God's Faithfulness and Love in Judgment.
2 Kings ch. 11
God is sovereign, He rules in
the affairs of men. Ultimately He is the one who controls history, and He
controls it in a way that does not makes robots out of us but in light of our
own individual choices God is the one who works out His plans and His purposes.
God is also righteous. His righteousness is the standard of right and wrong in
the universe and justice is the application of that standard to His creatures.
So we have an absolute standard that never changes and it is always applied
consistently in the affairs of men. We have to start with that because
sometimes we may look at circumstances and think that perhaps God has somehow
become involved with some other situation in the world and is ignoring the
injustice is our own lives. But we always have to remember that these
attributes do not operate in isolation from other attributes and the righteousness
and justice of God also works in perfect harmony with His love. His justice is
always executed in light of His love, and His love is always consistent with
His righteousness. That is why His love is unique: it is a love that is based
on absolute and perfect virtue. A love that has no virtue is no love at all and
that is why human love is often so tenuous, because there is no virtue to
undergird it. God is also eternal; He has no beginning and no end. He is
omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent. In His omniscience He knows all the
knowable: He knows everything that might happen, everything that could happen,
all of the “ifs,” and so God is able to handle and provide for every
circumstance and situation. He is omnipresent which means He is present to all
aspects of His creation at every moment, and so He is never far from us. He is
omnipotent, which means he is always able to accomplish that which He intends
to accomplish and is able to surmount any challenge that faces His plan or His
purposes. He is also absolute truth or veracity. That works together which His
righteousness, justice and love in terms of His personal integrity. Truth
resides within His thinking, so what he does is always consistent with truth.
He is unchangeable or immutable.
When we think about these
attributes we need to go a step further sometimes. What do these attributes
mean and apply to a particular circumstance or situation that we face in our
life? If we were a citizen of
Therefore we have to think
through these attributes. In terms of God’s immutability He has made certain
promises to Abraham and to David. He operates according to the covenant He made
with Moses, and because God is never changing, is immutable, we can know that
although everything is falling apart around us we can rely upon Him. We know
that He is omnipotent, so He is able to handle whatever challenges there may be
to His plan. As time goes by and we hear of other things that are going on we
realize that something more significant spiritually is happening, and that is
that there seems to be an assault upon the descendants of David. They have been
wiped out by one king after another and so the line of David seems to be in
jeopardy. But God is able to protect the seed of David and protect His plan to
bring about that which He has promised. God is so powerful that He can control
the details from the micro to the macro. We think in terms of His omniscience,
that whatever the circumstances may be presented by human decisions God is not
taken by surprise. It may surprise us and we may be faced with completely
unexpected circumstances, but they are not a surprise to God, He has planed and
prepared for these circumstances from eternity past. And then we remember that
all of this relies upon the integrity of God, the very core of His essence: the
relationship of His righteousness, justice, love and truth.
These attributes we often
find related together in the Scripture. For example, Psalm 89:14 NASB
“Righteousness and justice are the foundation of Your throne; Lovingkindness
and truth go before You.” We see the connection between these attributes stated
again and again in the Scripture. Psalm 40:10 NASB “I have not
hidden Your righteousness within my heart; I have spoken of Your faithfulness
and Your salvation; I have not concealed Your lovingkindness and Your truth
from the great congregation.”
Often modern man has a
difficult time understanding how love and righteousness go together. He has a
tendency to somehow define love in a superficial way and then uses that to
somehow negate righteousness and justice. To modern man there are apparent
conflicts between these attributes—but not in the mind of God. In the Word of
God we see that one of the words that expresses these attributes is
“faithfulness,” it ties many of them together. The main idea of faithfulness is
stability. God’s love for us is a faithful love—chesed, which has the idea of loyal, faithful love. It is a love
that is dependent upon God’s character, and He is always faithful to His
promise, always faithful to His covenant; and it is a love that never changes.
Part of that love involves God’s judgment or discipline upon His people.
