Hope From the Word

Host (Bill Luebkemann): Making the choice to seek God first. That's next on Hope From the Word.

Guest (Male): The prophet comes, the man of God comes, and he says, "Look, these guys from the north, these guys must not go into battle with you because God's not with them. And they're going to pull you down.

And even if you go and fight courageously, and you got 300,000 and they got 100,000, and so that's 400,000. And even if the 400,000 are only facing 10,000, you're still going to lose because God's not with you and He's not going to give the victory to you if you bring these ungodly people from the Northern Kingdom with you."

Look, he didn't seek God and ask God for more help. He just went out and did this himself.

Host (Bill Luebkemann): I think we've all done something sort of half-heartedly. We may have gotten away with it in school or on the job, but when we try to go that route in our relationship with God, we get into real trouble every time.

Our example is King Amaziah. He was faithful early on in his reign, but after he united with the ungodly, his relationship with the Lord went downhill.

If you've been with us recently here on Hope From the Word, that's the troubling trend we've seen in these kings of late. Here's Bill Luebkemann in Second Chronicles 25.

So we're going to look at Amaziah here in chapter 25. We saw Joash last week in chapters 23 and 24, and how he started out being very righteous and ended up being very wicked.

We find the same kind of thing repeating itself here over and over again as we go through the Old Testament. One king is good, the next one is bad. One guy starts out good and ends up bad.

Reminds us of Paul saying that we need to finish the race and we need to run the race so that we can finish it. We need to run the race as if we want to win the race, because we do want to win the race.

I just don't see a whole lot of that going on here in the Old Testament. You see people starting out, but you wonder if they even know that they're in a race.

You remember that Joash was murdered, he had become wicked towards the end of his life there. He had plotted against a prophet who had come to him and spoke to him on behalf of the Lord, and Joash ordered that the prophet get killed.

Amaziah here becomes king after his father was killed because some people decided the right thing to do was to kill the king since he had killed the prophet. Never a good idea to take justice into your own hands.

And Joash's son, after he becomes king, gets to thinking to himself, "Gee, if there are some people out there who take justice into their own hands, I probably don't want to have them around because if they don't like me someday, they might do the same thing to me."

And he takes care of the people who killed his old man. Unfortunately, he doesn't take care of their children, and we'll see that that could possibly be what winds up costing him at the end.

Amaziah was 25 years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem 29 years. His mother's name was Jo haden. She was from Jerusalem. He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, but not wholeheartedly.

After the kingdom was firmly in his control, he executed the officials who had murdered his father the king. Yet he did not put their sons to death, but acted in accordance with what is written in the law in the book of Moses, where the Lord commanded, "Father shall not be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their fathers. Each is to die for his own sins."

So this guy, Amaziah, taking over when he's 25 years old, reigning for 29 years till he was 54, I guess. We have here his mother's name and we see that in the general sense, he did the right things, but not wholeheartedly.

He was not a guy that was sold out for the Lord 100%. Sort of following in the footsteps of his father. His father was very much like that, not quite wholeheartedly.

There's a danger here in not being a servant of the Lord wholeheartedly and not being a Christian with all your heart. And the danger is that you could fall away at some point. You do the whole thing all the way or you might as well not do it at all.

But when you serve the Lord with a half-baked attitude or just with half yourself, just when it's convenient for you, then it's going to become less and less convenient as life goes on, and before you know it, you may find yourself not walking with him at all.

After the kingdom was firmly in his control, he executed the officials who had murdered his father, but he followed the law, which is over in Deuteronomy chapter 24 verse 16.

Which we just read, "Father shall not be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their fathers. Each is to die for his own sin." Now, it was not unusual for somebody to execute the whole family. If somebody was a murderer in ancient times, it was not unusual for the whole family to be killed.

And if you read through the Old Testament here, you find other cases where the king did kill the whole family, and where he killed, you know, maybe all his brothers because he was afraid they would be king. Or somebody murdered his father, you know, the human reaction would be, "Kill all the people and also kill their offspring," because if you don't kill their offspring, their offspring are going to become upset and unhappy.

Even though their father did something wrong. In other words, if Tom, Dick, and Harry here murdered the previous king, and the new king executes Tom, Dick, and Harry, all of their children are going to be mad at the new king because he killed their father. Without thinking about the fact that, well, their father had killed the previous king.

And that may be part of the reason why this guy winds up getting assassinated at the end of his time also. It doesn't really say that, that's just speculation, but he did the right thing here. I don't want to give you the wrong impression.

He did what God said. He did not put the sons to death, but he acted in accordance with what is written in the law in the book of Moses, because this is what it says, "Fathers will not be put to death for their children, nor children for their fathers. Each one dies for themselves."

