The Righteousness and Blessing of God. 2 Chron. 17-21

2 Chronicles 17-20 tells us the story of Jehoshaphat. He was a king of the southern kingdom of Judah. In 2 Kings we have been focusing on the theme of grace and the theme of blessing for those who are obedient to the Lord versus those who choose the path of death rather than the path of life and who come under divine discipline and judgment. Under all of these chapters we have the doctrines related to the grace of God and the righteousness and justice of God. Many think that these are somehow conflicting concepts in history: on the one hand how can God be a loving, gracious God, and then on the other hand He seems to be a harsh God. This is a rather compartmentalized way of looking at attributes of somebody who is a person: that God is a person and like any person He has many attributes that work together in truth and consistency. We see that in the Godhead: how His love and His justice are perfectly compatible and how they work together, and how His justice is connected to His righteousness. In fact, in the Old Testament as well as the New Testament the word group that defines His justice and righteousness are the same. The words for righteousness are the same words as the words for justice. In the Old Testament are the words surrounding the root tsadeq which can mean righteousness in some contexts, and when it is talking about application it is dealing with the idea of justice. In the New Testament it is related to the root noun dike [dikh]. One form of this is dikaiosune [dikaiosunh], one form of which is “righteousness,” and then there are other forms of the word that express justice. So righteousness and justice are inseparable. Righteousness relates to the absolute standards of God’s character, His perfection, His integrity; and then justice is the application of that. But then also God is recorded in Scripture as a God of love: He loves His creatures because of who He is, not because of who they are. It is grounded in His character. So when His creatures violate His standard then His justice, in order to be consistent within Himself, must also bring about a judgment on that disobedience. However, at the same time we know that God is also love and He is going to design a way for His righteousness to be satisfied so that rather than bringing judgment He can bring blessing.

These ideas of judgment, blessing and grace are abstract ideas and difficult for many people to really get their mental fingers around and so the Scriptures give us a tremendous number of historical incidents where these principles are seen at play. That is what we have been seeing in the first eight chapters of 2 Kings. God is extending grace to the northern kingdom of Israel because of their disobedience to Him. They have completely rejected Him, they have defected from His leadership, and they have committed spiritual treason by going after other gods. This had deteriorated so that by the time they came to a king named Omri there was the introduction of an even greater idolatry, the worship of Baal. This sin reached such an enormous proportion in the northern kingdom that God announced to and through Elijah that there would eventually come punishment and judgment on the house of Ahab (1 Kings 19:16, 17) and who he would use to bring about this judgment: Hazael the king of Syria and through Jehu who was to be the commanding officer of Jehoram the son of Ahab, and through Elisha: what Hazael would not kill Jehu would kill, what Jehu would not kill Elisha would kill. But even though this announcement was made God showed His patience and longsuffering towards Israel, as he does with us when we are disobedient, consistently holding out grace and showing through the ministry of Elisha that He was the God of life, the God who would provide for them. On the one hand, through His justice He was bringing discipline upon the nation through various military defeats, famines and other things that had been identified through the Mosaic Law that He would do if they were disobedient, but at the same time He was reaching out to them in grace. This is what we see throughout Scripture: God in His justice is going to bring discipline, but He holds back on that as he always extends the offer of salvation through grace. There are national applications of that in the history of Israel and there are personal applications of that in terms of our own life.

We have an Ahaziah here who is the son of Ahab, and then we are going to find out that there is going to be an Ahaziah in the southern kingdom. Then there is an overlap of two kings who have the same name of Jehoram, and they are referred to by an alternate name, Joram. It is during this period that we see the miracles of Elisha and the principle of grace being extended before judgment. Judgment begins in verse 7 of 2 Kings chapter 8. This begins a new section in the book focusing on the various kings, the descendants of the house of Ahab and judgment on them covered in chapters 8-10, and then there will be focus on ten different kings in the northern kingdom and eight different kings in the southern kingdom, the antagonism between the two kingdoms. Primarily in the southern kingdom the focus on the major kings: Jehu in the north and then Athaliah who was the evil queen in the south, Joash who is going to bring tremendous revival—a tremendous story of grace and spiritual revival—then Ahaz, and in chapter 17 we see the fall of Israel.

When we look at all the people involved here it gets a little confusing. The left column (beige) is the house of Israel, the house of Omri specifically.

