Bible teaching on 2 Chronicles 21–24: kings, a queen, and God's faithfulness
A sermon from Latimer Church working through 2 Chronicles 21:4–24:7, covering the reigns of Jehoram, Ahaziah, and Athaliah, and the rescue of the young king Joash.
Summary
This is a sermon by a pastor at Latimer Church — most likely James de Costobadie (Costa) — preaching through 2 Chronicles 21:4–24:7. The sermon traces three figures: King Jehoram, whose reign is described as a wasted life marked by fratricide, spiritual rebellion, and a gruesome death "to no one's regret"; King Ahaziah, whose brief reign ended in death through association with the doomed house of Ahab; and Athaliah, Ahab's daughter, who seized the throne of Judah and attempted to destroy the entire royal line. The sermon argues that these narratives illustrate two foundational lessons of the Old Testament: that humanity cannot save itself, and that God can do what humanity cannot. The near-extinction of the Davidic line under Athaliah is presented as a recurring satanic strategy to destroy the line through which God's ultimate king — Jesus — would come, and the survival of the infant Joash is held up as evidence that God's purposes cannot be defeated even in the darkest moments.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction: Why ancient Israelite history matters on a Sunday morning
James de Costobadie: If you're here and today is your first day at church — you've never really been to a church before — you might wonder what on earth we're doing here. This is a Sunday morning, and we've just had a reading about some Israelite kings who lived about two and a half thousand years ago, and how the bowels fell out from one of them, and he died a horrible death to no one's regret. You might think: why would you spend a few minutes on a Sunday morning thinking about that?
Well, what we're going to see today is how this passage — which is a bit of ancient history — actually reflects the lessons of the Old Testament. The first two-thirds of the Bible contains a lot of words, a lot of pages, a lot of books. But at the end of the day, it teaches just a few great lessons, of which these are two.
First of all, the Old Testament teaches us that humanity cannot save itself. We cannot self-improve. We cannot change ourselves. It doesn't matter what you do to the Israelites — it doesn't matter if you change their leadership, or increase their number, or change their geographical location, or increase their resources — they are always the same. They always revert to type. They always wander away from God, because naturally that's what we're like. Humanity cannot save itself.
And then the second great lesson is that God can do what we cannot do. Think of how it was God in the time of Noah who saved Noah and his family through the ark. Think of how it was God who blessed one person, Abraham, and through him the whole world. Think of how it was God at the time of the Exodus who brought out his people so that they'd be able to worship him. Chronicles was written to teach the people after the exile these two great truths: that humanity cannot save itself, we cannot self-improve, and secondly, that God is able to do what we cannot. In other words, the grace of God is greater than our failings.
Now, those two lessons come out in each of the three main figures we're going to look at this morning — which is in fact not three kings, but two kings and then an interesting lady.
Jehoram: a wasted life
So let's have a look at the first king, Jehoram. Jehoram comes in chapter 21, and his is the tale of a wasted life.
Jehoram was the son of Jehoshaphat, who we read about last week. Jehoshaphat was a good man, a good king — he followed the ways of the Lord. Jehoram therefore had the privileges of a spiritual upbringing. He knew the word of the Lord. He knew the ways of the Lord. He knew the responsibilities that the kings of Israel had to help the country, the nation, walk in the ways of the Lord.
When you read back to chapter 21 and verse 3, you see how his father Jehoshaphat had wisely provided for him and his siblings. Chapter 21, verse 3: their father had given them many gifts of silver and gold and articles of value, as well as fortified cities in Judah, but he had given the kingdom to Jehoram because he was the firstborn son.
So what Jehoshaphat did — in one of his later, very wise moves — was a bit of succession planning. He knows that only one of his descendants can be king, and that's going to be Jehoram because he's the firstborn. But he doesn't want sibling rivalry to explode in unhappiness after his death, so he takes steps beforehand to make sure that each of the other children gets their share of the estate, so to speak. He gave them many gifts of silver and gold and articles of value, as well as fortified cities in Judah — because who doesn't like a few fortified cities in life? So it wasn't like they were all stripped bare and Jehoram gets everything. No — he's the king, but the others get their share as well.
Now, unfortunately, Jehoram didn't quite see it that way, and his first move when he becomes king is to butcher all his brothers, as well as any other perceived threats to the throne. Verse 4: when Jehoram established himself firmly over his father's kingdom, he put all his brothers to the sword along with some of the princes of Israel.
