June 9: The Throne That Collapsed Without the Mentor

After the death of Jehoiada, the officials of Judah came and paid homage to the king, and he listened to them.” — 2 Chronicles 24:17 (NIV)

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 decline was swift and dark. The officials persuaded him to abandon the temple of God and return to worshipping the Asherah poles and idols. God sent prophets to bring them back, but the people would not listen. Then Zechariah, the son of Jehoiada, the very son of the man who had saved Joash’s life, stood up and delivered God’s rebuke. And Joash ordered him stoned to death in the temple courtyard. As Zechariah was dying, he said: “May the Lord see this and call you to account.” Joash murdered the son of the man who had rescued him from death as an infant, in the very temple that man had spent his life protecting.

There are few stories in scripture that illustrate the danger of borrowed faith more devastatingly than this one. Joash had inhabited someone else’s spiritual convictions for forty years. He had lived within the structure of Jehoiada’s faith without ever building his own. And when the structure was removed, there was nothing underneath it. The house that looked solid was hollow at its foundation, and every wind of influence that arrived after Jehoiada’s death found it easy to blow through.

The application is confronting for anyone who has grown up in a strong spiritual environment, whether a godly home, a mentoring relationship, or a formative church community. There comes a point in every person’s life when the faith that was modelled to you must become the faith that belongs to you. Not a rejection of what you were given, but a personal appropriation of it: a moment when you decide, from the inside, that what you have been shown is true and that you will govern your life by it regardless of whether the person who showed it to you is still in the room.

Joash never had that moment. The tragedy is not that he was a bad man. It is that he was an incomplete one: shaped from the outside but never transformed from within. External formation without internal ownership is always one removal away from collapse. The mentor’s job is to become unnecessary. The mentee’s job is to make sure they are.

Today, examine your own faith honestly. Is it yours? Not who taught it to you or who models it around you, but yours, personally owned, personally decided, personally practiced when no one who shaped you is watching. If the most significant spiritual influence in your life were suddenly removed, what would remain? The answer to that question reveals the true foundation you are governing from.

Prayer

Father, I do not want borrowed faith. I want a faith that is mine, that I have chosen, that governs me from the inside when the external scaffolding is gone. Take everything that is merely inherited and make it personally mine through encounter with you. In Jesus’ name, amen.