2 KINGS 16
Read 2 Kings 16:1-19
In the last chapter we read about three kings of Israel in the north, all of whom did evil in the eyes of the Lord and were leading their kingdom to disaster. These stories were sandwiched between two kings of the Judah in the south. Things seemed to be better there. The kings did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, but with a qualification. They were not as good as their ancestor David and, although they worshipped the Lord themselves, they did tolerate worship of idols in the kingdom and they did not destroy the shrines of these false gods. Judah was in a better place than Israel with regard to their relationship with God.
But things start to change now. A new king in Judah, Ahaz, bucked the trend and behaved more like one of the kings of Israel. He did not do what was right in the eyes of the Lord, and not only allowed idol worship in his kingdom, he even took part in it himself, even to the extent of sacrificing his own son (Leviticus 18:21 and Deuteronomy 18:10 speak out very strongly against this pagan practice as an absolute denial of the Lord our God).
The political situation was hotting up. We have seen that the new superpower, Assyria, was flexing its muscles in the area and Israel has started paying protection money. Ahaz decided that the best way for Judah to survive was to simply submit to Assyria. He sent a message to the Assyrian king, Tiglath-Pileser, acknowledging that he was the servant of the Assyrian king (V7) and asking for protection and then sent a substantial gift (or perhaps bribe!) so that he would stay in the Assyrian king’s good books. Ahaz even went on a diplomatic visit to cement this new (if rather one-sided) friendship (v10).
When he got back, Ahaz set about restructuring the temple. He threw out a lot of the existing fixtures and fittings and installed new stuff that was just like what he had seen on his visit to Tiglath-Pileser. What was he trying to do here? He had done away with traditional worship in the temple and had made worship more like the pagan culture around him. Does that ring bells? Sometimes in recent years the church has been perhaps a little too quick to get rid of traditional worship and to adopt the trappings of popular culture. This may be all well and good, and we all have different opinions as to how far we should go down this route, but the problem comes when our worship is no longer honouring God, but honouring the pagan culture around us. That seems to be what Ahaz was doing here. He seemed to be trying to gain the acceptance of society by being just like the society all around him.
One of the principle tasks of the church is to stand up against the society in which it finds itself; to stand up for God’s word in a pagan society that takes no notice of God or his word; to be a prophetic voice. It is very easy to just go along with what everybody else is doing and saying, to take the line of least resistance. But we are called to be different, to stand out.