In his time of trouble King Ahaz became even more unfaithful to the Lord.” — 2 Chronicles 28:22 (NIV)
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.
This is one of the most baffling but also most human responses to the consequences of poor governance: when the strategy is clearly failing, rather than reconsidering the strategy, double its intensity. Ahaz saw the same gods of Damascus who had defeated him and concluded that since they had been powerful enough to defeat him, they must be worth worshipping. He installed their altar in the temple, moved God’s altar aside to make room, and gave the new altar the place of honour. The logic was upside down. But when a heart is hardened enough, it can make the inversion feel like wisdom.
Every leader will face failure. Strategies fail. Markets shift. Ministries go through difficult seasons. Relationships fracture. The question that defines the trajectory of a leader’s life is not whether failure will come but what they do when it arrives. Failure can be an invitation to return: to examine what has been done, to hear the voices that were carrying something true, to humble the heart and recalibrate. Or it can be an occasion for the hardening that drives a person deeper into what was already not working.
The presence of consequence is not always discipline. But it is always worth asking, in the honest quiet of prayer, whether God is trying to redirect you through what you are experiencing. The leaders who grow through failure are the ones willing to sit with that question long enough to hear an honest answer. The leaders who deepen their dysfunction through failure are the ones who arrive at consequence already certain that the problem lies elsewhere.
Ahaz’s story ends without repentance. He died in the same trajectory he had chosen and was not even buried in the royal tombs of Jerusalem, a final, quietly devastating verdict. His chapter closes not with a dramatic fall but with a slow, deliberate, sustained motion away from God that failure only accelerated. He is a cautionary portrait of what happens when the instinct to protect the self overrides every other instinct, including the instinct to be honest about what is actually happening.
Today, if there is an area of your leadership where the same approach has been producing the same poor results for an extended season, resist the instinct to simply apply more of what has not been working. Bring the failure honestly to God and ask: is this an invitation to return? What would it mean to take the road home from here?
Prayer
Father, when failure comes, let it do its redemptive work in me rather than hardening me further in the wrong direction. I do not want to be Ahaz, doubling down on what is clearly not working because I am too proud or too afraid to turn around. Give me the honesty and the courage to hear what failure might be saying. In Jesus’ name, amen.
