Far Reaching Ministry (Part C)

When he fought against Hazael, king of Syria, and Ahaziah, the son of Jehoram, became king of Judah, went down to see Jehoram, the son of Ahab, in Jezreel, because he was sick. These are just rotten people. So the next time you see who won the election in this country, just remember, it's nothing new under the sun.

Sometimes you get a good king, sometimes you get a bad one. This is Cross Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher, Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through the book of 2 Kings.

Please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. Now here's Pastor Rick in the book of 2 Kings chapter 8 as he continues his message, Far Reaching Ministry. We're not told whether Elijah received the gift. He likely did, because it's coming from a king. And to say, I don't want your gifts in front of public after you parade these camels through town probably just would not have been the better thing to do. Remember Jacob?

Jacob sent those in procession, these gifts to his brother to appease him. Hopefully he wouldn't get killed by Esau. Well, there's some of that without the intensity happening here.

So it's not far-fetched. Anyway, verse 10, And Elijah said to him, Go, say to him, You shall certainly recover. However, Yahweh has shown me that he will really die.

Oh, great a paradox. Yes and no. Elijah, will I recover from this sickness?

Yes and no. Verse 11, Then he set his countenance in a stare until he was ashamed, and the man of God wept. The man that's ashamed here is the messenger, Hazael, the servant of the king. So Elijah tells him the message to take back.

Tell him he's going to survive, but he's not going to live. And he just stares at this guy. And the guy is like, Stop it. Stop staring at me. What an awkward thing.

Try that in the lobby after. Just stare at the other person. And so that's what's happening here. Elijah's not ashamed. Elijah breaks down, starts weeping.

That is pretty interesting. Christ wept over Jerusalem because he wanted to reach Jerusalem. The prophet, as he's saying, you know, we don't know which Ben had added. There's probably a title for the king, like Pharaoh, like Caesar. Which, you know, the chronology is all over the place in kings.

A little detective work going on there. But anyway, evidently the prophet cared. And he's looking at an assassin who is pretending to be the assistant to the king in the time of his sickness. He saw, the prophet saw, a cold-blooded killer in front of him. Verse 12. And Hazael said, Why is my Lord weeping? He answered, Because I know the evil that you will do to the children of Israel. Their strongholds you set on fire, you will set on fire. Their young men you will kill with the sword, and you will dash their children and rip open their women with child. So the prophet breaks down weeping, really not so much for the king, Benhadad, though that may have been some, it was this disappointment that, well, we know what we've got with Benhadad, but when you come to power, we also know what we're going to get.

And that is this monster. And Hazael will do these things that the prophet is talking about. And you have to say, well, why would God tell the prophet this and allow it?

Because the people were so idolatrous and in apostasy, besmirking the name of Yahweh, just messing up everything with their brand of homemade religion. It was judgment on them. God is saying, I warned you that if you fell away from me, that the enemy would come in and just do what enemies do to people. And this is it.

He itemizes it. This is how warfare was conducted. Nowadays we'd be saying, they're going to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles on you and wipe out whole villages. And then you'll have famine and you'll have disease and you'll have, you know, this is what the prophet is saying. So again, this gift of knowledge and prophecy, he knows things that only God could tell him. And in addition, he's telling future events that are going to take place.

Truly, there is an assassin right there in front of him who is going to deny it. Verse 13, so Hazael said, but what is your servant, a dog, that he should do this gross thing? And Elijah answered, Yahweh has shown me that you will become king over Israel.

Yeah, by killing his king. That's clearly the implication. So when Hazael says, but what is your servant, a dog, that he should do this gross thing? The prophet is saying, yes you are.

You know, I didn't call you a dog, you called yourself a dog. You admit that this is inhuman. Now that word gross in the New King James is again misleading.

I don't, you know, we don't try to pick on the translators. The Old Testament is difficult for them. But anyway, it's closer to this exceptional thing, because gross is sort of our vernacular.

You know, if you dye mashed potatoes blue and serve it to somebody, they're going to say, gross, I'm not eating that. But that's not what is being said here in the Hebrew. It is, he is saying that I should do such an exceptional evil?

That is, gross is not inaccurate, but just kind of clarified I think. Anyway, when the opportunity to take the throne of Syria arises, he will become this dog that he refers to here. He will have motive, and he will have opportunity, and that creates the crime. And Elijah answered, Yahweh has shown me that you will become king over Syria. So Elijah sticks to what God has told him. He says, I don't care if you disagree with me, God has shown me.

