Pathology of Arrogance. 2 Kings 14 – 18
We now look at what took place during the same time period in kings of the southern kingdom. As we look at this passage in terms of both what happens in the north and in the south there is one thing that stands out throughout that is really incorporated into a verse in the New Testament. James 4:6 NASB "But He gives a greater grace. Therefore {it} says, 'GOD IS OPPOSED TO THE PROUD, BUT GIVES GRACE TO THE HUMBLE.'" The contrast is between the humble and the arrogant and God's response to them. This is an application of the principle seen in Proverbs 29:23 NASB "A man's pride will bring him low, But a humble spirit will obtain honor." The one who is humble is the one who is oriented to the authority of God. Humility isn't just somebody who has a low view of themselves or low self-esteem or who walks around where they can always be used and abused by people around them. The person who is humble is the person who recognizes their role in God's plan and the authority of God. The key passage to understand humility is Philippians 2 where, speaking of the Lord Jesus Christ, it says that He humbled Himself by obedience to the point of death. That is what humility is: obeying God's Word or obeying God's will no matter what it may cost.
The contrast to humility is pride or arrogance. What we see throughout the Scripture is that God is truly at war with those who are arrogant and that He brings them under His judgment. That is because arrogance was the first sin that entered into the universe, the sin of Lucifer, the highest of all the angels that God had created. He became elevated in his own eyes and wanted to have all the glory and honor that belonged to God for himself. This was the seed of arrogance that began in his thinking that led eventually to his rebellion against God and to the entrance of sin into the universe. So the root sin of all of the sins is the sin of arrogance. In 2 Timothy 3:1-5 Paul warns Timothy of the trend that would come during the last days. The "last days" in this passage isn't talking about the end times; it refers to the church age. In fact, the writer of Hebrews says "in these last days." So in some sense all of the church age comes under this particular category and so these are trends that we will see around us. NASB "But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come.
Holding forth a form of godliness but denying its power is what we see so often in our own lives and in the lives of many believers, and in the lives of many down through history, especially in the Old Testament and in the period we are examining in the times of the layer kings of Judah and Israel. They had a façade of spiritual observance but it only went so far. Underneath there was still a lot of compromise, acceptance of sin, rationalization and justification of sin; and we see this drum-beat through many of the kings that they walked in the path of their father so and so, they were obedient to the Lord but the high places were still in existence. There was a façade of observance at the temple, a partial obedience, but the weakness in the culture in the south was that they only went so far; there was a compromise with the pagan Canaanite thinking of the time. In arrogance they only went so far in obedience to God and it wasn't far enough. God had warned in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 that He would bring discipline and judgment upon the nation if they were not fully and totally obedient to Him. He would bring various stages of judgment and in one of those stages, Leviticus 26:19, He says "I will also break down your pride of power; I will also make your sky like iron and your earth like bronze." The point is the first phrase: God is going to break the pride of our power. That is the same thought that we find in James 4:6 and Proverbs 29:23. It is that arrogance, that attitude of self-sufficiency instead of God's sufficiency, self-reliance instead of God dependence. It follows after the original sin of Lucifer and it will always lead to our destruction.
In our passage in 2 Kings we need to pay attention to how each of these kings had a measure of obedience, a form of obedience, but they don't go all the way, they still compromise with pagan systems of thought that surround them. The first king that we look at is Amaziah, 2 Kings 14:1-20; 2 Chronicles 25:1-28. The difference between Kings and Chronicles is that the book of Kings was written giving the history of both the kings in the north and in the south, and it is written really to show the outworking of what God had promised in prophesied back in Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26, the blessings and the cursings and showing how when the nation is obedient to God and when they humble themselves under the mighty hand of God, God gives them grace and they are prosperous. But when they are disobedient then God is also faithful to His covenant and He is going to bring judgment upon the nation. So the real focal point of this is that God is faith to who He is, He is faithful to His character, He is going to be gracious to those who are obedient and he is going to bring judgment into the life of those who are disobedient. This is not because He is mean and wants to grind us down but He wants to break that arrogance, that pride, so that we will humble ourselves under His authority.
