The Rot at the Top: When God Gives a Nation Up Text: 2 Kings 15:13-16
Introduction: The Wages of Apostasy is Chaos
We live in an age that prizes stability. We want our retirement accounts to be stable, our governments to be stable, and our personal lives to be stable. But we want all this stability on our own terms. We want to live like practical atheists, ignoring the God who made us and the covenant He has established with us, and yet we are perpetually surprised when the floorboards start to give way. We are like a man who saws off the branch he is sitting on and then expresses astonishment at the sudden rush of gravity.
The northern kingdom of Israel, in its final death throes, is a master class in the consequences of apostasy. For generations, they had spit on the covenant. Beginning with Jeroboam's golden calves, they had institutionalized idolatry. They wanted to worship, but they wanted to do it their way, at their convenience, and for their own political ends. They rejected the authority of God's Word, God's law, and God's chosen place of worship in Jerusalem. And the result was not a vibrant, pluralistic society. The result was a vortex of chaos, assassination, and blood.
This short, brutal passage in 2 Kings 15 is a snapshot of the terminal velocity of a nation that has abandoned God. It is not just a dusty historical record. It is a diagnosis. When men will not be governed by God, they will be ruled by tyrants. When a nation rejects the ultimate King, it gets a series of pathetic, bloody, and short-lived pretenders. The political chaos is a direct fruit of the spiritual adultery. God is giving them exactly what they asked for. They wanted to be like the other nations, and so God gave them the political instability and savage brutality of the other nations, with a vengeance.
We must not read this as though it were some unfortunate series of political miscalculations. This is the hand of God in judgment. The rapid succession of kings, the conspiracies, the assassinations, this is the whirlwind that follows the sowing of the wind. Israel had abandoned the covenant, and the covenant has terms. There are blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience. What we are witnessing here is the curse of political chaos, a curse detailed plainly in the law of Moses.
The Text
Shallum son of Jabesh became king in the thirty-ninth year of Uzziah king of Judah, and he reigned one month in Samaria. Then Menahem son of Gadi went up from Tirzah and came to Samaria, and struck Shallum son of Jabesh in Samaria, and put him to death and became king in his place. Now the rest of the acts of Shallum and his conspiracy which he made, behold, they are written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel. Then Menahem struck Tiphsah and all who were in it and its borders from Tirzah, because they did not open to him; therefore he struck it and ripped up all its pregnant women.
(2 Kings 15:13-16 LSB)
The Thirty-Day King (v. 13)
We begin with the blink-and-you-miss-it reign of Shallum.
"Shallum son of Jabesh became king in the thirty-ninth year of Uzziah king of Judah, and he reigned one month in Samaria." (2 Kings 15:13)
Shallum had just assassinated the previous king, Zechariah, fulfilling God's prophecy that Jehu's dynasty would last four generations. But the man who was God's instrument of judgment did not thereby receive God's blessing for his own reign. God can use a wicked man's sinful ambition to accomplish His righteous purposes without excusing the man's sin. God is the master chess player; He moves all the pieces, both the black and the white, to His foreordained conclusion.
Shallum's reign lasts one month. This is not a stable government. This is a revolving door of bloody opportunism. When a nation's foundation is apostasy, the political structure built on it is a house of cards in a hurricane. Power becomes the only principle, and the man who takes the throne by the sword has no reason to be surprised when another man with a sharper sword comes for him. He who lives by the coup dies by the coup.
The brevity of this reign is a sign of God's judgment. A long and stable reign is presented in Scripture as a blessing, a sign of covenant faithfulness. Think of David, Solomon in his early years, or Uzziah in the south, who is mentioned here. Uzziah reigned for 52 years. In the time it took for Uzziah to grow old on the throne of Judah, the northern kingdom burned through multiple kings in a flurry of assassinations. Stability is a covenant blessing. Chaos is a covenant curse.
The Coup de Jour (v. 14-15)
The political instability continues, as Menahem replaces the man who had just seized power.
"Then Menahem son of Gadi went up from Tirzah and came to Samaria, and struck Shallum son of Jabesh in Samaria, and put him to death and became king in his place. Now the rest of the acts of Shallum and his conspiracy which he made, behold, they are written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel." (2 Kings 15:14-15 LSB)
Menahem comes up from Tirzah, the old capital, to Samaria, the current one. This is likely a power struggle between different factions or military leaders. When the fear of God is gone, every man with a private army sees himself as a potential king. The social fabric unravels. Loyalty becomes a commodity, bought and sold for personal advancement.
