Sermons

The wicked queen Athaliah sets out to destroy every descendant of David, but Jehosheba steals away the infant Joash and hides him in a back room of the temple, where he is brought up in secret for six years. Through those years the high priest Jehoiada quietly prepares for the appointed time, and at last Joash is crowned king of Judah.

What appeared to collapse was the house of David, not the covenant of God. Jehoshaphat took Ahab’s daughter as a wife for his son, certain that he himself would never be shaken; yet that decision drew his son and grandson into idolatry and brought the nation to the brink of ruin. Human sin and betrayal, however, could not break the covenant. In a place no one knew of, God was keeping one life safe.

Christians must not place too much confidence in their own faith, for sin does not begin as a settled intention; it begins with the compromises a person makes with himself. Yet even when people fail, God does not, and the covenant he made with David is finally fulfilled in Jesus Christ. To hold fast to that promise and remain faithful to the end is the part left to us today.

When the harvest was gathered in, the people of Israel built booths and lived in them. Yet just before this feast of thanksgiving comes the Day of Atonement, a day of fasting on which they were to deny themselves.

Before the joy of the harvest, a clean heart was required. Even after his victories, David kept examining himself and repenting. When Peter’s nets were so full of fish that they began to break, he did not give thanks but fell down and said, “I am a sinful man.” A vessel that is unclean cannot fully receive and enjoy the grace poured into it.

Repentance means leaving the place of sin, and thanksgiving fills that emptied place with grace once more. There is no Feast of Tabernacles without the Day of Atonement, and in the same way true thanksgiving grows deeper whenever it is built on repentance. It was in repentance that David received victory and Peter received a new calling.

Jehu wiped out the house of Ahab just as the word had said, and he even gathered those who served Baal into the house of Baal and killed them, leaving not one alive. He had run with everything he had, to the point of breaking down Baal’s pillar and Baal’s house and making it a latrine, and he boasted on his own account that others should see how zealous he was for God’s work.

Yet that zeal ended at the worship of the golden calves that Jeroboam had made. This was because, from the very beginning, he had not been heading toward God. The moment he looked at his own zeal and was satisfied with it, he had already received his reward in full, so there was no heavenly reward left for God to give him. By contrast, Jehonadab the son of Rechab, who was a Gentile, chose God without hesitation when Jehu questioned him. He charged his children not to set their hearts on the world, and his descendants kept those words for more than two hundred years.

What matters is not speed but direction. Being in the church and serving a great deal does not take the place of direction. We are not to work for our own boasting and our own righteousness; it is only when we seek out God’s will and obey it that God becomes our boast and our righteousness.

King Joram, wounded in battle, had returned to Jezreel, and when Jehu approached he went out to meet him, supposing he brought news of victory. Of all places, the ground on which he stood was Naboth’s field, the very place where judgment had long ago been pronounced on the house of Ahab. Jehu shot him dead, and soon afterwards Jezebel was thrown from a window and met a wretched end.

God’s judgment on the house of Ahab had not fallen for more than fifteen years. Through all that time Joram lived with the word of the curse forgotten, and so, without any sense of alarm, he walked of his own accord into the place of judgment. What moved Jehu and the commanders who set him on the throne was not pure obedience; it was nearer to a political reaction born of weariness with long corruption. Yet whatever their motives, God’s word came to pass exactly as spoken, without the slightest deviation.

That God’s judgment is slow in coming does not mean it has gone away. The time of reprieve is the time of God’s long patience, given so that people might turn back. Jehu did not undertake this work out of love for God, but he was true to the charge entrusted to him, and for that diligence he received commendation and reward.

The Shunammite woman waited out the seven years of famine that God had told her of beforehand, only to return home and find her house and land already in other hands. When she appealed to the king, Gehazi, whose leprosy should long since have removed him from the story, appears once more to testify to what Elisha had done, and the woman is given back even the harvest of the seven years she had been away.

This unexpected reappearance comes about because Kings is not a history bound to strict chronological order; it is a prophetic record of how God worked. For the same reason, chapter 8 places Hazael’s revolt alongside the accounts of Jehoram and Ahaziah, kings of Judah. Jehoram did evil in God’s sight, shaped not by his good father Jehoshaphat but by his wicked wife, and Ahaziah likewise followed the house of Ahab down a wicked path.

Though the obedience of one woman whose name is not even recorded stands beside the treachery of those who sat on thrones, it is God who holds history in his hands. Remembering his covenant with David, he did not destroy Judah in the end, and the wicked kings, too, came under judgment in God’s own time. However dark the world becomes, he upholds to the very end those who obey him; that is the message preached today.

When the Aramean army lays siege to Samaria, the famine grows as severe as it can be. A donkey’s head sells for eighty shekels of silver, and one woman, having boiled and eaten her own son, comes to the king to complain that she has been wronged, because another woman has hidden her son.

The king tears his robes and makes a show of repentance, yet the sackcloth beneath them is mere form, worn to be seen by the people. He does not stop to consider their own disobedience but sets out to kill Elisha, and he speaks words of unbelief: this disaster has come from God, so there is no point in waiting any longer. Even so, Elisha proclaims that by this time tomorrow prices will be back to normal, and he tells the officer who scoffs at this that he will see it with his own eyes but will not share in it.

