Scripture Daily

Context No. 1062 of 4322 · 2 Kings

Context · Reflection

2 Kings 10:6-10: in context

6Then he wrote a letter the second time to them, saying, “If you are on my side, and if you will listen to my voice, take the heads of the men who are your master’s sons, and come to me to Jezreel by tomorrow this time.” Now the king’s sons, being seventy persons, were with the great men of the city, who brought them up. 7When the letter came to them, they took the king’s sons and killed them, even seventy people, and put their heads in baskets, and sent them to him to Jezreel. 8A messenger came and told him, “They have brought the heads of the king’s sons.” He said, “Lay them in two heaps at the entrance of the gate until the morning.” 9In the morning, he went out and stood, and said to all the people, “You are righteous. Behold, I conspired against my master and killed him, but who killed all these? 10Know now that nothing will fall to the earth of the LORD’s word, which the LORD spoke concerning Ahab’s house. For the LORD has done that which he spoke by his servant Elijah.”

Jehu, on his campaign to wipe out the house of Ahab, writes to the guardians of Ahab's seventy sons in Samaria, daring them to prove their loyalty by killing the princes themselves. Terrified, they do it, slaughtering all seventy and sending their heads in baskets to Jehu at Jezreel. He orders the heads piled in two heaps at the city gate until morning. Then he stands before the people and makes a chilling speech: you are innocent; I conspired against my master and killed him, but who killed all these? He points to the heaps as proof that God's word against Ahab's house, spoken through Elijah, is coming to pass, that nothing the LORD said falls to the ground.

This is the bible refusing to sanitize a brutal chapter of history, and it presents Jehu as a deeply mixed figure. On one hand, what he says is technically true: God had decreed judgment on Ahab's house through Elijah, and it is being fulfilled to the letter. On the other hand, watch how Jehu uses that truth. He manipulates others into doing the killing so his own hands look cleaner, then stands over the heaped-up heads and preaches a sermon about God's word coming true, spinning a massacre he engineered as pure fulfillment of prophecy. He hides his own ambition and cruelty behind the language of divine purpose. It is a deeply unsettling thing a person can do, to carry out real evil while wrapping it in the vocabulary of serving God, and Jehu is a warning that a true statement about God's will can be used as a cover for one's own agenda. Hosea will later condemn the bloodshed. God's decree was real; Jehu's use of it to justify and disguise his own hand was not clean. Scripture lets both stand.

Do I ever dress my own agenda in the language of God's will, using true statements about his purposes to justify or disguise what I want, the way Jehu did over those heaped heads?

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