Hebrews 12:5, 6, a quotation from Proverbs 3:11-12, demonstrating that this is
an eternal truth; it was true both in the Old Testament in the dispensation of
When we see the judgment that
God is bringing against the northern kingdom and think about these concepts we
have to recognize that in the thinking of the world around us this appears to
be very harsh. The world operates on some sort of autonomous and independent
view of what love and righteousness is and it comes back and says this isn’t a
very loving God, sending someone like Jehu around to kill everybody, and it
just shows a very distorted concept of sin and evil. That is the basic problem,
not just the problem of not being able to understand love but it is based on a
prior confusion: a confusion about what evil is. At the very heart of false
religion and many of the modern ideologies that shape various worldviews is a
denial of the reality of evil. We have to recognize that when we fail to
believe in a real substantive evil we put ourselves at incredible risk for
self-destruction. Illustration: If we deny the existence of cancer, that it is
an illusion, we might engage in behavior that would put us at risk of cancer.
That is what is happening in western civilization. We have denied the real
substantive existence of evil, we are living in a fantasy world created by our
own imagination—we refuse to label terrorists as terrorists, we refuse to
recognize the real evil and violence that exists at the very core of Islamic
theology and the teaching in the Koran, and so we are not willing to face
things as they truly are—and we will make decisions that will put us at risk of
being destroyed by the very things that we deny exist. When we build our lives
on any kind of fantasy, any kind of illusion, then it is just building a house
of cards and eventually things will happen that will tear it down.
The Word of God clearly
teaches us about evil and the destructiveness of evil. And because evil is so
destructive, so horrible—and it often masquerades as that which is fairly
benign—it results in horrible and unintended consequences. But because evil is
so substantive, so seductive and so destructive there are times in history when
God has to excise that evil with major surgery that often appears to be quite
violent to the unbeliever. All of this manifests God’s sovereign control over
history and there are times when God has to insert Himself into history in
order to excise the cancer of evil so that the human race does not destroy
itself. The judgments we have seen fall within that category. Within the
culture of the northern kingdom of Israel and in the southern kingdom of Judah
a horrible spiritual malignancy was threatening to destroy the people of God,
the people that God had called to be a kingdom of priests, His holy people who
would represent Him to the world; the people through whom God was giving His
Word, the people who were designated the custodians of divine revelation, and
through whom the savior of the world would come. So now was the time for God to
perform major surgery in an extremely violent way. This is in order to protect
man. Love has these two elements: that which provides blessing; that which also
provides judgment.
An example of this: two New
Testament verses that are frequently quoted in terms of the gospel. John 3:16,
slightly enhanced translation to give an idea of what the Greek indicates: “For
God loved the world in this manner, he gave his unique [one of a kind] Son,
that whoever believes in him has everlasting life”; Romans 5:8 echoes that
thought: NASB “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that
while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” In both of these passages we
have an emphasis on the love of God, and we rightly rejoice in the love of God
because this has provided for us our incredible salvation: that God in His love
provided a savior who could give us eternal life and who would pay the penalty
for our sins. But the very act of His love that provided such a great salvation
for us provided a horrific judgment and suffering on the eternal second person
of the Trinity. The Lord Jesus Christ bore in His body on the tree our sin; it
was imputed to Him. We cannot imagine the horror, the suffering that the Lord
Jesus Christ went through during those three hours on the cross when He bore
the legal penalty for our sin. The love that we rejoice over, that gives us a
free salvation, was a love that also had to bring judgment upon someone because
of the righteousness and the justice of God. Love, then, always includes
judgment because real love is built on righteousness—it has virtue as a part of
its makeup.
God is perfectly faithful in
both His blessing and discipline or judgment. This is why Moses early on in
Deuteronomy reminds the Israelites of the faithfulness of God. Deuteronomy 7:9 NASB
“Know therefore that the LORD your God, He is God, the faithful God, who keeps His
covenant and His lovingkindness to a thousandth generation with those who love
Him and keep His commandments.” Then as he concludes Deuteronomy, again he came
back to the faithfulness of God, Deuteronomy 32:4 NASB “The Rock!
