Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
We first began with King David, then King Saul, then Asa, and last week we considered the reign of Jehoshaphat. This week we pick up exactly where we left off. Last week was Jehoshaphat, strictly speaking, with his son Jehoram. Jehoram made an arranged marriage between his son and the daughter of King Ahab of Israel, a pagan king. His son became king, and he was son-in-law of Ahab and Jezebel. He ascended to the throne and began his reign, and instead of walking in the way of the Lord, he walked in the way of the kings of Israel, as the house of Ahab had done, for the daughter of Ahab was his wife. That is another way of saying he walked in the way of a pagan king, an evil and immoral man.
Jehoram’s first act, once he was crowned king, was to kill his six brothers to make sure none of them would rise up against him as rivals to the throne. He reigned eight years, during which time the nations around Judah revolted, so Judah was constantly at war. He also led Judah down the path of idolatry and veiled worship once again. He passed away to no one’s regret. 2 Chronicles 21:20 says he was buried in the city of David, but not in the tombs of the kings. In other words, he was such an evil king that he was not even fit to be put in a grave near other evil kings. He was the worst of the worst.
After Jehoram, Ahaziah his youngest son reigned for about a year, with his mother Athaliah as his advisor. Athaliah, widow of Jehoram, was as wicked as she could possibly be. She was truly the daughter of her mother Jezebel, just as ambitious and bloodthirsty as both her mother and her father. She rose up and destroyed all the royal family of the house of Judah. That was the end, though only one of the sons survived: an infant by the name of Joash. He was rescued from the slaughter by his aunt, who was also the wife of Jehoiada the priest, and he was spared the queen’s wrath. Athaliah’s reign lasted about six years, and then she was executed.
It is a spiritual axiom in the Old Testament that the state of the temple is representative of the spiritual state of Judah. When a king is far from the Lord God, Yahweh Elohim, the people follow, and they too are far from the Lord God. And when the king and the people are far from God, the temple is abused, pillaged, neglected, and falls into disrepair. The royal family, pagan as it was, plundered the temple for whatever value was in it and then desecrated it by filling it with idols. Thereafter the temple was largely ignored.
When he was seven years old, Joash was declared king of Judah, and Athaliah was executed so that he could reign without fear. It is written of Joash that he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord all the days of Jehoiada the priest. Notice it did not say he was faithful to the end; it said that as long as he was under the influence and counsel of the high priest, his uncle, the uncle who had raised him and taught him, he did what was right in the sight of the Lord. During the early years of Joash’s reign, under the counsel of his uncle, Joash ordered a major renovation and cleansing of the temple. He also ordered that the temple and its worship be returned to their original purpose: offering sacrifices to the Lord God, Yahweh Elohim. Eventually the remodeling and cleansing was completed, and right worship was restored.
But as always in the Old Testament, that restoration, that reformation, was very short-lived. Jehoiada died, and others moved in to take his place as the king’s new advisors. It just so happened that all the new advisors were worshipers of the pagan gods, so they led Joash down the path of idolatry. He abandoned the worship of the Lord God, Yahweh Elohim, and restored the worship of Asherah and all the idols to the temple. The building had been restored, but the restoration was all but undone. They returned to idolatry, and those sins did not go unpunished.
God sent prophets to call Joash and the people to repentance, but Joash paid no attention to the prophets. So God sent a very unique prophet: Zechariah, the son of Jehoiada, Joash’s cousin, the cousin with whom he had grown up. The thought was that if anybody could get through to Joash, it would most certainly be his beloved cousin Zechariah. 2 Chronicles 24:20: “The Spirit of God came upon Zechariah the son of Jehoiada the priest. He stood before the people and said, ‘This is what God says: Why do you disobey the Lord’s commands? You will not prosper, because you have forsaken the Lord, and He has forsaken you.'”
Joash did not like what Zechariah had said, so he and his advisors decided they would invite Zechariah to the temple, and there the king and his advisors, sometimes called princes, picked up stones and stoned the prophet to death. And as he was being stoned, Zechariah cried out, “May the Lord see and avenge.” That cry echoed two brothers previously: Cain and Abel, one whose offering was acceptable and the other whose was not, one righteous and the other unrighteous, the unrighteous murdering the righteous. And the moment the recently restored and cleansed temple was defiled by the blood of the first prophet killed in the temple, Zechariah.
