Today, I am reading and commenting on  2 Kings 10-12.

I like the account about how Jehu eliminated Baal worship in the Northern Kingdom and find the account of how Athaliah had all of her grandsons killed, except the one that her daughter (maybe step-daughter) hid from her, revealing about the House of Omri (the royal house of the Northern Kingdom which Jehu deposed).  However, I have always wondered how King Joash went from being an enthusiastic worshiper of God to an idolater.  For as long as the priest who had raised him and set him on the throne was alive, Joash was an enthusiastic worshiper of God, but when Jehoiada died Joash started listening to wicked advisers and reintroduced Baal worship in Judah.  Joash became wicked to the point that some of his advisers ended up assassinating him.  Today I gained some insight into what happened.

When Joash first became king, he ordered the priests to take the money they received from most of the offerings to repair the Temple.  The passage tells us that after twenty-three years the Temple was still not repaired, so Joash instituted a different way of distributing the money to have the Temple repaired.  In all of those twenty-three years, Jehoiada was high priest.  Clearly, Jehoiada made no effort to see that the Temple was repaired.   This leaves us to reach one of two conclusions about Jehoiada, or a combination of the two.  Either Jehoiada did not care enough about the Temple and the worship of God to see that the Temple was repaired, or, he was too busy managing the kingdom to see that the Temple got repaired.  Whatever the case, we see that Jehoiada’s failure to share Joash’s dedication to bringing glory to God left Joash open to falling under the influence of those more interested in what he could do for them as king than what they could do to make the kingdom a better place.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.