Amaziah is the 9th king of Judah, the southern kingdom—796-767 BC. At age 25 he succeeded his father Joash. Joash was a good king initially but later came under the influence of those who were rebellious toward God and everything deteriorated during the second part of his reign. This was followed by tremendous chaos in the life of the nation. There were these short reigns, one as short as a month, and one king after another was assassinated, and they led the nation further and further into rebellion against God and into idolatry. We now want to focus on four kings: Amaziah, Azariah, Jotham and Ahaz.
Amaziah, Azariah and Jotham basically have the same evaluation: they don't fully obey the Lord. But they do follow the footsteps of Joash and are mostly obedient but not fully obedient. Then Ahaz follows after the gods in the north and he leads the nation into not only gross idolatry and depravity and perversion but because of that God is going to bring military discipline against the southern kingdom with the rise of the Assyrian empire. By the time we get to the end of the time of Ahaz they basically become a slave state to the Assyrian empire. But that precedes one of the greatest periods of spiritual revival under Hezekiah and the tremendous miracle of grace that occurs with him.
The evaluation for Amaziah is given in 2 Kings 14:3, 4 NASB "He did right in the sight of the LORD, yet not like David his father; he did according to all that Joash his father had done.
When we read in these passages that he did that which was right in the sight of the Lord, to understand that, we have to go back to Deuteronomy again. Deuteronomy is really the framework for understanding what happens during this period of history. Deuteronomy 6:17, 18 NASB "You should diligently keep the commandments of the LORD your God, and His testimonies and His statutes which He has commanded you.
The Christian life is not about some sort of legalistic approach to sin in order to be saved or in order to get God's grace. It is sin that wipes out our soul, it is sin that corrupts us, it is sin that destroys and that is the enemy of our spiritual life. So if we are not putting into practice or application the mandates of Scripture which deal with man—such as in Romans 6, to put to death the deeds of the flesh, in other words, to put to death the sin in our life—then what happens is we fight the same battles over and over again and that has a destructive and a corrupting influence on our thinking. And if we become complaisant and compromise with justifications and rationalizations then eventually that sin finds a foothold in our thinking. We don't think about it anymore and then maybe five, ten, fifteen years down the road it begins to become exploited within our thinking, and then the next thing we know that becomes the source of defeat in our life.
To illustrate this the Scripture uses the conquest of the land that God had promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. When they came into the land under Joshua they were to take all of the land, and that was a picture of spiritual warfare, it was their version of spiritual warfare. They were to take all of the land because the land was dominated by the Canaanites, dominated pagan thought and perversion, idolatry and even human infant sacrifice. So if we look at the conquest we can see an important comparison with our own lives. First of all we have to recognize the land itself is equivalent to our souls; that is the point of analogy. From the time that this land had been under the control of the Canaanites their thinking, their religious thinking, their rebellion against God, all of their perversions, completely dominated and controlled everything within their focus. In the same way we are born as sinners. Totally depraved is the theological term, and that doesn't mean we are as bad as we can be, it means that every aspect of our soul, the totality of our person, has been corrupted by sin. We have a sin nature and prior to salvation the sin nature dominates and we can't do anything that isn't the production of that sin nature. The sin nature produces a certain measure of morality, it also produces a certain measure of sin or disobedience to God, but it cannot produce anything that has any real eternal spiritual value, that measures up to the righteousness of God. In that comparison we have a territory that lies between our ears completely under the control of paganism just as the land was completely under the control of the paganism of the Canaanites.
