Month: June 2026

The letter was from Sennacherib, king of Assyria, the most powerful military force in the known world at the time and its contents were designed to produce fear. It catalogued every nation Assyria had already destroyed, listed every god those nations had trusted that had proved useless against Assyrian might, and concluded with a direct challenge: what makes you think your God is any different? It was not just a military threat. It was a theological attack, a direct assault on the believability of everything Hezekiah’s faith rested on.

In the first month of the first year of his reign, he opened the doors of the temple of the Lord and repaired them.” — 2 Chronicles 29:3 (NIV) First month. First year. First act. How precise can it get?…

Three words carry the entire tragedy: he listened to them. Them being the officials who arrived after Jehoiada’s death with an agenda that had been quietly waiting for this moment. While the priest was alive, his influence created a kind of gravitational field around the king that kept those voices at a distance. The moment he was gone, they moved in quickly, and Joash, who had never developed the spiritual backbone to govern independently of his mentor, had no resistance to offer.

The phrase that commends Joash is also the phrase that qualifies him, and the qualification deserves a long, honest look. Joash did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, all the years Jehoiada the priest instructed him. Not all the years he reigned. All the years Jehoiada instructed him. The integrity of this king was inseparable from the presence of his mentor. Remove Jehoiada and you remove the scaffolding that was holding the building upright.

Sending singers ahead of soldiers is not a military strategy, that is faith on another level. When Jehoshaphat positioned the worshippers at the front of the army, he was not being naive about the nature of warfare. He was making a declaration about the nature of the victory: this battle belongs to God, and what belongs to God should be preceded by His praise. The singers were not the warmup act before the real action. They were the advance unit of a different kind of force entirely.

It is one of the most disarmingly honest prayers in all of scripture, and it came from a king. A vast alliance of three nations had mobilised against Jehoshaphat. The intelligence report was overwhelming: a great multitude is coming against you. The military calculus was clear. Judah was outnumbered, outresourced, and facing a coalition that had never been assembled against them before. Any leader in that situation would have been justified in reaching for every strategic tool available. Jehoshaphat reached for none of them first. He proclaimed a fast throughout Judah and stood before the assembly and prayed.

Asa’s beginning was one of the finest in Judah’s royal history. But the book of his leadership closes on a note that should make every long-serving leader pause and take stock. In his later years, when threatened by Baasha king of Israel, Asa did something he would never have done in his earlier chapters: he emptied the temple treasury to buy a military alliance with the king of Aram, relying on foreign muscle rather than the God who had given him every victory he had ever known. When the prophet Hanani confronted him about it, Asa had the prophet thrown into prison and brutally oppressed some of the people at the same time.

Asa inherited a kingdom soaked in idolatry. Not the kind that crept in gradually during his watch, but the kind that had been normalized over generations, embedded in the culture, protected by powerful interests, and, most uncomfortably of all, installed by his own grandmother Maakah, who had made a repulsive Asherah pole and held the position of queen mother. This was not a situation Asa created. It was a situation he woke up to. And the first question his leadership had to answer was whether he would challenge what his family had allowed.

God handed Jeroboam ten tribes on a plate. Not through ambition or scheming, but through a direct prophetic promise delivered by the prophet Ahijah, who tore his cloak into twelve pieces, gave Jeroboam ten, and declared that God was giving him ten tribes because of Solomon’s unfaithfulness. The condition was straightforward: walk in my ways, keep my commands, and I will build you an enduring dynasty. It was as generous and as clear a divine mandate as any leader could ever receive.

He had the most powerful throne in the ancient world handed to him on a plate. He destroyed it in a single meeting. Rehoboam was Solomon’s son, inheriting a kingdom at its absolute peak, unified, wealthy, internationally respected, and feared. All he had to do was hold what had been given to him. He did not need to be brilliant. He simply needed to not be catastrophically foolish. He chose catastrophic foolishness.