In the thirty-ninth year of his reign Asa was afflicted with a disease in his feet. Though his disease was severe, even in his illness he did not seek help from the Lord, but only from the physicians.” — 2 Chronicles 16:12 (NIV)
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.
That is a very sad fall for a man who once removed his own grandmother from power rather than compromise his obedience to God. What happened between the Asa who tore down the Asherah pole and the Asa who imprisoned a prophet? The answer is gradual. It always is. Long success can breed a subtle self-sufficiency that feels nothing like pride and everything like experience. The leader who has seen God work through them for decades can quietly begin to trust the accumulated wisdom of their experience more than the fresh counsel of God’s voice. The reservoir of past victories becomes a substitute for present dependence.
Then came the disease in his feet. God, in mercy, offered Asa one more opportunity to return to the pattern of his better years, one more moment to cry out and be answered. Instead, he consulted only physicians and shut God entirely out of the room. Not because he had become an atheist. But because something had calcified in him, some old offence or pride or self-reliance, that made it feel impossible to be the man who needed God again. He died two years later.
The tragedy of Asa is not that he failed at the end. It is that he failed unnecessarily. He had the resources. He had the history. He had the God. What he lacked was the humility to remain dependent on the One who had made all his previous success possible. Leadership longevity requires a particular kind of ongoing surrender: the daily choice to remain as dependent on God in year thirty as you were in year one, even though by year thirty you have far more to lean on besides.
There is a painful irony in the phrase about his feet. Feet, in biblical imagery, represent walk and direction. Asa’s spiritual feet had gone lame long before his physical ones did. He had stopped walking with God in the way he once did, and the physical affliction may have been the mercy of a God who wanted his attention one final time.
Today, examine how your dependence on God has changed over time. Has long experience quietly replaced fresh trust? Is there a hardness in you, toward a voice, a correction, or a season of vulnerability, that was not there when you first began? The willingness to be corrected and to remain dependent is not weakness. It is what makes a long reign worth reading about.
Prayer
Father, keep me from finishing poorly. Where success has bred self-sufficiency, humble me. Where I have imprisoned the voices that carry your correction, forgive me and soften my heart. I want to end as well as I began, more dependent on you in year thirty than in year one. In Jesus’ name, amen.
