2 Kings 9:6-10: in context

A young prophet, sent by Elisha, slips into a room where the army commander Jehu is sitting, pours oil on his head, and delivers a startling commission: the LORD has anointed you king over Israel, and you are to strike down the house of Ahab. And God gives the reason for this violent judgment, a reason worth noticing. You must strike your master Ahab's house, the message says, that I may avenge the blood of my servants the prophets, and the blood of all the servants of the LORD, at the hand of Jezebel. This is about a long-standing debt of blood. Jezebel had spent years hunting and killing God's prophets, and God has not forgotten a single one of them.

That is the striking thing here, underneath the drama of the coup. Jezebel's murder of the prophets had happened long before; through all the years of her and Ahab's reign, it must have looked to the faithful as though those deaths would simply go unanswered, the killers secure on the throne, the martyrs forgotten. And here, at last, God says he has been keeping account the entire time. The blood of his servants was never off his books. He waited, but he did not forget, and now the reckoning comes. God takes the suffering of his faithful ones with deadly seriousness, and evil done to them does not, in the end, go unaddressed.

That steadies me in a world where injustice against good people so often seems to win and go unpunished. When I see the faithful crushed and their persecutors comfortable, it can look as though no one is keeping score, as though cruelty simply gets away with it. This passage insists that God is keeping score, that the blood of his servants is remembered, and that vengeance is his to repay in his own time, not mine to seize. When evil done to God's people appears to go unanswered, can I trust that he has not forgotten it, and leave the reckoning in his hands rather than despairing that no one sees?