The southern kingdom goes through a period of the ninth century from just a little before the turn of the century when Asa is king (Asa, Joash and Jehoshaphat are the only good kings). For most of that century with the exception of 13 or 14 years the southern kingdom is in a position of blessing; they have good kings.

We want to focus now on the high points of Jehoshaphat in 2 Chronicles 17. 2 Chronicles 17:1 ^NASB “Jehoshaphat his son then became king in his place [Asa’s], and made his position over Israel firm.” Asa was a great king, he instituted a number of revivals in the southern kingdom. He followed in the footsteps of his father David, was very obedient, but late in life he began to become distracted in his spiritual life and introduced some problems into the southern kingdom. In his last few years he has some problems with a foot disease and dies fairly miserably as part of God’s discipline upon him for his disobedience. Jehoshaphat begins well. He begins when he is 35 years of age and reigns for 25 years, and this included a period of three years of co-regency with his father. The assessment given to Jehoashaphat is important to pay attention to. We are told that he walked with Yahweh; he was a good king. In 1 Kings 22:43 we are told ^NASB “He walked in all the way of Asa his father; he did not turn aside from it, doing right in the sight of the LORD. However, the high places were not taken away; the people still sacrificed and burnt incense on the high places.” So the assessment of God is that overall Jehoshaphat was a good king. There were a couple of exceptions. He was obedient to a point but like many Christians there are certain areas in our lives that we are just not going to allow God to straighten out. Jehoshaphat went far but not all the way.

We get a little more detail of that in 2 Chronicles 17:3, 4 ^NASB “The LORD was with Jehoshaphat because he followed the example of his father David’s earlier days and did not seek the Baals, but sought the God of his father, followed His commandments, and did not act as Israel did.” The Lord was with Jehoshaphat, so this indicates divine blessing on him because he is obedient to the Lord and is walking with Him. But as we look at these ancient events and this history what makes the southern kingdom prosperous and strong militarily is not that they have bought into a correct economic system per se, not because they have the superior military skill or technology, but what drives all of that is the spiritual relationship of the king, the leader in the land, with God. We live in a world that is driven by empiricism. We take numerous courses in business, in finance, in economics, in law and politics. We go into the military and take courses in military history, study strategy and tactics and all kinds of technology of the battlefield, and we think that this is what produces success, prosperity and security. But what the Bible says is that it doesn’t matter how great the technology is, how great the education is, what matters is, is our relationship to the Lord. If we have the right relationship with the Lord God is going to take care of the other issues. If we don’t have the right relationship with the Lord then God is going to cause those systems, whatever they are, to fail at critical junctures and there will be defeat and collapse; because the issue that drives everything in life is the spiritual issue, and we can’t measure that in a classroom or in a laboratory or anything that is related to empiricism. We only understand that when we study the Word of God.

We see that in the beginning of Jehoshaphat’s reign he is spiritually obedient, he is focused on the Lord. And so the Lord is with him and blesses him and the nation is restored to a position of military superiority and security, financial security and economic prosperity that has not been since the time of Solomon. What causes that is the spiritual focus of Jehoshaphat. He “example of his father David’s earlier days.” David is the greatest example of spiritual leadership in the nation. At the beginning he has completely rejected the idolatry that has taken place in the north. 2 Chronicles 17:5 ^NASB “So [therefore] the LORD established the kingdom in his control, and all Judah brought tribute to Jehoshaphat, and he had great riches and honor.” Because of his spiritual orientation, his focus on God! The cause is his spiritual focus, not because of his personality, etc. Nobody has ever passed the prosperity test and no nation has ever passed the prosperity test. There are certain parallels between Jehoshaphat and Solomon, because when Solomon was young his heart was completely devoted to the Lord. He had riches and abundance and everything we could ever imagine in terms of the details of life but when Solomon became old his heart was turned away from the Lord, and the bottom line on Solomon’s reign was that he did evil in the sight of the Lord. The phrase that “they had done evil in the sight of the Lord” focuses on the fact that they had committed political and spiritual treason by going into idolatry. Remember the first commandment in the Mosaic Law was that they were to have no other gods before Yahweh. Yahweh was the leader in Israel and when they would worship another god that was an act of political and spiritual treason against God.

