Elijah and Elisha for Today

The Death of Ahaziah or No Escape

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

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Genre: Sermon Series

Lesson: 11 of 16

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[Rushdoony] Thank you, it’s been a privilege and a joy to be here and it does make me very, very happy and encouraged about the future to see congregations and schools like this.

Our scripture this evening begins in I Kings 22 the 51 verse and goes through the first chapter of II Kings. I Kings 22:51.

“51 Ahaziah the son of Ahab began to reign over Israel in Samaria the seventeenth year of Jehoshaphat king of Judah, and reigned two years over Israel.

52 And he did evil in the sight of the Lord, and walked in the way of his father, and in the way of his mother, and in the way of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin:

53 For he served Baal, and worshipped him, and provoked to anger the Lord God of Israel, according to all that his father had done.

Then Moab rebelled against Israel after the death of Ahab.

2 And Ahaziah fell down through a lattice in his upper chamber that was in Samaria, and was sick: and he sent messengers, and said unto them, Go, enquire of Baalzebub the god of Ekron whether I shall recover of this disease.

3 But the angel of the Lord said to Elijah the Tishbite, Arise, go up to meet the messengers of the king of Samaria, and say unto them, Is it not because there is not a God in Israel, that ye go to enquire of Baalzebub the god of Ekron?

4 Now therefore thus saith the Lord, Thou shalt not come down from that bed on which thou art gone up, but shalt surely die. And Elijah departed.

5 And when the messengers turned back unto him, he said unto them, why are ye now turned back?

6 And they said unto him, There came a man up to meet us, and said unto us, Go, turn again unto the king that sent you, and say unto him, Thus saith the Lord, Is it not because there is not a God in Israel, that thou sendest to enquire of Baalzebub the god of Ekron? therefore thou shalt not come down from that bed on which thou art gone up, but shalt surely die.

7 And he said unto them, what manner of man was he which came up to meet you, and told you these words?

8 And they answered him, He was an hairy man, and girt with a girdle of leather about his loins. And he said, It is Elijah the Tishbite.

9 Then the king sent unto him a captain of fifty with his fifty. And he went up to him: and, behold, he sat on the top of an hill. And he spake unto him, Thou man of God, the king hath said, Come down.

10 And Elijah answered and said to the captain of fifty, if I be a man of God, then let fire come down from heaven, and consume thee and thy fifty. And there came down fire from heaven, and consumed him and his fifty.

11 Again also he sent unto him another captain of fifty with his fifty. And he answered and said unto him, O man of God, thus hath the king said, come down quickly.

12 And Elijah answered and said unto them, If I be a man of God, let fire come down from heaven, and consume thee and thy fifty. And the fire of God came down from heaven, and consumed him and his fifty.

13 And he sent again a captain of the third fifty with his fifty. And the third captain of fifty went up, and came and fell on his knees before Elijah, and besought him, and said unto him, O man of God, I pray thee, let my life, and the life of these fifty thy servants, be precious in thy sight.

14 Behold, there came fire down from heaven, and burnt up the two captains of the former fifties with their fifties: therefore let my life now be precious in thy sight.

15 And the angel of the Lord said unto Elijah, Go down with him: be not afraid of him. And he arose, and went down with him unto the king.

16 And he said unto him, thus saith the Lord, Forasmuch as thou hast sent messengers to enquire of Baalzebub the god of Ekron, is it not because there is no God in Israel to enquire of his word? therefore thou shalt not come down off that bed on which thou art gone up, but shalt surely die.

17 So he died according to the word of the Lord which Elijah had spoken. And Jehoram reigned in his stead in the second year of Jehoram the son of Jehoshaphat king of Judah; because he had no son.

