Hope From the Word

Bill Luebkemann: It’s not just about getting advice, it’s about getting the right advice. That’s next on *Hope From the Word*. Listening to the wrong advisors can be to your undoing. When you seek advice, there’s wisdom in the counsel. Make sure you’re getting advice from believers. That’s Godly advice. If somebody says, “Yeah, I think you should do thus and such,” make sure it’s a Godly person who’s given you Godly advice. And what scripture did you get that advice from?

Guest (Male): Give me one pure and holy passion. Give me one magnificent obsession. Give me one glorious ambition for my life: to know and follow hard after you. To know and follow hard after you. To be your disciple in your truth. In this world empty, fail and poor, compared to knowing you, my Lord. Lead me on and I will run after you. Lead me on and I will run after you.

Bill Luebkemann: We tell our kids from an early age, be careful who you hang around. That’s because we know peer influence weighs heavily in their lives. But we also need to heed that advice ourselves as adults. Who or what we allow to be influential in our lives is important, young or old. Who are your influencers? The television, perhaps? The latest book on the market? Or is it a relative or a friend? Let’s take a careful look at this today on *Hope From the Word*. We are in 2 Chronicles 21.

You have also murdered your own brothers, members of your father’s house, men who were better than you. He got them all murdered. He probably slept better that night thinking, “I’m safe now.” But God knew. God was watching. He may have felt safe for a long time. Who knows how many years went by before this happened? He was only the king for eight years, so somewhere in the middle, a few years after he became king, is when this happened, perhaps.

It’s going to catch up with him. God knows. He’s not mocked. What we sow, that is what we’re going to reap. Now the Lord is about to strike your people, your sons, your wives, and everything that is yours with a heavy blow. You yourself will be very ill with a lingering disease of the bowels until the disease causes your bowels to come out.

I never heard of anything like that. Have you ever heard of anything like that? I don’t know what disease that was. It does not sound like fun, and I don’t recommend it. I’m thinking about that chronic disease of the bowel some people get. It’s really nasty. Crohn’s. Yeah, Crohn’s. I’m thinking maybe this was a super duper extra bad case of Crohn’s disease. There are other diseases of the bowels. I’m sure there’s a hundred of them. Maybe this was a special disease that God cooked up just for this guy. Who knows?

It's terrible to think about. That was the nature of this guy’s offense to God. You’re going to become ill with this lingering disease. It turns out the disease lingered for two years before he died. So he had two years to think about what he did. He had two years to lie there in pain and agony.

The Lord aroused against Jehoram the hostility of the Philistines and of the Arabs who lived near the Cushites. They attacked Judah, invaded it, and carried off all the goods found in the king’s palace, together with his sons and wives. Not a son was left to him except Ahaziah, the youngest. We know from other writings that those sons were all killed by the invaders.

Before the disease began, these Philistines and Arabs came in, they attacked, and they carried off everything. They invaded his land and carried off his goods. They went into his palace. They took his flat-screen TV and his DVR and his Pentium multi-threaded... whatever was popular in those days. The goods that he had. He had more goods than anybody, and they just carried them all away. They took his sons and his wives, and not a son was left except the one, Ahaziah, his youngest.

After all this, the Lord afflicted Jehoram with an incurable disease of the bowels. In the course of time, at the end of the second year, his bowels came out because of the disease, and he died in great pain. His people made no fire in his honor, as they had for his fathers. The enemies carried off this stuff prior to that. It doesn’t say exactly how long it was. But he may have lost his wives and his sons, and then he may have been sitting around for a while moping before he got this disease.

He had to know that it was coming because the prophet Elijah had written to him. The interesting thing to me too is that it never says he regretted anything. When Jonah went to Nineveh and said, “Your city will be destroyed in 40 days,” the people repented. He did not say, “Unless you repent, your city will be destroyed.” He said, “Your city will be destroyed.” He didn’t say, “This is your last warning, final chance, what is your final answer?” He said in 40 days, this city will be destroyed. But those people repented, and God relented. I’m given to believe God would have relented in many more cases if people had repented.

In this case, he never once repented. He didn’t repent, so God didn’t relent. He got the message from Elijah. He could have repented then. He didn’t. The enemies came in to attack him. He could have sought God and said, “Would you protect us from these enemies?” I think if he had, the scriptures are clear that God would have. Nevertheless, they carried away all his stuff. No one was left.

