Alright, wonderful. Alright, so lesson nine here is going to be chapters 21 through 28 of Second Chronicles. And this is entitled Royal Infidelity, again, but this time we're going from Jehoram to Ahas. A few more kings than we saw last time, but it's going to be some pretty epic stories here.
A lot of drama for sure, a lot of ups and downs for the Davidic Kingdom, to say the least. Now, what I decided to do is to share this quote, I shared this with you from one of your commentaries here, your Catholic introduction to the Old Testament last lesson. And I thought I'd just repeat it here one more time really, really quickly so we understand the differences between Chronicles and Kings. So just a real quick review here on where we've come and where we're going.
And so this quote here from Petrian Bergimat, they say, after the death of Solomon, the chronicler retells the history of the Southern Kingdom from King Rehoboam to Zedekiah. I'll get quick pause here. I'll pause a couple of times as we go through this. I did suggest that last time that you get your Catholic Bible dictionary, a highly recommended resource here, because they're going to provide you biographies of all these different kings, of course David Solomon, as well as all of these other various kings in the Southern Kingdom, as well as the Northern Kingdom, because chronicles and kings do have different accounts.
It's nice to have just one little snippet of biography, a quick overview of each of these kings in one account. So I highly recommend you do that. Alright, moving on. If the author of Kings, the chronicler pays no attention to the Northern Kingdom since it does not partake of the Davidic Covenant, it is not theologically significant.
Alright, pause there. I would say that's obviously completely true because as we read this and you have an idea already, as we're getting close to the end here, that we're not really talking about the Northern Kingdom like hardly at all. Kings talks about the Northern Kingdom a lot. It's back and forth between the Northern and Southern Kingdoms and how they engage a lot.
The only times the Northern Kingdom is really mentioned, or kings of the Northern Kingdom are mentioned, is when they are involved in the affairs of the Southern Kingdom. So I would say that. Another little point I want to remind you of is that, so it says here that the Northern Kingdom is not theologically significant because it doesn't partake of the Davidic Covenant. But true, I do want you to remember throughout this entire story, especially when we get to the Last Lesson and we look at the reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah as well as what we talked about Last Lesson, Lesson 8, that there are faithful migrants, the faithful remnants, devoted refugees who did migrate and move down south to the Southern Kingdom to worship God, to partake in the temple sacrifices and to get away from all the insanity and idolatries and this utter chaos of the North, they rejected the idolatry and they moved south.
So in that regard, as I explained in the last lesson, these Judean kings are still kings of all Israel, that very important line here in these books because you do have people from all ten tribes up north moving down south. So to a certain extent, you still have a bit of a unity or at least a germ, a seed, a kernel, acorn, whatever you want to use, of the wholeness of the twelve tribes. So yes, the Northern Kingdom is not talked about at all, but multiple times there are these quote, not quotations, but verses of faithful people coming down south. So Northern Israel and as much as they move down south are still very relevant and very significant precisely because they are partaking of the Davidic Covenant, they submit themselves to the King of David, the Davidic King and the Davidic line and the worship and the temple.
So I just want to keep that in mind as well. All right, it keeps going. Among similar lines, the person's the prophet Elijah and Elisha ministered in the north. The chronicler scarcely mentions them.
And we're going to see Elijah actually down here below in just a little bit. Elisha is not talked about at all and Elijah just gets one brief cameo because remember that they serve the north. God sent prophets to both north and south. That when we study the canonical prophets, you're going to see all of that.
Some prophets are sent north, some are south. Elijah and Elisha, his protege, are focusing almost exclusively on the north. However, we'll see an exception to that earlier soon. All right, last sentence.
Instead, the chronicler lengthens the accounts of the reigns of the Judean kings, but not often but not always with positive material about their military strength and religious reforms. Material apparently omitted in kings. So what the chronicler is doing here, remember, and we're going to see this whole slew of different kings here, Jehormed Aaz. The chronicler has this religious interpretation of Israel's history and he's focusing on covenant and fidelity.