And this king, so you see he was serving the Lord, and not wholeheartedly, but with half his heart maybe, he was serving the Lord at some level. And he did the right thing here. And we're going to see he makes some other good decisions before time goes too far.

Amaziah called the people of Judah together and assigned them according to their families to commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds for all Judah and Benjamin. He then mustered those 20 years old or more and found out there were 300,000 men ready for military service, able to handle the spear and shield. He also hired 100,000 fighting men from Israel for 100 talents of silver.

So the first thing he did was, he called everybody together and he assigned them to commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds. So he had commanders set up and he assigned the people, "You're going to be working for him, you're going to be working for him. You go over here, you go over there."

And he did that, it says, based on families. He assigned them according to their families. So that when they were fighting in the army, they were fighting alongside their other family members.

When a guy was in the army, his brother was serving alongside of him, and his uncle was behind him, and his son, if his son was old enough, was with him. They were serving together in the army with people that they knew, which might have made for a more effective fighting force because they'd be looking out for each other better, they'd be taking care of each other. They're not going to run away from the enemy and leave their close family members there. So this may have actually been a smart idea to make people fight with their families.

And once he had assigned them, he mustered those 20 years old and more. He called them all out, "Let's get ready. Let's have some drills, have some practice. We're going to do basic training here. How many are there?" Everybody 20 years old or more is going to come out here, and there were 300,000 men, and they were ready for military service. They were old enough, they were trained, they could handle a spear and a shield.

And he didn't think 300,000 men was enough. So he went and got himself some mercenaries. Just like we hired Hessians during the Revolutionary War. Or was it the British that hired the Hessians? The British hired the Hessians. We bumped off the Hessians. So he got himself some mercenaries. He went up to Israel, the Northern Kingdom, the kingdom that wasn't seeking God at all. And he hired 100,000 fighting men from them. Bad idea.

He should have read the history of what's been going on for the last few years, say the last 100 or 200 years, to find out nothing good ever came out of that Northern Kingdom. And those that worked with the Northern Kingdom always paid a heavy price. Look what happens.

But a man of God came to him and said, "Oh king, these troops from Israel must not march with you. For the Lord is not with Israel, not with any of the people of Ephraim. Even if you go and fight courageously in battle, God will overthrow you before the enemy, for God has the power to help or to overthrow."

So here he's saying, the prophet comes, the man of God comes, and he says, "Look, these guys from the North, from the Kingdom of Israel, from Ephraim, these guys must not go into battle with you because God's not with them. And they're going to pull you down.

And even if you go and fight courageously, and you got 300,000, and they got 100,000, and so that's 400,000. And even if the 400,000 are only facing 10,000, you're still going to lose because God's not with you and He's not going to give the victory to you if you bring these ungodly people from the Northern Kingdom with you."

"Look, he didn't seek God and ask God for more help. He just went out and did this himself." And if he needed more troops and God wanted him to have more troops, God would have told him to go somewhere else to get them, not to get them from the northern part of the kingdom.

So Amaziah here, the king, he received what the prophet had to say. He listened to the guy. He let him talk. He pondered it over, reflected it. Amaziah asked the man of God, "But what about the 100 talents I paid for these Israelite troops? What about the money? I already paid them."

The man of God replied, "The Lord can give you much more than that." In other words, to paraphrase out there, "It's a shame you wasted all that money, but the Lord can give you back 10 times that much." He owns the cattle on a thousand hills and you have no need to worry about that at all. That's not the point. It's not about the money.

The money's already spent. You're not going to get it back. You're not going to ask for a refund. You're just going to have to trust God here. But God doesn't want you going into battle with these other troops.

So Amaziah dismissed the troops who had come to him from Ephraim and sent them home. They were furious with Judah and left for home in a great rage. They were very unhappy. Now you might think, why would they be so unhappy? They got paid and they didn't have to fight.

That sounds like a pretty good deal. Wouldn't you like to do that? Go out, go out to work, get paid. They send you home. What's the big hassle? Why the rage? But you know, from reading about many battles, there was always a lot of booty. And these guys were going to go out and bring back all kinds of stuff. The money that they were paid, the 100 talents of silver, that wasn't very much.

The 100 talents, 70 pounds per talent, that's 70 times 100, 7,000 pounds of silver for 100,000 guys. Just in round numbers, it's like every guy got an ounce of silver. Not very much. But they were no doubt expecting to win a battle and bring back all kinds of animals and livestock and furniture and fixtures, and maybe some flat-screen TVs, and whatever else. And they were just furious and in a rage.

They took off and we'll see they did some damage on the way, but we'll get back to that in a minute. Hold that thought temporarily. Amaziah then marshaled his strength and led his army to the Valley of Salt, where he killed 10,000 men of Seir. The army of Judah also captured 10,000 men alive, took them to the top of a cliff and threw them down so that all were dashed to pieces.

