Month: June 2026

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.

Abijah was outnumbered two to one. The army of Jeroboam had 800,000 soldiers. Abijah had 400,000. Before a single sword was drawn, Jeroboam had also deployed 200,000 men to surround Judah from behind while negotiations appeared to be taking place from the front. It was an ambush. Judah was in the middle of it before they realised what was happening. By every visible measure, the situation was beyond recovery.

We have spent three and a half weeks in the palace, walking through the reigns of kings whose stories have held up mirrors to every kind of leadership. We have seen courage and cowardice, wisdom and foolishness, genuine faith and spectacular compromise. But the thread that runs beneath every story, the pattern that connects every failure and commends every success, is not primarily about external leadership at all. It is about the kingdom within.

In a single year, the northern kingdom of Israel had three kings. Zechariah reigned six months before Shallum conspired against him and killed him in public. Shallum reigned one month before Menahem conspired against him and killed him. Menahem, who secured his reign by a campaign of brutality so extreme that scripture records the detail of pregnant women being ripped open in the towns that refused to open their gates to him, paid a thousand talents of silver to the Assyrian king to buy the stability that his violent takeover could not organically produce. It is one of the darkest and most chaotic passages in all of Kings.

Elisha was dying. Jehoash, king of Israel, came to him weeping, using the same words Elisha himself had used when Elijah was taken: “My father! My father! The chariots and horsemen of Israel!” It was a genuine display of grief. Elisha, even in his final illness, had one more instruction to give. He told the king to take his bow and shoot an arrow out of the window. He placed his hands over the king’s hands as he shot. Then he told him to take the arrows and strike the ground. Jehoash struck three times and stopped. And the dying prophet, from his bed, was furious.

Jotham gets four verses. That is almost nothing by royal standards. No dramatic military victory that takes a chapter to recount. No revival that reshapes the nation. No prophetic confrontation that enters the biblical record. He built some things, he won one battle, he required tribute from his enemies, and he walked steadily before the Lord his God. Four verses. And the summary verdict: he grew powerful.