The Wrath of Chemosh and the Sovereignty of God Text: 2 Kings 3:21-27
Introduction: The Hard Providences of War
We live in a soft age. We like our Christianity domesticated, our worship services tidy, and our God predictable. We want a God who fits neatly into our systematic theologies and answers our prayers in ways that always make immediate sense to us. But the God of the Bible, the God who actually runs the world, is not so easily tamed. He is the God of hard providences, of strange victories, and of judgments that fall in ways that rattle our tidy categories. The Scriptures do not hide this from us; they display it in full color, particularly in the historical narratives. These are not just stories to teach moral lessons to children. They are case studies in the absolute, untamed sovereignty of God.
The passage before us is one of the most jarring and difficult in all the historical books. It begins with a miraculous, God-given victory. It ends with the armies of Israel and Judah in a full retreat, and the reason given is a "great wrath" that seems to be generated by a horrific act of pagan idolatry. On the surface, it looks like the god of Moab, Chemosh, won a round against Yahweh. It appears that a desperate, demonic act of child sacrifice had real power, real efficacy, against the people of God. And if that is the case, then we are in real trouble.
But we must never read the Bible on the surface. We must not be lazy readers. God is the author of this story, and He is telling us something profound about the nature of spiritual warfare, the utter depravity of paganism, and the mysterious ways of His own judgment. This is not a story about the power of Chemosh. It is a story about the sovereignty of Yahweh, who can use even the most satanic acts of His enemies to accomplish His own purposes, including the chastisement of His own people. This passage forces us to confront the reality that we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, and that God's control over these powers is absolute, even when He permits their temporary and apparent triumphs.
We are going to see a deceptive victory, a demonic sacrifice, and a divine wrath. And through it all, we must hold fast to the foundational truth that our God works all things, even this, after the counsel of His own will.
The Text
Now all the Moabites heard that the kings had come up to fight against them. And they summoned all who were able to put on armor and older, and they stood on the border. Then they rose early in the morning, and the sun shone on the water, and the Moabites saw the water opposite them as red as blood. Then they said, "This is blood; the kings have surely fought together, and they have struck down one another. So now, Moab, to the spoil!" So they came to the camp of Israel. And the Israelites arose and struck the Moabites. So they fled before them; and they went forward into the land, striking down the Moabites. Thus they tore down the cities; and each one threw a stone on every piece of good land and filled it. And they stopped all the springs of water and felled all the good trees, until in Kir-hareseth they let its stones remain; however, the slingers went about it and struck it. Then the king of Moab saw that the battle was too strong for him, so he took with him 700 men who drew swords, to break through to the king of Edom; but they could not. So he took his oldest son, who was to reign in his place, and offered him as a burnt offering on the wall. And there came great wrath against Israel, and they set out from him and returned to their own land.
(2 Kings 3:21-27 LSB)
A Deceptive Victory (vv. 21-25)
The stage is set for a great battle. The coalition of Israel, Judah, and Edom, having been miraculously supplied with water in the desert by Elisha's prophecy, is now poised to strike Moab. The Moabites muster their forces and prepare for the invasion.
"Then they rose early in the morning, and the sun shone on the water, and the Moabites saw the water opposite them as red as blood. Then they said, 'This is blood; the kings have surely fought together, and they have struck down one another. So now, Moab, to the spoil!'" (2 Kings 3:22-23)
Here we see the hand of God in a beautiful piece of providential irony. The very water God provided to save His people becomes the instrument of deception to destroy their enemies. The early morning sun, hitting the pools of water in the trenches they had dug, creates an optical illusion. The Moabites, knowing that this coalition was a fragile one, jumped to the most logical conclusion. They assumed the kings had turned on each other, a common enough occurrence in the ancient world. Their greed outran their caution. "To the spoil!" they cried, and charged headlong into a trap.
Their assumption was reasonable, but wrong. And this is a critical lesson. The enemies of God operate according to the wisdom of this world, which God has determined to make foolishness. They see the circumstances, they run the political calculus, and they draw conclusions that make perfect sense from a materialistic point of view. But they do not factor in the God who makes water look like blood. They do not account for the God who sits in the heavens and laughs.
The result is a complete rout. The Israelites and their allies rise up and slaughter the charging Moabites, pursuing them into their own land and laying waste to it, just as Elisha had prophesied. They destroy cities, ruin fertile land with stones, stop up springs, and cut down good trees. The victory is total and devastating. It is a clear and undeniable act of God's favor and power. The allied armies are simply the instruments of a judgment spoken by God's prophet.
The Ultimate Depravity (vv. 26-27a)
The Moabite army is crushed, and their king is cornered in the fortress of Kir-hareseth. He makes one last desperate, conventional attempt to break out, but it fails. And this is where the story takes its dark and terrible turn.