18 Now the rest of the acts of Ahaziah which he did, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah ?”

This is the story that seems to have embarrassed many Bible commentators. The idea of God killing two groups of fifty men horrifies them. Now of course these same critics see no harm in killing people they dislike. It does not disturb them that Nazi’s or Christians or Racists or Capitalists or anybody else be restituted {?} except those that they happen to feel sorry for. Nowadays of course they feel sorry for the criminals, and not for us. But God is not allowed to execute His enemies. And some of these commentators do something which is very ungodly, they quote scripture against scripture rather than trying to understand scripture with scripture and so they quote Luke 9 verses 51-56 and they will make the statement that Elijah represents a kind of lower mentality, well if he did why in the world did God honor him? And who are we to call Elijah lower? I wish we had few Elijah’s around

Now we read in Luke 9:51-56 “ And it came to pass, when the time was come that he should be received up, he steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem, and sent messengers before his face: and they went, and entered into a village of the Samaritans, to make ready for him. 53 And they did not receive him, because his face was as though he would go to Jerusalem. 54 And when his disciples James and John saw this, they said, Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias did? 55 But he turned, and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. 56 For the Son of man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them. And they went to another village.”

And so they tell us “well you see our Lord said that the disciples were wrong in this situation, and that His ministry is to save the lives of men, not to destroy them.” Now is this so? Is our Lord saying that Elijah is wrong? Not a word of it. All he said was that the disciples were wrong at that point, not Elijah.

Moreover, this comes as the last public appearance before being taken up into heaven with the prophet Elijah. For a generation he had witnessed to the people, and now this flagrant insult to God by Ahaziah; first the long, the lifelong witness, and then the judgment. Is it any different in our Lord’s Day? This episode in Luke is in the middle of His ministry. He said He had come to seek and to save those that were lost and those whom He called out, to bring exception to that when certain things happen, even if they were on a housetop, because houses then had flat roofs and in the summer heat people slept there, not to go down to pack up but to head for the hills because the judgment of almighty God was going to come up on Jerusalem and Judea, not a Christian lost his life because they heeded our Lord’s words. It is a total judgment and scripture tells us it was the most fearful episode in all of history and there will never be anything to equal.

Now did our Lord say “I don’t believe in judgment?” far from it. What our Lord made clear was that His ministry was to proclaim salvation, to {?} out the people and then came the judgment. Even as Elijah anointed Elisha and started three schools of the prophets of seminary, to witness and to call out the people before the judgment God pronounced through him on Israel would consume and destroy the nation forever. But of course people do not like judgment; it doesn’t set well with them.

I shall never forget that some years ago Dorothy, my wife, had a women tell her that she believed in annihilation, not hell. And Dorothy kept {?} her on that and found out that, as the women finally said so, her sons were all reprobates and she did not want them to spend eternity in hell, and so she had decided since she didn’t want them there, God certainly wouldn’t want them there and they would be quickly, quietly, and eternally annihilated, that would be the easiest way to solve the situation. And therefore she didn’t want any part of a God who would have a hell, the {?} answer was he obviously want no part of the living God. We cannot have God on our terms, and this of course is the reason for most unbelief, men want God on their terms to serve their needs, to be a great resource for man. They do not want the living God.

Well we have here Ahaziah, an evil son of an evil father and mother but he lacked the ability of either his father or his mother. Now this is a significant fact, it’s a common fact, it’s a fact which should give us great comfort. You see, nothing stands still in this world. We as Christians do not stand still, if we do we’re not Christians. We either grow in faith or we have no faith. And when we stand in terms of the faith and meet our responsibilities under God it is not only we who grow but our children grow beyond us in their obedience, in their awareness, in their knowledge of the kingdom. It was one of the most marvelous days in my life when something I had really known instinctively, but it fully dawned on me once at the table when we were talking about doctrine, going over some aspects of the catechism and its meaning as I was listening to the youngest of my four daughters who is next to the youngest child I suddenly realized here she is young, and she had a knowledge of things that took me much longer to grasp because I didn’t have that Christian school, I had as a fine a Christian home training as anyone could have, but I didn’t have the school supporting the home and she had both, and it was marvelous to see the progress there. And I was with her overnight before I took the plane to come to Burlingham and then down here, and I listened to the oldest of her three daughters in first grade, and I realized how much further along little Christine{?} and it was a delight, a very great joy, to see that with each generation the growth, the progress, starting much further ahead in those of us who have gone before in their awareness of the faith and their {?} and their receptivity to it.

