Scripture Daily

Context No. 559 of 4322 · 2 Kings

Context · Reflection

2 Kings 18:1-8: in context

1Now in the third year of Hoshea son of Elah king of Israel, Hezekiah the son of Ahaz king of Judah began to reign. 2He was twenty-five years old when he began to reign, and he reigned twenty-nine years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Abi the daughter of Zechariah. 3He did that which was right in the LORD’s eyes, according to all that David his father had done. 4He removed the high places, broke the pillars, and cut down the Asherah. He also broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, because in those days the children of Israel burned incense to it; and he called it Nehushtan. 5He trusted in the LORD, the God of Israel, so that after him was no one like him among all the kings of Judah, nor among them that were before him. 6For he joined with the LORD. He didn’t depart from following him, but kept his commandments, which the LORD commanded Moses. 7The LORD was with him. Wherever he went, he prospered. He rebelled against the king of Assyria, and didn’t serve him. 8He struck the Philistines to Gaza and its borders, from the tower of the watchmen to the fortified city.

Hezekiah is one of the great reforming kings of Judah, and the summary of his faithfulness is stunning: he trusted the LORD so that there was no one like him among all the kings of Judah, before or after. Among his reforms he tears down the pagan high places and pillars, as good kings did. But one of his acts stands out from the rest, because the thing he destroys is not a pagan idol at all. He breaks in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, because the people had been burning incense to it, and he contemptuously renames it Nehushtan, just a piece of bronze.

Think about what that took. The bronze serpent was not a foreign idol; it was a genuinely sacred relic from Israel's own history. Centuries earlier, at God's own command, Moses had lifted it up in the wilderness and everyone who looked at it was healed. It had been a real instrument of God's grace, a holy object with an authentic story. But over the generations the people had drifted from worshiping the God who healed through it to worshiping the object itself, burning incense to a lump of bronze. And Hezekiah had the clarity and the courage to destroy even that, a true relic, a genuine piece of sacred history, once God had let it curdle into an idol. He would not let a good thing that had become a substitute for God remain.

That is an uncomfortable and necessary question to turn on myself, because the idols hardest to see are the ones that started as genuine gifts. A past spiritual experience, a tradition, a blessing, even a form of worship that once truly brought me near to God, can quietly shift into something I treasure in place of God himself, clinging to the gift rather than the Giver. Is there a genuinely good thing in my life, once a real means of God's grace, that I have let become an idol, an object I now cling to instead of the God behind it, and do I have Hezekiah's courage to call it Nehushtan and let it go?

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