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| > Sermon Archive > Sermons by Author > Dr. Wes Bredenhof > Come and see the zeal of God's Servant! | Previous Next Print |
| Order Of Worship (Liturgy) Hymn 7 Psalm 73:9 (after the Law of God) Psalm 85:3 Psalm 101 Psalm 93 Scripture reading: John 2:13-22 Text: 2 Kings 10:1-17 |
Beloved congregation of Christ,
What sorts of things do you get zealous about? I guess that raises the question: what does it mean to be zealous? It means to be super passionate, to be on fire for something. What sorts of things do you care really intensely about?
I once went to a hockey game in Everett, Washington. It wasn’t an NHL major league game, just a minor league game, one step below the NHL. It wasn’t a huge arena; it only sat about 15,000 fans. But on this spring evening the place was packed solid, sold out. And it was loud. The place was shaking. I have never been to a sports event before or since that was as loud as that hockey game. The fans there were crazy. They were super zealous for their team.
The Bible tells believers to be zealous. In Revelation 3, Jesus was writing to the lukewarm church in Laodicea. They were pretty casual about their faith, neither cold nor hot. So Jesus said in Revelation 3:19 that they have to “be zealous and repent.” They have to up the level of their love and enthusiasm for the Lord.
Titus 2:14 says Christ gave himself for us to redeem us from our lawlessness and rebellion. But he also gave himself for us towards something. Our redemption in Christ is also for the purpose of our being “a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.” Christ wants us to be passionate about living a godly and holy life.
In our passage this morning, we see great zeal with God’s servant Jehu. Let’s see what we can learn from what God reveals through Jehu, how he points us to Christ, and how he wants to inspire, shape and direct our zeal as Christians. I preach to you God’s Word and I’ve summarized the sermon with this theme: Come and see the zeal of God’s Servant!
We’ll consider this zeal:
- Fired by God’s Word
- Finishing off God’s enemies
- Falling short of God’s law
Up to this point, the newly anointed King Jehu has been taking care of business. He’s assassinated the previous king, Joram, as well as Ahaziah the king of Judah. In the verses before our text, Jehu came to bring God’s justice on Jezebel. Jezebel had been the wife of wicked King Ahab. She’d led Ahab into even deeper depths of sin. She was an idolater and encouraged the people of Israel to worship idols too. Over top of that, she killed innocent people like Naboth and his family. She persecuted and killed God’s prophets as well. So God sent Jehu to deal with her and he did.
As we come into chapter 10, a large part of Ahab’s family is still alive. Verse 1 tells us that Ahab had seventy sons in Samaria. Now we shouldn’t think that these were all literally his sons with Jezebel. This term “sons” can also refer to male descendants. So these were his grandchildren and maybe great-grandchildren. They were probably young men. And Jehu has been given a mandate by God to deal with them.
So he wrote to the leading men who had oversight and guardianship over Ahab’s offspring. He made it clear that they had a choice. They could select one of these young men to be king and they could go to war and probably die. Or they could side with Jehu and live. Verse 4 tells us that they were very, very afraid. They’d heard what had happened to Joram and Ahaziah and so they knew they wouldn’t stand a chance. They wrote back and pledged their allegiance to Jehu. They’d do whatever he told them to do.
Jehu wrote back and told them to send them the heads of these males of Ahab’s house. That request could have been taken two ways. It was deliberately ambiguous. Jehu could have been asking for them to send the direct guardians of these young men. They were the heads of these young men, responsible for them. Or he could have been literally asking for the heads on their bodies. The leading men of Samaria decided to interpret it in the more literal sense. They immediately beheaded all these young men. They put their 70 heads in baskets and sent to them to Jehu in Jezreel.
When the heads arrived, Jehu had them laid out in two heaps at the entrance of the town. It was a public display. In the morning, he gathered everyone together from the town and made an announcement. He told them they were all innocent. He was the one who rose up against Joram and assassinated him. But then he adds something curious, “But who struck down all of these?” With his ambiguous request to the leading men of Samaria, Jehu had what we call plausible deniability. That means he could avoid taking responsibility for it. Did he mean for this to happen? Maybe he just wanted to meet with the guardians of these young men. With this approach, he could claim there was widespread support for his coup. Even the leading men of Samaria could see the writing on the wall. Jehu was now the rightful king.
