Commentary - 2 Kings 12:1-3

Bird's-eye view

This brief passage sets the stage for the reign of Jehoash, a king whose story is a potent illustration of both covenant faithfulness and the perils of a borrowed, second-hand piety. Here we see the grace of God in preserving the line of David through a boy who should have been murdered, placing him on the throne under the tutelage of a godly priest. This is a picture of godly order, with the priest instructing the king from the law of God. Jehoash's reign begins as a great reformation, a recovery from the Baal-worship of his wicked grandmother Athaliah. For as long as his mentor lives, things go well. But the text provides a crucial and ominous qualification: the high places were not removed. This failure to achieve a thorough reformation, this toleration of syncretism, is the seed of Judah's future trouble and reveals the foundational weakness in the king's own heart. His was a reformation by proxy, and when the proxy was removed, the king's true character, or lack thereof, was revealed. This passage is therefore a study in contrasts: divine preservation and human frailty, external righteousness and internal compromise, the blessing of godly counsel and the danger of an unowned faith.

Outline

Context In 2 Kings

The account of Jehoash's reign comes on the heels of one of the most dramatic episodes in the history of Judah. In the previous chapter, we read of the murderous rampage of the queen mother Athaliah, a daughter of Ahab and Jezebel, who seized the throne and attempted to exterminate the entire Davidic line. But God, in His covenant faithfulness, preserved the infant Jehoash, who was hidden in the temple for six years by his aunt and the high priest, Jehoiada. Chapter 11 recounts the righteous coup d'etat orchestrated by Jehoiada, where the usurper Athaliah was executed and the seven-year-old Jehoash was installed as the rightful king. This was a massive reset for Judah, a return to covenant order after a terrifying flirtation with the paganism of the northern kingdom. Our passage, then, begins the formal record of this new king's reign, a reign born out of revival and reformation, and it immediately establishes the central tension that will define it: the king's outward obedience under the influence of a godly mentor, set against a backdrop of incomplete, and therefore fatal, compromise.

Key Issues

A Tethered Righteousness

The story of Jehoash is the story of a man whose righteousness was tethered to another man. As long as the stake, Jehoiada, was firmly in the ground, the rope held, and Jehoash grazed in the pastures of righteousness. But it was the stake that was righteous, not the one tethered to it. When God, in His providence, pulled up the stake by taking Jehoiada home, Jehoash was free to wander off, which he promptly did, with disastrous results (2 Chron. 24:17-22). This passage gives us the good part of the story, the summary of his long and outwardly successful reign. But it contains within it the seeds of the later apostasy. The problem with a borrowed faith is that you eventually have to give it back. Godly mentors, pastors, and fathers are an immense blessing, a true means of grace. But their job is to point you to Christ, not to become your Christ. Their instruction is meant to be internalized, written on the heart by the Holy Spirit, not simply followed as an external code. Jehoash's story is a sober warning to all who live in the orbit of godly men: do not mistake proximity to righteousness for personal possession of it.

Verse by Verse Commentary

1 In the seventh year of Jehu, Jehoash became king, and he reigned forty years in Jerusalem; and his mother’s name was Zibiah of Beersheba.

The historical markers are set for us. The reign of Jehoash in the south (Judah) is synchronized with the reign of Jehu in the north (Israel). This reminds us that God is the God of all history, weaving the stories of two separate, and often antagonistic, kingdoms into one grand narrative of redemption. Jehoash begins his rule at the tender age of seven, a living miracle. He is the brand plucked from the fire (Zech. 3:2), the sole surviving heir of David's line, rescued from the murderous intent of his grandmother Athaliah. His forty-year reign speaks of a period of stability and blessing, a direct result of God's faithfulness to His covenant with David. God had promised David a lamp in Jerusalem, and that lamp had been reduced to a flickering ember, but God did not allow it to be extinguished. The very existence of King Jehoash on the throne is a testimony to the fact that God keeps His promises, even when men do everything in their power to thwart them.

2 And Jehoash did what was right in the sight of Yahweh all his days in which Jehoiada the priest instructed him.

Here is the central statement of the passage, and it is a carefully qualified commendation. On the one hand, Jehoash "did what was right." This is the standard by which all kings are judged. It doesn't mean he was sinless, but that the general direction of his public policy was oriented toward the law of God. He oversaw the repair of the temple and restored the proper worship of Yahweh. This was a good thing, a blessed reformation. But the praise is immediately limited by the crucial subordinate clause: "in which Jehoiada the priest instructed him." The righteousness of the king was coextensive with the life and influence of the priest. This sets up the ideal relationship between church and state. The priest, the minister of God's Word, instructs the king, the civil magistrate, in the standards of righteousness. The state does not wield the Word, and the church does not wield the sword. But the church speaks the Word to the one who holds the sword, instructing him in how to wield it justly. For a time, this worked beautifully. But the text subtly hints that the righteousness was in the instruction, not necessarily in the heart of the one being instructed. Jehoash's obedience was contingent. It was a mediated righteousness, and the mediator was Jehoiada, not Christ.

3 Only the high places were not taken away; the people still sacrificed and burned incense on the high places.

This word "only" or "nevertheless" is one of the saddest in all the books of Kings. It signals a good start with a bad finish, a reformation that runs out of steam just before the finish line. The high places were traditional sites of worship, often on hilltops. Before the temple was built, men like Samuel had worshiped Yahweh at such places. But after God established His house in Jerusalem, all other altars were declared illegitimate. Worship was to be centralized, a picture of the fact that there is only one God and one Mediator. To continue worship at the high places, even if it was ostensibly directed toward Yahweh, was an act of disobedience. More than that, these places were hopelessly polluted by their long association with Canaanite idolatry. They were centers of religious syncretism, a blending of Yahweh-worship with pagan sensibilities. For Jehoash to leave them standing was a failure of nerve and a catastrophic compromise. It showed that while he was willing to restore the "official" cult in Jerusalem, he was not willing to wage war against the "popular" religion of the countryside. He cut down the trunk of idolatry but left the roots in the ground, guaranteeing that it would grow back. And it is this failure, this incomplete obedience, that reveals the true state of his heart. A borrowed faith can produce external conformity, but it lacks the zeal to pursue holiness to the uttermost, to tear down every last idol.

Application

This passage puts two sharp questions before us. First, is our righteousness our own? That is, is it a righteousness that comes from a heart transformed by the grace of God in Jesus Christ, or is it a righteousness that is merely on loan from our parents, our pastor, or our Christian community? It is a great blessing to be raised under a "Jehoiada," but the goal of all godly instruction is to lead us to a personal, unshakeable faith in Christ alone. We must own our convictions. We must come to the point where we would do what is right in the sight of the Lord even if every Jehoiada in our life were taken away. A faith that cannot stand on its own two feet when the props are kicked out is not true faith at all.

Second, where are our "high places?" Where have we made peace with compromise? Where have we stopped short in our pursuit of holiness? Reformation, whether personal or corporate, that does not go "all the way down" is no true reformation. We are experts at cleaning up the big, obvious, public sins while tolerating a host of smaller, more culturally acceptable, private ones. We restore worship in the temple of our lives, but we leave the illicit altars standing on the hills of our hearts, a little shrine to money here, a high place for lust there, a grove for bitterness over there. This text calls us to a thorough-going repentance. The gospel does not just call us to renovate the temple; it calls us to demolish every high place, to smash every idol, and to yield every square inch of our lives to the exclusive and absolute lordship of Jesus Christ. He is the great King who did not just have a good start, but who finished the work His Father gave Him to do, and it is only by His grace that our half-hearted reformations can be forgiven and our hearts made truly clean.