He could have repented then. Who knows, maybe God would have given him a victory to be able to retrieve his sons and wives and goods. He didn’t. Then he got this disease, and he had it for two years. That means among other things that God was giving him a two-year repentance period. He didn’t know he was going to have two years or one year. It could have been five years or eight years or no years. He didn’t know what he was going to have. He knew he had this disease, and he could have repented. He did not.

It’s just amazing to me that somebody could be so against God that all these things could be happening and they just won’t change their mind. You see it today when you argue with an atheist about the Lord, or you watch when I saw Dawkins on TV being interviewed recently. They dig their holes. You think that with all the overwhelming evidence that mankind did not evolve from mud like they believe, you think that sooner or later they would see it the other way. But they don’t so often.

This guy had all this chance to repent and to change his mind. Two more whole years lying there in pain and agony. Finally, his bowels came out, and he died in great pain. The people made no fire. It was a custom to make a big fire in honor of one who had died, but not so for him.

Jehoram was 32 years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem eight years. He passed away to no one’s regret. That is one of the saddest lines in the Bible. Even the worst person in the world, you think when they die, somebody cares: his mother, his wife, his kids, somebody. He passed away to no one’s regret and was buried in the City of David, but not in the tombs of the kings. They didn’t give him a good burial. There was nobody mourning, nobody crying, nobody fasting, nobody observing a 30-day period of mourning, not even his remaining son or his one remaining wife that we’ll see later on.

The people of Jerusalem made Ahaziah, Jehoram’s youngest son, king in his place since the raiders who came with the Arabs into the camp had killed all the older sons. Ahaziah, son of Jehoram, king of Judah, began to reign. I picked this up from an old commentary. They said this about Jehoram: in addition to the revolts already mentioned, two neighboring tribes made hostile incursions on the south and west parts of his kingdom. His country was ravaged, his capital taken, his palace plundered, his wives carried off, and all his children slain except the youngest.

He himself was seized with an incurable dysentery, which after subjecting him to the most painful suffering for the unusual period of two years, carried him off, a monument of the divine judgment. To complete his degradation, his death was unlamented, his burial unhonored by his subjects. I just thought that was an interesting way to recap this guy’s life. Ahaziah’s brothers were killed. The people of Jerusalem made Ahaziah king. You’d think after what he watched his father go through, he would have said, “I’m going to clean up the act here. I’m going to get this country right with God. We’re going to seek after God. We’re going to do things the right way.” But unfortunately, not.

Ahaziah was 22 years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem one year. Some in the original Hebrew, it is thought that it says 42 years. Again, some people will argue with this. How could he be 42 years old if his father died at the age of 40? His father became king when he was 32, reigned for eight years until he was 40. Back in one of the books of Kings, it says he was 22 years old. The difference between 22 and 42 in Hebrew is just one character, and the characters almost look the same.

Most likely when somebody was copying, it’s thought that at some point somebody mistook the one character for a different character. The scriptures that we have today are copies of copies. They didn’t have Xerox machines back then. That’s why in some places in the original Hebrew it says 42, but it probably really means 22. Ahaziah was 22 years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem one year. His mother’s name was Athaliah, a granddaughter of Omri. She was the one who was the daughter of Ahab, granddaughter of Omri.

She was the one that was married to Jehoram. Apparently, she was not carried off by the attackers. Apparently, this guy had other wives that were carried off, but not her. This guy was king, Ahaziah was king, and his mother was still around, the wife of Jehoram, the prior king. He too walked in the ways of the house of Ahab, for his mother encouraged him in doing wrong. He was just brought up in this way by his father. The Bible says the sins of the fathers are visited upon the second or the third generation.

I don’t believe God punishes a child because of their father’s sins. But you can see clear evidence that the sins are passed along in the upbringing of the children so that they are out there doing the same sin. When he eventually died and lost his life, he lost his life because of his own sin, not because of his father’s sin. But it was because of his father’s sin that this was the way he was trained up.

The Bible says, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” Well, this guy was trained up in the wrong way, and he did not depart from it. His mother was a daughter of Ahab, so his mother was influencing the household. His grandfather on the one side was a good and righteous king, but his father was wicked because his mother was wicked because her father and mother were wicked. That was all this guy knew.

When he became king at age 22, he probably didn’t know what to do. He went to his mom and said, “What do you think we should do?” She said, “Well, let’s go ask my family over in Israel for some advice.” He too walked in the ways of the house of Ahab, for his mother encouraged him in doing wrong. He did evil in the eyes of the Lord, as the house of Ahab had done. For after his father’s death, they became his advisors to his undoing.

