93 - God's Faithfulness and Love in Judgment [B]

God's Faithfulness and Love in Judgment. 2 Kings ch. 11

God is sovereign, He rules in the affairs of men. Ultimately He is the one who controls history, and He controls it in a way that does not makes robots out of us but in light of our own individual choices God is the one who works out His plans and His purposes. God is also righteous. His righteousness is the standard of right and wrong in the universe and justice is the application of that standard to His creatures. So we have an absolute standard that never changes and it is always applied consistently in the affairs of men. We have to start with that because sometimes we may look at circumstances and think that perhaps God has somehow become involved with some other situation in the world and is ignoring the injustice is our own lives. But we always have to remember that these attributes do not operate in isolation from other attributes and the righteousness and justice of God also works in perfect harmony with His love. His justice is always executed in light of His love, and His love is always consistent with His righteousness. That is why His love is unique: it is a love that is based on absolute and perfect virtue. A love that has no virtue is no love at all and that is why human love is often so tenuous, because there is no virtue to undergird it. God is also eternal; He has no beginning and no end. He is omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent. In His omniscience He knows all the knowable: He knows everything that might happen, everything that could happen, all of the "ifs," and so God is able to handle and provide for every circumstance and situation. He is omnipresent which means He is present to all aspects of His creation at every moment, and so He is never far from us. He is omnipotent, which means he is always able to accomplish that which He intends to accomplish and is able to surmount any challenge that faces His plan or His purposes. He is also absolute truth or veracity. That works together which His righteousness, justice and love in terms of His personal integrity. Truth resides within His thinking, so what he does is always consistent with truth. He is unchangeable or immutable.

When we think about these attributes we need to go a step further sometimes. What do these attributes mean and apply to a particular circumstance or situation that we face in our life? If we were a citizen of Israel living in the northern kingdom and suddenly woke up one morning and heard that the king had gone to battle with the Hazael, the king of Syria, and that the king was wounded. Suddenly now everything becomes uncertain. Is he going to live? Is he going to doe, and if he dies what will happen to the battle? Then we hear that he is brought back to Jezreel but is seriously wounded, and a coup is being staged by one of his generals who claims that he has been anointed by God. As he comes back to Jezreel he assassinates the king, Jehoram, at the command of God and then kills the king of the southern kingdom who is up there as well. Then we hear that he is sending out his hit squads to execute all of the other descendants and relatives of Ahab, and so a blood bath is taking place. So it seems as if the world may be falling apart around us and there is no sense of stability. What in the world is God doing?

Therefore we have to think through these attributes. In terms of God's immutability He has made certain promises to Abraham and to David. He operates according to the covenant He made with Moses, and because God is never changing, is immutable, we can know that although everything is falling apart around us we can rely upon Him. We know that He is omnipotent, so He is able to handle whatever challenges there may be to His plan. As time goes by and we hear of other things that are going on we realize that something more significant spiritually is happening, and that is that there seems to be an assault upon the descendants of David. They have been wiped out by one king after another and so the line of David seems to be in jeopardy. But God is able to protect the seed of David and protect His plan to bring about that which He has promised. God is so powerful that He can control the details from the micro to the macro. We think in terms of His omniscience, that whatever the circumstances may be presented by human decisions God is not taken by surprise. It may surprise us and we may be faced with completely unexpected circumstances, but they are not a surprise to God, He has planed and prepared for these circumstances from eternity past. And then we remember that all of this relies upon the integrity of God, the very core of His essence: the relationship of His righteousness, justice, love and truth.

These attributes we often find related together in the Scripture. For example, Psalm 89:14 ^NASB "Righteousness and justice are the foundation of Your throne; Lovingkindness and truth go before You." We see the connection between these attributes stated again and again in the Scripture. Psalm 40:10 ^NASB "I have not hidden Your righteousness within my heart; I have spoken of Your faithfulness and Your salvation; I have not concealed Your lovingkindness and Your truth from the great congregation."

Often modern man has a difficult time understanding how love and righteousness go together. He has a tendency to somehow define love in a superficial way and then uses that to somehow negate righteousness and justice. To modern man there are apparent conflicts between these attributes—but not in the mind of God. In the Word of God we see that one of the words that expresses these attributes is "faithfulness," it ties many of them together. The main idea of faithfulness is stability. God's love for us is a faithful love—chesed, which has the idea of loyal, faithful love. It is a love that is dependent upon God's character, and He is always faithful to His promise, always faithful to His covenant; and it is a love that never changes. Part of that love involves God's judgment or discipline upon His people. Hebrews 12:5, 6, a quotation from Proverbs 3:11-12, demonstrating that this is an eternal truth; it was true both in the Old Testament in the dispensation of Israel as well as in the church age.