Jehoram was 32 years old when he became king — in other words, old enough to know better — and he reigned in Jerusalem for eight years. He walked in the ways of the kings of Israel, as the house of Ahab had done, for he married a daughter of Ahab.
So he kills his siblings — a move that was rather ironic, because it actually set in motion a chain of events that would ultimately lead to the near obliteration of his own line. And at the heart of the problem, verse 6, is the problem of the human heart: he walked in the ways of the kings of Israel. That's not a good comment, by the way. The kings of Israel in the north had wandered away from God. They were enemies of God. That's how bad it had become — the people of God had become enemies of God, led by the dreadful King Ahab. And Jehoram, instead of going to war against the enemies of God in the north as he should have done, wanted to be like them.
So he rebels against all the promises given to David. Here is the son who goes against everything his parents stood for. It's a tragedy, a sad thing in life, where you have a child who actually robs their parents. That actually happened to a friend of mine who had a child who was off the rails. They came home one day — the children at this point were in their later teens — and the house had been ransacked and various precious items stolen. When the police did their investigation, they found it was their son who had stolen from the parents and sold their goods. Now, that's what Jehoram does here against Jehoshaphat, as he walks in the ways of Ahab.
The generational consequences of spiritual compromise
But what you do see here is a way in which Jehoshaphat had actually not done him any favours. You see how Jehoram married a daughter of Ahab. You may remember from last week that Jehoshaphat was a good man and a godly king, but he had one repeated character flaw: he kept making alliances — unwise alliances with the north — in a way he never should have done. And here now he's paying the consequences, because his son chooses to marry Ahab's daughter in a way he never should have done. Which perhaps teaches us that spiritual compromise doesn't stay contained to the generation that makes it. You cannot just box it in. It often has consequences for the generations that follow — which is an incentive to every parent to walk in the ways of the Lord.
Any of us who are parents here, we know that you cannot control the outcome for your kids. The outcome of our kids is in God's hand. We can't control that. But we can contribute towards it. No parent would say it makes no difference what I do — it does make a difference, even if it's not a straight-line kind of difference. And here is the encouragement from these words — encouragement in a negative way — that Jehoshaphat's choices actually did carry on into the generation below.
The single greatest determinant for whether our kids have an appetite for the word is whether we have an appetite for the word of God. The single greatest factor in how they treat church is how we treat the family of God and how we speak about it. Now, absolutely, it is not a straight line. We know we can't control the outcome. There are many people at Latimer who pray dearly for their children who are not in the place they would want them to be, and we rejoice in the grace of God that is greater than anything we do right or wrong. But nonetheless there is a lesson here for those who have children at home: to set the example that we would want for them.
Elijah's letter and Jehoram's judgment
Okay. Now Jehoram receives a letter from Elijah. Remember, the prophet Elijah is up in the north — that's where he focuses his ministry. He is flat out telling Ahab he's on the wrong track. And that's what he does. But in between times, he finds the time and space to write a letter down to Jehoram in the south. The letter is an indictment of Jehoram's reign and speaks about the judgment that God is going to bring.
Verse 14: "The Lord is about to strike your people, your sons, your wives and everything that is yours with a heavy blow. You yourself will be very ill with a lingering disease of the bowels until the disease causes your bowels to come out."
Oh gosh. Who would want to know? Well, straight away we find that in the way it's written, the judgment is enacted. In addition to the enemies in the south and north, they now have the Philistines to the west — verse 16 — and the Arabs to the east coming at them. In other words, the Davidic kingdom is shrinking here in judgment. And then Jehoram suffers the personal maladies that the prophet had warned him of — sounds absolutely terrible — and dies in great pain.
We read in verse 20 that he passed away to no one's regret. What an awful epitaph to have on your tombstone: to no one's regret. Well, that was Jehoram. Because when a person wraps themselves up in evil, no one's sad when they depart this world. Jehoram spurned the privileges that were given to him — which is a warning to us as well.
A lot of us here have grown up with spiritual privileges, or have been part of a Bible-teaching church for a long time. Jehoram contains a warning not to waste what we have been given, not to turn away with a hard heart, not to allow sin to take root in our hearts. Jehoram perhaps found that old saying to be true: that sin will take you further than you want to stray, it will keep you longer than you want to stay, it will cost you more than you want to pay. It always seems like the sugar-coated pill at the beginning, but turns out to be a pill of poison. That was Jehoram. His was a wasted life.