I'm not debating it with you, I've announced it. Too bad, we need to have more Christian youth that go off to our universities to have this response. When they're faced with these atheists and antichrists, they need to stand up. Yah, well God has shown me. And look, I signed on for biology, I didn't ask for you to give me a religious dissertation on anything.

Stick to biology, tell me about cells. For I call my pastor who's got that hardware. Anyway, wouldn't that be funny, you could make cartoons out of this. Anyhow, back to this. So this man, either he couldn't see his own evil heart, or he was unwilling to look. But even though he's lying, or ignorant, it's going to happen. Point, talk is cheap in the face of temptation. You know a lot of us don't sin because we don't get the opportunity to. And thus we pray, lead us not into temptation, deliver us from the evil one. Because we are up against strong, wicked forces in the spiritual realm, and we have a sinful nature that provides a port of entry for them. When it comes to sin, the flesh has no customs agents.

And so you should bring it all in. Coming back to this, verse 14, then he departed from Elisha and came to his master who said to him, what else did Elisha say to you? And he answered, he told me, you would surely recover. Well, that's not only a half truth, it's a lie.

He doesn't get a chance to recover. Hazeel tells his king, on behalf of the prophet, what was said. He has had a hundred miles to think about this. That's how far from Samaria to Damascus they're about, give or take.

So verse 15, but it happened on the next day that he took a thick cloth and dipped it in water and spread it over his face so that he died and Hazeel reigned in his place. Well, you know, he got to thinking about that. You may have evil people in your life. So did the ancients.

Never been a shortage of them. Satan has never said, hmm, where are we going to find somebody wicked? He's like, can you go to the shelf and bring one over here?

Maybe the Lord won't block me from using this evil person. Anyway, Ben had that on his deathbed. Well, he became a deathbed probably too weak from the illness to resist and he suffocates under the cloth.

This would, you know, you couldn't get crime investigators there, forensics, to say, hey, this is foul play. He was alive and this is what happened. Everybody just felt that he just breathed his last and now the obvious choice for his successor would be Hazeel. When Hazeel becomes king, he does a lot to make Damascus a beautiful city and the people loved him. They worshipped him pretty much for over 800 into the days of the apostles. They still held Hazeel in high esteem. Did they find out that he murdered or is it just Elijah's word against his?

I don't know, but I know that he may have gotten away with it with men, but not with God. Verse 16, now in the fifth year of Jo-ram, the son of Ahab, king of Israel, Jehoshaphat, having been king of Judah, Jehoram, the son of Jehoshaphat, began to reign as king of Judah. Okay, this is, it's not, it's complicated because of the names, not because of the material. We have two kings with the same name, one in the north and one in the south, and it just can be a little complicated, but if you, you know, you could sit down and figure it out. So don't kick yourself if you are confused in your reading of this last section in chapter 8. To distinguish between the two, usually Jo-ram is the king in the north, Israel, which is confusing too because Judah still is Israel, but it's Judah separate from Israel, and Jehoram, who's also named Jo-ram, is king in the south, Judah. And that will get further confusing when you get to verses 24 and 25, but again, there's no theological loss, so let's try to see if there's anything for us though as Christians. Verse 17, he was 32 years old when he became king and he reigned eight years in Jerusalem. Well, that is Jehoram, son of Jehoshaphat, verse 18, and he walked in the way of the kings of Israel. Okay, so the king in the south, who is now king at age 32, is following the kings in the north when it comes to religion, and that's what the writer is pointing out. Just as the house of Ahab had done, for the daughter of Ahab was his wife, and he did evil in the sight of Yahweh. So, this shifts now because most of Kings is about the kings in the northern kingdom.

Chronicles is about the southern kings, but the southern kings come into the story as here. Now, Jehoshaphat, of course, was a very good king. He loved the Lord, he was not an idolater, but he had that one problem we always pointed out, he couldn't choose friends wisely.

He had this attraction to bad people. And we wonder how Jehoshaphat could have allowed his son Jehoram to marry into such a family as Ahab and Jezebel. I mean, well, 2 Chronicles 18, Jehoshaphat had riches and honor and abundance, and by marriage he allied himself with Ahab.

And he's probably saying, listen, we'll have a righteous influence, we'll marry into the family, it'll be good for the kingdom, we'll be at peace with each other, we're all Jewish brothers, and we'll have a righteous impact on that family. And the reverse happened. The evil prevailed.

