The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
On Ash Wednesday we began our Lenten journey with an examination of the good kings of Judah. We started with the greatest king in all of Judah’s history, King David. Solomon came next, and his reign was regarded as the golden age of Israel, still a united kingdom. Solomon became the richest and most powerful king in all of Israel’s history. He was given the privilege of building Solomon’s temple, wherein God would dwell permanently in the city of Jerusalem.
Like all the kings before and after him, Solomon did some evil and stupid things, but this evening we are moving to one of David’s great-great-grandsons, Solomon’s great-grandson Asa, king of Judah. In 2 Chronicles 14 we read that King Asa did what was right in the eyes of the Lord his God. His accomplishments in the first ten years of his reign are impressive: he removed foreign altars from the temple, tore down memorial stones dedicated to pagan gods, cut down the Asherah poles, commanded Judah to seek the Lord their God and return to the faith of the fathers, to the Ten Commandments and the Torah. He also removed the high places and incense altars dedicated to pagan gods. As a result of returning Judah to the worship of the Lord God, the kingdom of Judah was at peace.
Asa had been preceded by nasty predecessors. Rehoboam was his grandfather, the son of Solomon. The Bible says Rehoboam did evil in God’s sight because he did not set his heart to seek God. The people of Judah did evil in the sight of the Lord and provoked Him to jealousy with their sins. They built high places and memorial stones on every hill. The kingdom was constantly at war, and it ultimately divided between the northern and southern kingdoms.
When Asa ascended to the throne, it was a difficult time: a nation confused about who God was. But a new king meant a new start. 2 Chronicles 14:1 says the land had rest for ten years. Asa thought that rest was due to their fidelity, but the text makes it clear the ten years of peace was a gift from the Lord God, not something they had earned.
When the ten years ended, so did the peace. An army of a million Ethiopians moved to the southern border of Judah, and Asa was outnumbered two to one. There was no way he could defeat them himself, so he turned to the Lord God: “Lord, there is no one besides You to help in the battle between the powerful and those who have no strength. Help us, O Lord our God, for we trust in You, and in Your name have come against this great multitude. O Lord, You are our God; do not let man prevail against You.” And the Lord honored the prayer and delivered the Ethiopians into the hands of Judah, though outnumbered two to one.
Thirty-five years Asa sat on the throne when he faced a new challenge. The northern kingdom of Israel began to prepare for war against Judah and militarized the border. The king of the north was building a mighty fortress at Ramah, a border city. A military installation on that northern border would choke off trade and financially devastate Jerusalem and all of Judah. We would expect, given his previous performance, that Asa would go to the Lord for help. But he did not go to the temple to seek help in prayer or to hear the Word of God. No, he went to the temple to raid the treasury. He brought out silver and gold from the treasury of the house of the Lord and sent it to Ben-hadad in Damascus, in modern-day Syria. He robbed the temple in order to bribe a pagan king for help.
Asa also used that money to hire mercenaries to attack northern Israel, forcing Israel to reallocate its military from the southern border. All using temple money to shed blood: blood money. And the plan worked; he got the desired result. But all was not well in Judah. After leading a reformation of the faith during the first ten years of his reign, and after facing down a million-man Ethiopian army with the Lord’s protection, Asa turned to wealth and power and money. He looted the house of the Lord to pay for protection from a pagan king.
From here things went from bad to worse. Hanani the seer came to call Asa to repentance, and Asa had him thrown into prison. He began to persecute the faithful in Jerusalem who cried out against him. In his later days, Asa grew more hostile to the Word of God. In the thirty-ninth year of his reign, a debilitating disease set in. Yet even in his disease he did not seek the Lord God for help; he went only to the physicians. Even facing death, Asa had given up praying to and trusting in the Lord God. So he died and was buried with his fathers.
On balance, under Asa’s forty-one year reign, the southern kingdom was fairly good, mostly because of those first ten years. But he could not provide a lasting peace. In his later years he trusted more in himself and less in the Lord God. He stole from God to buy a temporal victory with the help of pagan kings. It was against the Law to use temple money for blood, but he did it anyway.
It is a common problem for sinners such as us, even those numbered among the household of faith. In good times and in bad, we have trouble trusting that the Lord will give us our daily bread. When things do not go as we expect, we wonder if God has forgotten us, or worse, if He is inflicting us with troubles. We do not like the hidden will of God. We want to know why we are going through what we are going through and what is in it for us. We want God to explain Himself, like a teenager demanding, “Explain yourself to me.” We would rather see the map of our lives before we live it. But like Asa, we are called to live by faith, not by sight. “For the eyes of the Lord roam throughout the earth, so that He may strongly support those whose heart is completely His.”
That is the difference between Asa and King David. David was called a man after God’s own heart. Asa proved he was not to be counted among those whose heart was set on the Lord God.
But God had promised a kingdom and a King from the line of David. This King would reign on David’s throne forever, and the kingdom itself would last forever. He would be the Prince of Peace of whom Isaiah spoke. The Son of David would come into the royal city and bring everlasting peace to His people. He would take our illnesses, bear our sins, and atone for them by His blood.
He was received as the Son of David and King of Israel on Palm Sunday, to shouts of joy. He entered the temple, but not to take anything from it. Unlike Asa, Jesus did not come for the money. Instead Jesus overturned the tables of the animal sellers and poured out the coins of the money changers. They were corrupt, charging outrageous fees, lining their pockets and those of the priests. They had turned the temple into a robber’s den. But Jesus was turning the house of the Lord back into a house of prayer, the house of His heavenly Father.
The Son of David did not go about looking for money from the temple treasury. One day during Holy Week He looked up and saw the wealthy putting their gifts into the treasury, and He saw a poor widow putting in two coins, and He said, “Truly I say to you, this poor widow put in more than all of them.” The guardians of the temple treasury thought silver and gold were the goal, that they could buy salvation and political influence. But thirty pieces of silver bought far more than they imagined: they paid Judas to betray the King of the Jews, to turn Him over to a pagan governor to be killed. And it worked.
When Judas saw his betrayal, he tried to return the money, but it could not be returned, for it is against the Law to receive blood money. So those who had paid him now refused it. That blood money from the temple treasury, spent to buy the life of the King, brought redemption through the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. By means of thirty pieces of silver from the house of the Lord God, the King of the Jews was hanged on a cross. The Son of David paid the price for peace.
Remember from the Small Catechism: “I believe that Jesus Christ, true God, begotten of the Father from eternity, and also true man, born of the Virgin Mary, is my Lord, who has redeemed me, a lost and condemned creature, purchased and won me from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil, not with gold or silver, but with His holy, precious blood and with His innocent suffering and death.”
Jesus’ kingdom, as He told Pilate, is not of this world. It is called the Church. The King came into this world and still comes in the Word and Sacrament ministry of His Church, His kingdom on earth. It was the King’s blood that brought the peace we enjoy. It is the King’s blood by which, in the stead and by the command of my Lord Jesus Christ, I forgive you all your sins, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. It is the King’s blood that we partake of every time we come to Holy Communion. There is nothing else in the whole wide world that brings true peace between God and man except the blood of the King. The Prince of Peace, the Son of David, David’s Son and David’s Lord. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.