2 Chronicles 22:1-12 - Homiletics

A medley of the memoranda of evil-doing, its consequences, and its end.

The one surviving son of Jehoram, his youngest son, Ahaziah, is put on an unsteady, unsafe throne. Jehoram had caused all his own brethren to be slain, and now it had come to pass that all his "eldest sons had been slain by the band of men that came with the Arabians to the camp" As Athaliah, the daughter of Ahab and granddaughter of Omri, the evil wife of Jehoram, had not failed to make an evil husband of Jehoram, so, the evil mother, she does not fail to make an evil son of Ahaziah. She "was his counsellor to do wickedly." And therein her whole house, "the house of Ahab," were "after the death of his father, counsellors to his destruction." Ahaziah repeated the error of his grandfather Jehoshaphat, in associating himself with the King of Israel, going up with him to fight against Hazael King of Syria, at Ramoth-Gilead. It leads to further complications. The King of Israel is wounded and returns to Jezreel, and because "he was sick," Ahaziah must go thither also to "see" him. He unconsciously is courting "his destruction," "of God" ( 2 Chronicles 22:7 ); for once there he must support the king of his rival line against one whom "God had anointed" to the very work of "cutting off the house of Ahab." He is not only setting himself "to help the ungodly, and to love them that hate the Lord" ( 2 Chronicles 19:2 ), but he is setting himself in battle with one against whom the Lord has anointed his own servant ("Jehu the son of Nimshi"), that he may destroy him and his! That is, he has put himself in the position of actively and directly fighting against God. And now, by doing thus, he not only involves "the princes of Judah, and the sons of his own brethren" (because of the company in which they were found), in indiscriminate slaughter, but himself, the King of Judah, hidden— hidden in Samaria , searched for, caught, taken. He with his mother has been run to earth in a double sense, hounded to his miserable earthly end, his bones being honoured with decent burial only out of reverence for his good grandfather Jehoshaphat. The humiliating epitaph, however, on his grave was to this effect, "The house of Ahaziah had no power to keep still the kingdom!" Once more the enraged mother of the son whom she more than any one else had driven into his sin and his grave, plots the slaughter of the entire royal seed of David; but in vain. A faithful promise, a sure covenant, an unalterable purpose, prevents the thing! The sister of the king just buried was married to Jehoiada the priest, and she was the appointed preserver of the royal line, in the providence of God. She saves one, an infant, her nephew, and with her husband hides him for six years where alone so many others have taken refuge, and been safely hidden till the stormy wind and tempest have been overpast—"in the house of God." The usurping and iniquitous Athaliah, daughter of Ahab, wife of Jehoram once, and once mother of Ahaziah, an orphan, a widow, and without a son, unloving and unloved, neither fearing God nor regarding man, reigns awhile, but does not rule! God rules the people, rides the storm, keeps the sleep, the infancy, the childhood, of his anointed; inspires his true priest, Jehoiada, with wisdom, patience, determination, and religious courage. The royal line of Judah is not cut off in its sixth king, and, when to the most of human knowledge it seemed so, that six years' interval may well have served as a needed pause in the life of the kingdom and of its chief men. "The Word of the Lord" was no doubt "precious in those days," but it was not lost, and there was a faithful priest. The silences of nations and oft of our own individual life, the silences of Scripture and of the inscrutable God himself, all have meaning, all bear the mark of design and long-suffering providence, and if improved instead of neglected, sinned against, and defied, may be rich with future blessings.