Self-Destruction through Self-Deception.
2 Kings 13:1-25
What we see from this point
on as far as the northern kingdom goes is a continuous deterioration into
rebellion against God into apostasy and degeneracy, and it is fueled by an
increasing level of self-deception which leads to self-destruction. This
applies not just to the nation Israel but it applies to each individual believer. We can
all come under arrogance or the blindness of our own arrogance of
self-absorption and this, if it is not dealt with with the objective truth of
God’s Word can lead to tremendous catastrophe in our own lives and in our own
souls, because as we succumb to self-deception it eventually will lead to
self-destruction and all that comes with that.
Romans chapter one really
describes the dynamics that occur, and this is true even for someone who is a
believer although the context of Romans chapter one is talking about
unbelievers. A believer in rebellion against God, a believer that is not
focused on God’s Word, still falls into this same trap. Romans 1:20 NASB
“For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal
power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what
has been made, so that they are without excuse.” In other words, we can look at
what exists in creation and we can see something about the one who created it.
We can begin to understand that all that exists at a microscopic level cannot
just have come to exist by accident and therefore we learn something about the
one who made us. There is enough evidence out there in creation about the
existence of God that no one can stand before the Supreme Court of Heaven and
say they didn’t see any evidence. [21] “For even though they knew God, they did
not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their
speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened.” No matter how rank the
atheist might be all have known, the Scripture says, that God exists. And they
know it, but they are suppressing that. They made a choice to be deceived, to
deceive themselves and to suppress that truth. [22] “Professing to be wise,
they became fools, [23] and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an
image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and
crawling creatures.” So instead of worshipping the creator man is going to
worship something else because man is created by God in his soul in such a way
that he must worship something. So if you remove God and take Him out of the
picture you must worship something within the creation—nature, ideas generated
by man, yourself, money, material things, something. So there is this exchange
that takes place and the more man touts his intellectual achievements and
denies God the more foolish he becomes.
What this is saying is that
the position of the unbeliever is they are living in delusion, living on the
basis of a lie. When you reject the objective reality of the God of the Bible
then something takes its place, and what takes its place is a fantasy. What
takes its place is a creaturely generated explanation of reality that is going
to somehow give meaning or value and justification for behavior to our lives.
What the Scriptures says is that it all comes under the general delusion of
this lie that pulls in every aspect of life and everything that we see and
redefines it. Imperceptibly, unconsciously an unbeliever or a rebellious
believer goes about his life and everything he sees is instantly redefined,
taken over and restructured within the framework of the lie he has chosen to
control his life. We all do this, it is the sophistication of our sin nature,
and unless there is the Holy Spirit and the Word of God to take out a hammer and
chisel and start breaking that lie apart we would just end up in complete
self-destruction. So Romans chapter one gives us an analysis of what is going
on in the nation of Israel because this is what is going on in the souls of the
majority of those who live in the northern kingdom.
As we get into the thirteenth
chapter we focus on two kings in the northern kingdom, Jehoahaz and his son
Jehoash (also known as Joash). Not a lot of said of either one but enough is
said to give us a pretty good understanding of the dynamics of what God is
doing in the northern kingdom of Israel. In the conclusion of the chapter is an
incident that involves Elisha. This is his closing scene as Elisha is in his
final illness before he dies.
What we have to recognize
when we go to the Old Testament is that this was written initially to the
initial audience of Israelites in order to teach them certain principles,
certain spiritual realities, and to illustrate what had been stated and
predicted by Moses back in Deuteronomy as Moses addressed the nation before
they went into the land. He told them what would take place: how they would
depart from the Lord and how they would go through various cycles of divine
discipline, and how God would bring hardship, military conquest and economic
collapse into their lives in order to pressure them to bring them back to Him.
And when they would turn back to Him then God would bless them. Then they would
once again fall into the trap of false deception and living on the basis of the
lie that they told themselves. We see this happen as a nation and we see that
is what is being illustrated in these episodes. But the nation is composed of
individuals and individuals are doing the same thing. The individuals of that
time are no different from the individuals of our time or the nations of our
time, so there are a lot of principles of application here for what happens
when a nation succumbs to a lie, to self-deception, and what happens to
individuals within those nations. It always comes out of the sin nature which
is the source of arrogance in our life. The very orientation of the sin nature
is toward self—self absorption, and in its arrogance it is focused on a lie
which deceives us into thinking that somehow we can live our lives apart from
God.
