Sermon on 2 Chronicles 14–16: King Asa and the path to spiritual renewal
A sermon from Latimer Church on what King Asa's reign teaches Christians about seeking God, removing idols, building the kingdom, and trusting in God rather than themselves.
Summary
This is a sermon delivered at Latimer Church, most likely by James de Costobadie (Costa), working through 2 Chronicles 14:2–16:14. The sermon uses the reign of King Asa as a framework for understanding how spiritual renewal happens — both individually and corporately. The preacher draws four practical lessons from Asa's life: seeking the Lord, removing false gods and sin, building up the kingdom, and trusting God rather than one's own resources. The sermon closes with a cautionary note from chapter 16, where Asa — after decades of faithfulness — fails to trust God under pressure and does not finish well. The preacher ultimately points beyond Asa to Jesus as the one who perfectly embodies all four qualities and who, through his Spirit, can bring about genuine change in believers.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction: A spiritual health check
One of the privileges of middle age is the annual health check — get the bloods done, take the blood pressure, stand on the scales. Hang on a second, they must be wrong. Let's readjust those. And of course it's all for good reason, because the body's systems naturally deteriorate over time, and aided by poor habits which can creep in, we can find ourselves on a trajectory we really wouldn't want to stay on. The good news is that the doctor attending to us is not just there to hand over the poor results we feared, or to laugh at us in our overweight malaise — he or she is actually there to help us.
Now, I wonder if you were to undergo a current spiritual health check, how you would do this morning. Love for the Lord — what's that like? Love for people generally — what's that like? Love for the Lord's people in particular — how are you doing on that? Thankfulness and gratitude to God running through your life each day — how's that going? Hunger for his word — ravenous? What's your appetite like? Hatred of sin — find it repulsive in your own life? How are you doing on that? Appetite for good deeds — how's that going?
I think many of us might feel a little bit nervous if we were to be assessed, all the more so if someone were to leak the results and make them public, sort of publish them on the internet or something. But good news is at hand, because today we are meeting someone who can actually help us, and that person is this ancient king Asa.
Who is King Asa?
The reason that Asa can help us is that he was a spiritual reformer — that is, he had a concern not just for his own spiritual health but for those around him too. He was the king of the kingdom, the king that God had appointed, so he had a responsibility for others, and it's a responsibility that in God's providence we can benefit from as well as the Lord's people. That's why he can teach us how spiritual renewal can come about.
As it turns out, King Asa is someone we can mostly learn positively from — that's chapters 14 and 15 — with the unfortunate caveat that towards the end of his reign he rather took his eyes off the ball and represents something of a cautionary tale, which comes in chapter 16. So let's have a look at this together. We'll have to be selective because his reign covers three chapters, but we'll focus on some bits and miss out others.
Chapters 14 and 15 speak very positively about King Asa. The headline statement comes in chapter 14 and verse 2: Asa did what was good and right in the eyes of the Lord his God. Now imagine that on your tombstone: "This person did what was good and right in the eyes of the Lord his God." Pretty good, isn't it? Billy Graham on his tombstone has the words, "Preacher of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ." Most of us can't copy that — we're not preachers. His wife, Ruth Graham, had the words, "End of construction. Thank you for your patience" — clever. But maybe this is the best of the lot for a follower of our God, who himself is good and righteous: to be a person who is good and right in the eyes of the Lord his God.
Chapter 14 revolves around a war where the Lord takes control and shows himself to be the great warrior God, after Asa cries out for help. Chapter 15 begins with the Spirit of God commissioning a man named Azariah, who goes out to meet King Asa. Often the kings don't listen to the prophets, but Asa does listen to him — his ears are attuned to what he says — and spiritual renewal takes place in the country.
So in the trajectory of the kings, which is mostly downhill, Asa actually represents for the most part a brief uptick. And here are four things that we learn from him about how to bring about spiritual renewal in our own lives and also for us as a church together. Four things that Asa did — four verbs.
First: He sought
First of all, he sought. To seek — as in to seek the Lord — is the word that stands out from these chapters more than any other. It comes nine times in these three chapters. So for example, chapter 14 verse 4: he commanded Judah to seek the Lord. Or the advice of Azariah the prophet, who says in chapter 15 verse 2, "If you seek him, he will be found by you." And then clearly Asa does seek him together with all the people, because a little bit later on in chapter 15 verse 12, we read that they entered into a covenant to seek the Lord — meaning that they came back to the Lord and they obeyed his commands.
