Pathology of Arrogance. 2 Kings 14 – 18
We now look at what took
place during the same time period in kings of the southern kingdom. As we look
at this passage in terms of both what happens in the north and in the south
there is one thing that stands out throughout that is really incorporated into
a verse in the New Testament. James 4:6 NASB “But He gives a greater
grace. Therefore {it} says, ‘GOD IS
OPPOSED TO THE PROUD, BUT GIVES GRACE TO THE HUMBLE.’” The contrast is between the humble and the
arrogant and God’s response to them. This is an application of the principle
seen in Proverbs 29:23 NASB “A man’s pride will bring him low, But a
humble spirit will obtain honor.” The one who is humble is the one who is
oriented to the authority of God. Humility isn’t just somebody who has a low
view of themselves or low self-esteem or who walks around where they can always
be used and abused by people around them. The person who is humble is the
person who recognizes their role in God’s plan and the authority of God. The
key passage to understand humility is Philippians 2 where, speaking of the Lord
Jesus Christ, it says that He humbled Himself by obedience to the point of
death. That is what humility is: obeying God’s Word or obeying God’s will no
matter what it may cost.
The contrast to humility is
pride or arrogance. What we see throughout the Scripture is that God is truly
at war with those who are arrogant and that He brings them under His judgment.
That is because arrogance was the first sin that entered into the universe, the
sin of Lucifer, the highest of all the angels that God had created. He became
elevated in his own eyes and wanted to have all the glory and honor that
belonged to God for himself. This was the seed of arrogance that began in his
thinking that led eventually to his rebellion against God and to the entrance
of sin into the universe. So the root sin of all of the sins is the sin of
arrogance. In 2 Timothy 3:1-5 Paul warns Timothy of the trend that would come
during the last days. The “last days” in this passage isn’t talking about the
end times; it refers to the church age. In fact, the writer of Hebrews says “in
these last days.” So in some sense all of the church age comes under this
particular category and so these are trends that we will see around us. NASB
“But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come.
Holding forth a form of
godliness but denying its power is what we see so often in our own lives and in
the lives of many believers, and in the lives of many down through history,
especially in the Old Testament and in the period we are examining in the times
of the layer kings of Judah and Israel. They had a façade of spiritual
observance but it only went so far. Underneath there was still a lot of
compromise, acceptance of sin, rationalization and justification of sin; and we
see this drum-beat through many of the kings that they walked in the path of
their father so and so, they were obedient to the Lord but the high places were
still in existence. There was a façade of observance at the temple, a partial
obedience, but the weakness in the culture in the south was that they only went
so far; there was a compromise with the pagan Canaanite thinking of the time.
In arrogance they only went so far in obedience to God and it wasn’t far
enough. God had warned in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 that He would bring
discipline and judgment upon the nation if they were not fully and totally
obedient to Him. He would bring various stages of judgment and in one of those
stages, Leviticus 26:19, He says “I will also break down your pride of power; I
will also make your sky like iron and your earth like bronze.” The point is the
first phrase: God is going to break the pride of our power. That is the same
thought that we find in James 4:6 and Proverbs 29:23. It is that arrogance,
that attitude of self-sufficiency instead of God’s sufficiency, self-reliance
instead of God dependence. It follows after the original sin of Lucifer and it
will always lead to our destruction.
In our passage in 2 Kings we
need to pay attention to how each of these kings had a measure of obedience, a
form of obedience, but they don’t go all the way, they still compromise with
pagan systems of thought that surround them. The first king that we look at is
Amaziah, 2 Kings 14:1-20; 2 Chronicles 25:1-28. The difference between Kings
and Chronicles is that the book of Kings was written giving the history of both
the kings in the north and in the south, and it is written really to show the
outworking of what God had promised in prophesied back in Deuteronomy 28 and
Leviticus 26, the blessings and the cursings and showing how when the nation is
obedient to God and when they humble themselves under the mighty hand of God,
God gives them grace and they are prosperous. But when they are disobedient
then God is also faithful to His covenant and He is going to bring judgment
upon the nation. So the real focal point of this is that God is faith to who He
is, He is faithful to His character, He is going to be gracious to those who
are obedient and he is going to bring judgment into the life of those who are
disobedient. This is not because He is mean and wants to grind us down but He
wants to break that arrogance, that pride, so that we will humble ourselves
under His authority.