And as much as the king is faithful to God, his covenants, his laws, faithful to Moses, and faithful to King David for that matter, and be able to the people as well, then he's going to be blessed and by extension he's going to bless all the people. So the king's obedience kind of trickles down. So the king's obedience brings prosperity which trickles down all the way to the rest of the people. And the inverse is also true.
If the king is disobedient and wicked, then he's going to bring disaster amongst his people. All right, so I just wanted to spend those few minutes here just kind of reviewing where we are, what we're doing before we dive in here to these various kings. And there's a lot of drama going on for sure. One thing I always think about is it would be amazing.
And you'll see what I mean when you get through this. It would be amazing to have someone like a great movie producer, director, actors put together a mini series on the books of kings and chronicles. Just the history of the United and divided king. That would be so epic.
You can get seven or eight seasons easily of like eight, ten episodes each of all the things going on because everything that you want in a mini series you have here. You've got the entry, you've got the betrayal, you've got disaster, you've got murder, you've got fidelity, you've got warm moments. Everything that you would want is here in the scriptures. So I think it'd be awesome.
I don't know. Maybe angel studios should put something together like that. That'd be pretty epic. And you'll see what I mean as we get through this here.
So let's begin here where we left off in chapter 21 with King Jehoram. He reigned as I put down in your notes here, 848 to 841. And I'll always give you the parallel passages in the book of Second King so you can follow along. So he is the oldest son of Jehosaphat.
We talked about him in the last lesson at the end of the last lesson. Jehosaphat was pretty good. He was a pretty good king. He had some pick ups here and there, especially the biggest problem was when he tried to rub shoulders with a wicked northern king, Ahab.
And his wife was infamously evil, but Queen Jezebel, so Ahab and Jezebel are this power couple for ball. You got that expression, power couples. They were very, very bad. And so Jehosaphat for whatever reason, I speculated a little bit in the last lesson why that might have been the case where he's fraternizing with Ahab up north.
He was punished for it. That was not good. I'd like to think that he had good reasons for it. Maybe he wanted to try to unite the kingdoms here and rebuild bridges or something like that.
He was tolerating Ahab's wickedness and that he was punished for that as we talked about in the last lesson. And so Jehosaphat here, his oldest son was very wicked. His johorim is his name. I mean, get these all mixed up sometimes.
So Jehorim, or simply Jehorim sometimes he's called, was extremely wicked to God's covenants and laws. Let's read a few verses here in chapter 21 verse 4 and following. You'll see exactly what I mean. Alright, 21 verse 4.
Actually before that, it talks about how Jehosaphat blessed all of his sons with all his material wealth and great possessions and all this kind of stuff. He gave them fortified cities, et cetera. But then he gave the king the two Jehorim because he was the first born. Now verse 4, when Jehorim had ascended the throne of his father and was established, he slew all of his brothers with the sword and also some of the princes of Israel.
That's pretty darn wicked. That is like Cain times 10 to kill all of his brothers. Why did he do that? Well, he probably thought that they were a threat.
I mean, I'm sure that's the case. Or he was paranoid and just kind of murderous by nature. But that is an awfully wicked thing to do to kill his own brothers like that. And then it goes on, he was 32 years old when he became king.
He ran eight years in Jerusalem and he walked in all the way of the kings of Israel as the house of Ahab had done for the daughter of Ahab was his wife. And he did it was evil inside the Lord. Yet the Lord not destroyed the house of David because of the covenant which he had made with David since he had promised to give him a lamp to him and to his sons forever. All right.
So this is really important here. So he slew his brothers. He's very, very wicked because he's following the idolatry of all worship and other things of his father-in-law King Ahab. This was one of the things that Jehorim did is he married, if you go back to chapter 18, you're going to see that Jehorim made an alliance with Ahab.
That alliance was to marry his son with Ahab's daughter. And that's what I was saying a moment ago. I'd like to think that he's trying to unite the kingdoms again because whenever you have a marriage alliance, you're going to have some kind of truce or some kind of, I don't know, like a positive relationship with the kingdom that you're marrying into, right? So maybe that was going on.