Now, it's instructive that when Azariah speaks to Asa in chapter 15, seeking the Lord is the first thing that he tells him to do. "If you seek him, he will be found by you." And that teaches us a valuable lesson, which is this: that spiritual renewal for us individually or as a church begins not with doing more things, or trying to summon more energy to fight sin a bit more actively in areas we're hopelessly failing, or serving more, or being better in some way, or giving more. Rather, spiritual renewal begins with seeking the Lord. Because the real problem in life is not how we're living — it's who we're following. It's when our eyes and our hearts and our minds drift away from the Lord. That's the root of the problem.
Now, if you're here this morning and you're not yet a Christian, I want to make this really clear, because sometimes people imagine that God in the Bible just wants us to be better. We've all heard of the Ten Commandments — surely that's what God wants, to just follow a few more of the commandments or follow them a bit better, or reform our lives in that sort of way, cut out a few of our worst habits and do a bit better in life. And we think that's what he wants. We're completely mistaken. What we don't understand is that I can't even live up to my own poor standards, let alone God's almighty, holy standards.
What we need to do is not try and be better people. What he calls us to do is to seek him — to come back to him first of all. Think of Jesus, who invited people and said, "Whoever comes to me I will never drive away." That's where spiritual renewal begins. It actually begins with a relationship. It begins with turning around, stopping walking away from God, and coming back to him, and putting our faith in Jesus — Jesus who has his arms wide open to us on the cross and accepts anyone, whatever background, whatever they've believed up to this point, however they've lived up to this point. He wants us to come back to him with all of our muck and filth and disappointment and all of that, and to allow him to cleanse us by his death.
Well, here's the message for every Christian as well: that spiritual renewal in our own lives begins with coming back to him. What does the New Testament say? "Come near to God and he will come near to you." And over a period of time in life it's actually very easy to wander away from God a bit. I speak to people in this church and in this congregation who have been through some tough things in life, who carry some hard things in life, and when you carry a few scars, your eyes can drop down and we can take our eyes off the Lord. Or maybe we find ourselves wandering away because we got into patterns of behaviour that we know we shouldn't have done. Again, our eyes are taken off the Lord, and perhaps we feel a bit shameful about it, and so we kind of give him the cold shoulder — by accident as much as anything else. What we need to hear is these words: to seek the Lord. Because if you seek him, he'll come back to us. He wants us to come to him first of all. And that's the first and the most important thing that Asa can teach us — most important because everything else flows out of it.
Second: He removed
First of all he sought, then secondly he removed. Following the Lord means following his ways, learning to love what he loves — that means nurturing some things positively — but it also means getting rid of some things, learning to hate what he hates and then getting rid of those things.
So chapter 14 verse 3 — have a look down. Asa removed — what did he remove? The foreign altars and the high places. He smashed down the sacred stones and he cut down the Asherah poles. The Asherah poles were symbols of Canaanite fertility, of the fertility goddess Asherah in the form of a tree or a tree trunk. And the Asherah pole really represented the kind of tree of life in the Canaanite religion. In other words, this is where they found their security, where they found their identity, and found their hope. In Deuteronomy chapter 7 verse 5, Asherah poles were declared to be an object of false worship, which the Israelites needed to destroy when they came into the land of Canaan, because they needed to be clear that the Lord their God — the Lord is one. There's only one God, not ten gods, not sixty gods — one God. And so they should have one love: one Lord, one love, an undivided love with their heart. And so every other false god needed to go — needed to be cut down. Get out the chainsaw, break it up, put it in the fire. And that's what Asa does.
Now, you read it on the page and you think, that's easy. Easy? The people were in love with these things. That's what they were all about. It's not easy to go in and say, "Sorry chaps, the party's over, this thing's going. We're cutting it down, we're getting rid of it." I mean, this is what we built the nation's life around. This is what we all think is really important. And Asa goes in and says, no — it needs to go.