And he wasn’t done. On his way to Samaria, he happens to bump into relatives of the recently deceased king of Judah, Ahaziah. We say “happens,” but we know that this too is in God’s providence. Just like Ahaziah, they also have targets on them because of their family’s association with Ahab. Ahaziah’s family wasn’t only allied with Ahab’s, but they were also related to one another by marriage. You can see their friendly family relationship in verse 13. They were going to go and visit. But they don’t arrive because Jehu takes them to a private place, the pit of Beth-eked, and he slaughters them.
Finally there’s one more group of relatives of Ahab in Samaria. Jehu meets Jehonadab on the way and invites this godly man to join him in his chariot to witness the bloodbath in Samaria. When Jehu arrives, he and his men ruthlessly eliminate every last family member of Ahab.
When Jehu invited Jehonadab up into his chariot, he said, “Come with me, and see my zeal for the LORD.” He’s saying, “Come along and see how much I care about God and his honour.” We know from elsewhere in the Bible, in Jeremiah, that Jehonadab cared about God too. He was also zealous for the LORD. So he wanted to see what Jehu would do, wanted to see his zeal, his passion for cleansing the land of Ahab’s filth.
Now we might be put off by the violence and bloodshed in this chapter. You might even feel like it’s unchristian. After all, doesn’t the sixth commandment tell us not to kill? And yet here, Jehu is killing people right, left, and center. Just in this chapter, we know that he’s responsible for the death of at least 112 people. That’s over top of Joram, Ahaziah, and Jezebel in the last chapter. He seems to have a lot of blood on his hands, doesn’t he?
There a couple of things we need to recognize. One is that the sixth commandment doesn’t forbid all killing. It forbids unlawful killing. If a police officer has no other choice but to use his or her gun to stop a criminal, that’s not against the sixth commandment. If a soldier goes to war for his country and uses a weapon to kill the enemy, that’s not against the sixth commandment. In the eyes of God, those are lawful killings. They’re still sad and regrettable, but no sin has been committed.
The other thing we need to recognize is that Jehu was acting on the orders of God. His zeal was fired by God’s Word. Look with me at verse 10. Jehu publicly refers to the word of the LORD which came through the prophet Elijah. God had said that Ahab and his house were to be annihilated. Jehu was doing what God commanded. So he could even claim at the end of verse 10, “for the LORD has done what he said by his servant Elijah.” It’s not Jehu’s word, but God’s word. It’s not Jehu’s work, but God’s work. And the writer of 2 Kings tells us that Jehu was exactly right. In verse 17, Jehu’s violent bloodbath in Samaria is said to be “according to the word of the LORD.” It was God’s will and it was God’s plan.
So when you see the zeal of God’s servant Jehu in this passage and you have an issue with it, your issue really isn’t with Jehu. It’s with God. Jehu was doing God’s Word. God decided that the appropriate punishment for Ahab and his house was complete annihilation. We might struggle with that, but if we do, I wonder whether we really understand the seriousness of sin. What Ahab and Jezebel and their family did was not just atrocious in human eyes, it was an attack on the infinite majesty of God. They all deserved far more than a violent human demise. And after that violent human demise, they would have received what they truly deserved. Is God just for doing that? Yes, he is. As Abraham said many years before this, the Judge of all the earth will do what is right.
Today God doesn’t command us to do things exactly like Jehu did. We’re not commanded to go and commit all this bloodshed. That was something peculiar to the time of Old Testament Israel, before the coming of Christ. As we look at Christ’s ministry on earth, we don’t see him carrying out massacres like Jehu did. And yet Christ was zealous for God and his will. We see it in that passage we read from John 2. Like Jehu zealously cleansed the land of Ahab’s descendants, Jesus zealously cleansed his Father’s house in Jerusalem. Christ’s zeal was fired up by God’s Word in passages like Psalm 69:9, “For zeal for your house has consumed me.” Today as we’re disciples of Christ, our zeal is to be fired up in the same way – by God’s Word.
