Sermons

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.

In their suffering the Israelites cried out to God, yet once life grew comfortable they returned to empty ritual and offered blemished sacrifices. Such worship could never win forgiveness of sin, and so God sent Jesus as the sacrifice of atonement.

Malachi pointed to John the Baptist as the last prophet, the one who would announce Jesus at his first coming, and John rebuked a merely outward religion and called the people to repentance. Anyone who hears that gospel and still wavers between God and the world is like the Israelites who would not make up their minds when Elijah stood before them. Faith must be like the animals that part the hoof and chew the cud: drawing a clear line between good and evil, and continually searching the Word.

For God’s people who fear Christ, the sun of righteousness rises with healing in its rays, and they know true freedom, like calves let loose from the stall. Because Jesus’ coming into the world is itself the fulfillment of judgment and salvation, those who do not believe in Christ now will have no further opportunity. The faithful who hold fast to the end will share in the marriage supper of the Lamb, while the unbelieving world will face judgment in the fire of wrath.

Even after the prophet had rebuked them, the people of Israel did not repent; instead they mocked God. They insisted that the wicked could prosper and never be punished. Yet there were also the righteous, who feared the Lord, and every word they spoke and every resolve they made was recorded in full in the book of remembrance that lies before God.

Daniel saw a vision of many books opened before the judgment seat, and later the disciple John saw the dead judged according to their deeds, as it was written in those books. The sins of the wicked and the good deeds of the righteous roll on together like two wheels, but when the day of judgment comes they part ways: the one into the arms of Christ, the other into judgment. Only a faith accompanied by works is inscribed in the book of remembrance, as Abraham’s was when he obeyed even to the point of offering up his son.

Christians must not suppose that heaven and judgment are unreal simply because they cannot be seen. Those who hold fast to their faith to the end, whatever persecution and tribulation may come, will share in the first resurrection and reign with Christ for a thousand years. They must repent of their sins while the opportunity remains and live honestly in the truth if they are to receive eternal blessing.

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.

Though God tells the people of Israel that he loves them and calls them to return, they answer him back no fewer than six times: when has he loved them, and how are they to return? In Judah, after the death of King Josiah, the wicked persecuted the righteous and still no judgment came, so the people mocked God’s silence and counted repentance as futile.

God is silent not because he is unaware of their sin but because he is waiting for the time of judgment. When wrongdoing goes unpunished at once, people lose their fear, like those whose conscience has been seared, and grow ever bolder in sin; yet the moment he lifts his hand, there is no further chance. Even in this silence God kept putting questions to them, bearing with them patiently to the very end.

A faith that merely repeats its forms, without good character and genuine repentance, finds no forgiveness. The righteous must live by faith alone, even in suffering, and fix their eyes not on the prosperity of this world but on the eternal Kingdom. Remembering the day when they will stand before the judgment seat, they need to take hold of the last chance God gives and turn back.

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.

The church has reached its twenty-second anniversary. The message set two things side by side: the scene in which Jesus gave his disciples a new commandment, telling them to love one another and to love as he had loved them, and a vision of being lifted by grace to the summit of the mountain of sin while those around were falling as they tried to climb it.

The new commandment is not a demand to wear oneself out in service and giving; it is a life of self-sacrifice, lived for the sake of others. Many attend church while their spirits remain parched, and to know of that thirst and pass by, the sermon said, is to break the commandment to love one another. The vision carried a further word: the mountain of sin cannot be scaled by human strength, and can be ascended only by a hand reaching down from heaven.

A day will come, it was said, when every worldly rank and outward show is stripped away before Christ and the soul alone stands before him. Even the most impressive devotion may be burned up in the fire, but a life of quiet love and prayer in a lowly place will remain like pure gold. The sermon closed with the assurance that those who love one another as the new commandment teaches can become a holy people, blessed by God.

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.