2 Kings 16

2 Kings 16

Although Judah had generally followed God, only having moments of disobedience, they too began to fall away, as we saw in their last few kings. They remained somewhat obedient to God, but their partial obedience caused them to become lukewarm. They were slowly drifting away, and when Ahaz took the throne, he led them to one of the lowest points in their history. He followed the gods of some of the surrounding nations and chose to worship them. He even sacrificed one of his children to those gods.

At this point in Israel and Judah’s history, both nations were drifting from God. They had turned their worship to other gods, and they did not depend on God’s strength when faced with various challenges. So when Israel and Syria went to battle against Judah, both sides were in essence on their own. What we do not learn from the 2 Kings is that Israel’s time was nearing its end, and this was the first step in their ultimate downfall. By reading through the prophets, we will later learn more about the warnings God had been sending to the Israelites. We will also learn that God had asked Ahaz not to turn to the Assyrians for help. But from 2 Kings we see that Judah was given the victory because the Assyrians fought with them. Both Syria and Israel were defeated, and the exile of the Israelites was about to begin.

As for Judah, Ahaz continued to turn them away from God. Seeing the altars that the Syrians had constructed in Damascus, he had Uriah, his priest, construct new altars for Judah. He removed the bronze altars that had been made for God from the Temple and replaced them with some of these new altars. He continued to sacrifice to his other gods with his new objects for worship.

I mentioned earlier that there are more details related to the background of this story in the Prophets. Since I have been trying to just go straight through Scripture without skipping around too much, we have not had any interactions with those books. However, I encourage you to skip ahead and now and begin reading through the Prophets. You will recognize many of the people in those books because they work hand-in-hand with the books of History. I have seen it put this way before:

The story of the Old Testament begins in Genesis and actually ends in Esther. The story does not historically pick up again until the book of Matthew in the New Testament. So that leaves us with the question, what should we do with the rest of the books in the Old Testament? Well, starting at the top of the above chart, the Books of Poetry and Wisdom were all written by or were about people already mentioned in the Books of Law and Books of History. Also, all the prophets lived within the time period covered from Genesis to Esther. So their writings were all reflections on and warnings to people living in that time period. When we read all three of these sections of Scripture together, we are able to gain a fuller understanding of what the situation was at the time. Therefore, when reading through 2 Kings 16-17 it is helpful to look at the opening chapters of Isaiah, who was a prophet in Judah during the time of Ahaz.

Finally, we then encounter the problem of knowing which prophets go with which story. It is not always as clear as to what time period the prophet lived in, and there are many times more than one opinion on the historical settings of the prophets. This is one reason why it is hard to put the Bible in chronological order. We just do not know for certain where all of the different poems and prophecies fit within the larger story (although there are some very well developed theories out there). There have been efforts made at providing a chronological reading of Scripture, and there are even Bibles now that try to order the story in this fashion. So if you are interested in seeing how the whole story fits together chronologically, I encourage you to pick up a copy of one of those Bibles, as they can be quite helpful.


Matt