2 Chronicles 17:6 ^NASB “He [Jehoshaphat] took great pride [delight] in the ways of the LORD and again removed the high places and the Asherim from Judah.” It is not just formal, he is not just going through the motions; he is enthusiastic and excited about his relationship with God and that is the highest priority in his life. That is the way it should be with us. It doesn’t matter what else we do in life, if we don’t have this one area squared away in terms of our relationship with Him then everything else is going to collapse eventually.

We know four areas of accomplishment in the life of Jehoshaphat. The first is that because of his obedience to God, because he understood divine viewpoint truth of the Scriptures, he had sound financial policies and therefore a sound economy. He is oriented to doctrine/truth and he recognizes that he has to follow the principles of the Mosaic Law in which are found sound fiscal policies, and so Judah was returned to a place of prosperity, the greatest since the time of Solomon. Furthermore because of their economic and military strength some of their pagan neighbors, e.g. the Philistines, the Moabites, the Edomites, were coming to Jehoshaphat for protection. They were paying tribute to him because there were the rumblings off in the east of the rise of Assyria. With this rise of the evil Assyrian empire on the east they recognized that they are not going to be able to handle that monster alone and were looking to Jehoshaphat for protection. That is a partial fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant: the descendants of Abraham were to be a blessing to all people. Because Jehoshaphat is obedient to God he is able to be a blessing to his neighbors and provide protection and economic benefit and blessing by association.

The second positive accomplishment under Jehoshaphat’s reign is related more to his spiritual life and his focus on divine priorities. Under Jehoshaphat missionary activities were inaugurated in the south. By his third year of reign he sent certain groups of priests and Levites who would go throughout the southern kingdom of Judah the Law, teaching doctrine to the people in the southern kingdom. Later on he never lost that, even though we have this huge gap within his reign we know little about—from about the third year to about the twentieth, and later on he begins to stub his toe and entered into alliances with the house of Ahab, he still doesn’t lose that heart for the Lord. In the first alliance (1 Kings 22) he is rebuked by Jehu, and after that he sends Levites into the northern kingdom, into the hill country of Ephraim, to teach the Word.

A third area of reform that came was in the judicial area. 2 Chronicles 19:5 ^NASB “He appointed judges in the land in all the fortified cities of Judah, city by city. [6] He said to the judges, ‘Consider what you are doing, for you do not judge for man but for the LORD who is with you when you render judgment.’” A judicial system can only have real integrity when they understand that they are subordinate to a higher system of law and a higher system of absolutes, and that there is an external standard of righteousness that goes beyond the human sphere of relative experience and human ideas of social justice. So Jehoshaphat informs the judges that that they are to recognize they are serving the Lord and that they are simply applying the absolutes of the Mosaic Law to the circumstances, they are not to create law, they are not to legislate from the bench. He established a judiciary with integrity and he does that because he is oriented to the righteousness of God. If we are not oriented to the righteousness of God we cannot have a just society or a just legal system. What has happened in the USA in the last 120 years is that as we have thrown out the Bible, as we have become more and more infected and corrupted by the evil of Darwinism and evolution this has impacted our understanding of the law.

The fourth area of reform was that he removed the Baal cult prostitutes from the land. This is what is referred to in 1 Kings 22:46 ^NASB “The remnant of the sodomites [^NKJV “perverted persons”] who remained in the days of his father Asa, he expelled from the land.” The word in the Hebrew which the NASB translates as “sodomites” is masculine noun based on the Hebrew qadash which is a word that is translated “consecrated” or “holy” or “set apart.” It was a word that was used in a feminine noun to refer to the temple female prostitutes, the masculine form referred to the male cult prostitutes in Baal worship. The core idea of qadash is to be set apart to the service of a god. So these male and female cult prostitutes in the Baal worship were set apart for the service of Baal, and that is what they were doing in their perverted activities in the various worship areas devoted to Baal. What is being said here is that they cleaned up the religious environment in the southern kingdom and did what the Mosaic Law said to do: he got rid of those people.

