The Pulpit Commentary — 2 Kings — Section 13

HOMILETICS. Vere. 1-18.-The short reign of Ahaziah: his sins, and tlieir punishment. For homiletic purposes we must attach to this chapter the last three verses of the Fir~t Book of the Kings. We find in that passage a short but very complete account of the general character of Ahaziah's sins; we find in this chapter a tolerably full account of one great act of sin, and a clear declaration of the manner in which that act and his other sins were punished. It will be well to consider separately (1) the sins; (2) their aggravations; and (3) their punishment. I. THE BINS. These were three in number: (1) walking in the way of Jeroboam the son of Nebat (1 Kings xxii. 52), or maintaining the calf-worship-the hereditary will-worship of the northern kingdom, introduced by Jeroboam, the first non-Davidio king, and thenceforth continued uninterruptedly by each successive Israelite monarch; (2) walking in the way of his father-neglecting the worship of Jehovah, persecuting his prophets, practically proscribing the old religion, and probably ruling with harsh- ness and cruelty; and (3) walking in the way of his mother-" serving Baal and worHhipping him" (1 Kings xxil. 53), maintaining the Phc:enician sensualistic cult, which Jezebel had introduced from Zidon (1 Kings xvi. 31), and which was of a most demoralizing and debasing character. It we.s, primarily, under this third head that the special act of sin fell which forms the main subject of eh. i. II. THEm AGGRAVATIONS. Abaziah might have been expected to have lell.fflt wisdom by experience, to have taken to heart the warning furnished by his fathe1'e life and death, and at least to have avoided thEI sins which had brought down upon the king and upon the kingdom so terrible a blow, so signal and severe a punishment. But, on the contrary, he went beyond his father in the great sin for which his father was punished, viz. apostasy from Jehovah to Baal. Ahab bad always been half-hearted in his irreligion-he would, and he would not; he strove to combine an acknowledg- ment of Jehovah with a practical devotion to hie rival; he gave both his sons names which placed them under the protection of Israel's true God; he at one time" humbled himself before Jehovah," and" fasted, and lay in sackcloth, and went softly" (1 Kings xxi. 27, 29); he consented to inquire of a prophet of the Lord at the request of Jehoshaphat (1 Kings xxii. 9); he had no dealings, that we know of, with the foreign Baaliatic temples or oracles which abounded in Phc:enicia and Philistia, and thus did not, at any rate, parade his contempt of Jehovah in the eyes of the adjoining nations, Ahaziah acted differently. He was a consistent, thorough-faced, out-and-out idolater. Jehovah was nothing to him; Baal w11s everything. We ought, perhaps, to view it as some extenuation of his sin that he would nature.Uy be influenced to some extent by his mother, wh11tever her character, and that the strong, firm, and fierce character of Jezebel would naturally influence him to a large extent. But men are not mere creatures of circumstances; they have the power to resist influences no less than to yield to them, and are bound to consider the nature of the influences surrounding them, and to resist such as they perceive to be bad. There is no evidence that Ahaziah offered any resistance at all to Jezebel's influences. He was the weak son of a wicked mother, and simply "walked in her way." As Ewald says, he "exhibited a far more decided inclination than Ahab had done to all sorts of heathenish super- stitions"(' History of Israel,' vol. iv. p. 77, Eng. trans.). He made a parade of hi~ Baalistic leanings. He was obdurate and persistent, and despised warning after warn- ing. A cruel hardness of heart, quite equal to his mother's, is shown in his exposing to probable death a second and a third body of fifty men, rather tlmn submit to Elijah, and own himself in the wrong. Thus he would appear to have reached, in his com- paratively short life, a deeper depth of moral evil than his father i II his longer one. III. THEm PUNIBHMKNT. 'l'he revolt of the subject kingdom of Moab was the first punishment which befell the apostate king. He had to determine, on ascending the throne, what line he would take in religions matters-whether he would maintain or abolish the Baal-worship, whether he wou~d maintain or abolish the worship of th~  6 THE SECOND BOOK OF THE KINGi.~. [OH, I, 1-18,