It doesn't seem clear in scripture. I'm just hoping against hope that was his motive, but certainly marrying his son Jehorim to this wicked woman. Her name is Athelya. By the way, we'll talk about her a lot here coming up.
That was a very bad thing. So Athelya brings all of her parents wickedness into the Southern Kingdom and greatly affects the fidelity of her husband, Jehorim here. So that was really bad. So in all of this situation here, remember it says in verse 7 that God was faithful to Jehorim or really he was faithful to the kingdom of David.
That's really the point here because as this quote here says this brief quote in the accounts of the chroniclers, less edifying reigns or chroniclers accounts of less edifying reigns, he never fails to make it clear that even though the Lord inflicted punishment, he never foresoaked his people. And that's really important throughout this entire history, especially as you say to the prophets, even though Israel is unfaithful, God is never unfaithful. God will always uphold his end of the bargain. And whenever he punishes Israel and the kings in this instance, it's always to give them to repent, right?
It's always to give them penance of some kind to wake them up a little bit and that's what's happening. All right. So this is pretty bad here where when he's killed his brothers, the lion just kind of shrinks, you know, so what would happen if Jehorim didn't have a son? Well, one of his brothers might have been made king, right?
You know, so when all the brothers are killed, you're really limiting the lineage here considerably. And this is going to be one story of many, actually. There's a few stories of how the kingdom of David is almost snuffed out entirely. And God is always faithful though.
He's always going to bring a miracle really out of the ashes, like a phoenix out of the ashes. And that's what's going to happen a couple times, especially when we see the future story of Atholiah here on the next page of the notes in the next couple of chapters. A couple of different times that if it is king is almost snuffed out, but God is faithful, that in and of itself here's a big takeaway for you. That's the stories of how the kingdom almost disappears, but God is faithful and brings it back.
That's going to be important for the exile itself, because we're going to see at the end of lesson 10, the Davidic kingdom is by all intents and purposes destroyed. The king's Etachiah sees his own sons killed before him, then his eyes are gouged out. So the last living memory or visual memory that he has is of his lineage being destroyed. And so he's blinded and taken away into captivity.
Then for hundreds of years, up until Christ at least, almost 600 years, there is no king. Like it just seems like the Davidic kingdom is gone, but it's not gone. God is going to bring back this righteous branch, the chute to come up out of the stump of David, David as the prophet say. So keep that in mind.
It's a really important connection here that as we study this drama, the epic narrative, the ups and downs of these kings, it's pretty dark and depressing for sure. But that's going to foreshadow how God is always in control and he will bring the son of David, namely Jesus Christ, out of the ashes later on. And that's a pretty cool thing to keep in mind. Okay, so he's wicked.
So as a result, then various nations are going to rebel from him. It talks about in verse eight, how the Edomites rebelled in him. And I'm not trying to read all of these particular passages just to give you the story here. Edom revolts from Judah, and Edom had been subjected to Judah ever since the days really of David, if I don't forget, if I remember correctly.
All these various surrounding nations, the nations that surrounded Jerusalem and Judah and Israel under David and Solomon. They are all subject and true to the David and king, but little by little we're going to see that all just completely come crashing down to where they've been whittled down to a toothpick. And then it's going to be easy for Babylon to come in later on and just snap that toothpick in half without any effort hardly at all. And so you're seeing the disintegration of the prosperity of the David and kingdom little by little through the wickedness of these kings.
And that's what's going on here with Edom and others as well. All right, so let's go to verse 11 then. It says, the more overhe made high places in the hill country of Judah and led the inhabitants of Jerusalem into unfaithfulness and made Judas go astray as well. So these high places, really quickly, what are high places?
I don't remember if I've said this before. I certainly have in the Bible study on First and Second Kings. But the high places are little shrines or altars to pagan foreign idols that are in the countryside essentially. So you have a idolatry that comes into Jerusalem and into the temple in some cases, which is really awful.