There are five principles to be seen here:

a) When your relationship with God is your number one priority then other areas of life are going to fall into place. That is the ultimate issue. If you want happiness, stability, and the problems of your life resolved then the first issue is to focus on your spiritual life. It is amazing how God works behind the scenes in bringing about the solutions to our problems. It doesn’t mean we won’t have problems and we won’t have adversity but when we are focused on the Lord, God is the one who goes before us and He is the one who makes our paths straight, which what Solomon is talking about in Proverbs 3:5, 6. Cf. Matthew 6:33. Put the priority on God and God will deal with the circumstances in our lives.

b) Nationally when the majority of the people are focused on the divine viewpoint the indirect result is that God is going to bless the nation. It’s blessing by association. The key, though, is leadership. We can make the same application to corporations. If leadership doesn’t have integrity, if the leadership isn’t focused on righteousness, the people respond and follow after that leadership. Usually the leader will go further than they would go, and so if they get a leader whose heart is bent toward apostasy he is going to take them to the logical end. If the people are oriented to truth and they have righteous kings then he will lead in a direction much further than they would have anticipated.

b) There is no wall of separation between moral and social principles, and economic and judicial principles. Today we have people who think they can be economically conservative and socially liberal. That is idiocy. You cannot disconnect social and moral issues from economic and legislative issues. We live in a world where all of these things connect together. We see in Israel that when a leader is squared away the economics follow.

d) The role of the leader is to lead according to divine viewpoint, and failure to do so always leads to catastrophe, divine judgment. It may be preceded by years or decades of God extending grace but is always leads to judgment.

e) Jehoshaphat had his priorities right but he also got his eyes on man as the solution. Towards the end of his life he began to enter into alliances: three times with the house of Ahab, and each time God came along and really let him have it because of his failure to trust the Him. He forgot the principle of Psalm 118:8 ^NASB “It is better to take refuge in the LORD Than to trust in man.” In the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 15:33 ^NASB “Do not be deceived: ‘Bad company corrupts good morals.’” That word translated “morals” can mean character or habits.

When Jehoshapaht allies himself with the north there are unintended consequences that take place. First there was the battle at Ramoth-Gilead where there was defeat by the Arameans and Ahab was killed. The second was that having seen the weakness the southern states of Moab and Ammon begin to revolt against Jehoshaphat, and they in fact launched an attack against him—describes in 2 Chronicles 20. By the time he learned of the attack they had already crossed over to the west side of the Dead Sea in the area of Engedi and he had to quickly pull together and army. But first he understood the principle: it is not the military, it is the relationship with God. So he called for a nation-wide fast, he assembled the people at Jerusalem for prayer, and the prayer that he gave in chapter 20 is one of the most remarkable prayers in all of the Scripture as he calls upon the Lord to protect them and to provide for them. The next day they go into battle and we are told that they followed the command of the Lord. 2 Chronicles 20:20, 21 ^NASB “They rose early in the morning and went out to the wilderness of Tekoa; and when they went out, Jehoshaphat stood and said, ‘Listen to me, O Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem, put your trust in the LORD your God and you will be established. Put your trust in His prophets and succeed.’ When he had consulted with the people, he appointed those who sang to the LORD and those who praised {Him} in holy attire, as they went out before the army and said, “Give thanks to the LORD, for His lovingkindness is everlasting.’” This is real political leadership. And what he did was put together a choir to sing hymns to the Lord and that is going to lead them into battle to remind the soldiers that the real issue is spiritual, not military, not numbers, not technology. God then gives them a tremendous military victory and, after they finish, they head back to Jerusalem. It takes them four days and we are not sure exactly where this occurred: [26] “Then on the fourth day they assembled in the valley of Beracah, for there they blessed the LORD. Therefore they have named that place ‘The Valley of Beracah’ until today.” Berach means blessing. But the most egregious thing that Jrhoshaphat did in his reign was that he married his son to Athaliah the daughter of Ahab. It was probably done to seal an alliance as early as before the battle of Ramoth-Gilead, but that brought misery into the life of the southern kingdom for the next fifteen years after he died.

The lesson that we learn from all of this is the lesson of the importance and the priority of our relationship with God. It doesn’t matter of we are applying this to ourselves as individuals or our family or to a corporation or company or to a nation, the principle is the same. It is the Lord who builds the house and those who reject Him labor in vain. There is no real promotion, real success or real prosperity apart from the Lord. There may be times of apparent prosperity as God is extending grace to us while He is waiting for us to return to Him and to walk with Him, but don’t mistake that for the fact that somehow God is blessing you because “it is really all okay.” We have to understand how the righteousness and justice of God works in connection with His grace. His grace He extends to us first, and then there will be judgment. As believers when we are out of fellowship there is always the opportunity to be restored to fellowship through confession of sin.