“The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being.” — Hebrews 1:3 (NIV) If the second commandment forbids manufacturing an image of God, a fair question follows: how, then, are we supposed to know…
“They make idols, but the idols will disgrace their makers; they are frauds, lifeless and powerless.” — Jeremiah 10:14-15 (paraphrased, NLT) We tend to imagine idolatry as something that happened to other, more primitive cultures, distant in both time and…
“You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.” — Exodus 20:4 (NIV) An idol is, at its simplest definition, a substitute for…
“Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve… But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” — Joshua 24:15 (NIV) Abstract devotion is easy to claim and almost impossible to verify. Concrete devotion shows up…
“So whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” — 1 Corinthians 10:31 (NIV) Imagine your life as a car. Who is driving? Who is in the passenger seat? And who,…
Notice what God does not say. He does not say: obey these commandments, and then I will rescue you. He does not say: prove your loyalty first, and then I will consider loving you. The order is reversed from what most of us expect from any authority figure who hands us a list of rules. God begins with the rescue already accomplished. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. Past tense. Finished. Done. Only after that declaration does the first commandment arrive: you shall have no other gods before me.
We have been in the palace for thirty days. We have sat with kings who tore their robes in genuine repentance and kings who threw prophets in prison for telling the truth. We have watched thrones won by courage and lost by pride, sustained by prayer and corrupted by alliance, inherited through faithfulness and seized through violence. We have seen what happens when a leader governs from the fear of God and what happens when they govern from the fear of man. And underneath every story, the same thread has been running: how you govern the sphere God gave you matters, profoundly, permanently, and well beyond what you can see.
Jeremiah gave Zedekiah the clearest, most specific leadership counsel in the entire book: surrender to Babylon, and you and the city will live. Resist, and Jerusalem will be burned. Zedekiah knew Jeremiah was a genuine prophet. He had been consulting him in secret for months, sneaking him out of prison for private conversations because he trusted what Jeremiah said but could not be seen publicly agreeing with him. The knowledge was there. The trust was there. The word from God was there. What was not there was the courage to act on it.
Hoshea was Israel’s last king. Under his reign, the Assyrian king Shalmaneser invaded, besieged Samaria for three years, captured it, and deported the Israelites to Assyria. The northern kingdom of Israel, which had existed for over two centuries and had produced nineteen kings across nine dynasties, was gone. The people scattered. The land resettled with foreigners. The ten tribes never returned from captivity. It was the end of everything.
Jehoshaphat was one of the finest kings Judah ever produced. He sought the Lord in the early years of his reign with genuine hunger. He sent teachers throughout Judah to instruct the people in the law of God. He established justice systems that were genuinely impartial and God-honouring. He prayed one of the most beautiful and honest prayers of corporate intercession in the Old Testament. And he formed a marriage alliance between his son and the daughter of Ahab and Jezebel.