Now, you see how Asa is emboldened to do this. Have a look at chapter 15 and verse 8: "When Asa heard these words, the words of the prophecy of Azariah son of Oded the prophet, he took courage." Isn't that interesting? He heard the clarity of the word of God and made a decision. It's no good being passive in the face of sin. You have to be active. He took courage. And it takes courage to fight sin, because we rely on those things. That's what an idol is — the thing in which we find our security. It's our prop, or it's our medication in life. It's our comfort. It's the thing which controls our decision-making. It's the thing that makes us feel alive. That's why idols draw us in. That's the attraction — they seem to offer what we need. But they never do, because the promises are empty and we only end up craving more of the same to fill the same need.
Well, King Asa shows us the way here. He shows that he sought the Lord by cutting down the false gods in the country. There's no hedging of bets here — it was decisive. So decisive, in fact, that he even takes action against his own family member because of their false worship. Have a look at chapter 15 verse 16: "King Asa also deposed his grandmother Maka from her position as queen mother, because she had made a repulsive image for the worship of Asherah. Asa cut it down, broke it up, and burned it in the Kidron Valley."
Asa's grandmother Maka was Rehoboam's wife. She was the matriarch of the family. She'd been in this position for decades. Now, you know your grandmother — you look up to your grandmother. You wouldn't do anything against your grandmother. Asa here takes action. She's the queen of the country, she's in this position of influence, and she's leading people astray. And he says it's not good enough — she needs to go, because she's made this repulsive image. And he cuts it down. She says, "Oh, you know, dear, what are you doing? That's my Asherah — that's my tree." And he says, "Oh, sorry, Granny" — gets out the chainsaw, gone, broke it, and burned it in the Kidron Valley. Because it was repulsive.
Now, let's have a think about this. Let me ask you: what have you removed from your life because it's repulsive in the eyes of the Lord? And I don't mean your grandmother. What sin have you removed? There must be something, if you've been a Christian for a period of time, unless you're perfect. So what is it? Or if you can't think of one, why can't you think of one? Is there nothing that you have needed to get rid of from your life? Of course there is. But here is a sign of spiritual complacency — when we can't identify what it is. Don't worry, the people around you probably can. But when we ourselves can't identify what's wrong with us, we've got a problem. So we need to open our eyes. We need to ask God to show us: what is it that needs to go in our lives? Is it greed? Is it pride? Is it covetousness? Is it materialism? Is it selfishness? Is it self-reliance? Is it wrong-headed views of God? Or is it simply that desire to do whatever we want with our life — putting us back in charge, that worship of self which the culture encourages us to do, and which God finds repulsive?
What is it that you need to remove from your life to show that you're seeking the Lord? There must be something. We'll pray that God would help us to do that.
Asa shows us the way — even if it affects family relationships. You remember how Jesus said, "If a person doesn't hate their father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, he cannot be my disciple." He's speaking there in hyperbole, but it's a point well made: that unless you have a fundamental preference for me, even above members of your family, you cannot follow me. In other words, one Lord, one love — he must come first.
And for some of us that may be really difficult, because we're in a family where it's just sort of tossed out there that tolerance is the way forward, and we find ourselves actually having to say, "I don't think that's right — Jesus is the only way." Or we're in a family where career is assumed to be the most important thing, and actually we have to get a grip on this and say, "Actually, it isn't the most important thing. I know it may have been to my parents, but it's not to me. This is the most important thing."
Let me give you a humorous little illustration. I remember the preacher Vaughan Roberts speaking years ago. Vaughan became a Christian when he was 17, and as a teenager he loved sport — lived for sport. So he's got all these books: cricket books, biographies, all the rest of it. When he's 17 he becomes a Christian — guess what? He throws them all out. He said his mother — I mean, can you imagine, as a mum, what's happened, what's undone? And he said, looking back, he said, "I sort of wish I still had them now, but at the time it was the right thing to do, because that was the thing I was living for. That was the thing that was most important to me." So sometimes you have to draw a line in the sand and say, "Enough — now I'm living for the Lord, this is more important than that." We have to say, "I'm making a change, making a decision."
I wonder what making a fundamental preference for Jesus would mean for you, and what you need to remove from your life.
Third: He built up
Thirdly, Asa built up. He didn't just go around as the sort of destructive chainsaw king of the ancient world. Yes, there were things to be removed from the kingdom, but then he built up positively. Because that's what God does — sure, he takes away from us the things that need to be taken away, he changes the things that need to be changed, but then replaces them with better things. God replaces bad things with good things.
