Does it matter which God you follow?
Many people today would say no. What matters is that it works for you. What matters is that you’re sincere. What matters is that you tolerate others. But beyond that – your religion is your choice. Do as you please.
In a world that thinks like that, the Bible reading we had from 2 Kings 10 is a sharp wake-up call.
Grace Spurned
It’s a shocking story.
We’ll think in a moment about just how shocking. But it’s easy to be shocked at the wrong thing. It’s not what happens that makes this so sad. The tragic thing is who this happens to.
The people who are killed in this story are the people of God. The people God had chosen to call his own. The people he’d chosen to bless. The people he’d quite uniquely decided to give special treatment to. These weren’t any old people. These were people God had set his love on, showered his blessings on. And yet this is how the story ended for some of them.
That’s the truly tragic thing here. God has always been a God of grace. This is a story of what happens when you spurn God’s grace.
Shocking Events
Here’s how the story goes.
Last week, some of us thought about Israel’s king Ahab. He was a wicked king. A tyrant. Most seriously he changed Israel’s national religion. Instead of worshipping Yahweh, the one true God, the people would now worship Baal, the God of the Canaanite peoples. He then enforced his religious policy by slaughtering the prophets and servants of the Lord.
Ahab died, and his son took the throne. God wanted justice after Ahab’s atrocities. God wanted Baal worship driven out of Israel. It was time for a new broom, a new king. So God sent the prophet Elisha to anoint Jehu. 2 Kings chapter 9, verse 6: I anoint you king over the Lord’s people Israel. You are to destroy the house of Ahab your master, and I will avenge the blood of my servants the prophets and the blood of all the Lord’s servants shed by Jezebel.
Jehu wipes out Ahab’s surviving family. He then turns his attention to driving out Baal worship, which is where we join the story.
Jehu announces that there’s going to be an extra big sacrifice for Baal. Everyone is to gather at Baal’s temple, the one Ahab had built with public money. Jehu himself performs the sacrifice. But that’s just the prelude. The great sacrifice to Baal is the lives of the people inside. It’s a massacre, and that’s why it’s so shocking for us. Every prophet of Baal, every priest of Baal, every worshipper of Baal, is cut down.
It’s scandalous. It’s a shock. It’s shocking that something like this should be in our Bibles. It’s shocking to hear it read out on a Sunday morning. We have to work out what to do with it, but we’ll only be able to hear what God is saying to us once we’ve got over the initial shock.
There are three things to say about the shock factor.
God’s Kindness
Firstly, we can still see God’s kindness at work. Yes, even in this brutal story.
This event brings no pleasure to God. Believe me, it brings me no pleasure to preach on it either. Israel turned away from Baal. God never wanted it to come to this. He sent so many prophets to warn the people, to turn them back to himself. Household names like Elijah and Elisha. You’ll remember Jesus wept over Jerusalem. God wept over his people back then. Sadly, Jesus was still crucified, and Israel still worshipped Baal.
Not only do we see tears in God’s eyes as this happens, this event is itself a warning. God knows that if the people don’t’ turn back to him, he’ll have to send in foreign armies to destroy the entire nation. It would be good if Jehu’s massacre hadn’t been necessary. But given it was, maybe a small scale bloodbath will wake the people up. Maybe carnage on a national scale can be avoided. God loved his people so much he’d even allow something as brutal as this. It was an attempt to avert a bigger disaster.
That’s the first thing to say about the shock. We can still see God’s kindness at work.
Meant to be Shocking
The other thing to say is that this is meant to be shocking.
We mustn’t think that sensitive readers from the 21st century are shocked by this, but primitive Iron Age people would be fine with it. When the book of Kings was first published, the Jewish readers would have been as shocked as we are. They’d been brought up on God’s love and grace. They thought God would always forgive, that was his job.
This account is meant to be shocking.
Jehu is very careful to make sure he’s separated the worshippers of God and the worshippers of Baal. The people of their day thought that God’s love and grace meant that he’d never do something like this. It didn’t matter all that much if God’s people worshipped the gods of the nations around them. The shock of this story is deliberate. It does matter. God takes it very seriously indeed. His must people must worship him only, have him as number one in their lives.
You can train a poodle not to wee on the carpet. Allegedly. You can’t domesticate God. But that doesn’t stop us from trying.
In the 1980s, a wealthy Colombian drug baron started his own private zoo. After his death, the animals were rehoused, except the hippos escaped. And bred. And now nobody knows how many wild African hippos there are in the Magdalena River. Hippos don’t make good pets. And yet people try to keep the Living God as a pet, and when they do so this story comes as a big shock. A deliberate and necessary shock.
Not Entirely Good
I said there are three things to say about how shocking this is. We can still see God’s kindness at work. This is meant to be shocking. And third: This event was not entirely good.
Jehu is commended by God for what he does. We mustn’t miss that in the narrative. God doesn’t disown Jehu; what he did was right.
Verse 28: So Jehu destroyed Baal worship in Israel. That’s a good thing. Then verse 30. (These are the words of God himself): Because you have done well in accomplishing what is right in my eyes and have done to the house of Ahab all I had in mind to do, your descendants will sit on the throne of Israel to the fourth generation. This was right in God’s eyes. This was what God had in mind. So Jehu gets paid for his work. His dynasty will run for at least 3 further kings.