So they captured some of some soldiers here of the enemy. They fought the battle. The Lord gave them the victory. They killed 20,000 men in all. 10,000 in the battle there, and 10,000 more that they executed afterwards by throwing them off a cliff. These were bad guys for whatever reason. It doesn't elaborate here on what they had done or what the purpose was.

Meanwhile, the troops that Amaziah had sent back, remember I said, "Hold that thought." Meanwhile, the troops that Amaziah had sent back and had not allowed to take part in the war, raided Judean towns from Samaria to Beth Horon. They killed 3,000 people and carried off great quantities of plunder.

So while he was out fighting a battle, the troops from the North that he said, "I'm not going to use you guys, just go home." They were so enraged that as they were going home, they raided Judean towns on the way back to the Northern Kingdom. So here was Amaziah the king with his 300,000 men out fighting a battle, and the army of Israel plundered the kingdom of Judah. I guess they figured, "We're going to get our booty one way or the other. He doesn't want us to fight with him. We're going to take it right here."

So they killed 3,000 of the Judeans and carried off all kinds of plunder. Now Amaziah was away at battle. When he came back, he found this out. It didn't make him very happy. We'll get to that also.

When Amaziah returned from slaughtering the Edomites, he brought back the gods of the people of Seir. He set them up as his own gods, bowed down to them and burned sacrifices to them. The anger of the Lord burned against Amaziah, and he sent a prophet to him who said, "Why do you consult this people's gods which could not save their own people from your hand?"

Like, "Hello, do you have any common sense here? Are you awake? Are you listening?" Here's a guy who was approached by a prophet of God who told him, "Do not take the 100,000 troops from Israel with you. I'm not with them. I'll give you the victory in the battle, but not with those 100,000 guys."

So he goes into battle, trusting the Lord, and the Lord gives him a great victory. And what does he do? He brings back the gods from that land to his own land and sets them up and starts to worship them. Well, this is one of the dumbest things you can find in the Old Testament. This guy was one of the dumbest kings there was. He just got this battle. And these other people lost. 20,000 guys got killed. And he's taking their gods. Now some people say, maybe he figured he probably irritated those gods because he killed all those people. So maybe he figured he better placate them some by doing a little worship.

It's odd that you would want to take the gods from a people that, well, first of all, they're not the real God, they're not your God, they didn't give you the victory. But besides which, their people lost. So what good are they? He had all the facts here in front of him to make the right decision, but he didn't do it. He brought back the gods. He set them up as his own gods. He didn't just bring them back for souvenirs, he didn't bring them back to melt them down so he could have the precious metal. No, he brought them back and set them up as his own gods. He bowed down to them and burned sacrifices to them, so he was worshiping these idols.

And this caused the anger of the Lord to burn against him. And the Lord sent another prophet, or maybe it was the same one. Saying, "What are you doing here? Why are you consulting these gods? They couldn't even save their own people from your hand. Your God gave you the victory. Why are you worshiping their gods?"

This time, however, Amaziah wasn't wasn't listening. Before he went into battle, he was listening. Before he went into battle, he heard what the man of God had to say and he adjusted his plans accordingly. But not now. Now he's unhappy.

While he was still speaking, the king said to him, "Have we appointed you an adviser to the king? Stop! Why be struck down?" So the prophet stopped, but said, "I know that God has determined to destroy you because you have done this and have not listened to my counsel." So the prophet got just a little bit more in.

This prophet came to him and basically what the king says is, "Who do you think you are coming in here and giving a message to the king? Who do you think you are? Do we appoint you an adviser? Do we make you in charge? Do we tell somebody that you're going to be in charge here? Have we appointed you an adviser to the king? Stop! Why be struck down?"

In other words, "We're going to kill you if you don't shut up." So the prophet said, got this last comment in here, "God's going to destroy you, and I know it. And it's because you have not listened to my counsel." He had an opportunity here. Everywhere in the Bible, over and over again, there's always an opportunity for repentance.

All he had to say was, "Holy cow, I can't believe I'm so stupid. Let's take these gods and melt them down, and let's make an offering to the real God and ask for his forgiveness." And the outcome here could have been completely different. But he didn't want to do that. He was feeling really strong. He took an army of 300,000 guys, went out and killed the enemy of 20,000 guys. His army was 15 times bigger than theirs. He won the battle and it's gone to his head now.

And he thinks, "How good am I? How smart am I? How strong am I? Aren't I something? I'm a legend in my own mind." And he started to think more highly of himself than he should have. After Amaziah, king of Judah, consulted his advisers, he sent this challenge to Jehoash, son of Jehoahaz, the son of Jehu, king of Israel, "Come and meet me face-to-face. Come meet me face-to-face." He he was probably mad because of what the Israelite army had done on their way back to the North to his towns.

