Scripture Daily

Context No. 111 of 4322 · 2 Chronicles

Context · Reflection

2 Chronicles 25:9-13: in context

9Amaziah said to the man of God, “But what shall we do for the hundred talents which I have given to the army of Israel?” The man of God answered, “The LORD is able to give you much more than this.” 10Then Amaziah separated them, the army that had come to him out of Ephraim, to go home again. Therefore their anger was greatly kindled against Judah, and they returned home in fierce anger. 11Amaziah took courage, and led his people out and went to the Valley of Salt, and struck ten thousand of the children of Seir. 12The children of Judah carried away ten thousand alive, and brought them to the top of the rock, and threw them down from the top of the rock, so that they all were broken in pieces. 13But the men of the army whom Amaziah sent back, that they should not go with him to battle, fell on the cities of Judah from Samaria even to Beth Horon, and struck of them three thousand, and took much plunder.

Amaziah king of Judah has hired a hundred thousand mercenaries from the northern kingdom of Israel for a hundred talents of silver, and a prophet has told him to send them home because God is not with Israel. This passage is his response, and it opens with the most practical question in the Bible.

But what about the hundred talents I have already paid? The prophet's answer does not address the accounting: the LORD is able to give you much more than this. Amaziah sends the troops home. They go off in a rage at being dismissed. He then takes his own army to the Valley of Salt and wins, killing ten thousand Edomites, and capturing ten thousand more, whom his soldiers throw from the top of a cliff.

Two things sit side by side here. He obeyed at real financial cost, and then did something appalling with the victory. And the dismissed mercenaries, on their way home, raided towns in Judah and killed three thousand people. His obedience had a bill attached, and the bill came due in a way the prophet never mentioned. Obeying did not make the consequences go away. What am I expecting to go smoothly because I did the right thing at the start of it?

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