God Keeps His Word

Faith During Faithlessness, Week Two: Jehu

Text: 2 Kings 9:1 to 13 Supporting texts: 1 Kings 19:15 to 18; 1 Kings 21:17 to 29; 2 Kings 10:28 to 31; Hosea 1:4; Luke 19:35 to 38 Topics: Justice, promises, retribution 

Big Idea: God said the house of Ahab would be judged, and about twenty years later he did exactly that, through a man named Jehu. 

Application Point: God can use a person to accomplish his purposes without that person's heart ever belonging to him. Being useful to God and being right with God are two different things.

Introduction

Last week we watched Elijah hand off his ministry to Elisha.

Today we move ahead about twenty years in the story, to 2 Kings 9, and we meet a man named Jehu.

Here is what I want you to understand before we open the text. This chapter does not make much sense on its own. If you start reading at 2 Kings 9:1, you will find a young prophet pouring oil on an army officer's head and telling him to wipe out the royal family, and you will reasonably wonder where any of that came from.

So we are going to do three things this morning.

First, I want to show you the background, which is a promise God made roughly two decades earlier.

Second, we will walk through the passage itself.

Third, we will look at how Jehu's life actually turned out, because that is where the warning for us lives.

Part One: The Background 1 Kings 21

Turn back with me to 1 Kings 21. This is the account of Naboth's vineyard.

Naboth owned a vineyard next to the palace grounds at Jezreel. King Ahab wanted that land for a vegetable garden. Naboth refused to sell, and his reason are important: In Israel, family land was not an investment. It was the inheritance God assigned to your tribe and your family when he brought His people into the land. Selling it off permanently was not something a faithful Israelite did.

Ahab went home upset. His wife Jezebel took over. She arranged a public assembly, arranged for two men to accuse Naboth falsely of blasphemy, and had him executed. Then she told Ahab the vineyard was available.

God sent Elijah to confront Ahab in that vineyard, and Elijah delivered a specific word of judgment. Ahab's family line would be brought to an end, and it would happen at Jezreel, on that ground.

Then something unexpected happened. Ahab tore his clothes, fasted, and humbled himself. God saw it and responded. He told Elijah that because Ahab humbled himself, the judgment would not come during Ahab's lifetime. It would come in the days of his son.

So hold two things together. God's judgment on that family was real and it was announced. And God's patience was also real. Ahab bought roughly fifteen more years with one afternoon of genuine grief.

Then time passed. Ahab died in battle. His sons ruled after him. Elijah was taken up in the whirlwind. A generation grew up in Israel who had never heard of Naboth. And nothing happened. Nothing happened for about twenty years.

That is the point I want you to hold onto. Silence from God is not the same thing as forgetfulness. The promise was still standing when everybody else had moved on.

Part Two: 2 Kings 9

Now look at 2 Kings 9. There are three sections here.

The Assignment, 2 Kings 9 vv. 1-3

2 Kings 9:1–3 NIV

The prophet Elisha summoned a man from the company of the prophets and said to him, “Tuck your cloak into your belt, take this flask of olive oil with you and go to Ramoth Gilead. When you get there, look for Jehu son of Jehoshaphat, the son of Nimshi. Go to him, get him away from his companions and take him into an inner room. Then take the flask and pour the oil on his head and declare, ‘This is what the Lord says: I anoint you king over Israel.’ Then open the door and run; don’t delay!”

Elisha calls a young man from what the text calls the company of the prophets. This was a group of men in training under Elisha. Elisha gives him a flask of oil and four instructions.

Go to Ramoth Gilead. This was a fortified city on Israel's eastern border, and at this moment it was a military camp, because Israel was at war with Aram. King Joram, Ahab's son, had been wounded in that war and was recovering back at Jezreel. So the army is at Ramoth Gilead without the king.

Find Jehu son of Jehoshaphat son of Nimshi. That is three names deep, which is unusual. Elisha is making sure there is no confusion about which officer they mean.

Take him into an inner room, away from the other officers. Anointing a new king while the current king is still alive is treason, so this has to be done privately.

Pour the oil on his head, say the words, open the door, and run. Elisha does not tell him to stay for the celebration. Deliver the message and go.

There is one more thing here worth noticing. Back in 1 Kings 19, God gave Elijah three assignments:

Anoint Hazael as king of Aram,

Anoint Jehu as king of Israel, and

Anoint Elisha as prophet. Elijah completed one of the three. Elisha handled the second. And this third one, Elisha does not even do himself. He sends a student whose name we are never told.

That is worth sitting with. God's purposes did not depend on Elijah finishing his list. The authority was never in the man. It was in the word he carried.