Menahem strikes Shallum and kills him. Just as Shallum had done to Zechariah, so it is done to him. The violence is cyclical. This is what happens when a nation rejects God's law as the ultimate standard. Without a transcendent law, raw power becomes the only arbiter of right and wrong. Might makes right. The man with the most swords gets to be king, for a little while.
Verse 15 gives us the standard formula, referring us to the official records for the details of Shallum's conspiracy. But the inspired text has given us all we need to know. He was a conspirator who reigned for a month and was then killed by another conspirator. His legacy is his treason, and his end was the fruit of it. This is the grim, repetitive story of a people under judgment.
The Logic of Tyranny (v. 16)
This last verse is one of the most brutal and stomach-turning in all the historical books. It reveals the nature of the man who has now seized power, and it reveals the depths to which a society can sink when it abandons God.
"Then Menahem struck Tiphsah and all who were in it and its borders from Tirzah, because they did not open to him; therefore he struck it and ripped up all its pregnant women." (2 Kings 15:16 LSB)
Menahem, having taken the capital, now moves to consolidate his power. The city of Tiphsah, likely a town that supported his rival or simply refused to acknowledge his bloody claim to the throne, resists him. They did not open the gates to him. They refused to consent to be governed by a murderer and a usurper.
Menahem's response is not simply to conquer the city. It is to terrorize it. It is to make an example of it. The brutality is strategic. He "ripped up all its pregnant women." This is an act of unimaginable savagery, but it is not random. It is an attack on the future. It is a way of saying, "Not only will I kill you for resisting me, I will kill your children and your children's children. There will be no future for those who defy me." This is the logic of absolute tyranny. It is the politics of hell.
This specific atrocity is mentioned elsewhere in Scripture as a sign of God's ultimate judgment against the wicked. The prophet Amos condemns the Ammonites for this very crime, "because they have ripped open the pregnant women of Gilead" (Amos 1:13). The prophet Hosea warns that this will be the fate of Samaria itself at the hands of the Assyrians: "their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their pregnant women shall be ripped up" (Hosea 13:16). What the pagan nations do to Israel in judgment, this Israelite king now does to his own people. The apostate nation has become indistinguishable from the pagan nations it was called to drive out. This is the final stage of covenantal rot.
Conclusion: The Unshakeable Kingdom
It is easy to read a passage like this and despair. We look at the political chaos, the raw ambition, the sheer brutality, and we see echoes of it in our own time. We see our own leaders reject the crown rights of Jesus Christ. We see them redefine good and evil. We see them, in their own sophisticated and sanitized ways, attacking the future by attacking the family, the unborn, and the created order of male and female. The spirit of Menahem is not dead.
But we are not to despair. We are to see this chaos for what it is: the death throes of a rebellious and idolatrous system. The kingdoms of men, built on the sand of human autonomy and rebellion against God, are all destined to collapse into this kind of ruin. They are all temporary. They are all Shallums and Menahems, strutting on the stage for a brief moment before they are swept away.
This history is recorded for our instruction, to drive us to the one true King, whose kingdom cannot be shaken. While the throne of Samaria was a bloody mess, the throne of David in the south, for all its faults, was maintained by God's covenant promise. And that promise ultimately pointed to the Son of David, Jesus Christ.
Jesus is the king who did not seize power by the sword, but who conquered by laying down His life on a cross. He establishes His kingdom not through terror, but through grace. He builds His church not by ripping open the womb, but by causing men to be born again from the womb of the Spirit. His reign is not for one month, but forever and ever.
The chaos of this world, the political turmoil, the moral decay, it should not surprise us. It is the predictable result of a world that has rejected its Maker. But in the midst of this chaos, God is building His unshakeable kingdom. He is calling a people to Himself, a people who bow the knee to King Jesus. And that kingdom will advance, and it will grow, and it will one day fill the earth. The Menahems of this world will do their worst, but their worst is no match for the sovereign plan of God. Therefore, let us not put our trust in princes, in sons of men, in whom there is no salvation. Let us put our trust in the Lord Jesus Christ, the King of kings, whose throne is forever and whose dominion is from generation to generation.