The Israelites were commanded to have an uncompromising mentality to defeat all of the Canaanites. They were to go in and kill every man, woman and child. That sounds very hard for us but it was hard for them; it wasn't something they really wanted to do. In some cases they were to kill all of the animals. They were not to benefit from all of the corruption of the Canaanite culture and so they were to completely destroy everything related to that pagan culture so that it would not come back and influence them later on. Their mission was to seek and destroy everything. In the same way the believer is given that same mission in terms of the thinking that goes on in the territory between our ears. We are to take every thought captive for Christ. It is an uncompromising mission. We are to wipe out everything in our thinking that has to do with the world system. As Paul says in Romans 12:2 we are to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. That occurs by learning the Word. We are not to be conformed to the thinking of the world. We know this is a mission we will never fully achieve; we will never be perfect; we will never destroy or eradicate the sin nature, but that is our mission, we have to have a single-mindedness to wipe that out.
We have to note in terms of the comparison that the Israelites began well. They depended upon God and killed every man, woman and child in Jericho, and then they moved on to the next place. But there was some disobedience that occurred, as in the case of Achan who took some of the gold and silver for himself and put it under his tent, and that brought sin into the camp of Israel. As a result when they went to the next town to attack it they lost the battle and 7000 Israelites died. Sin hindered their ability to do what God wanted them to do. They had to come back and discover the sin, and in that they had to sanctify themselves again. In our case we would say we have to recognize the sin in our life, confess it, so that we are restored to fellowship. Next they went to the major cities in the north and captured those, but then they began to compromise. It is not fun going out and killing every man, woman and child; it is not emotionally appealing. So they compromised and began to back off.
If we read the account in the opening chapters of the book of Judges what happens eventually is they get to a point where they don't even go to battle against the Canaanites anymore. It is just like the believer who says to himself that he as these really comfortable sins in his life and he is just not going to deal with them. But that sin comes back to haunt him later on as it grabs strategic toehold in his soul and then begins to expand. Eventually the influence of the Canaanite culture grew and that is the story of the book of Judges, so that by the time we get to the end of the book the Israelites are living just like the Canaanites, no one could tell the difference. That is what happens with so many believers who fail in the process of spiritual growth because of compromise. By the time they have reached the end of their life they have regressed and perhaps they don't think or act any differently from the pagans around them. So the key tools we have to develop are the tools of confession on a regular basis—but that doesn't do anything other than get us back to a position where we can exploit the Word of God and apply it—and learning doctrine, and we really need to be involved in some sort of self-examination (but not some sort of maudlin, emotional, subjective navel contemplation) where we really think about the ways in which we need to be a little more consistent in our application of God's Word. But we have to recognize that the root of all sin is arrogance, and arrogance not only involves self-absorption but also self-justification—justifying why we are the way we are. Often we have been justifying something for so long we no longer really see what is there.
Amaziah began well. He executed his father's murderers and did it in a way that honored the Word. He didn't kill their families or their children, he just killed those who were involved in the conspiracy and the assassination because he knew Deuteronomy 24:16 prohibited fathers being put to death for their sons or sons being put to death for their fathers. But has he continued to reign he decided to expand the territory of the southern kingdom by fighting the Edomites. He raised an army of 300-thousand from Judah and Benjamin and hired 100-thousand mercenaries from the northern kingdom. Remember that God has been at war against the northern kingdom and has them under discipline at this time and so God sent a prophet to Amaziah warning him to release those 100-thousand soldiers because he was not going to get his victory by compromising with a bunch of pagan and rebellious believers from the north. Principle: When we make sinful decisions and then reverse course there are often still consequences to pay. Amaziah thought that one of the consequences was financial. He had paid them 100 talents of silver, which is equivalent to three tons of silver and he was worried about getting it back. 2 Chronicles 25:9 NASB "Amaziah said to the man of God, 'But what {shall we} do for the hundred talents which I have given to the troops of Israel?' And the man of God answered, 'The LORD has much more to give you than this.'" If you have to get right with the Lord and start moving down the road of obedience don't worry about what it is going to cost, or other secondary conditions related to the details of life, God can easily take care of that.