But the way he went about it was wrong. His heart was not really in it for God’s glory. We know that, because we’re twice told he didn’t turn away from the sins of Jeroboam. The people continue to worship the Lord at two golden calf shrines. Jehu did God’s work, but he was motivated by self-interest. He killed more people than he needed to. Instead of careful justice, we get scattergun butchery, delivered with deceit. A few generations later, the prophet Hosea was to announce God’s judgement on Jehu for what he did.
You’ll know that knives and tools must be sharp. If the surgeon doesn’t use a sharp scalpel, there’ll be tissue damage. More accidents happen in kitchens where the knives are blunt. Injections hurt if the needle is not sharp.
Jehu was a blunt instrument. God wielded him to bring judgement on his idolatrous people. But what he did was not entirely good.
God is kind. God’s jealousy for his people’s loyalty shocks our shrunken view of God. If only God could raise up someone like Jehu. Someone who could show his kindness. Someone who could enforce God’s justice. And yet someone wholly devoted to God, a sharp and precise tool.
Don’t take vengeance
Which brings us to the point where we can apply this story to our lives today.
Jehu is not a role-model. He’s far from it. The Bible never tells us to inflict vengeance on anyone. We are not to judge. That is God’s job, and not ours.
This story doesn’t show us what we should do. It does show us what God is like. It does show us what God will do.
Be Ready for the Day of God’s Vengeance
So what is this saying to us, today about God? This is telling us that God avenges himself. He takes it very seriously when people follow after other gods. He will divide between those who follow him, and those who follow other gods. And those who follow other gods will meet a sorry, even gruesome end.
But this is all Old Testament stuff, isn’t it? Surely followers of Jesus don’t have to worry about separating people, judging them, then punishing those who do not follow Jesus?
Let’s start by asking which Old Testament kings Jesus is patterned on. David and Solomon are the obvious ones. But not just them.
Let me read again from the scene when Elisha anointed Jehu king over Israel. Elisha left, and Jehu’s companions said to him, 2 Kings chapter 9, verse 11: ‘Is everything all right? Why did this maniac come to you?’ ‘You know the man and the sort of thing he says,’ Jehu replied. ‘That’s not true!’ they said. ‘Tell us.’ Jehu said, ‘Here is what he told me: “This is what the Lord says: I anoint you king over Israel.” ’ They quickly took their cloaks and spread them under him on the bare steps. Then they blew the trumpet and shouted, ‘Jehu is king!’
You probably know the famous story of Sir Walter Raleigh. He didn’t want Elizabeth I to get her feet wet, so he put his coat over a puddle she was about to step in. Actually, my historian friends probably tell me this never happened.
That wasn’t what Jehu’s friends were doing. This was much more than keeping his feet clean. This was a symbolic act. Their cloaks symbolised them. It was a way of saying: If you’re king, here’s where I belong. I’ll put this down here. I’m underneath you. You’re the king.
Now think back to the first Palm Sunday. Jesus rode into Jerusalem? Mark tells us what the crowds did: Mark chapter 11, verse 8: Many people spread their cloaks on the road. And then he entered Jerusalem, and violently drove the money-worshippers out of the temple. Jesus, a second Jehu.
That’s not as dramatic as what Jehu did. For that we have to read Jesus’ teaching. He taught repeatedly what would happen at the end of the age. Like Jehu, he would separate people into those who followed him, and those who followed other gods. Like Jehu, the future for those who did not follow him would not be a happy one.
These teachings of Jesus are not easy reading, as we’d all prefer it if Jesus never said these things.
The kingdom of heaven is like wheat growing in a field. But someone sowed weeds too. “Shall we rip up the weeds,” say the farm workers. “No,” says the farmer, “you might pull up some wheat by mistake. Leave it till harvest time.” And at harvest the weeds go in the fire, and the wheat goes in the barn.
Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of heaven is like two builders. One built his house on rock, and the other on sand. When the storm came, the house on the rock stood firm and the house on the sand fell with a great crash. Here’s what it will be like for those who hear my teaching and put it into practice, and those who hear my teaching but don’t live it out.
On that day, when the Son of Man comes in all his glory, he’ll sit on his throne and separate people like a farmer separates sheep from goats. Those on his left will go away to eternal punishment, but those on his right to eternal life.
I’m sorry to say this. But the God we read about in this story of Jehu is the same God that Jesus revealed to us.
Conclusion
This story is not easy to read. It’s a shocking story. It’s a tragic story.
In part, it’s shocking because we’ve such a small view of God. We’ve domesticated God. His kindness eliminates all other sides to his character. We need a story like this as a wake-up call.
But remember what made the Jehu story so sad? This happened to people who had experienced so much of God’s grace, his goodness, his kindness. They turned their back on so much.
If God was kind in Jehu’s day, he’s even kinder in our own. Because of Jesus, we can be forgiven for everything we’ve ever done wrong, we can be adopted into God’s family, we can be promised a certain future in a renewed world, free of pain and suffering.
Such grace. Amazing love. The most wonderful blessings to people who deserve none of them.
Yet for all that, there will be people in our own day who don’t want to know. Who turn their back on these wonderful blessings. Who think this is a small thing. Today, just as for the first readers of Kings, we need Jehu to remind us who the Living God is.
God offers us such kindness in Jesus. It’s beyond our wildest dreams. How tragic it would be to miss out. How wonderful it is for those who say yes.