This is what happened to Rehoboam also. When Solomon died, Rehoboam his son became king. Rehoboam asked the wrong advisors what to do. In that case, he should have listened to his father’s advisors, because Rehoboam asked Solomon’s advisors, “What should I do about this Northern Kingdom?” They said, “Be nice to them and they’ll be your loyal subjects forever.” But instead, he asked the young punk hot-headed advisors that he knew from the club circuit. They said, “Go in there and whip them and kick them and beat them into shape and let them know you’re even stronger than your father.” It was to his undoing.

Listening to the wrong advisors can be to your undoing. When you seek advice, there’s wisdom in the counsel. Make sure you’re getting advice from believers. That’s Godly advice. If somebody says, “Yeah, I think you should do thus and such,” make sure it’s a Godly person who’s given you Godly advice. And what scripture did you get that advice from? That’s kind of a little bonus.

This guy did evil in the eyes of the Lord because that’s all he knew from his mother, from his father, from his grandparents on the mother’s side. That’s what the house of Ahab did, and his father’s advisors were his advisors. It became his undoing. He also followed their counsel when he went with Joram son of Ahab, king of Israel, to war against Hazael king of Aram at Ramoth-Gilead. It was also unwise of him to join the king of Israel in this war.

The Arameans wounded Joram, so he returned to Jezreel to recover from the wounds they had inflicted on him at Ramoth in his battle with Hazael king of Aram. He’s helping the king of Israel who gets wounded and returns to recover. This guy decides, “I’m going to go visit the king of Israel.” Then Ahaziah son of Jehoram, king of Judah, went down to Jezreel to see Joram son of Ahab because he had been wounded. His mother was the daughter of Ahab, so that makes Ahab his grandfather.

This was his grandfather’s son. This would be his uncle. This king was his uncle. He’s helping his uncle who’s ungodly, and now he’s going to go visit him, and it costs him his life. Through Ahaziah’s visit to Joram, God brought about Ahaziah’s downfall. When Ahaziah arrived, he went out with Joram to meet Jehu son of Nimshi, whom the Lord had anointed to destroy the house of Ahab. Jehu was going to be the next king of Israel, and God had told Jehu to destroy the house of Ahab.

While Jehu was executing judgment on the house of Ahab, he found the princes of Judah and the sons of Ahaziah’s relatives who had been attending Ahaziah, and he killed them. He then went in search of Ahaziah and his men captured him while he was hiding in Samaria. He was brought to Jehu and put to death. They buried him, for they said, “He was a son of Jehoshaphat, who sought the Lord with all his heart.” So there was no one in the house of Ahaziah powerful enough to retain the kingdom.

He was hanging around in the wrong places. It’s like a Christian that says, “I’m going to go to the bar. I’m not going to drink anything, I’m just going to witness to the unsaved people there.” Now, maybe that might be okay for someone who never drank in his life, but for a recovering alcoholic, that’s probably not a wise thing to do. If you gambled away your house and your car and all of your belongings and your wife left you because of your gambling problem, you probably don’t want to go to the racetrack to witness to the jockeys.

This guy was hanging around in the wrong place. It was all he knew. He didn’t know any better. He’s hanging out with the king up in the Northern Kingdom. He says, “I’ll go visit the guy for a while,” and it turns out he just happens to be around while judgment is being executed on that king. This was God’s doing. We saw that in here also: through Ahaziah’s visit to Joram, God brought about Ahaziah’s downfall.

He’s only king for one year, and he was there when Jehu, who was sent by God to exterminate the house of Ahab, was there. This guy got sucked into it as well as his relatives, and they all got wiped out and there was pretty much no one left in his house. His mother was Athaliah. She’s back down in Jerusalem now. Her son just got killed. Her husband is killed. She doesn’t have much left. When Athaliah the mother of Ahaziah saw that her son was dead, she proceeded to destroy the whole royal family of the house of Judah.

She went out and wiped out all the extended relatives, cousins, whoever was part of that royal family, she killed them. But Jehosheba, the daughter of King Jehoram, took Joash son of Ahaziah and stole him away from among the royal princes who were about to be murdered and put him and his nurse in a bedroom. This guy who died had a son who at the time was just one year old. Remember, Ahaziah was 22 years old when he became king. His son was born around the same time that he became king.

Joash was only one or two years old, just an infant. Jehoiada was the high priest, and his wife Jehosheba, she was a daughter of King Jehoram also. She took the infant and hid the infant in the temple in a bedroom. The temple had adjoining rooms along the side of it, which maybe some of them were like apartments where some of the temple workers were allowed to live. She took this one descendant that was left that the Queen Mother, Athaliah, didn’t know about, and she hid this child in a bedroom.