The Message, 2 Kings 9 vv. 4-10

2 Kings 9:4–10 NIV

So the young prophet went to Ramoth Gilead. When he arrived, he found the army officers sitting together. “I have a message for you, commander,” he said. “For which of us?” asked Jehu. “For you, commander,” he replied. Jehu got up and went into the house. Then the prophet poured the oil on Jehu’s head and declared, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘I anoint you king over the Lord’s people Israel. You are to destroy the house of Ahab your master, and I will avenge the blood of my servants the prophets and the blood of all the Lord’s servants shed by Jezebel. The whole house of Ahab will perish. I will cut off from Ahab every last male in Israel—slave or free. I will make the house of Ahab like the house of Jeroboam son of Nebat and like the house of Baasha son of Ahijah. As for Jezebel, dogs will devour her on the plot of ground at Jezreel, and no one will bury her.’ ” Then he opened the door and ran.

The young prophet arrives, gets Jehu alone, pours the oil, and speaks. The message has two halves.

The first half is good news. God is making Jehu king over Israel.

The second half is the assignment that comes with it. Jehu is to strike down the house of Ahab. The reason given is specific. This is payment for the blood of the prophets and of the Lord's servants that Jezebel had killed. Then the message names how Jezebel herself will die, and it names the location: that plot of ground at Jezreel.

That detail is the whole point. Anyone who knew the story would recognize immediately that this was not a new decision. This was Elijah's word from the vineyard, coming due after twenty years.

The Response, 2 Kings 9 vv. 11-13

2 Kings 9:11–13 NIV

When Jehu went out to his fellow officers, one of them asked him, “Is everything all right? Why did this maniac come to you?” “You know the man and the sort of things he says,” Jehu replied. “That’s not true!” they said. “Tell us.” Jehu said, “Here is what he told me: ‘This is what the Lord says: I anoint you king over Israel.’ ” They quickly took their cloaks and spread them under him on the bare steps. Then they blew the trumpet and shouted, “Jehu is king!”

Jehu comes back out to the courtyard. The other officers ask him why that madman came to see him.

A quick note on that word. In Hebrew it is not a term for mental illness. It describes ecstatic or intense behavior, and it was sometimes used dismissively of prophets. These are career soldiers, and to them a prophet running through camp is a nuisance. You know how those people are.

Jehu deflects at first. They press him. He tells them. And then they do something that requires explanation for us.

They take off their cloaks and lay them on the bare steps for Jehu to stand on, then blow the trumpet and shout that Jehu is king. A cloak was a serious possession. It was a coat, a blanket, and a bedroll. Laying it on the ground under someone was a public act of submission and support. It is the same custom you see on Palm Sunday when the crowds lay their cloaks on the road in front of Jesus.

So the anointing happened behind a closed door where no one saw it, and the public recognition happens minutes later in the open where everyone did.

Part Three: How Jehu Turned Out

Here is where we have to be careful, because if we stop at verse 13 we will draw the wrong conclusion.

Jehu carried out the assignment. He did it completely. The house of Ahab fell. Jezebel died at Jezreel exactly as it had been spoken. Jehu then gathered the prophets of Baal and destroyed them, and organized Baal worship in Israel came to an end.

2 Kings 10:30 NIV

The Lord said to Jehu, “Because you have done well in accomplishing what is right in my eyes and have done to the house of Ahab all I had in mind to do, your descendants will sit on the throne of Israel to the fourth generation.”

Now read the very next verse.

2 Kings 10:31 NIV

Yet Jehu was not careful to keep the law of the Lord, the God of Israel, with all his heart. He did not turn away from the sins of Jeroboam, which he had caused Israel to commit.

Jehu did not turn away from the golden calves at Bethel and Dan. Those calves were set up by Jeroboam generations earlier. They were not foreign gods. They were a corrupted version of worshiping the true God, and they were politically useful because they kept people from traveling south to Jerusalem to worship. Jehu tore down the foreign religion and left the convenient one standing. Verse 31 says plainly that he was not careful to keep the law of the Lord with all his heart.

And there is one more piece. Generations later, the prophet Hosea names his own son Jezreel, because God intends to hold Jehu's family accountable for the blood shed there.

So we have a man whom God commends for obedience and also holds accountable for how he carried it out. Jehu obeyed the command and never gave God his heart. He was useful to God without being changed by God.

That is the warning in this passage, and I want to state it as clearly as I can. It is possible to accomplish real things for God while remaining spiritually unchanged. It is possible to be right about somebody else's idolatry and blind to your own, particularly when your own version is the one that is working for you.

Where Does this Lead Us?

Go back to those cloaks on the steps for one moment, because Scripture gives us the same scene twice.

Jehu is acclaimed king on a pile of cloaks, and then he gets into his chariot and drives to Jezreel to carry out a sentence on a guilty family. Centuries later Jesus is acclaimed king on a pile of cloaks, and then he rides into Jerusalem to receive a sentence on behalf of a guilty people.

