Readings:
2 Kings 13-16
Wisdom 9
John 5:1-29

2 Kings 13-16

Israel suffers through a series of evil kings after the somewhat good (the best the had so far, and would ever have) king Jehu. During this time there was increasing wars and raids with the Syrians and as Elisha was dying he blessed the king of Israel, who was completely unworthy of it, with victory over the Syrians but it was limited to three times.

We also see a miracle of Elisha after he’s dead and buried. At some point after his death, there’s a funeral for an unnamed man who had died and a band of raiding Moabites are seen riding towards them, so the toss his dead body hastily in Elisha’s grave. When his body touches the bones of Elisha he’s immediately revived and comes back to life.

The next two kings of Judah were a mixed bag of good and bad. They both wanted to do what was right in the eyes of God, but they didn’t go far enough in eliminating idolatry in their kingdom. Their bio always opens with “and he did right, but didn’t take away the high places…” and it’s a strike against every king since Solomon.

Even with the flipping back and forth between good and evil kings, Judah was a much more stable kingdom than their neighbors to the north. There was even a couple assassinations in Judah, but the Davidic dynasty remained in power throughout. While in Israel there were multiple assassinations, coups and revolts. The north was tumultuous along with being wicked.

We go back and forth through all these kings until we get to one of the worst, and he wasn’t a king of Israel. Ahaz becomes king in Judah, after his father and grandfather were both good and stable kings, but not Ahaz. This king was so wicked that he sacrificed his own son to the Canaanite gods and it says he burned incense to them on the high places that his predecessors had allowed to remain. It shows us how allowing serious sin to remain in your house will eventually effect your descendants.

Syria and Israel make an alliance against Judah, and they lay siege to Jerusalem. So Ahaz send messengers to Assyria asking for assistance, and the Assyrians oblige by capturing Damascus, the capital of Syria. So when Ahaz goes to Damascus he sees the altar they have there and sends word back to Jerusalem so they can make an exact copy of it. He replaces the bronze altar in the temple of Jerusalem with this altar he had fabricated, and he made other changes in the temple to accommodate his polytheistic beliefs and practices.

John 5:1-29

Jesus is again I’m Jerusalem and by a pool called Bethesda. There lays a man who’s paralyzed and has been for 38 years. This is the same amount of time that Israel wandered from the rebellion at Kadesh until they arrived in Moab at the threshold of the promised land.

Jesus asks the man if he’d like to be healed, but instead of answering that question, he begins to tell him about how he can’t get down into the waters which their tradition said was occasionally stirred by an angel and were momentarily miraculous. Here’s the son of God asking him if he’d like to be healed, and he’s telling the same son of God why he can’t be healed. It really is amazing when you think about it. Of course, this man did t have the benefit of knowing the whole story, but reading this it’s hard not to want to yell at him that his healing is standing right in front of him.

Once again Jesus gets into it with the Jerusalem authorities because they place a higher value on observing the letter of the law over the spirit of the law. They were experts, like sleazy lawyers, at getting our of their obligations when inconvenient for them by using loopholes, but studiously observing laws to appear righteous when it cost them nothing.

Tomorrow’s Readings:
2 Kings 17
Wisdom 10
John 5:30-47