When we see the judgment that God is bringing against the northern kingdom and think about these concepts we have to recognize that in the thinking of the world around us this appears to be very harsh. The world operates on some sort of autonomous and independent view of what love and righteousness is and it comes back and says this isn't a very loving God, sending someone like Jehu around to kill everybody, and it just shows a very distorted concept of sin and evil. That is the basic problem, not just the problem of not being able to understand love but it is based on a prior confusion: a confusion about what evil is. At the very heart of false religion and many of the modern ideologies that shape various worldviews is a denial of the reality of evil. We have to recognize that when we fail to believe in a real substantive evil we put ourselves at incredible risk for self-destruction. Illustration: If we deny the existence of cancer, that it is an illusion, we might engage in behavior that would put us at risk of cancer. That is what is happening in western civilization. We have denied the real substantive existence of evil, we are living in a fantasy world created by our own imagination—we refuse to label terrorists as terrorists, we refuse to recognize the real evil and violence that exists at the very core of Islamic theology and the teaching in the Koran, and so we are not willing to face things as they truly are—and we will make decisions that will put us at risk of being destroyed by the very things that we deny exist. When we build our lives on any kind of fantasy, any kind of illusion, then it is just building a house of cards and eventually things will happen that will tear it down.

The Word of God clearly teaches us about evil and the destructiveness of evil. And because evil is so destructive, so horrible—and it often masquerades as that which is fairly benign—it results in horrible and unintended consequences. But because evil is so substantive, so seductive and so destructive there are times in history when God has to excise that evil with major surgery that often appears to be quite violent to the unbeliever. All of this manifests God's sovereign control over history and there are times when God has to insert Himself into history in order to excise the cancer of evil so that the human race does not destroy itself. The judgments we have seen fall within that category. Within the culture of the northern kingdom of Israel and in the southern kingdom of Judah a horrible spiritual malignancy was threatening to destroy the people of God, the people that God had called to be a kingdom of priests, His holy people who would represent Him to the world; the people through whom God was giving His Word, the people who were designated the custodians of divine revelation, and through whom the savior of the world would come. So now was the time for God to perform major surgery in an extremely violent way. This is in order to protect man. Love has these two elements: that which provides blessing; that which also provides judgment.

An example of this: two New Testament verses that are frequently quoted in terms of the gospel. John 3:16, slightly enhanced translation to give an idea of what the Greek indicates: "For God loved the world in this manner, he gave his unique [one of a kind] Son, that whoever believes in him has everlasting life"; Romans 5:8 echoes that thought: ^NASB "But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." In both of these passages we have an emphasis on the love of God, and we rightly rejoice in the love of God because this has provided for us our incredible salvation: that God in His love provided a savior who could give us eternal life and who would pay the penalty for our sins. But the very act of His love that provided such a great salvation for us provided a horrific judgment and suffering on the eternal second person of the Trinity. The Lord Jesus Christ bore in His body on the tree our sin; it was imputed to Him. We cannot imagine the horror, the suffering that the Lord Jesus Christ went through during those three hours on the cross when He bore the legal penalty for our sin. The love that we rejoice over, that gives us a free salvation, was a love that also had to bring judgment upon someone because of the righteousness and the justice of God. Love, then, always includes judgment because real love is built on righteousness—it has virtue as a part of its makeup.

God is perfectly faithful in both His blessing and discipline or judgment. This is why Moses early on in Deuteronomy reminds the Israelites of the faithfulness of God. Deuteronomy 7:9 ^NASB "Know therefore that the LORD your God, He is God, the faithful God, who keeps His covenant and His lovingkindness to a thousandth generation with those who love Him and keep His commandments." Then as he concludes Deuteronomy, again he came back to the faithfulness of God, Deuteronomy 32:4 ^NASB "The Rock! His work is perfect, For all His ways are just; A God of faithfulness and without injustice, Righteous and upright is He." The word "faithfulness" is a reminder that God is going to be faithful to His covenant, consistent and stable, and He is never going to break that covenant with Israel.

In the Davidic covenant, 2 Samuel 7:12-16; Psalm 89; 1 Chronicles 17:11-14, God promised David an eternal house, an eternal kingdom, and an eternal throne. In other words, He promised that in his descendants there would be one who would occupy the throne of Israel forever and ever. This is at the very center of what is taking place in these events in 2 Kings 8-11. The nation has succumbed to idolatry. It has rejected God, which violated the first commandment which elevated God to the position of the king/ruler of the nation, and so to reject God and to live in idolatry was in fact the highest form of treason. They were substituting another god for the God who rescued them from Egypt and delivered them at the time of the exodus. That idolatry led to hostility toward God which was manifested in its most extreme form in the Baalism, the fertility religions that were brought into the northern kingdom of Israel by the wife of king Ahab, Jezebel. So the house of Ahab introduces this extreme evil into the northern kingdom that destroys the nation. They go through years of judgment and discipline from God as He faithfully applies His promise to discipline them, as outlined in the five cycles of discipline in Leviticus chapter twenty-six.   