Lepers cast out beyond the city walls find the Aramean camp deserted and carry the good news into the city. As the people rush out, that officer is trampled to death, and everything happens just as Elisha said. Where there was no hope, God brought salvation through the weakest, and that salvation leads on to the cross of Jesus Christ.

The Aramean army surrounds the city of Dothan, and the servant attending the man of God is seized with fear at the sight. Elisha prays, and when the servant’s eyes are opened, he sees the hills full of horses and chariots of fire. Elisha then prays that the Aramean army be struck with blindness, and leads them into the very heart of Samaria.

To the eyes of the flesh, the power of the world looks vast and impossible to overcome. But once the eyes of the spirit are opened, it becomes clear that even so great a world is nothing before the heavenly host God has sent. The king of Aram trusted in his own strength alone and set out to capture Elisha, and so to capture God himself; that very judgment was already his defeat.

The king of Israel asks whether he may put the captured Aramean soldiers to death, but Elisha tells him instead to give them their fill of food and send them home. Grace freely received must flow on even to one’s enemies. What counts is not a multitude of soldiers or grand buildings, but each person opening the eyes of the spirit and obeying God wholeheartedly.

Naaman, commander of the army of Aram, had leprosy. On the word of a young Israelite girl who had been carried off as a captive, he went to Elisha. Yet Elisha did not even come out to meet him, and only sent word that he should wash himself seven times in the Jordan.

Naaman’s pride lay in wanting to be answered while keeping his own righteousness and dignity intact. Six times he washed, and the disease remained. Only when he went down into the water the seventh and last time was his leprosy made clean. God held back his answer until Naaman had stripped off every garment of the world and obeyed.

It was only after he was healed, and his gifts were refused, that Naaman came to understand who God is. Elisha’s servant Gehazi, by contrast, went secretly after those same gifts, told a lie, and in the end took upon himself the very leprosy that had afflicted Naaman. Miracles come only to those who lay aside their shame and greed, stand before God with nothing to cover them, and obey.

A woman who had lost her husband was about to have her two sons taken as slaves to pay a debt. When she went to Elisha, he asked what she had in her house, and all she had was a single jar of oil. She poured that oil into each of the jars she had borrowed, and it kept flowing until there were no jars left.

God could simply have supplied what she lacked out of nothing, yet he chose to use the small thing already in her hand. In this way people come to know that God himself has stepped in, and they draw nearer to him in faith. That she went in, shut the door and obeyed was likewise God’s will, for he meant to establish that household in faith.

What we hold in our hands now may look unimpressive, but to God it is enough. The place where we are brought lowest and are at our weakest is in fact the place of grace where God works mightily. We must not treat small things as worthless, nor forget the Holy Spirit who is at work within them.

The allied armies of northern Israel, southern Judah, and Edom set out to attack Moab but fall into crisis when they run out of water to drink. Only then did the three kings seek Yahweh’s will, and God, who filled every valley with water, promises that he will make them victorious in this battle too.

When the king of Moab offers his own son as a human sacrifice, great wrath comes upon Israel instead, and with victory right before them, the allied armies abandon the battlefield. They had tasted a miracle and even received an answer, yet it came to light that they had not repented of the idolatry they themselves had committed and had instead taken the lead in judging Moab. Those who fear and love God can never stand on the same side as those who have fallen into idolatry.

The battle still belongs to God, but a time will surely come when sin is exposed before God and brought to account. People can never become righteous by their own strength, and only when they set themselves aside and repent each day can the problem of their sin be resolved. The only way for us to be free from our darkness and sin is Jesus Christ.

Over the past two days we have considered how recent events in the Middle East line up exactly with biblical prophecy. If what Scripture records is true, then the prophecies not yet fulfilled will also come to pass just as they are written, without a single one left out.

The world is seeing politics, economics and religion merge into one, while communist systems and technologies such as artificial intelligence and facial recognition are already putting in place the conditions for the Antichrist’s complete control. Yet though the last day will come like a thief, for us who are children of light it is not a day of destruction but a day of hope. God’s patience has its limits, and the time of judgment will certainly come; but within that judgment Christ’s victory has already been appointed.

Not in fear but with joy and anticipation, we must be made ready as the pure bride of Christ. Just as the virgins who had their oil ready waited longingly for the bridegroom, we too need to look forward to the Lord’s return, gladly crying out, “Come, Lord Jesus.” A life that rejoices always, prays without ceasing and gives thanks in all circumstances is where that waiting is lived out.

As the day approaches for Elijah to be taken up into heaven, he keeps telling Elisha, “Please wait here.” Each time they move on, from Gilgal to Bethel, to Jericho and to the Jordan, he repeats the same words, three times in all. Each time, Elisha swears by the life of Yahweh that he will not leave his master, and he follows Elijah to the end.

The words “wait here” were not telling Elisha to stay where he was. They were a plea to follow to the end with a desperation strong enough to defy his master’s command. Only once Elisha has seen the Jordan part with his own eyes does Elijah tell him to ask for what he wants, and Elisha asks for a double portion of his spirit. Only after watching his master go up into heaven, right to the end, did Elisha gain a certainty without a pinpoint of doubt.

The journey of faith also brings moments of wanting to give everything up and turn back, and stumbling blocks that hold a person back and say, “Wait here.” To obey is better than sacrifice. God answers, just as they ask, those who follow to the end. They do this not by keeping up forms, but by coming to understand his will with a heart that sincerely loves him.