God’s Word should be the standard determining the things we’re going to care most about. You can care about your favourite sports team and cheer for them. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that. But if that’s the thing in life that you get most passionate about, that’s a problem. If that’s the thing you live for, that’s a problem. What does God want us to be zealous about? We have to go to his Word to find out. In the introduction we already saw that he wants us to be zealous for repentance and for good works. Like Jehu, and more importantly like Christ to whom he points, we should be zealous for God. We should be zealous about worshipping him. Zealous about loving him and zealous about serving him with every aspect of our lives.
Going back to 2 Kings 10, I want you to notice something else about Jehu’s zeal. In verse 11, it says, “So Jehu struck down all who remained of the house of Ahab in Jezreel, all his great men and his close friends and his priests, until he left him none remaining.” Notice how twice we find the word “all” and then “none.” Similarly, in verse 14 with the relatives of Ahaziah, “he spared none of them.” Then notice too verse 17, “…he struck down all who remained to Ahab in Samaria, till he had wiped them out.” The author of 2 Kings strongly emphasizes the complete annihilation of anyone associated with Ahab. He entirely finished off God’s enemies. Not a word fell to the ground of the Word of the LORD. Everything was fulfilled. Everyone who was meant to be eliminated was eliminated.
This was a zeal that saw things through to the end. If we think of it like a car, you need fuel for the engine to run. Let’s say you have a journey of 200 km you need to take. But if you only put in enough fuel to get you 150 km, you obviously won’t finish off the journey. Zeal is like the fuel in the tank to drive our engine. If you’re lacking zeal, you won’t finish what you’ve been given to do. Your work will turn out half-baked.
Jehu’s zeal was powerful enough for him to see the work through to the end. He completely finished off God’s enemies, just as he was commanded to. In this, Jehu was pointing ahead to the greater King, Jesus. He had a zeal for God’s house, but he also had a zeal for the mission God had given him to redeem sinners. Because he had that zeal, he endured three hours in the darkness on the cross. Because he had that zeal, he took God’s wrath in our place. Because he had that zeal, he didn’t stop until Satan, sin, and death were all completely finished off. In his redemptive work for us, Christ didn’t go by half-measures. He left nothing undone and as a result we’ve been blessed with eternal life and peace with God.
As we look to Christ in faith, it’s God will that our zeal looks like his. By its very definition, zeal isn’t supposed to be half-baked. It’s supposed to be intense. Zealous people are going to look extreme and fanatical to others, going all the way all the time. You go to church twice every Sunday? That’s extreme. You send your kids to a Christian school? That’s fanatical. You believe marriage is only between one man and one woman? You’re obviously some kind of fundamentalist. And on it goes. But loved ones, these are just the outside and relatively easy ways in which to be zealous.
You see, there’s something that’s way harder. It has to do with finishing off something opposed to God that still remains in us. I’m talking about the remnants of our old nature. If we’re zealous about repentance, like the Bible tells us to be, then we’re going to have to be zealous about killing what remains of our old nature. That’s going to be tough. We have to be zealous about putting our old sinful desires to death. You can’t be casual about that. You can’t be excusing those desires, rationalizing them, or minimizing them. Just like Jehu went on a zealous rampage against God’s enemies, in Christ we have to do the same with what remains in us that’s opposed to God. How can we do this? We can’t do it in our own strength. We have to pray constantly and ask for the Holy Spirit to stoke our zeal with God’s Word. We have to ask for him to come and make us committed to the total destruction of our evil desires. We have to be zealous about finishing off God’s enemies, but we’ll need the Holy Spirit’s help to do that. So we have to pray for his help.
Jehu was an amazing Old Testament figure. But like all men in the Old Testament, he was just a man. While he was zealous in this one particular way, there were other ways in which he wasn’t so zealous.
Remember his background from the beginning of chapter 9. Before he became king, Jehu was a general. He was a soldier in the army of Israel. So Jehu was a man of blood and violence. That seems to have come easily to him. When he was told by Elisha’s messenger that he was going to be God’s anointed avenger, Jehu seems to have had no qualms or difficulties about that. It was a calling custom fit for a man with his background in soldiering.
But after all that work was done, he was going to have to be the king. And a godly king has to do more than just liquidating God’s enemies. A godly king in Israel was to follow God’s will in every respect – and to be zealous for doing that comprehensively. He couldn’t just be zealous for the aspects of his office that were conveniently lined up with his character and background. He had to be zealous for every part of his calling as king.