And sometimes even good kings would uproot the psychology, but they wouldn't touch the countryside for one reason or another. They're weak, pathetic, and they don't want to cause a ruckus or who knows what their reasons are. And so a lot of these high places would remain in the countryside. And the common folk would go to visit these shrines and idols and worship them and engage in debauched activities.
And so this king, Jehoram, is actually putting many of these things up for the people, leading his own people astray into idolatry. And so that's, of course, really bad. I mean, it's really only Hezekiah and Josiah who eliminates all the high places. And as we're going to see, they even go up into the northern territory of Israel, which at this point has been destroyed by Syria, or at that point was destroyed by Syria.
But you have a little bit of good kings trying to do some reforms, but it's really just Hezekiah and Josiah who go all the way. So Jehoram is one of these kings who just brings idolatry throughout the whole land. It's not that he just has a weakness to serve these idols. He actually causes his people to worship these idols as well.
And it's at this point when Elijah makes his debut here, and then for the only time in Second Chronicles he writes a letter. He actually doesn't show up in person, but he writes a letter. So this is what says in verse 12. That's pretty brutal.
That's some pretty ugly stuff here. And of course he dies of, I don't know what it was, like, Mass of Diarrhea or something. His bowels are coming out. It's pretty ugly stuff.
We don't want to spend too much time thinking about that. So Elijah, why does Elijah actually write a letter? Why didn't God send him a different prophet? My only personal speculation on this is because Elijah was meant to condemn Baal and the priests of Baal.
And because the idolatry of Baal had penetrated into Jerusalem into Temple, due to Jehoram and Atholiah, his wife, who was the daughter of a heaven Jezebel, I think then God condemns Jehoram because he's worshiping Baal, right? And this is kind of Elijah's task is to eliminate Baal and the priests of Baal. And this is, that was the whole story if you remember, but back in historical books, Elijah has this big old standoff with, it's, he's in front of King Ahab and they're on Mount Carmel. And if you remember, it's basically Elijah versus 300, I think it was prophets of Baal, and they're trying to get fire to come from the sky from Baal.
It doesn't happen within when Elijah prays to Yahweh, the fire comes down and completely consumes the sacrifice and all the water that was surrounding it. It's a pretty epic story, right? So Elijah is very much focused on eliminating this idolatry of Baal. This idolatry has penetrated Jerusalem, so it makes sense.
At least in my mind, just kind of thinking about this on my own, that Elijah would write a letter of condemnation from God to the king because he's worshiping Baal. So just a personal thought of mine, take it or leave it if you want to. All right, so as a result, or rather after this lecture, oh, a couple of quick points here about Elijah showing up here for the first time. This is actually really interesting because his appearance and his passage is important as commentaries will say for two reasons.
Number one, as I've already said, this is the only time Elijah is mentioned in Chronicles. Why? Because he is a prophet of the North and we're focusing on the South, that's the reason why. And this is the only place in scripture where he's directly involved in the affairs of the Southern Kingdom.
You don't find this anywhere in Second Kings. Elijah only focuses up North. All right, so moving on from there, he loses a whole bunch of other territories and battles against the Philistines and Arabs and Ethiopians. And just like Elijah said in verse 18 and following, he dies a pretty ugly death of the battles, whatever that looks like a very incurable disease and no one mourned him.
And that's, if no one mourns you when you die, not even one person, you are a pretty wicked king. And so there you go, there's your horror amount, not too fun, but some pretty interesting things in the history nevertheless. It's not always like, remember last time I said there's like this pendulum that swings back and forth. For the most part, every king has various infidelities.
That's the title of royal infidelity. But you do have a pendulum swinging from like good kings and bad kings, and sometimes bad kings go good like Manasseh. We'll talk about next lesson. And sometimes good kings go bad as we're going to see here pretty soon.
So in case that's pendulum's going to continue swinging back and forth. Let's move on now to the next king in line, whose name is Ahazaya. Hey, this is Doc Neck. Thank you so much for listening to this course sample.
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