Because Jehosheba, the daughter of King Jehoram and wife of the priest Jehoiada, was Ahaziah’s sister, she hid the child from Athaliah so she could not kill him. She was another daughter of this woman, or maybe she was a daughter of the king but of a different mother. She helped out her dead brother by retrieving his one- or two-year-old baby. He remained hidden with them at the temple of God for six years while Athaliah ruled the land.

Athaliah wanted the kingdom for herself. She liked being the Queen Mother. She liked being the wife of the king, and then when her husband died and her son was the king, she liked being the mother of the king. She liked the prestige and she liked the power and she liked the authority and all that other kind of stuff. She didn’t want to give it up. She thought, number one, they might come after me. They might try to kill me. So I can’t let that happen.

Number two, if one of the extended relatives, cousins, or what have you, somebody else becomes king, then their mother gets to have my job and I’m just a nobody again. She seized power. In a way, this was kind of like a coup. She seized power, but God allowed it to give time for this one-year-old infant to grow up to the age of eight when he became king. We don’t have time to get into that right now. That’s another whole story in chapter 23 and chapter 24, which we’ll do next time, Lord willing.

We’ll see how Joash was hidden away for those seven years. After seven years, when he was around eight years old, the high priest brought him out. But first, he went through a very elaborate procedure getting everybody on his side, making sure all the priests were on his side, making sure they had enough guards to guard this young boy so that his grandmother couldn’t execute him. I was reading this today thinking you could make a movie out of this. You could make a miniseries drama on TV out of this, just these chapters that we’re reading here.

You see the same kind of things happen over and over and over again. People never learn. They don’t learn from history, they don’t learn from their family, they don’t learn from their neighbors. They just don’t learn. When you look around in the world today, you see the same kind of problem. As Christians, maybe we all don’t learn very often. There’s probably plenty of reasons any one of us could say we didn’t learn something that we should have learned.

As we see this nation of Israel always getting so confused and as we look around at America today, we are not the chosen people like the Jews were. America is not the nation that Israel was. But in many ways, we can see some of the same kind of things going on here. We can see that these people were just not interested in following God. When they were following God, they did great. When they pulled away from him, God removed his hand.

They didn’t lose battles because their army didn’t have enough basic training or they didn’t have enough money for weapons systems or anything like that. They lost battles because God was not blessing them any longer. Our country, America, has been blessed by God, and many people just don’t realize it. They say we need to fix this or change this or do this to make this right or that right or the other thing right. All of those things may or may not be good things.

What is definitely a good thing is following after God. If my people who are called by my name, if we will look to him and follow him and seek him with all of our heart and mind and soul, then he will honor that and he will answer those prayers. We see here that they just didn’t learn that lesson. Joash learned it. Joash was a great king, at least for most of his life. He did get off base there towards the end.

So many times as I read these guys that started out strong, they get off base at the end. Sometimes I say to myself, I’ve been a Christian since 1981 and I don’t want to get off track. I’m older than I was then, just a little bit. I don’t want to get off track. I don’t want to get sucked into worshipping idols or doing anything crazy at the end of my life. I pray, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Lord, keep me walking strong with you and not being sucked into all these things because it seems like so many people got tripped up later in their lives.

Guest (Male): You’ve been listening to *Hope From the Word*. We’re currently in a study of 2 Chronicles. You can hear this message or more *Hope From the Word* with Pastor Bill Luebkemann by going to ccmarlton.org. Pastor Bill’s messages can also be found by downloading the Hope FM app on your smartphone or tablet. If you prefer to listen via podcast, you can find *Hope From the Word* wherever you find your podcasts.

We’d love to have you join us at Calvary Chapel of Marlton either in person or online. Our Sunday service begins at 10:00 AM, and there’s a Wednesday evening service at 7:00. To catch us online, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel at Calvary Chapel of Marlton or just go to our website for the link: ccmarlton.org.

If you’d like to take a moment to write to Pastor Bill, it would be such a blessing to us. We’re thankful each and every time we hear what God is doing through our listeners’ lives. And we want to pray for you, too. Either email us through the website at ccmarlton.org or call 856-983-1662. We’ll continue our study in 2 Chronicles next time on *Hope From the Word* with Pastor Bill Luebkemann, a presentation of Calvary Chapel of Marlton.