The end of chapter 10 tells us that this is where Jehu fell short of God’s law. While he got rid of Ahab’s house, while he got rid of Ahab’s priests, he wasn’t zealous enough. There was still what the author of Kings calls the “sin of Jeroboam the son of Nebat.” There were these idolatrous golden calves in Bethel and Dan. They had been there for years. Many years earlier, Jeroboam set up these idols to keep the people in the northern kingdom from going to Jerusalem to worship God at the temple. Those golden calves remained until the people of Israel were sent into exile in Assyria. Though Jehu was one of Israel’s best kings, this remained a blind spot even for him. He couldn’t get up the zeal to completely eliminate idolatry from the land.
Thus it became obvious that King Jehu could never be the messianic king God had promised. As a king he fell dramatically short. He remained a sinful man. He was zealous when it was convenient, far less than zealous when it was too hard.
But as we look to Jesus Christ, we see what Jehu was not. We see a king who was perfectly zealous in season and out of season, when it was relatively convenient and when it definitely wasn’t. Loved ones, that was for us. Because we’re far more like Jehu than we’d care to admit. If there’s no or little cost, being zealous isn’t so hard. But when there’s a cost, then zeal for God and his will can suddenly get put in the “too hard basket.” That’s not right. It’s sinful. It was paid for by Jesus on the cross. When we trust in what he did there, we can be forgiven. God’s grace covers it. But we also have the righteousness of his zealous life transferred over to us. So going forward, God always sees us through the lens of his Son and his zeal. God sees people who are zealous at all times, whether it’s convenient or not, whether it’s easy or not.
But loved ones, we also have to see ourselves now in Christ. We have to become who we are in him in God’s eyes. God wants us to be committed to growing in zeal, also when it comes to the thorough eradication of idols in our lives. Where Jehu fell short with idols, Christ never did. We’re supposed to be in Christ, not in Jehu. We share in Christ’s anointing with the Holy Spirit. That means we need to recognize idolatry in our lives. Idolatry is anything we take into our lives and make more ultimate than God. Anything we find comfort from instead of from God becomes an idol for us. You know the long list of those things that can easily become idols for us. Recognize the ones that still draw your heart. Then pray and ask the Holy Spirit to give you a holy hatred for those idols. Ask him to give you a holy zeal to drive out those idols from your life. Let God’s Word shape how you view those idols. Rather than indifference, listen to God’s Word telling you to be filled with disgust for them.
Zeal has been described as passion on steroids. For a Christian, it’s something we can’t do without. A Christian without zeal is like fire without heat. It should be impossible to imagine. Yet it happens with me and I’m sure with you too. We can go for periods of time when our zeal droops. Not only that, but sometimes even in the church zeal is frowned upon. If someone becomes zealous for serving the Lord, sometimes we see this thing called the crab pot syndrome. When you’re boiling a pot of crabs, if one of them tries to climb out, the others will drag him back in. Godly zeal doesn’t mix at all with cultural Christianity, with nominal faith, with hypocrisy. Yet zeal for God is regularly impressed upon us in the Scriptures. It is something to pursue. So let me ask you: will you take God seriously and be zealous for him? AMEN.
PRAYER
O God in heaven,
Thank you for the unbridled zeal of Jesus our Saviour. We worship you for giving us a Saviour who was driven by your Word. We adore you for the way he finished off all your and our enemies at the cross. O God, we love you for the way Jesus had a perfect zeal at all times and still does. Through him, we ask for your forgiveness for all the times we have not been zealous for you. Through Christ, we ask for your mercy for every time we have let our zeal sag, for every time we’ve also discouraged others from being zealous for you. We pray for your Holy Spirit to fire up our zeal with your Word. We ask for his help in being zealous not only outwardly, but also inwardly. Not only with our outward behaviours, but also being zealous in warring against our evil desires. Please help us with your Spirit to be zealous at all times, in all places, and in all ways. We pray that our zeal would serve for your glory.
* As a matter of courtesy please advise Dr. Wes Bredenhof, if you plan to use this sermon in a worship service. Thank-you.
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