What gruesome stories fill today’s reading. Slaughtering every male descendant of Ahab was extreme; killing boys because of who their parents are is horrific. How can a God of love and justice impose this harsh judgment on an entire family because of the parents’ sin? Even if these stories don’t raise such questions in your own mind, they will raise questions in others’ minds, for which we need to be prepared with answers. Not answers to give to questioning people necessarily, because a seeker is best directed to God and not given our attempts at satisfaction. We need to know that God has a satisfying answer to such questions so that we can confidently direct seeking souls to Him.
If God is who He says He is, then He is just in bringing such judgment on this family. Do you believe that God is who He says He is? Then you must seek to understand how this judgement is just. Think about it: God deems the killing of his every male descendant as just judgment for Ahab’s sin. If the awful killing is just, that indicates that the sin is awful. We may fail to accept that the judgment is just because we fail to see the sin as awful. As has been pointed out before, we can’t have a true understanding of the awfulness of sin because we are in the midst of it; we must look to God for a true understanding of sin. One way He teaches us about sin is in the judgment He decrees for it. Reading such accounts reminds us about the awfulness of sin, because we need to be reminded. We need to hate sin for the awful thing it is, hate it enough to want free of it, hate it enough to see our Savior for the heroic and powerful Savior He is. Be horrified at the extremely violent justice described in today’s reading, and understand how horrifying sin is, and run to the Savior who can free you and heal you from it.
The sins of Ahab and Jezebel brought judgement on Judah’s royal family because Jehoshaphat was accommodating enough to pursue an alliance by marriage with Ahab’s family. He could have saved his descendants a lot of hurt in maintaining standards for his family and his nation. Standing alone may have gone against the standard practices of the day, against common sense, against what was perceived as common decency – but it would have saved them the judgment. The higher nature of God’s ways make them more difficult for us to reach, but the effort will be rewarding. Ignoring His higher ways drags us into the same horrible sin and its effects as the people with whom we mingle and partner. Given this object lesson in today’s reading, is there some rising above that you need to choose today?