Pekah son of Remaliah, a chief officer, conspired against him with fifty men of Gilead and assassinated him.” — 2 Kings 15:25 (NIV)
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.
Violence breeds violence. Manipulation breeds manipulation. The methods by which you take a throne become the culture of the throne you take. Pekah’s twenty years produced nothing worth reading about beyond the record of his military failures, including the loss of significant Israelite territory to Assyria. He had the position but lacked the foundation, the calling, the character, and the anointing that produced a reign worth inheriting. The sword that got him the seat could not give him the qualities the seat required.
This principle operates with quiet consistency in every domain of leadership. The person who maneuvers themselves into a leadership role through political skill, strategic relationships, or the deliberate undermining of the person before them may succeed in occupying the position. But they will find that the position produces far less in their hands than it would have in the hands of someone whose appointment was genuine. Anointing follows calling. Authority flows from appointment. You cannot manufacture either through ambition, however sophisticated.
There is also a warning here for those who are legitimately gifted but impatient. Pekah may have had real leadership capacity. The text does not tell us he was incompetent. What it tells us is that he was unwilling to wait. And the willingness to wait, to develop in obscurity, to serve under someone whose seat you may eventually occupy, is not weakness. It is the preparation that makes the seat worth sitting in when you finally arrive at it.
The throne you seize is never quite yours. There is a difference between the position you take and the seat you are given that is felt in the room, even when it cannot always be articulated. People sense whether the leader before them was placed or manoeuvred. They sense whether the authority is genuine or performed. And they respond accordingly, with either the trust that enables genuine leadership or the compliance that merely manages its absence.
Today, reflect on how you arrived at the leadership positions you currently hold. And more importantly, how you are pursuing the ones you do not yet have. Is the path you are walking one that God can bless? Are you waiting in ways that develop you or striving in ways that will ultimately undermine what you are trying to build?
Prayer
Father, guard me from the ambition that reaches for what you have not yet given me and the impatience that refuses to be shaped by the waiting. I want only the thrones you appoint me to, taken in your timing, through your process. What I seize by force I cannot sustain by grace. In Jesus’ name, amen.