That is the difference between the two kings, and it is the difference the gospel makes. Jehu was sent to execute judgment. Jesus came to absorb it.

And that matters for both halves of what we have talked about this morning. If you are waiting on God for justice, the cross tells you he takes it seriously enough to pay for it himself. And if you are the one who needs mercy, the cross tells you the account has already been settled.

Application

Three things to take with you.

First: trust God's memory when nothing seems to be happening.

Twenty years passed between Elijah's word in the vineyard and the oil poured on Jehu's head. During those twenty years there was no sign that God was doing anything about Naboth. The people who had cared about that case were dead or had moved on. And God had not forgotten a thing.

Let me be careful about what that does and does not promise you. It does not promise that God will settle your account on a schedule you find acceptable, or that you will be present to watch him do it. Naboth was not. What it does promise is that nothing has been lost or overlooked, and that the God who keeps records is a better prosecutor than you will ever be.

So here is the practical step. If you are carrying something that was never made right, take an actual moment this week, alone, and hand the case to God out loud. Saying it out loud matters, because most of us have only ever thought about it. Then stop rehearsing it. Rehearsing a wound feels like justice and does nothing to the person who wronged you. It only works on you.

Second: do your part, and leave the outcome to God.

Look at the young prophet one more time. His assignment was four steps long. Find the man, pour the oil, say the words, go home. What Jehu did with it after that was between Jehu and God. And remember that God gave Elijah three assignments back in 1 Kings 19. Elijah finished one, died with two of them undone, and God's purposes were not damaged in the slightest.

A lot of us are worn out, and it is usually not because we are doing too much for God. It is because we have picked up a second job he never gave us, which is making sure everything turns out right. You do not only want to tell your brother the truth about his drinking; you want to tell it in a way that guarantees he will not be angry with you. You do not only want to raise your children in the faith; you want a guarantee about who they will be at twenty five. There is no such guarantee, and reaching for one will wear you down to nothing.

There is an old parable about this that Pete Scazzero uses, written originally by a rabbi named Edwin Friedman.

A man finally receives the opportunity he has waited his whole life for, and to reach it he has to cross a bridge. Halfway over, a stranger stops him. The stranger has a long rope wrapped around his waist, and he politely hands the man one end and asks him to hold it. The man takes it without thinking. And the stranger jumps.

Now he is braced against the railing with another human being hanging at the end of that rope. He calls down instructions. Wrap the rope around yourself and climb, and I will pull from up here. The man below will not do it. He says only one thing: my life is in your hands, and if you let go I will die.

So the man on the bridge is holding two things at once. He is holding the rope, and he is holding the one opportunity he will lose if he stands there forever. He gives the stranger one more chance to climb. And then he says the hardest sentence in the story: I will not take responsibility for your life. Only for my own. That choice is yours, and I am handing it back to you.

Now hear me carefully, because that story can be taken badly. It is not about walking away from people in real trouble. We are told to carry one another's burdens, and this church will keep doing exactly that. It is about a situation some of you know from the inside, where a person will not take one step for themselves and has arranged their life so that their choices are permanently your emergency. You can hold that rope for years. Holding it will not save them, and while your hands are full of it you cannot do the thing God actually gave you to do.

So here is what I am asking. Pick the one thing this week that is genuinely yours. It might be a conversation you have been avoiding since spring. It might be an apology you owe. It might be a word for someone sitting near you today that you have talked yourself out of five times because you are not a Bible teacher. Do that one thing, kindly and clearly, and then stop. The response belongs to God.

Third: find out where your obedience stops.

Jehu tore down Baal and left the calves at Bethel, and the difference between the two was cost.

I want to hand you a better question than the one we usually ask ourselves. We ask, do I love God? And all of us say yes, and the conversation ends there, and nothing changes. Try this one instead: Where have I obeyed God right up to the point where it would cost me something, and then quietly stopped?

For some of us that is money. We give, and it is real giving, and the amount has not moved in nine years no matter what happened to our income. For some of us it is a relationship.

We have forgiven everyone that is reasonable to forgive, and there is one person we have decided is the exception. For some of us it is a habit we have privately agreed to keep, the one we call our one thing. And for a few of us it is a job or a schedule that is slowly costing us our family, and we know it, and we have not touched it because it pays well.

Sit with that question long enough for the Spirit to answer it. The first thing that comes to mind is usually the safe answer. Wait for the second one.

Then do one thing with it. Tell one person. Not the everyone you know, just one person, someone who cares enough to ask you about it again in a month. The calves at Bethel stood for generations because nobody who had the power to remove them ever wanted to remove them badly enough. Do not let that be the story of whatever God shows you today.

Do not settle for being useful to God. Ask him to change you.

Let us pray.