As for the temple, it was indeed a magnificent building, empty or full, dedicated to God or to Baal. It was an impressive building, but apart from true faith and the sacrifices to the God who instituted them, it was little more than a monument to the kings who built it, the king who restored it, the kings who defiled it over and over again. Its size and engineering were a great wonder in the ancient world. That was the Gospel lesson during Holy Week: even Jesus’ disciples were struck in awe at Herod’s renovation of the temple. “What wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings!” they said to Jesus. Right then and there Jesus put an end to their celebration, telling them that soon the destruction of the temple would come and not one stone would be left upon another.
Joash died in 796 BC, and the temple stood for another 250 years until King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon invaded and raised the temple to the ground, about 586 BC. That was the end of that temple. But the temple was rebuilt in the time of Ezra and expanded by King Herod in the days of Jesus. And that temple too was short-lived, destroyed in 70 AD by the Romans.
Joash the boy king began his reign honorably, doing what was good and right in the sight of God. But like the kings of Israel and many of the kings of Judah, Joash ultimately rebelled. As he grew in confidence in his kingship and his power, he rebelled against the Lord God, the God of his father David. What the children of the Old Testament and the New Testament needed all along was a better king than all the kings that had come before, and especially better than Joash.
We need a king who never rebels against God His heavenly Father, who never did during His earthly ministry. We need a king who from cradle to grave to resurrection was faithful to the one true God, His heavenly Father. We need a King of the Jews who came to fulfill the Law, who was crucified and forsaken in our place. We need a king who will bring with Him, when He comes again, a new heaven and a new earth, a new Jerusalem where people will worship the King face to face. We need a king who will rule over His kingdom with grace and truth, who saves His people from their sins, not leads them into sin. That is what all those other kings did; that is how they lost the favor of God. They led God’s people into false belief and false worship, as we see taking place in churches all over the West today.
We need a king who was faithful from birth to death to resurrection. There in the temple, as an infant, was Jesus, fulfilling the Law, being circumcised and presented as the firstborn Son to the Lord God, Yahweh Elohim. That is the kind of King we need: one who fulfills all righteousness. When the time came for the purification rites required by the Law of Moses, Mary and Joseph took Jesus to Jerusalem to present Him to the Lord, as it is written in the Law of the Lord, “Every firstborn male is to be consecrated to the Lord.”
As Joash restored the temple and took the life of the prophet Zechariah, so King Herod renovated and expanded the temple, but he sought to take the life of Jesus. He was Joash number two. But even as a boy, Jesus was always about His Father’s business, always about the temple, always about the Word, always about saving His neighbor. Remember the family trip to Jerusalem when He was twelve: “Did you not know that I must be about My Father’s business?” At the very beginning of His ministry and at the very end, during Passion Week, zeal for the house of the Lord consumed Jesus. He cleansed the temple, drove out the sellers, overturned the money changers’ tables. He restored the temple to its proper worship. Mark 11:16 tells us He would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the temple grounds, as if He and His Father owned it.
The prophets were sent to prepare Judah for the coming Messiah, but just as the Judeans had rejected the prophets, the Pharisees rejected John the Baptist and Jesus. After waiting centuries, they rejected the Son of David for whom they had waited. When He came to the temple, they crucified Him. Jesus said to them, “Woe to you, for you build the tombs of the prophets, and it was your fathers who killed them. From the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who was killed between the altar and the house of God, yes, I tell you, it shall be charged against this generation.”
Joash conspired to kill the prophet Zechariah, who had been like a brother to him all his life. When Judah put the King of the Jews to death, the King of the Jews became the author and mediator of a new covenant. And Christ did not cry out from the cross as Zechariah did, “Take vengeance.” Rather, Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” The blood of Jesus forgives sins. The blood of Jesus washes away sin and gives eternal life.
Our King, the Lord Jesus Christ, is the true temple, and although His body was destroyed on Good Friday, the temple of His body did not see decay but was raised gloriously on the third day. We too have an eternal temple for which we yearn. Our bodies are His temple, made fit by Him, because our sins have been forgiven. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.