The lamp that would not go out
And yet — and yet — the lamp would still burn.
Verse 7: Nevertheless, because of the covenant the Lord had made with David, the Lord was not willing to destroy the house of David. He had promised to maintain a lamp for him and his descendants forever.
In other words, even though Jehoram was good for nothing, God remained faithful. And to the Israelites who are reading Chronicles after the exile, yes, there is the warning here not to waste their privileges. But there's also an encouragement that God would look after his dynasty and that it would prevail, irrespective of how things looked and how desperate they seemed. The lamp would continue to burn even in the dark moments of redemptive history.
Which reminds us that God has a plan to have his Son on a throne forever. And sure enough, in our lives it doesn't always feel that way. It doesn't seem that way. We have times of boredom or puzzlement or confusion or maybe rebellion. But we should remember that God has a plan he will one day bring to completion. Even you and I in our sinfulness are not able to snuff out that plan. Praise be to God — we can't save ourselves, but God will do for us what we cannot do. Praise be for the grace of God, which is greater than all of our sin.
Athaliah: the tactics of a wicked foe
That then leads us on to Ahaziah — or more to the point, Athaliah — who is the rather interesting lady who comes in next. Athaliah: the tactics of a wicked foe.
Despite the abysmal leadership of Jehoram, the people of Judah still chose his son Ahaziah to be their next king. Sometimes people are so conditioned that they just go with the flow anyway. The biggest problem for Ahaziah, the next king and son of Jehoram, was his mother, Athaliah, who we read was fully committed to Baal worship — and who we'll return to in just a moment.
Foolishly, Ahaziah copied his grandfather Jehoshaphat and made the same mistake in joining the war with the north against Ramoth Gilead. But unlike Jehoshaphat, he didn't escape, and instead paid the ultimate cost for his folly with his own life.
We read how events unfolded in chapter 22, verse 7. Have a look there: Through Ahaziah's visit to Joram — he visits his uncle — God brought about his downfall. When Ahaziah arrived, he went out with Joram to meet Jehu, son of Nimshi, whom the Lord had anointed to destroy the house of Ahab. While Jehu was executing judgment on the house of Ahab, he found the princes of Judah and the sons of Ahaziah's relatives who had been attending Ahaziah, and he killed them. He then went in search of Ahaziah, and his men captured him while he was hiding in Samaria. He was brought to Jehu and put to death.
Oh dear. So what happens here is that God has an instrument of judgment against the north, against Ahab — and that instrument is this man Jehu, who wields the sword. Unfortunately, Jehu got a bit carried away and, slightly overzealous, carried on with that judgment into the south as well. And so he ends up killing Ahaziah and Ahaziah's children.
Now, the cash value of that was that he very nearly eliminated any heirs to God's throne. If you've been following Chronicles, you'll know that the whole key to God's kingdom is the king. How could you have a kingdom without a king? You have to have a king on the throne. But now there is a real danger — there is no king and no heirs. It's a disaster.
And this was written for people later on, after the exile, hundreds of years later, who themselves had no king. They must have really chimed in with this. It was a time when God's promises must have seemed up in the air. It looked as though the sin of the nation had defeated God's purposes. And the impression was only strengthened once Athaliah got to work.
So let's get on to Athaliah. She is Ahaziah's mother, the daughter of Ahab — so she doesn't have a great line to come from. After the demise of her son, she takes matters into her own hands. She strategically sought to destroy all the royal offspring in order to assume Judah's throne for herself.
When you think about it in Bible terms, this has been a tactic of the devil right from the beginning — to try to destroy the line of salvation. That's what the devil tries to do. You remember how during the time of Pharaoh, Pharaoh was moved to kill all the Hebrew sons in Egypt. During the days of Esther, the entire Jewish nation faced extermination at the hands of Haman. When Jesus arrived, you remember how King Herod ordered all Jewish sons in the region to be put to death. And the book of Revelation, at the end of the Bible, pictures the devil as a dragon ready to destroy Israel's promised child. So trying to destroy the line of God's ultimate king is a long-held strategy of the devil.
And for six long winters, it looked as though Athaliah might have succeeded. Because for the first time in history, there's no one on the Davidic throne. The only qualified leaders were now in the tombs in Jerusalem — dead and buried. The mighty God of Israel, Yahweh, seemed to be defeated. To Jews who were alive at the time, it must have seemed like total defeat when Athaliah