Month: June 2026

Josiah could have kept the reformation private. He had already been personally broken by the word, already humbled himself before God, already received a prophetic word of assurance that the coming judgment would not fall in his lifetime. He had enough personal peace to simply govern well and let the national situation run its course. Instead, he gathered all the people of Jerusalem, all the elders of Judah, all the priests and prophets, every person in the city, great and small, and he stood before them at the temple pillar and read the entire book of the covenant to them himself. Then he renewed the covenant publicly and invited every person present to do the same.

He was twenty-six years old when his servants found the lost Book of the Law during the temple restoration. By then he had already been king for eighteen years, having ascended to the throne at eight. He had spent his teenage years seeking God in an environment where the written word of God had been so thoroughly lost that it took a building project to uncover it. He was already on the right track. He was already moving in the right direction. And then the word arrived. And what the word did to him in a single reading revealed the difference between a good heart and a thoroughly transformed one.

That phrase is one of the most tragic in all of Kings and Chronicles: even more unfaithful. Ahaz had already dismantled the worship of God in Jerusalem before the crisis arrived. He had been sacrificing to the gods of Damascus, burning his own children in the fire as an offering to Baal, closing the doors of the temple, and setting up altars at every street corner in Jerusalem. Then God allowed military defeats to come, Judah was overpowered from multiple directions simultaneously, and the response of Ahaz to the discipline of God was to intensify the behaviour that had produced it. He doubled down on the wrong direction.

Pekah did not wait to be appointed. He did not develop the qualities that attract a genuine calling. He identified a throne he wanted, removed the person sitting in it, and sat down himself. The method was a sword. The result was a reign of twenty years over Israel, which sounds like a long tenure until you read what those twenty years produced. It was a reign characterised by the same sins of Jeroboam that had defined every faithless king before him, and it ended when another man did to him exactly what he had done to his predecessor. He was assassinated by Hoshea, who then took the throne by the same method Pekah had used to seize it.

Uzziah’s reign reads like a highlight reel for the first twenty-six verses of 2 Chronicles 26. Military victories on multiple fronts. Agricultural innovation that transformed Judah’s landscape. Fortifications built, towers constructed, a powerful army equipped and trained, military technology developed that was so advanced it gets a specific mention in scripture. His fame spread as far as Egypt. He was celebrated, effective, and genuinely blessed. And then, at the absolute peak of everything, he walked into the temple to do something only priests were permitted to do, and he was struck with leprosy on the spot.

That qualifying phrase, but not wholeheartedly, is one of the most quietly devastating verdicts in scripture. Amaziah did what was right. He followed the law, he executed justice, he even obeyed a prophetic instruction at significant financial cost when told to send a hired Israelite army home before battle. In many external respects, his reign looked like faithfulness. But God’s assessment was not of the external acts. It was of the interior orientation that produced them. The acts were right. The heart was divided.

By any biblical measure, Manasseh was the worst king Judah ever produced. He reigned for fifty-five years, the longest reign in Judah’s history, and spent the majority of it systematically dismantling everything his father Hezekiah had built. He reinstalled the high places Hezekiah had demolished. He built altars to Baal and Asherah. He practised sorcery and divination. He installed a carved image in the temple itself. And scripture adds its most chilling indictment in a single phrase: he shed so much innocent blood that he filled Jerusalem from end to end. This was not a man who drifted gradually into unfaithfulness. He ran toward it with deliberate, sustained energy for decades.

He did not ask how the vineyard became available. That is the most damning detail in the entire story. Jezebel sent the letters. Jezebel forged the king’s seal. Jezebel arranged the false accusation. Jezebel orchestrated the stoning. And when it was done, she went to Ahab and told him: Naboth is dead, go take the vineyard. He stood up and walked down to claim it. Not a question asked. Meanwhile, an innocent man was murdered and a king walked into his property without bothering to wonder how the obstacle had been removed.

He was the king of Israel, the most powerful man in the northern kingdom, commanding armies and controlling the economy of an entire nation. And he was lying on his bed refusing to eat because a farmer would not sell him a vegetable garden. The scene is almost comic in its absurdity, except that it is also deeply revelatory. You learn who a leader really is not in the moments of greatest challenge but in the moments of petty frustration. Ahab’s response to a small denial exposed the profound poverty of his inner governance.

When Isaiah told Hezekiah that he was going to die and should put his house in order, Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and wept. He prayed with raw urgency, reminding God of his faithfulness, and God answered before Isaiah had even left the middle court of the palace. Fifteen more years. A prayer answered so quickly and so completely that it reads almost like a man catching his own death mid-sentence and reversing it. It is one of the most dramatic healing miracles in the Old Testament, and it is rooted in the genuine faith of a man who had governed his life and his kingdom with sincere devotion.