And that's what Asa does here. So for example, have a look down at chapter 14 and verse 6: "He built up the fortified cities of Judah, since the land was at peace. No one was at war with him during those years, for the Lord gave him rest." In other words, he builds up the kingdom which God was building — he's the king, and he's building up the kingdom which God himself was building. Or chapter 15, at the end of verse 8: "He repaired the altar of the Lord that was in front of the portico of the Lord's temple." So Asa as the king gets to work building in line with God's promises.
And there's a lesson there for us: spiritual renewal comes when we devote ourselves to the building of the kingdom of God through the gospel of Jesus. God is at work in this world, building his kingdom. The way he does it is not bricks and mortar, it's not geographical boundaries, it's not the land of Israel or any other land. He's building his kingdom, which is a spiritual kingdom. Remember how Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world." It's a spiritual kingdom that people come into as they believe in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and submit to King Jesus. And then, amazingly, he uses ordinary people like you and me — us who are here — to be involved in that process of building the kingdom: by using our talents and our gifts in the service of the King, by opening our mouths and speaking about the King as we speak about Jesus to our friends, neighbours, or family, and invite them to hear about Jesus and talk to them about him, as we use our gifts in the service of the gospel.
What we're doing is this: God is using us to build his kingdom, one brick at a time, as people all over the world come to believe in Jesus. And it's such a privilege of life, and it turns our life around when we see our lives in that light. Here is the grand purpose of life — to be involved in the building of the kingdom which will last for eternity, not just last for twenty years or thirty years or whatever, but last for eternity.
I really hope that on a Sunday night when you go to bed, you are excited about the people that you saw in church that day, about the people that God is building this kingdom with. I hope that when you get the opportunity to meet with non-Christians — people at work, people you meet along the road in life — you pray for them afterwards. No one comes into our life by accident. God puts them there, and we're able to pray for them that God would turn their life around for eternity. Now, what could be more enjoyable in life? What could be more exciting? What could be a greater adventure in life than to commit ourselves to building that kingdom, so that when our days on earth are done and dusted, there's actually something to show for them? People talk about legacy — but forget the legacy on earth. The legacy is an eternal legacy. That's what we're praying that God will bring about.
As we move to this new building — I mean, what would we rather be building? Building our own kingdom on earth, or building the eternal kingdom that will last forever? So spiritual renewal comes about when we focus on the things that God is focused on, particularly the building of his kingdom.
Fourth: He trusted
And then fourthly, he trusted. So he sought, he removed, he built, and he trusted. We saw this from King Abijah last week, but it's equally true of King Asa, and it lies at the heart of this great battle in chapter 14.
Just notice the resources that Asa has at his disposal in verse 8. He's got an army of 300,000 from the tribe of Judah — and we're told that they've got large shields and spears — and then he's got 280,000 from the tribe of Benjamin, armed with small shields and with bows. Okay, so he's got 580,000 troops, large shields, small shields, spears and bows — what we would call the full military kit. He's got everything, and he's got tons of troops. But rather than trusting them, rather than trusting his resources, what does he do instead? He prays. And look at the words of the prayer, verse 11: "Then Asa called to the Lord his God and said, 'Lord, there is no one like you to help the powerless against the mighty. Help us, Lord our God, for we rely on you, and in your name we come against this vast army in front of us.'"
Now, this battle that they fought should help us to think of the spiritual battle in which we're engaged. We are in a war every day, because we live in this material world, but alongside the material world there is a spiritual world where powerful forces are against us. They are invisible but they are real, headed by Satan himself. You may know that in the New Testament, Satan is pictured like a roaring lion looking for whoever he may devour. In other words, he's trying to gobble us up — he's trying to take us away from Jesus.
I don't know how you see yourself in life, but the thought of going one-on-one against a lion — you'd say our chances are slim, wouldn't you? I mean, you go to Irana Park and you wander through the wrong gates and you wander into the enclosure and you think, "Oh, hang on a second, I don't know if I'm supposed to be this side of the wire." Yes, you're in danger — because that's what lions do. They gobble us up. Well, that's what it's like spiritually speaking.