So he challenges the North, "Come and meet me face-to-face. You know, you did that attack while I was out of town with my 300,000 guys. You went through these villages that were probably mostly women and children and young kids because an old, an old people, because the fighting army was gone, and you killed people and you plundered them. You're a bunch of cowards! Come back and meet me face-to-face, and then we'll see who the winner is."

But Jehoash, king of Israel, replied to Amaziah, king of Judah, "A thistle in Lebanon sent a message to a cedar in Lebanon. 'Give your daughter to my son in marriage.' Then a wild beast in Lebanon came along and trampled the thistle underfoot. You say to yourself that you have defeated Edom, and now you are arrogant and proud. But stay at home. Why ask for trouble and cause your own downfall and that of Judah also?"

This guy could be a diplomat, even though he's an evil king of Israel. But he sends him this message, there was this big cedar and a little tiny thistle, and it went to the thistle's head, and he thought, "I'm as strong as that cedar there." And he said to the cedar, "Give your daughter to my son in marriage." And just then a wild beast came along and stepped on the thistle, and that was the end of that thistle, just crushed it to death. But that cedar was standing strong. There was nothing that any wild beast could do to that big tree.

And what he's saying here is, "You are like a little thistle. You're not, you're nothing. And you don't want to mess with us because we're bigger and stronger than you are. We know you defeated yourself. We know you defeated Edom. Just enjoy that. You you say to yourself, you defeated Edom, and now you're arrogant and proud. Enjoy the victory. But don't go looking for more trouble somewhere else. Stay at home. Why ask for trouble and cause your own downfall and that of Judah also?"

But God was leading these affairs here, and Amaziah was doomed to be destroyed because he had left, left God, he wasn't following the Lord anymore. He thought he was being strong and arrogant and bold, but the Lord was really allowing him to march off into his own defeat.

Amaziah, however, would not listen. For God so worked that he might hand him over to Jehoash because they sought the gods of Edom. So let's make it clear here. He's going to lose this battle, not because his 300,000 men are not well trained, not because they're not as good as the others. He's going to lose the battle because God orchestrated it in such a way to bring this guy down. And the reason was because he sought the gods of the other country.

So Jehoash, king of Israel, attacked. He and Amaziah, king of Judah, faced each other at Beth Shemesh in Judah. Judah was routed by Israel, and every man fled to his home. Jehoash, king of Israel, captured Amaziah, king of Judah, the son of Joash, the son of Ahaziah at Beth Shemesh. Then Jehoash brought him to Jerusalem and broke down the wall of Jerusalem from the Ephraim gate to the corner gate, a section about 600 feet long. He took all the gold and silver and all the articles found in the temple of God that had been in the care of Obed-Edom, together with the palace treasures and hostages, and returned to Samaria.

So the king of the South here, Amaziah, didn't listen. He wanted to have a fight, so the king of the North came down. We could just shorten up these verses. Make it nice and easy. We say here, Jehoash came down and cleaned Amaziah's clock. Just wiped him out. He came down and he attacked. They faced each other, and Judah was routed, and every man fled. They gave up. They they flew the white flag. They took off and ran to their own home.

And the king of the South, Amaziah, was captured by the king of the North. And then the king of the North came down to Jerusalem and he he tore down a big long section of the wall and he pillaged the city. So because of the king's stupidity, the nation of Judah suffered this terrible defeat. Part of the wall was ripped down. The gold and silver from the temple were taken away. And the king himself was taken away as a hostage, and there were other hostages as well.

All because God had orchestrated this thing to tear down and to tear away the kingdom from Amaziah.

You've been listening to Hope From the Word. We're currently in Pastor Bill Luebkemann's study of Second Chronicles. If you'd like to hear this message again, you have several options. Visit our website at ccmarlton.org, download the Hope FM app to your smartphone or tablet, or look for us wherever you find podcasts. If you've been thinking about visiting Calvary Chapel of Marlton where Bill serves as pastor, we'd love to have you. Our service times are on Sunday mornings at 10:00. We also meet midweek on Wednesdays at 7:00 p.m. You can also livestream from home when you visit our YouTube channel at Calvary Chapel of Marlton. For more information, go to ccmarlton.org. We hope to see you soon. Before the day is done, we'd like to connect with you. Share a praise report, prayer request, or what you're learning from this series. You can easily email us from our website ccmarlton.org or just call us at 856-983-1662. There's more to come from Bill's study of Second Chronicles, and we'll have that for you next time on Hope From the Word with Pastor Bill Luebkemann. This program is brought to you by Calvary Chapel of Marlton.