His work is perfect, For all His ways are just; A God of faithfulness and
without injustice, Righteous and upright is He.” The word “faithfulness” is a
reminder that God is going to be faithful to His covenant, consistent and
stable, and He is never going to break that covenant with
In the Davidic covenant, 2
Samuel 7:12-16; Psalm 89; 1 Chronicles 17:11-14, God promised David an eternal
house, an eternal kingdom, and an eternal throne. In other words, He promised
that in his descendants there would be one who would occupy the throne of
We are looking at this
judgment in terms of this particular covenant, because not only is the nation
threatened but the seed promise is threatened. The ball we really have to keep
our eye on as we read through these events in Kings, as well as the parallels
in Chronicles, is the protection of the seed because the ultimate angelic
conflict is seeking and attempting to prevent God from being able to fulfill
His promises to
Asa is the great grandson of
Solomon. He was the father of Jehoshaphat who in a moment of spiritual and
political weakness entered into an alliance with Ahab which was secured by a
marriage between his son Jehoram and the daughter of Ahab and Jezebel,
Athaliah. So the house of Ahab is introduced into the southern kingdom and the
line of David. Baalism is brought into the southern kingdom and like any
malignancy is permeating all of the people of God and is reaching a critical
mass. Before it does irreversible damage God is going to bring a judgment upon
the nation. What has happened in this historical flow is that there has been an
assault upon the house of David. 2 Chronicles 21:4, 7 NASB “Now when
Jehoram had taken over the kingdom of his father and made himself secure, he
killed all his brothers with the sword, and some of the rulers of
After Jehoram dies his
Ahaziah comes to the throne and he is so bad he doesn’t even last a year before
he is executed by Jehu. 2 Chronicles 22:8, 9 NASB “It came about
when Jehu was executing judgment on the house of Ahab, he found the princes of
When Ahaziah was executed
by Jehu his mother becomes the queen. Ahaziah was rather young at the time and
so his children were still infants. When Athaliah took the throne she decided
she needed to clean house to protect herself and her power base, and so we are
told in 2 Kings 11:1 NASB “When Athaliah the mother of Ahaziah saw
that her son was dead, she rose and destroyed all the royal offspring.” It
looked as if the seed of David is in extreme jeopardy and the Davidic covenant
is in jeopardy. However, God is in control. Just when our life is in the
biggest mess it has ever been and falling apart around us never forget that God
is still there and is in control, and God still has a plan. God has Jehosheba
who was the daughter of king Jehoram, a believer and the sister of Ahaziah and
so is also the daughter of Athaliah, but she is married to the priest,
Jehoiada. She realizes what Athaliah is doing and she rescues Joash who is the
infant son of Ahaziah and hid him away so that he was not killed. [3] “So he
was hidden with her in the house of the LORD six years, while Athaliah was reigning over the
land.” This puts all of the priests’ life in danger. They are hidden in a
chamber, probably on the temple mount, and protected there by God and by the
priesthood, and Jehoiada was very wise and had informed certain military
leaders, certain other princes and the Levites and priests of the existence of
Joash, and they protected the secret and him during this time until it was time
for him to become king. It was during that time that Jehoiada taught and
trained Joash, and because Joash was taught by this believer, and because he
was taught the Word while he was sequestered and hidden away in the temple this
provided a basis for subsequent blessing on the nation, at least until Jehoiada
died. When Jehoiada died Joash made a major turn and brought the nation back
into idolatry. But this shows, at least initially, the grace of God in
protecting and providing for the house of David in the southern kingdom; it
shows His grace and His faithfulness in that no matter how bad things looked,
no matter how destructive things had been, God was still working.
This is true in our lives.
We have the promises of God that we can go to and the Word of God that we can
go to, and that is what gives us real comfort in the midst of crisis.
Lamentations