Two Kings

I have spent a fair amount of time admiring and writing about Hezekiah. One of the last of Judah’s kings, he is admirable because he changed direction — not just that he personally did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, but that he attempted to reverse centuries of demon worship in the kingdom of Judah. He tore down the statues and shrines and high places, attempting to correct the course of history. He opposed the prevailing culture to try to lead the people back to God. He started off on a path of courage that while certainly made easier by the fact of his position, still must have taken some personal fortitude to see through.

In the end, he suffered from pride as it seems all government leaders do. Every time I bring him up in casual conversation with my churchgoing friends, the first thing they go to as a counterpoint is how he stupidly showed off all the kingdom’s treasures to people who would later steal them when the kingdom was sacked. Bad as it was however, I don’t see that as his worst failure. I think his worst failure, as with almost every king we read about in the Bible, is that he seems to have completely neglected his responsibility to be a father to his son.

The Bible repeatedly tells us of God’s concern for the proper rearing of children — not just to raise them up in the right ways, but crucially to raise them in a way that teaches them to raise their children in the right ways. The first is hard enough; by all appearances the second seems impossible without the help of God. The magnitude of the task should humble any parent.

Hezekiah failed on the first count — Manasseh his son immediately reversed every one of his reforms, rebuilt the high places and the shrines to demons and all the rest. He sacrificed his own children to demons, and desecrated the Temple of the Lord by building a demonic altar in it. In a nation built by driving out or exterminating wicked, demon-worshipping people, he turned the people from God so thoroughly they were worse than the people they’d displaced.

But the people did not listen. Manasseh led them astray, so that they did more evil than the nations the Lord had destroyed before the Israelites.
— 2 Kings 21:9 (NIV)

It’s not until Hezekiah’s great-grandson Josiah comes along, 57 years after Hezekiah’s death, that we see another attempt at reform. For some reason, when he was about 16 years old, he started to pursue God. It doesn’t appear from the text that he even knew what he was doing — the kingdom’s spiritual life had deteriorated so far that nobody even knew the books of the Law. But somehow, either through prophets or personal revelation, he knew that all the demon worship going on around him was wrong.

In the eighth year of his reign, while he was still young, he began to seek the God of his father David. In his twelfth year he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem of high places, Asherah poles and idols.
— 2 Chronicles 34:3 (NIV)

It wasn’t until the 18th year of Josiah’s reign, 10 years after he’d begun pursuing God, that Hilkiah the priest found the Book of the Law in the Temple and had it brought before the king to be read aloud (2 Chronicles 34:8-21). What followed was the greatest reform: leading the people back to God and reinstating the Passover, which hadn’t been celebrated at this scale since the pre-kingdom days of the prophet Samuel.

Sadly, Josiah also falls to his own pride, not heeding the warning of the Egyptian pharaoh Neco, who told Josiah not to oppose him because God was with him (2 Chronicles 35:21-22). Worse, both of his sons who succeeded him on the throne “did evil in the eyes of the Lord, just as his predecessors had done”, showing (I believe) that Josiah also failed in his responsibility to be a father to his children.

One thing I’ve learned from the past 2.5 years of reading the Bible daily is that it gets easier to discern the voice of God. Even if I don’t know the exact passage, I can hear someone say something about God and know immediately if it sounds right or wrong. I can usually find the passage later through research, and thus far have always been able to confirm my suspicions. Josiah had no book for 10 years and yet followed God faithfully, attempting to change the course of an entire kingdom as he did so. He might be forgiven for not knowing that God was speaking through Neco, though one would presume that for the last 13 years of his reign he made an effort to find more of the Scriptures. The Bible Recap suggests that the book Hilkiah found was the scroll of Deuteronomy, Moses’ love letter to the children of Israel. With its focus on generational teaching and spiritual growth, it’s difficult to excuse Josiah’s failures with his sons. It seems that in the absence of Godly fatherhood, demons step in to fill the gap. That would certainly explain a lot of what’s happening in our culture today.

None of the kings of Israel or Judah seem to have been great fathers. I wonder if the good kings would have, in retrospect, preferred to have done a better job at that and a worse job at being king.