When we take a majority of
people in a nation who are living according to a lie, and the more
sophisticated the lie and the more consistently they live on the basis of that
lie, then that whole nation begins to drift in the direction of those lies and
operates on the basis of lies, distortions and various fraudulent views of
reality. And yet they believe these things are true in the very core of their
being. This impacts every dimension of life—money and how money is handled,
business and how it is conducted and how contracts are made, language and the
meaning of language and how language is twisted and distorted to mean certain
things in order to fit the parameters of the big lie. It also affects
scholarship, academia, because there are scholars and academics who are set on
being the great apologists for the great lie, and so they are constantly
promoting and defending the lie, publishing these in the magazines and journals
and newspapers that pander to those who promote the lie, and this all begins to
build a civilization that as time goes by is just built upon this lie.
When there are a number of
nations who cooperate at an international level on the basis of this lie, then
we begin to see the kind of circumstances set up that will lead to the end
times scenario and eventually the campaign of Armageddon at the end of the
Tribulation period, because that is the only direction it can go. It started
with the arrogance of Lucifer before Genesis chapter one when Lucifer wanted to
be like God. Once he committed that sin of arrogance and he uttered his five “I
wills” all focusing on his desire to be elevated above God and to be worshipped
above God then everything else falls out from that lie. Satan is really the
chief architect of this whole approach to living on the basis of a lie and
self-deception.
In the Old Testament God
warned Israel about living on the basis of this lie. What is the
core lie as we saw in Romans chapter one? It isn’t what modern psychologists
tell us what may be their favorite lie in this decade, the lie according to
Scripture is the lie that somehow God doesn’t really exist and that what really
determines reality is something within creation, something that is ultimately
defined, generated and set forth by individual creatures. The lie starts with
God: is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob the God of the universe or not?
That is the foundation stone, and if we reject the God of Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob as the creator God of the universe, the heavens and the earth and the
seas and all that is in them then once we reject that we are ultimately
elevating to that level something inside of creation—an idea, a thing, an
animal, or just humanity itself. That is why the first two commandments in the
Ten Commandments focus on worshipping the Lord God alone. Once we shift from
that foundation then everything else tumbles out in terms of the great
deception.
What was the big problem in
the northern kingdom of Israel? After Solomon died and his son Rehoboam ascended the
throne he listened to the young arrogant counselors he had who insisted that in
order to maintain the façade of their materialistic lifestyle, the façade of
wealth and grandeur that they had had at one time under Solomon because of
God’s blessing, but has gradually deteriorated over time in the latter years of
Solomon’s reign because of his idolatry and the disobedience of the people,
they were forcing themselves to live as if they still had the affluence, the
prosperity and material blessing they once had. So they wanted to increase
taxation so that they could get more money from the people in order to maintain
this external façade. There is something vaguely familiar with that whole
methodology! It goes down through the ages. We see civilization after
civilization, empire after empire, nation after nation, following this same
arrogant path.
After the split Jeroboam
recognized that he could not bring a unity to the northern kingdom if every
three or four months all of his people were going down to Jerusalem to celebrate one of the pilgrim feasts mandated by
the Law. He recognized that he had to have an alternative religion, his own
worship centers in the northern kingdom so that he could keep everybody at home
in the north at these various times, and he erected two golden valves, one in
Bethel and one in Dan, so that the people in the north could come and worship
there. At this point he leads the people into idolatry. There is the rejection
of the creator God, the construction of the metal god made of gold, and then he
assigns a name to this god and says, “This is the god who brought you out of Egypt, who redeemed you from slavery in Egypt.” It wasn’t the God they worshipped down in Judah on the temple mount, it was this golden calf they had
constructed in the north. Once they made this mental shift to this deception
then everything else began to collapse. It collapsed because God has
constructed reality you can’t continue to live in prosperity and happiness on
the basis of a lie. Then God intensified these consequences in terms of these
various stages of discipline that are outlined in Leviticus chapter 26 and
Deuteronomy 28 and 29.
The northern kingdom has gone
through this and even of we start with the prosperity that they had at the time
of Solomon’s death, and even though they have periods when they come back to a
time of temporary prosperity (they never go back to the glory days of Solomon),
we can follow their trajectory sliding downhill. The more apostate they become,
the more they more they are sold out to living according to this lie, there is
intensified discipline—famines, wars, loss of territory, etc.
In the first nine verses of
this chapter we have the summary of the reign of Jehoahaz (Joash) in the north.