And Asa teaches the way. He trusted in God. Look at how he uses those words: "There is no one like you to help the powerless against the mighty." He realises that he is powerless. Do we realise the same? There's an enemy against us who's trying to take us away from Jesus. He'll use anything he can — he'll use good things in life, bad things in life, he'll use success in life, he'll use loneliness in life, disappointment in life. It doesn't matter to Satan — it's all the same, as long as he can do the final thing, which is take us away from Jesus. He is the lion who's trying to eat us.
So we need to see ourselves as powerless, because that's what we are against him — until we come to God, who is powerful. We need to pray to him, trust him, asking that God would strengthen us to follow him all the days of our life. Remember how in the Lord's Prayer — we said it earlier — Jesus steers us away from making this mistake of self-reliance: "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one." Trust in him and you will not fall, for he is able to hold us when we have no strength for ourselves.
So spiritual renewal happens when we trust in him and not in ourselves. "Cast all your anxiety on God, because he cares for you," says the New Testament. Cast your anxiety on God — in other words, realise that we are powerless for so many situations in life, but if we spread out those situations and cast them before God, then he's able to help us in our time of need.
I don't know what you're facing at the moment, and what difficulties God in his wisdom has brought into your life. But in facing those, don't try and face them alone — that's not how it's supposed to be. Rather, realise that we are the powerless but we have a powerful God. And if in the middle of the night, when we're thinking of the worst-case scenario that might come to us, if we spread out our anxieties, then he will bear them for us. We're to trust in him.
So King Asa — he's a great king. He teaches us to seek, to remove, to build, and to trust.
A cautionary tale: Chapter 16
I just want to finish on the cautionary tale from chapter 16, because towards the end of his life, for some reason, he then doesn't do what he did during the rest of his life. Isn't that funny — that you can go all these years and then towards the end go in another direction? And it's a cautionary tale for those of us who've been Christians here for a few decades. You're not safe until you come to the very end of your life.
The trouble in chapter 16 is he stops trusting God. What happens is that Baasha, king of Israel in the north, attacks. And Baasha takes control of this place called Ramah. And Ramah is like a choke point. I mean, you've been following the situation in Iran with the Strait of Hormuz — it's a choke point. Iran knows that it doesn't matter how many tanks and planes America has; they've got their foot on the throat. Well, here, Baasha has his foot on Asa's throat, because Asa's in the south, and Baasha can now control the flow of goods and people and everything from the north to the south.
Asa's under pressure. But instead of doing what he's always done — which is trust the Lord — he goes in another direction and makes an alliance with someone else, Aram, to come and invade Baasha and force Baasha to divert his forces. The funny thing is, we're told he's actually successful in that — militarily it was a good strategy. But spiritually, it wasn't. And at that time, verse 7, Hanani the seer — like a prophet — says, "Because you relied on the king of Aram and not on the Lord your God, the army of the king of Aram has escaped from your hand." He didn't trust God. Under pressure, he didn't trust God as he should have done.
And later in his life, it's a sad ending. Verse 12: in the thirty-ninth year of his reign, Asa goes through some physical difficulties in old age — he's afflicted with a disease in his feet. Even though the disease was severe, even in his illness he didn't seek help from the Lord, but only from the physicians. He should have done both — go to the physicians, go to the doctor, absolutely, God's provided that — but trust the Lord at the same time. And he doesn't. So he doesn't finish well.
And verse 14: he literally digs his own grave, and he's buried in the tomb that he himself had cut.
Pointing beyond Asa to Jesus
In the end, perhaps Asa isn't any better than us. He's just like us. And that's really the problem — he is too like us. But he does help us to see Jesus, who is different to us.
Jesus, who always sought the Lord his God. Jesus, who removed the sin from the house of the Lord — remember, turning over the money tables. Jesus, who built the kingdom of God and has been building it for the last two thousand years through the work of the gospel, through his Spirit. Jesus, who trusted — Jesus didn't make an alliance with Satan to bring about the kingdom; he trusted God to do what he had promised.
Asa can't actually help us as we need him to. But Jesus, through his Spirit who works within us, can change us from the inside out to be more like him. That's why Jesus holds the key. Jesus will teach us to seek him. Jesus will teach us to remove, and motivate us to remove, every obstacle to living for him. Jesus will help us to prioritise the building of the kingdom. Jesus will enable us to trust him for everything in your life, great and small.