Amaziah is the 9th king
of
Amaziah, Azariah and Jotham
basically have the same evaluation: they don’t fully obey the Lord. But they do
follow the footsteps of Joash and are mostly obedient but not fully obedient.
Then Ahaz follows after the gods in the north and he leads the nation into not
only gross idolatry and depravity and perversion but because of that God is
going to bring military discipline against the southern kingdom with the rise
of the Assyrian empire. By the time we get to the end of the time of Ahaz they
basically become a slave state to the Assyrian empire. But that precedes one of
the greatest periods of spiritual revival under Hezekiah and the tremendous
miracle of grace that occurs with him.
The evaluation for Amaziah
is given in 2 Kings 14:3, 4 NASB “He did right in the sight of the LORD, yet not
like David his father; he did according to all that Joash his father had done.
When we read in these passages
that he did that which was right in the sight of the Lord, to understand that,
we have to go back to Deuteronomy again. Deuteronomy is really the framework
for understanding what happens during this period of history. Deuteronomy
The Christian life is not
about some sort of legalistic approach to sin in order to be saved or in order
to get God’s grace. It is sin that wipes out our soul, it is sin that corrupts
us, it is sin that destroys and that is the enemy of our spiritual life. So if
we are not putting into practice or application the mandates of Scripture which
deal with man—such as in Romans 6, to put to death the deeds of the flesh, in
other words, to put to death the sin in our life—then what happens is we fight
the same battles over and over again and that has a destructive and a
corrupting influence on our thinking. And if we become complaisant and
compromise with justifications and rationalizations then eventually that sin
finds a foothold in our thinking. We don’t think about it anymore and then
maybe five, ten, fifteen years down the road it begins to become exploited
within our thinking, and then the next thing we know that becomes the source of
defeat in our life.
To illustrate this the
Scripture uses the conquest of the land that God had promised to Abraham, Isaac
and Jacob. When they came into the land under Joshua they were to take all of
the land, and that was a picture of spiritual warfare, it was their version of
spiritual warfare. They were to take all of the land because the land was
dominated by the Canaanites, dominated pagan thought and perversion, idolatry
and even human infant sacrifice. So if we look at the conquest we can see an
important comparison with our own lives. First of all we have to recognize the
land itself is equivalent to our souls; that is the point of analogy. From the
time that this land had been under the control of the Canaanites their
thinking, their religious thinking, their rebellion against God, all of their
perversions, completely dominated and controlled everything within their focus.
In the same way we are born as sinners. Totally depraved is the theological
term, and that doesn’t mean we are as bad as we can be, it means that every
aspect of our soul, the totality of our person, has been corrupted by sin. We
have a sin nature and prior to salvation the sin nature dominates and we can’t
do anything that isn’t the production of that sin nature. The sin nature
produces a certain measure of morality, it also produces a certain measure of
sin or disobedience to God, but it cannot produce anything that has any real
eternal spiritual value, that measures up to the righteousness of God. In that
comparison we have a territory that lies between our ears completely under the
control of paganism just as the land was completely under the control of the
paganism of the Canaanites.
The Israelites were
commanded to have an uncompromising mentality to defeat all of the Canaanites.
They were to go in and kill every man, woman and child. That sounds very hard
for us but it was hard for them; it wasn’t something they really wanted to do.
In some cases they were to kill all of the animals. They were not to benefit
from all of the corruption of the Canaanite culture and so they were to
completely destroy everything related to that pagan culture so that it would
not come back and influence them later on. Their mission was to seek and
destroy everything. In the same way the believer is given that same mission in
terms of the thinking that goes on in the territory between our ears. We are to
take every thought captive for Christ. It is an uncompromising mission. We are
to wipe out everything in our thinking that has to do with the world system. As
Paul says in Romans 12:2 we are to be transformed by the renewing of our minds.
That occurs by learning the Word. We are not to be conformed to the thinking of
the world. We know this is a mission we will never fully achieve; we will never
be perfect; we will never destroy or eradicate the sin nature, but that is our
mission, we have to have a single-mindedness to wipe that out.
We have to note in terms
of the comparison that the Israelites began well. They depended upon God and
killed every man, woman and child in
If we read the account in
the opening chapters of the book of Judges what happens eventually is they get
to a point where they don’t even go to battle against the Canaanites anymore.