"So he took his oldest son, who was to reign in his place, and offered him as a burnt offering on the wall." (2 Kings 3:27a)
We must not read this and simply move on. We must stop and feel the full weight of the horror. This is the absolute nadir of pagan religion. This is the logical end of all idolatry. When you worship something other than the true God, you are, in the final analysis, worshipping a demon. And demons are not benevolent. They are not your friends. They hate you, and they hate your children.
The king of Moab, in his final extremity, does what paganism always does. He offers his most precious possession to his god, Chemosh, in a desperate bid for power. He sacrifices his own son, the heir to his throne, on the city wall in full view of the besieging armies. This is not just an act of war; it is an act of worship. It is the blackest of liturgies. And it reveals the true nature of the gods of the nations. A god who is willing to eat your children will not hesitate to eat you. The true God, our God, gives His only Son for His people. The false gods demand that you give your sons to them.
This is the worldview clash at the heart of all history: Christ or Chemosh. The God who sacrifices Himself, or the god who demands you sacrifice your children. Every society has an ultimate standard, a point past which no appeal is allowed. That standard is the god of that system. For the king of Moab, the god of his system demanded the blood of his son. We should not feel superior, for our own secular, pagan society sacrifices millions of its children on the altar of convenience and sexual freedom. The god is different, perhaps, but the smoke from the sacrifice rises all the same.
The Great Wrath (v. 27b)
This is the verse that has troubled commentators for centuries. The king of Moab performs this unspeakable act, and the immediate result is that "there came great wrath against Israel."
"And there came great wrath against Israel, and they set out from him and returned to their own land." (2 Kings 3:27b)
What are we to make of this? Did Chemosh, this demonic principality, actually muster up some real spiritual power and unleash it on Israel? Did the child sacrifice work? God forbid. To believe that is to fundamentally misunderstand everything the Bible teaches about the absolute sovereignty of God. An idol is nothing in the world, Paul tells us. But he immediately adds that the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons. These spiritual realities are there, but they are utterly subordinate to the Lord Jesus Christ, who made them and who defeated them at the cross.
So, the wrath did not come from Chemosh, as though he were an independent power. The wrath came from God. The text says there was great wrath against Israel. It does not identify the source, but in a world governed by Yahweh, there is only one ultimate source of such things. The satanic act of the Moabite king became the occasion for God's wrath to be expressed against His own people.
Why? The text doesn't explicitly say, and so we must be careful. But we can infer some things. Perhaps the sight of this horror utterly broke the morale of the Israelite army. They were victorious, on the verge of finishing the job, and they were confronted with a level of satanic desperation that horrified them to the core. They saw what true devotion to a demon looks like, and perhaps it exposed the shallow nature of their own devotion to Yahweh. Their revulsion and horror may have translated into a panicked retreat. God's wrath, in this case, would be His giving them over to their own fear and disgust.
Another possibility is that this act of supreme paganism brought the simmering sins of the allied kings to a boil. Remember, this coalition was not exactly a gathering of saints. Jehoram of Israel was a syncretistic idolater, and Jehoshaphat of Judah was constantly being rebuked for his unwise alliances with the northern kingdom. It is possible that God, having used them to execute the first part of His judgment on Moab, now used Moab's final, desperate act to execute a judgment on them. Their campaign was over. God pulled the plug. The victory was intentionally left incomplete as a rebuke to the compromised kings who were leading it.
God's Strange Work
So what does this mean for us? This story is a powerful reminder that God's ways are not our ways. He is always in control, but His control does not look like what we would expect. He can grant a miraculous victory one moment and then ordain a humiliating retreat the next, and be sovereign over both.
This event shows us the true face of the enemy. Our spiritual battle is not against flesh and blood, but against spiritual forces of wickedness that hate God, hate His people, and hate the image of God in every human being. These forces are real, and their worship is bloody and horrific. We see it today in the abortion industry, in the sexual mutilation of children, in the ideologies that seek to erase the distinctions God Himself created. The spirit of Chemosh is very much alive.
But the story also shows us the absolute sovereignty of God over these forces. He can use a sunrise on a puddle of water to rout an army. And He can use the most depraved act of a pagan king to check the advance of His own people. The "wrath" that fell on Israel was not the wrath of Chemosh, but the strange and terrible wrath of God, working through second causes to achieve His own inscrutable purposes. Israel's victory was from God. And Israel's retreat was from God.
This should not cause us to despair, but rather to fear. We serve a great and terrible God. He is a consuming fire. He demands our total allegiance, not the kind of half-hearted, compromised alliances that characterized the kings of Israel and Judah. When we go to war in His name, whether against sin in our own hearts or against the public evils of our day, we must do so with clean hands and a pure heart. For if we do not, God is perfectly capable of granting us a partial victory, only to send us home in confusion and disarray, reminding us that the battle is not ours, but the Lord's, and He will conduct it on His own terms.