Now the same thing happens with the ungodly. Ahaziah was evil and blundering and incompetent to the degree that Ahab and Jezebel were not, and there is no a downward slide with the ungodly and you see this everywhere in the world. Men who are experts in analyzing and studying the Communist world have said there is a difference with each passing generation in the level of competence in Marxist world. They are not as bold, they are evil but they are not as bold and not as confident, they need some morals to have courage. So that evil goes downhill in time as holiness goes further and further ahead. Of course the parable of the tares and the wheat tells us this, that at the beginning the tares and the wheat are very much alike, but with time the wheat becomes obviously what it is, and the tares become more obviously what they are so that you can spot the difference between them readily, there is a growth in both directions. And so there is a deterioration of the ungodly, all you have to do is look at the White House; each occupant gets worse doesn’t he?

Now not only did Ahaziah lack the ability of his father and his mother but he was also cowardly. Moab, which had been in subjection to Israel, rebelled. Everybody went to war except Ahaziah, he should have been the commander, he was the king, he was a young man. But of course Ahaziah knew the prophesy of Elijah and he knew his father had been killed in battle as had been predicted by Micaiah and had been predicted by Elijah, but he was going to frustrate God, he was going to stay at home during the war neatly surrounded by the palace guard. Isn’t that a beautiful way to foil God? How are you going to get killed when you’re at home? Well whether he had a little to much to drink or whether he stumbled and fell, we don’t know, but he fell through the lattice work in an upper story and was seriously injured, critically injured, and so he enquired of Beelzebub the God of Ekron, the true pagan.

Now it’s interesting that Ahaziah did not send to find whether he could be healed, he wanted to know the future. What was his fate? And so many of the ungodly are that way, they go to astrology. Why? They want to know what’s in their future, they don’t want to command the future, they simply want to know what is there; this is of course Saul. Saul should have known, having been properly taught, that the way to command the future was by being commanded of the Lord. Instead he wanted to know “what’s going to happen to me?”

Some years ago I read a very interesting book about the gypsies by a young man who was taken into a gypsy camp and lived there for years. He said that the one thing that thy gypsies never indulged in for themselves was fortune telling concerning their own future. The gypsy women made a good living by fortune telling, but they regarded all who came to them with contempt as the ultimate suckers. They used words that were as crude and blunt as possible {?}to describe them, the ones that this man cited were blunt. Why? Because, said the gypsies, people who go to fortune teller seek self-fulfilling prophesy, they’re losers, and it’s easy to ascertain their character and with a few questions find out what their fears are and to give them a word which is a self-fulfilling prophesy, they’re going to be pleased and {?}, that’s their life.

And today of course people all around us are going to astrology and to various forms of occultism not because of any other reason than to know the future, what is fated for me? “What’s in the stars for me?” And those who seek to command the future apart from the Lord seek to control the future non-morally. This is the goal of the modern scientist and the modern socialist. They want to control the future, but non-morally through their science, through their {?} for prediction, their control. And the Lord’s attitude towards this is always that which we meet with here in reference to Ahaziah, He sees this as an insult to Him. He is the Lord, all things are in His hand and anyone who wants to know the future can know it only in terms of the word of God, the wages of sin are always death. If we follows the Lord’s way, read Deuteronomy 28, the classic statement of this, these blessings will pursue us and overtake us, they’re irresistible whereas with disobedience these curses are irresistible

To bypass God in any attempt to plan for or to know about the future is an insult to God. We can be prophets of future events in terms of the word. God says what will happen if we do certain things, it’s spelled out there so that we can predict and we must predict the essence of preaching is to declare the word of God and a fundamental aspect of the word of is to say that the wages of sin is death, but that obedience, the obedience of {?} brings the blessings of God.