But what happened is what happens when we try to straighten thing out in our life, and when we have been involved in sin there are still some consequences. There were consequences for those Israelites got angry and as they headed back north they began to raid the border villages between Judah and Israel, killing 3000 in those villages. That set up things for later on, but before we get there God blessed Aamaziah; he had victory over the Edomites. This victory that God gave Amaziah led Amaziah to thinking that it was his victory and not God's victory, so the arrogance that has been there now begins to expand. He decides that he can win and he challenges the northern kingdom. He is going to get vengeance now because of those mercenaries who had killed the 3000 Judahites along the border. He calls out Jehoash, the king in the north, to battle. Jehoash tries to warn him off but he doesn't listen. In arrogance he goes to battle with Jehoash and is defeated. Jehoash exploits that victory, captures Jerusalem, goes into the temple taking all of the gold and all that is valuable, goes back north with Amaziah a captive. Eventually Amaziah was released and when he went back to the south those in Judah were very angry with him. 2 Kings 14:19, 20 NASB "They conspired against him in Jerusalem, and he fled to Lachish; but they sent after him to Lachish and killed him there.
The next king was Azariah, also known a Uzziah. He was the 10th king of Judah, was 16 when he succeeded his father, and he also started off well. But again, there was the same basic problem. He follows in the footsteps of his father but he doesn't fully do away with all of the high places, and the idols are not removed. 2 Kings 15:3, 4 NASB "He did right in the sight of the LORD, according to all that his father Amaziah had done.
2 Chronicles 26:16 NASB "But when he became strong, his heart was so proud that he acted corruptly, and he was unfaithful to the LORD his God, for he entered the temple of the LORD to burn incense on the altar of incense." As he had victory he took credit for it himself rather than God and so in arrogance he decided he would go into the temple and burn incense on the altar of incense, but he was opposed by Azariah the high priest. Eighty priests stood there outside of the holy place to oppose him, and as they had this challenge God brought judgment upon him because Uzziah refused to follow the law. [19] "But Uzziah, with a censer in his hand for burning incense, was enraged; and while he was enraged with the priests, the leprosy broke out on his forehead before the priests in the house of the LORD, beside the altar of incense." This was God's judgment on Uzziah for the rest of his life. He had to live in isolation in a house separated from everybody else because of the leprosy.
He was then succeeded by his son Jotham. Jotham was better than those who had come before. He was more obedient and God blessed him in many ways. He reigned for sixteen years, but he still has that same area of compromise. 2 Kings 15:35 NASB "Only the high places were not taken away; the people still sacrificed and burned incense on the high places. He built the upper gate of the house of the LORD." The conclusion of his reign is given in 2 Chronicles 27:6 NASB "So Jotham became mighty because he ordered his ways before the LORD his God." He is consistently humble before the Lord but there is still an incompleteness in his obedience. He did not remove the high places and the altars to various idols that were there. All of that compromise hasn't really hurt, we might say, but now it comes home with a vengeance in his son Ahaz.
Ahaz is the 12th king of Judah, 735-715. He became king at age 20, he had a 16-year reign and he is the most evil king. He doesn't just allow the high places to continue but he completely follows after the idolatry, the false religion of the north. 2 Kings 16:3, 4 NASB "But he walked in the way of the kings of Israel, and even made his son pass through the fire, according to the abominations of the nations whom the LORD had driven out from before the sons of Israel.
2 Chronicles 28:22 NASB "Now in the time of his distress this same King Ahaz became yet more unfaithful to the LORD.
Sot is it that unwillingness to deal with sin in terms of obedience, that sin that so easily besets us that comes back to destroy us spiritually and to wipe us out. But here is always hope. James 4:6 warns about the threat of arrogance. Therefore James 4:10 says NASB "Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord, and He will exalt you." The only path to power, prosperity and success is by being humbled under the hand of God—trusting in Him, being obedient to Him and recognizing that He is the authority in our life. That begins at the cross. There is nothing that we bring to God that impresses God. Then as we go through the spiritual life we have to keep the goal in front of us, the mission in front of us, which is to grow to the fullest extent that we can; not to compromise, not to settle for just being a first or second grade level Christian. We want to exploit the grace of God all the way to the end of our lives so that we can become as mature believers as we can because only in that do we glorify God. We can only do that when we have a no compromise mentality.