Remember that Jehu was the one anointed by Elisha and called by God to a specific
task to completely annihilate the house of Omri/Ahab that had brought the
fertility religion, the Baal worship into the northern kingdom. As obedient as
Jehu was to that commission he never fully destroyed the high places and he
kept the idols in Bethel and Dan operational. Jehu died in 814 BC and was
succeeded by Jehoahaz who died in 798 and succeeded by Jehoash who died in 782,
but in the latter part of his reign he is going to have a co-regency with his
son Jeroboam II. Jeroboam II was the last king in the north to restore
territory and bring the people back to a façade of prosperity; it is God’s
final act of grace toward the northern kingdom before He will bring them into
judgment. Jeroboam died in 753 and thirty years later in 722 the northern kingdom
will be destroyed by the Assyrians. In the south at this time we have looked at
Joash (835-796) who covers the last part of Jehu’s reign, all of Jehoahaz’s
reign, and then he has a small two-year overlap with one who has a similar name
in the north, Jehoash. The two kings we focus on in this chapter are in the
north: Jehoahaz and Joash.
What we learn here in these
verses is that Jehoahaz is the son of Jehu. Jehu was the great reformer but he
only went so far, and Jehoahaz is like his father. He reigns in the north for
seventeen years but his evaluation is that he continues in the sins of Jeroboam
the son of Nebat. So the delusion continues; the self-deception continues. The
nation is living on the basis of a lie. Their understanding of their purpose is
a lie; their understanding of reality is a lie, and this infiltrates everything
they do. It infiltrates their family life because the men are going off and
some of the women to the temples, to the temples prostitutes in order to have
prosperity, in order to encourage the gods somehow to imitate them and give
them prosperity. It is a worship of success, of the possession of material
things, as providing the meaning in life; it is worshipping things as the
source of value in everything in life. And as God promised He is going to bring
in punishment from the north by bringing the Arameans (Syrians) against them
militarily under Hazael and bring tremendous suffering and hardship.
2 Kings 13:3 NASB
“So the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel, and He gave them continually into the hand of Hazael
king of Aram, and into the hand of Ben-hadad the son of Hazael.”
Finally under all this pressure Jehoahaz crumbles a little bit and he turns to
the Lord for help. So he is not as evil as some of the kings in the northern
kingdom, is probably a believer and has some understanding of who the true God
is, he is not completely blinded by self-deception. [4] “Then Jehoahaz
entreated the favor of the LORD, and the LORD listened to him; for He saw the oppression of Israel, how the king of Aram oppressed them.” So God is going to deal
with them in grace. It is not because they deserve it, they are not really
changing, it is only a superficial things. They are just crying out in pain,
they are not recognizing the real sin and the deceptiveness of their own soul.
Who is the deliverer? The deliverer is not a Jewish hero, not an Israelite
hero. This is like when God raised up Shamgar back in the early part of the
book of Judges to defeat the Philistines at a time when there was so much
apostasy in Israel that there was no one in Israel that God could raise up to
deliver them. It is the same here, there is nobody in the northern kingdom that
God can raise up to deliver them and so He raises up the power of the
Assyrians. They invade Syria from the north-east. Ben-hadad can’t continue to
fight against Israel, he has to turn around and watch his rear as he is being attacked by
the Assyrians. This takes all the pressure off of the northern kingdom of Israel.
Notice how they respond.
Did they respond like believers should respond? Did they recognize that they
had been under divine discipline, so that they humbled themselves under the
hand of God and turned to Him? No! 2 Kings 13:6 NASB “Nevertheless
they did not turn away from the sins of the house of Jeroboam, with which he
made Israel sin, but walked in them; and the Asherah also
remained standing in Samaria.” There were some harsh negative
consequences. Militarily they were wiped out. [7] “For he left to Jehoahaz of
the army not more than fifty horsemen and ten chariots and 10,000 footmen, for
the king of Aram had destroyed them and made them like the dust at threshing.”
That which they looked at for security rather than God is taken away from them.
They are still operating on self-deception, still willfully blind to reality
because their basic problem isn’t intellectual, the basic problem isn’t
financial, not environment, no social; it is volitional and they don’t want to
worship God.
Verses 10-13 summarize the
reign of Joash. Not much has happened during his reign that is of real value,
he just continues the same policies of self-deception and running the nation on
the basis of a lie. 2 Kings 13:10 NASB “In the thirty-seventh
year of Joash king of Judah, Jehoash the son of Jehoahaz became king over Israel in Samaria, {and reigned} sixteen years. [11] He did evil in the sight of the LORD; he did not
turn away from all the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, with which he made
Israel sin, but he walked in them.” But there is still a little
bit of interest in God and hope and understanding the truth in Joash. That
comes out in the next episode beginning in verse 14: “When Elisha became sick
with the illness of which he was to die, Joash the king of Israel came down to him and wept over him and said, ‘My
father, my father, the chariots of Israel and its horsemen!’” This must have taken
place very early in Joash’s reign, not long after he came to the throne. Notice
he weeps over Elisha. There is some sense in his youth that there is value to
Elisha and that he does represent truth and God. Remember the same phrase, “the
chariots of Israel and its horsemen,” was used back when Elisha was
addressing Elijah and Elijah was then going to depart to heaven. What many
think was the Elisha coming for Elijah, but here there is no chariot coming for
Elisha. This is a title that is being given to the prophet because he
represents the power of God in the spiritual conflict that Israel is at the center of. So he is addressed as the one
who is the real power of Israel. It is not their physical military might; the only
military might they have comes from the hand of God.