To seek to know the future apart from God is to treat God as dead. Now let’s stop for a moment and consider that. It is to treat God as dead. Well not too long ago we had in the 1960’s the death of God school of theology, {?} still with us but now calls itself by other names, but it’s the same fundamental idea. Now what very few people realize about that school of thought was that they never flatly said “God is dead”, they never did. What they said was is that the God of scripture is dead for us, that as far as we are concerned He is dead. Whether he is living or not is irrelevant to us, we don’t want any part of Him. So their emphatic statement at all points was not simply “god is dead” but that “he is dead for us, because we have chosen to live life on our terms, in terms of our own goals and our own directions, our own government and we say that the government must be upon man’s shoulders.

Now I submit that anyone who thinks about today and tomorrow apart from the Lord belongs to the death of God school. He may say he is a Christian, he may profess to believe the Bible from cover to cover but the essence of the death of God position is to say “God is dead for me because I am going to disregard Him, and I am going to act as though He and His word do not exist.” As far as most churches and most communities are concerned, God is dead. They get together briefly, they sing hymns, they profess to believe the Bible, some of them don’t even do that, but irrespective to them God is dead, they’re not involved in {?} of the Lord’s. They’re there to get whatever they want to go out with a nice happy glow, and meet a lot of good people, and because it’s good for their children it will make them more obedient to get some of that {?} and that’s all, that’s all. For them the living God is dead to all practical intents.

Should not God declare war on this? And is this not exactly what we see here in this passage? At the culmination of His ministry God, through Elijah, pronounces death on the city, on the death of god mentality. It tells something about our own time if we do not change our ways. Men want God to be dead to them, except as a resource when they want Him, you know. Nice to have a grandfather in heaven that you can plug into when we want something, but the rest of the time forget about it. But men do not want God interfering in this world, they say in effect as they read passages like this “Now look God, that’s not handling it the right way, let us take charge, let us do our own judging, our own sinning, our own saving.” In effect they are saying “we are wiser than thou.” Should we then be surprised at God’s judgment?

Ahaziah stayed out of the battle to escape the judgment of God, knowing God’s judgment, and he died. No man can stay out of the war of the Lord without being judged of God. You either fight the Lord’s battles, or like Ahab and Ahaziah, {?}fighting our own. The theology of the lie is a belief that God is dead for me whenever I choose to shut the door on Him. But if I choose to go my own way I should have the right as a free and independent person to decide what I do, live as I please, as long as I’m not being deliberately insulting to God and defiant of Him, I’d like to live my own life. The theology of the lie says that there is an area that belongs to man and God had better not cross the line. The theology of the lie is the reigning theology of man’s heart. We want God, but on our terms. We want God to judge the world and its sins, but not us. We want not the living God, but that our way be done. The Lord I cannot say but that He will deal with them we can rest assured. We are acting as though God is dead and they are trying to determine the future without reference to the word of God and with reference to {?} and Moscow, and you think God takes any more kindly to that then He did to what Ahaziah did?

The Lord {?} with death, of that you can be assured. The question is, where do we stand in relationship to the living God? Do we live by His every word? Do we stand in terms of the requirements and submit ourselves to Him as the Lord, as His absolute possession? The essence of the law is “Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God with all Thy heart and mind and strength.” {?} Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God we thank Thee for this time together and for this week of fellowship. We thank Thee our Father for these, Thy people, Thy servants, Thy property, and we rejoice in Thy love of Thy word and in their dedication to the cause of Christian education, we pray for Thy blessing and prospering hand upon them. Protect them from the wrath of the enemy, bring unto them Thine elect and gather the little children into the bosom of this school that they may there be nurtured in Thy word, and by Thy {?} Bless the parents as they guide and teach their children and the teachers as day by day they nurture them in Thine admonition. Bless Thine under shepherd as he serves Thee and minister to his every need. And now Lord give us traveling mercies as we journey homeward, a blessed nights rest, and joy always in Thee and our labor unto Thee. In Jesus name, amen.