We are looking at this judgment in terms of this particular covenant, because not only is the nation threatened but the seed promise is threatened. The ball we really have to keep our eye on as we read through these events in Kings, as well as the parallels in Chronicles, is the protection of the seed because the ultimate angelic conflict is seeking and attempting to prevent God from being able to fulfill His promises to Israel in terms of the Abraham and Davidic covenants. Satan is trying to wipe out the seed of David.

Asa is the great grandson of Solomon. He was the father of Jehoshaphat who in a moment of spiritual and political weakness entered into an alliance with Ahab which was secured by a marriage between his son Jehoram and the daughter of Ahab and Jezebel, Athaliah. So the house of Ahab is introduced into the southern kingdom and the line of David. Baalism is brought into the southern kingdom and like any malignancy is permeating all of the people of God and is reaching a critical mass. Before it does irreversible damage God is going to bring a judgment upon the nation. What has happened in this historical flow is that there has been an assault upon the house of David. 2 Chronicles 21:4, 7 ^NASB "Now when Jehoram had taken over the kingdom of his father and made himself secure, he killed all his brothers with the sword, and some of the rulers of Israel also….. Yet the LORD was not willing to destroy the house of David because of the covenant which He had made with David, and since He had promised to give a lamp to him and his sons forever." This is at the center of understanding all of this.

After Jehoram dies his Ahaziah comes to the throne and he is so bad he doesn't even last a year before he is executed by Jehu. 2 Chronicles 22:8, 9 ^NASB "It came about when Jehu was executing judgment on the house of Ahab, he found the princes of Judah and the sons of Ahaziah's brothers ministering to Ahaziah, and slew them." They are also part of the line of David but this is at the direction of the Lord because this part of the line has been so egregiously affected by the evil of Ahab; they are part of the house and lineage of Ahab and so there has to be this destruction of Ahaziah and his brothers. "He also sought Ahaziah, and they caught him while he was hiding in Samaria; they brought him to Jehu, put him to death and buried him. For they said, 'He is the son of Jehoshaphat, who sought the LORD with all his heart." So there was no one of the house of Ahaziah to retain the power of the kingdom.'"

When Ahaziah was executed by Jehu his mother becomes the queen. Ahaziah was rather young at the time and so his children were still infants. When Athaliah took the throne she decided she needed to clean house to protect herself and her power base, and so we are told in 2 Kings 11:1 ^NASB "When Athaliah the mother of Ahaziah saw that her son was dead, she rose and destroyed all the royal offspring." It looked as if the seed of David is in extreme jeopardy and the Davidic covenant is in jeopardy. However, God is in control. Just when our life is in the biggest mess it has ever been and falling apart around us never forget that God is still there and is in control, and God still has a plan. God has Jehosheba who was the daughter of king Jehoram, a believer and the sister of Ahaziah and so is also the daughter of Athaliah, but she is married to the priest, Jehoiada. She realizes what Athaliah is doing and she rescues Joash who is the infant son of Ahaziah and hid him away so that he was not killed. [3] "So he was hidden with her in the house of the LORD six years, while Athaliah was reigning over the land." This puts all of the priests' life in danger. They are hidden in a chamber, probably on the temple mount, and protected there by God and by the priesthood, and Jehoiada was very wise and had informed certain military leaders, certain other princes and the Levites and priests of the existence of Joash, and they protected the secret and him during this time until it was time for him to become king. It was during that time that Jehoiada taught and trained Joash, and because Joash was taught by this believer, and because he was taught the Word while he was sequestered and hidden away in the temple this provided a basis for subsequent blessing on the nation, at least until Jehoiada died. When Jehoiada died Joash made a major turn and brought the nation back into idolatry. But this shows, at least initially, the grace of God in protecting and providing for the house of David in the southern kingdom; it shows His grace and His faithfulness in that no matter how bad things looked, no matter how destructive things had been, God was still working.

This is true in our lives. We have the promises of God that we can go to and the Word of God that we can go to, and that is what gives us real comfort in the midst of crisis. Lamentations 3:22, 23 ^NASB "The LORD'S lovingkindnesses indeed never cease, For His compassions never fail. {They} are new every morning; Great is Your faithfulness." We always have to remember the essence of God and go back to who he is and what He has done for us, think through each category of His attributes, and that lies behind the promise of Psalm 91:4 ^NASB "He will cover you with His pinions, And under His wings you may seek refuge; His faithfulness is a shield and bulwark." 

Illustrations