Verse 22
FURTHER WICKEDNESS OF AHAZ; HIS DEATH; AND THE SUCCESSION OF HEZEKIAH
"And in the time of his distress did he transgress yet more against Jehovah, this same Ahaz. For he sacrificed unto the gods of Damascus, which smote him; and he said, Because the gods of the kings of Assyria helped them, therefore will I sacrifice to them, that they may help me. But they were the ruin of him, and of all Israel. And Ahaz gathered together the vessels of the house of God, and cut in pieces the vessels of the house of God, and shut up the doors of the house of Jehovah; and he made him altars in every corner of Jerusalem. And in every city of Judah he made high places to burn incense to other gods, and provoked to anger Jehovah, the God of his fathers. Now the rest of his acts, and all his ways, first and last, behold, they are written in the book of the kings of Judah and Israel. And Ahaz slept with his fathers, and they buried him in the city, even in Jerusalem, for they brought him not into the sepulchres of the kings of Israel: and Hezekiah his son reigned in his stead."
We have commented extensively upon the wickedness of Ahaz in Second Kings; and there is no need to elaborate the discussion here.
His great failure was his adoption of the theological ideas that prevailed throughout the ancient world, namely, that each country had its gods, and that their victories or defeats were due to the will of such pagan deities. In God's deliverance of Israel from Egypt, he had established most conclusively the principle that there is only one true and Almighty God, that the pagan deities are not merely powerless, but that they are actually nonentities, and finally that God's People would prosper or suffer in direct proportion to their fidelity, or lack of it, to the One True and Only God.
The long time sins and apostasies of the Chosen People had all but completely erased from their hearts those basic truths; and the final result of that shameful development would be rapidly revealed in the defeat and deportation, first, of Northern Israel to Assyria (722 B.C.), and later, in the defeat and captivity of Judah in Babylon (586 B.C.).
Be the first to react on this!