2 Kings 13:15 NASB “Elisha said to him, ‘Take a bow and
arrows.’ So he took a bow and arrows. [16] Then he said to the
king of Israel, ‘Put your hand on the bow.’ And he put his hand {on
it,} then Elisha laid his hands on the king’s hands.” This is like
an ordination ceremony when pastors who are ordained will put their hands on
the head of the person they are ordaining. It shows an identification and a
transfer of authority, and that is what he is doing. He is talking to the young
king and this is an opportunity for the king to really trust God and rely upon
Him to provide for him in a very rich and abundant way. [17] “He said, ‘Open the
window toward the east,’ and he opened {it.} Then Elisha said, ‘Shoot!’ And he
shot. And he said, ‘The LORD’S arrow of victory, even the arrow of victory over Aram; for you will defeat the Arameans at Aphek until you
have destroyed {them.}’”
2 Kings 13:18 NASB
“Then he said, ‘Take the arrows,’ and he took them. And he said to the king of Israel, ‘Strike the ground,’ and he struck {it} three times
and stopped.” Elisha doesn’t tell him how many times to strike the
ground, it is up to the king to decide how many times he is going to strike the
ground. He just strikes the ground three times, he could have struck it five
times, ten times, or twenty times but he only does it three times. For this
limitation Elisha gets angry with him. [19] “So the man of God was angry with
him and said, ‘You should have struck five or six times, then you would have
struck Aram until you would have destroyed {it.} But now you
shall strike Aram {only} three times.’” In other words,
you will defeat him but you will not completely remove the problem.
What is going on with this
whole bow and arrow thing? There are a number of passages that could illustrate
this but one that perhaps gives us the most clarity is in Psalm 127:3-5 as the
psalmist is praising God for the gift of children NASB “Behold,
children are a gift of the LORD, The fruit of the womb is a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, So are
the children of one’s youth.” A warrior uses an arrow in order to
defeat the enemy—recognition that we are in a spiritual conflict. Parents have
a prime role in that conflict in raising up their children in the nurture and
admonition of the Lord so that they can go out within this spiritual warfare
and have a positive influence for the Lord in the midst of the devil’s world.
The picture here is one of influence and defeat of the enemies of the people of
God. [5] “How blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them; They will not be
ashamed When they speak with their enemies in the gate.” The more ammunition
you have the more of the enemy you can destroy. So when we look at the use of
the bow and arrow imagery in 2 Kings it is a picture of using the Lord as a
military warrior to defeat His enemies. The enemies of Israel are the enemies of God. The idea for the spiritual
warrior is to fully trust God in the sufficiency of His grace and His power,
and not to limit it but to exploit it.
We limit ourselves, our
willingness to exploit the grace of God, and that is exactly what Joash did
here. Rather than beating the ground six or seven times in order to secure a
complete victory he limits from his own limited view of God (because he has
bought into the lie) and only strikes the ground three times. He understood the
significance of this imagery in terms of the defeat of the enemy. He knew that
this was a depiction of exploiting God’s power in the military conflict. He was
limited because the more we live according to the lie and according to
self-deception the more we are limited in our relationship to God.
Then we are told about
Elisha’s death. The bury him and then there are some raiding bands from Moab. As they were burying a man they saw this band of
raiders coming and instead of completing the tomb and the burial for the man
they just opened the tomb of Elisha and put the man in Elisha’s tomb. “…and
they cast the man into the grave of Elisha. And when the man touched the bones
of Elisha he revived and stood up on his feet.” This is a
resurrection, he is brought back to life. This fits the pattern that we have
seen in Elisha’s ministry. From what we saw in 2 Kings 2 Elisha’s ministry
focused on the message of life and hope and meaning that comes only from God.
The people were instead devoted to the worship of Baal and the Asherah and the
result was that they were under divine discipline. The people were miserable,
and yet Elisha’s message was a message of real hope, that hope and life comes
only in relationship with God. So here is one last example of bringing life
where there is death, and that only comes through God and through the message
of His prophets.