They had the influence. And the harvest was wickedness. Again, Jehoshaphat, a good man, prone to keeping bad company and making bad decisions when it came to who he associated with.

And as a result, his son delighted in the wickedness of his in-laws. Now David, of course, is always mentioned, and he's mentioned here in verse 19, because he is the standard of righteousness amongst the kings. Ahab, along with Jeroboam, they are the standards of wickedness and evil behavior. And Ahab is described as committing the sins of Jeroboam, in that he kept calf worship going on in Yahweh's name, set up two temples in Israel, Jeroboam did. You can worship Yahweh in either one of these temples, you just bat down to this calf, burn incense to it, make sacrifices to it. Whatever you do to Yahweh in Jerusalem, you can do to these calves. Which, of course, is disgusting to God. Then Ahab marries Jezebel, the Phoenician princess, and he injects, in addition to Jeroboam's religion, bowel worship.

And, of course, these are the ones that had no problems killing children. They waited for the children to be born, and then they would kill them in the name of their religion. 1 Kings 16, And it came to pass, as though it had been a trivial thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nabat, he took as wife, talking about Ahab, Jezebel, the daughter of Ethbaal, king of the Sidonians, and he went and served Baal and worshipped him. Well, that's going to be the father-in-law of Jehoshaphat's son.

And so, he's going to have the devil for an in-law. And the wife that has this great influence over these wicked men, Jehoram and Ahab, it's not explicitly stated that it was Jezebel's daughter, it is Ahab's daughter, we presume by Jezebel, because of the wickedness, the wicked connection. But kings had multiple wives, and it wouldn't be far-fetched to say, well, it wasn't Jezebel, but that's not how I'm telling the story.

She's going to get blamed for everything, because she deserves it. Anyway, verse 19, Yet Yahweh would not destroy Judah for the sake of his servant David, as he promised him to give a lamp to him and his sons forever. This was probably written before Nebuchadnezzar, and it is certainly not untrue, it's just not the whole story. Of Judah's kings, the most singled-out ones for their goodness, King David, Asa, Jehoshaphat, Joash, Hezekiah, and Josiah. They all had issues, little issues too, but they were still righteous kings.

I would add Uzziah to that, also called Azariah, he's got leprosy in the end for trying to, he got too big for his crown, and got crowned with leprosy, we'll get him some other time. Anyway, the historian here is maintaining the mercy to God. Well Judah is going to become like the northern kingdom, Ezekiel points this out in graphic detail, not fit for un-adult audiences, juvenile audiences either. But anyway, back to this, Judah will be destroyed in judgment, but not annihilated, that lamp continues on.

And of course Christ brings it to the forefront as no other. And that will spill into the millennial reign, it all is connected in the revelation and the prophets. Verse 20, in his days, Edom revolted against Judah's authority and made a king over themselves. Verse 21, so Joram went to Zare and all his chariots with him, then he rose by night and attacked the Edomites who had surrounded him, and the captains of the chariots and the troops fled to their tents. Well this reads as though Joram of the south goes to fight with Edom who wants to get from under his feudalistic control, and they win.

They are surrounded but they fight their way out of it. Verse 22, thus Edom has been in revolt against Judah's authority to this day, and Libnah revolted at that time. So he won the battle but he lost the war.

And he's a wicked man. Then Libnah revolts. And so there's this, hey, we found out that Edom revolted?

Well we're going to get rid of this guy also. King Josiah's wife, Imethuel, she is from Libnah, which also revolted, and that always, you know, see what I mean? All the kings, the good kings, there was something about all of them. Why does he have to go outside of Israel to get a wife? Good King Josiah, well because someone arranged it for him more than likely long before he had any say so, because he comes to the throne and he's still just a lad. Anyhow, that's my defense of Josiah. Verse 23, now the rest of the acts of Jo-ram and all that he did, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah? So that's the book of chronicles we have, which gives us more details about him, and I'm going to read one in a moment how it ends for him. Verse 24, so Jo-ram rested with his fathers, not that he was tired, he died, and was buried with his fathers in the city of David.

Then Ahaziah, his son, reigned in his place. Another no good character. Jo-ram was not well liked by the people. This is still the southern king, I hope I didn't lose you on this.