It is just like the believer who says to himself that he as these really
comfortable sins in his life and he is just not going to deal with them. But
that sin comes back to haunt him later on as it grabs strategic toehold in his
soul and then begins to expand. Eventually the influence of the Canaanite
culture grew and that is the story of the book of Judges, so that by the time
we get to the end of the book the Israelites are living just like the
Canaanites, no one could tell the difference. That is what happens with so many
believers who fail in the process of spiritual growth because of compromise. By
the time they have reached the end of their life they have regressed and
perhaps they don’t think or act any differently from the pagans around them. So
the key tools we have to develop are the tools of confession on a regular
basis—but that doesn’t do anything other than get us back to a position where
we can exploit the Word of God and apply it—and learning doctrine, and we
really need to be involved in some sort of self-examination (but not some sort
of maudlin, emotional, subjective navel contemplation) where we really think
about the ways in which we need to be a little more consistent in our
application of God’s Word. But we have to recognize that the root of all sin is
arrogance, and arrogance not only involves self-absorption but also
self-justification—justifying why we are the way we are. Often we have been justifying
something for so long we no longer really see what is there.
Amaziah began well. He
executed his father’s murderers and did it in a way that honored the Word. He
didn’t kill their families or their children, he just killed those who were
involved in the conspiracy and the assassination because he knew Deuteronomy
24:16 prohibited fathers being put to death for their sons or sons being put to
death for their fathers. But has he continued to reign he decided to expand the
territory of the southern kingdom by fighting the Edomites. He raised an army
of 300-thousand from Judah and Benjamin and hired 100-thousand mercenaries from
the northern kingdom. Remember that God has been at war against the northern
kingdom and has them under discipline at this time and so God sent a prophet to
Amaziah warning him to release those 100-thousand soldiers because he was not
going to get his victory by compromising with a bunch of pagan and rebellious
believers from the north. Principle: When we make sinful decisions and then
reverse course there are often still consequences to pay. Amaziah thought that
one of the consequences was financial. He had paid them 100 talents of silver,
which is equivalent to three tons of silver and he was worried about getting it
back. 2 Chronicles 25:9 NASB “Amaziah said to the man of God, ‘But
what {shall we} do for the hundred talents which I have given to the troops of
But what happened is what
happens when we try to straighten thing out in our life, and when we have been
involved in sin there are still some consequences. There were consequences for
those Israelites got angry and as they headed back north they began to raid the
border villages between
The next king was Azariah,
also known a Uzziah. He was the 10th king of
2 Chronicles 26:16 NASB
“But when he became strong, his heart was so proud that he acted corruptly, and
he was unfaithful to the LORD his God, for he entered the temple of the LORD to burn
incense on the altar of incense.” As he had victory he took credit for it
himself rather than God and so in arrogance he decided he would go into the
temple and burn incense on the altar of incense, but he was opposed by Azariah
the high priest. Eighty priests stood there outside of the holy place to oppose
him, and as they had this challenge God brought judgment upon him because
Uzziah refused to follow the law. [19] “But Uzziah, with a censer in his hand
for burning incense, was enraged; and while he was enraged with the priests,
the leprosy broke out on his forehead before the priests in the house of the LORD, beside the
altar of incense.” This was God’s judgment on Uzziah for the rest of his life.
He had to live in isolation in a house separated from everybody else because of
the leprosy.
He was then succeeded by
his son Jotham. Jotham was better than those who had come before. He was more
obedient and God blessed him in many ways. He reigned for sixteen years, but he
still has that same area of compromise. 2 Kings 15:35 NASB “Only the
high places were not taken away; the people still sacrificed and burned incense
on the high places. He built the upper gate of the house of the LORD.” The
conclusion of his reign is given in 2 Chronicles 27:6 NASB “So
Jotham became mighty because he ordered his ways before the LORD his God.”
He is consistently humble before the Lord but there is still an incompleteness
in his obedience. He did not remove the high places and the altars to various
idols that were there. All of that compromise hasn’t really hurt, we might say,
but now it comes home with a vengeance in his son Ahaz.
Ahaz is the 12th
king of
2 Chronicles 28:22 NASB
“Now in the time of his distress this same King Ahaz became yet more unfaithful
to the LORD.
Sot is it that
unwillingness to deal with sin in terms of obedience, that sin that so easily besets
us that comes back to destroy us spiritually and to wipe us out. But here is
always hope. James 4:6 warns about the threat of arrogance. Therefore James