The closing statement: 2
Kings 13:22 NASB “Now Hazael king of Aram had oppressed Israel all the days of Jehoahaz. [23] But the LORD was
gracious to them and had compassion on them and turned to them because of His
covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and would not destroy them or cast
them from His presence until now.” They don’t deserve this. They
don’t deserve anything more than increased discipline. But the way God works
with the disobedient believers is to take them through some discipline then
treat them in grace, give them that opportunity to turn back to God in
obedience. If they don’t he increases the pressure. God was gracious to them
not because of who they are but because God regarded the covenant with Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob.
2 Kings 13:24 NASB “When Hazael king of Aram died, Ben-hadad his son became king in his place.”
Then things became only worse as Ben-hadad begins to attack them, but God gave
a measure of grace to Joash and he did recover some of the cities that Hazael
had taken from the northern kingdom earlier. This begins a process of recovery
for the northern kingdom for a while as their last little bit of hope as God
treats them in grace before the final judgment.
As we look at this example
we point out that there are various ways in which we see the same thing going
on in the world around us today. As Christians in the United States we live in the midst of spiritual warfare. We are to
be successful warriors persevering within the angelic conflict, growing and
maturing in the Lord and studying the Word. We are not to succumb to the lie.
The lie that permeates every civilization is that which the Bible refers to as
worldliness. Every civilization, every nation, every generation has its own
zeitgeist or spirit of the times. We pick this up from parents, from teachers,
from movies, and our minds are constantly being assaulted by very sophisticated
and intellectual arguments against Christianity and the truth of God’s Word,
and very sophisticated and intellectual arguments to support and to defend the
way of the world.
The preaching and teaching
from the pulpits of America must meet those attacks with the same level of
sophistication and intellectual rigor, otherwise there will not be anyone in
the pews in the next generation. This is what has happened in England and Europe. As the content of the pulpit ministries became
diluted with the human viewpoint rationalization and rationalism of 19th
century liberal Protestantism it absolutely eviscerated Christianity of any
biblical truth and biblical content. So that by now we go to these wonderful,
beautiful churches in England and on the continent, and some are gymnasiums, some
are museums, some are just empty with two people in them on Sundays, some of
whom are not even converted. The strength of Christianity no longer is there.
That is because the Word of God is rejected. The nations are living in a
fantasy world and the people are living in a fantasy world. As a nation we are
living on the basis of a number of fantasies. We live on a financial fantasy
having spent money we didn’t have. We are living on the basis of debt rather
than what we actually have. We are at war against stupidity and ignorance. A
nation goes to war because there is a well defined enemy that seeks to destroy
that nation, yet we don’t have the courage to define the enemy and so we live
on the basis of a military lie. We are at war with Jihadi Islamo-fascim and we
need to define it as such. We live on the basis of a political fantasy that we
still have leaders in Washington that genuinely want to follow and defend the US
Constitution. We live on a moral fantasy that we can live in moral
relativism—legalize homosexual marriage, legalize illegal drugs, that we can
have open borders, that we can call right wrong and wrong right and it won’t
really destroy the nation. Then we live in the worst of all, a spiritual
fantasy that there is a separation of church and state and we can restrict God
to a little closet or cubby hole on Sundays and for the rest of the week we can
live as if He doesn’t exist. This goes under the false statement of separation
of church and state. This nation was not founded on separation of church and
state. That is not found in the Constitution, it is found in a letter that
Thomas Jefferson wrote to a Baptist church in Connecticut, and in the context it means just the opposite of
what it is used to mean today. In fact, the First Amendment states, “Congress
shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the
free exercise thereof.” The spiritual problem is the source of all other
problems. This nation was always thought by its founders to be a Christian
nation.
The spiritual life is the
real issue in a nation. The reason we have problems isn’t because we have
elected the wrong officials. The reason we have elected the wrong officials is
because the nation has turned its back on God. If we don’t get the spiritual
solution right then political tea parties, getting a lot of people out to the
polls, and all of the other solutions will have no effect. They are just like
the band aids that the northern kingdom put on, just like Joash going to God
and praying for deliverance but there was no real change because of self-deception.
The solution starts first
with the gospel. People have to understand that Jesus Christ died on the cross
for their sins and they must trust Christ as savior. Second, they must grow. 1
Peter 2:2 NASB “like newborn babies, long for the pure milk of the
word, so that by it you may grow in respect to salvation.” This is not an
option, it is a command. If we don’t have time to study the Word then we are
living in the same deceptive lie that dominated the northern kingdom, and it
will have the same result which is self-destruction individually and then
nationally.
Illustrations