It's fun reading about how he was disliked. Second Chronicles chapter 21 verses 18, 19, and 20, it's come gory reading and I felt you'd like that. So, looking at verse 18, speaking of this king, after this Yahweh struck him in his intestines with an incurable disease. Then it happened in the course of time after the end of two years that his intestines came out because of his sickness, so he died in severe pain and his people made a burning for him like the burning of his fathers. He was 32 years old when he became king, he reigned in Jerusalem eight years, and to no one's sorrow departed. However, they buried him in the city of David, but not in the tombs of the kings. So he has a horrible death and they make a burning for him because he is a king, but personally they weren't sorry to see him go.

How tragic. See, these are the Bible stories that are real. This is what you want to read to the kid, not the intestines part, but the part about here's a king that has all of this opportunity given to him to be a righteous influence, and what he does with it is vile, and the result is when he dies, they're all glad to see him go. He's not the only king from Judah that gets this kind of a send-off. Verse 25 now, In the twelfth year of Jo-ram, the son of Ahab, the king of Israel, Ahaziah, the son of Jehoram, the king of Judah, began to reign. I can follow that. Not that important unless you want to really dig into it. Ahab's son is Jo-ram.

This is a reference point. Ahaziah is the son of the Jo-ram to the south that had just died that I read about that horrible death he experienced. Jehu is coming next chapter. He's going to kill both these guys at Elijah. Elijah's going to send a message and say, Hey, Jehu's going to be king, and Jehu, he starts off well. You like him at first.

Well, I mean, from an alpha male perspective. Verse 26, Ahaziah was 22 years old when, did I just read the note? 22 years old when he became king, and he reigned one year in Jerusalem. His mother's name was Athaliah, the granddaughter of Amri, king of Israel. So Athaliah, Jezebel was the wicked witch in the northern kingdom. Athaliah will be the wicked witch in the southern kingdom, and likely the daughter of Jezebel. She is just a monster, and we'll get that in Kings.

Chronicles gives us even more. But her grandfather was Amri, her father Ahab. Anyway, verse 27, and it gets a little confused.

Sometimes I get confused with all these same names. I'm talking about you, not the people in the Bible. Verse 27, And he walked in the way of the house of Ahab, and did evil in the sight of Yahweh, like the house of Ahab, for he was the son-in-law of the house of Ahab. Okay, so Jehoram was married to Athaliah, the daughter of Ahab, as Ahaziah, their son. She's the mother of this now king. She was the wife of the king that died with the intestines issue.

See, that was a good reference point, me reading that. Now we know who I'm talking about. She was his wife. This is her son, Ahaziah. When Jehu gets rid of him, Ahaziah, he's going to get rid of Jezebel, too.

He's the one that says, throw her down, and she gets eaten. The good king's son and his wife yielded a wicked harvest. These were devils-in-law.

This connection between the northern and southern kingdom created the devils-in-law. You have a weekly series out of this. What is that one? I've never watched it, but I've heard about it. Wives and Billionaires or something like that. Who wants to marry a billionaire? Jezebel!

Am I the only one that's heard of these things? So anyhow, this is just decadence. It's so unnecessary. You would just have greed written all over it.

Who wants to marry a millionaire? Everybody's hands goes up. Okay, sorry. Verse 28, Now he went with Jo-ram and the son of Ahab to war against Hazael, king of Syria, at Ramoth Gilead, and the Syrians wounded Jo-ram.

Yeah, he's going to die from this. Verse 29, Then king Jo-ram went back to Jezreel, he's the king in the north. See, they've used the name. They've switched the name around. More confusing.

To recover from the wounds which the Syrians had inflicted on him at Ramah, this is verse 29, when he fought against Hazael, king of Syria, and Ahaziah, the son of Jo-ram, became king of Judah, went down to see Jo-ram, the son of Ahab, in Jezreel, because he was sick. These are just rotten people. So the next time you see who won the election in this country, just remember it's nothing new under the sun. Sometimes you get a good king, sometimes you get a bad one. Thanks for joining us for today's edition on Cross-Reference Radio. This is the daily radio ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia.

We trust that what you've heard today in the book of 2 Kings has been something to remember. If you'd like to listen to more teachings from this series, go to crossreferenceradio.com. Once more, that's crossreferenceradio.com. We encourage you to subscribe to our podcast, too, so you'll never miss another edition. Just go to your favorite podcast app to subscribe. Our time is about up, but we hope you'll tune in again next time as we continue on in the book of 2 Kings. We look forward to that time with you, so make a note in your calendar to join Pastor Rick as he teaches from the Bible right here on Cross-Reference Radio.