And he smote three times and stopped. Funny thing about human beings, we do tend to think in threes. The man of God was furious. He said, you should have smitten five or six times. If you’d done that, you would have smitten Syria until you had consumed it. Now, you’re going to smite them three times only. What a lesson. Never be half-hearted with God’s instructions, even when those instructions are symbolic. Because if he had taken those arrows in his hand and whacked the ground again and again until she said, it’ll do, that’s enough, that’s enough. He would have wiped out Syria and changed the course of history. But he just whacked the ground three times. Elisha died, and they buried him. And all the bands of the Moabites invaded the land in the coming of the year. And it came to pass as they were burying a man. They were going along to spy the band of men. And so they took this man that they were getting ready to bury. He was dead. They cast him into the sepulcher of Elisha because it’s handy. They just sort of tossed him in there and he rolled in. And when he was let down and touched the bones of Elisha, he revived and stood up on his feet. You talk about an air-raising experience. We’re taking our friend off to bury him, and because we have to get rid of him for a moment because of an impending battle, we let him down, and he touches the bones of another man, this man being Elijah. Elisha, I should say. He revived and stood upright. Incredible thing to happen. Now, why did that happen? What does it mean? Was the Spirit of God still present with the corpse of this great man? Had there been so much power around him year in, year out, year in, year out, that it was still residual? Or was God performing one last symbolic miracle by the body of Elisha? I don’t know. And I’m sure there are many people who can speculate about the meaning of this particular thing. But it’s just that. It’s speculation. We don’t know. But Hazael, the king of Syria, oppressed Israel all the days of Jehoahaz, and the Lord was gracious to them, had compassion on them, and had respect to them because of his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and would not destroy them. He would not cast them down from his presence as yet. But, unfortunately, it was only going to be a matter of time.
SPEAKER 01 :
Until next time, I’m Ronald Dart. The Born to Win radio program with Ronald L. Dart is sponsored by Christian Educational Ministries and made possible by donations from listeners like you. If you can help, please send your donation to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. You may call us at 1-877-7000. 888-BIBLE44 and visit us online at borntowin.net.
SPEAKER 03 :
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