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Context No. 637 of 4322 · 2 Chronicles

Context · Reflection

2 Chronicles 16:7-14: in context

7At that time Hanani the seer came to Asa king of Judah, and said to him, “Because you have relied on the king of Syria, and have not relied on the LORD your God, therefore the army of the king of Syria has escaped out of your hand. 8Weren’t the Ethiopians and the Lubim a huge army, with chariots and exceedingly many horsemen? Yet, because you relied on the LORD, he delivered them into your hand. 9For the LORD’s eyes run back and forth throughout the whole earth, to show himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him. You have done foolishly in this; for from now on you will have wars.” 10Then Asa was angry with the seer, and put him in the prison; for he was in a rage with him because of this thing. Asa oppressed some of the people at the same time. 11Behold, the acts of Asa, first and last, behold, they are written in the book of the kings of Judah and Israel. 12In the thirty-ninth year of his reign, Asa was diseased in his feet. His disease was exceedingly great; yet in his disease he didn’t seek the LORD, but just the physicians. 13Asa slept with his fathers, and died in the forty-first year of his reign. 14They buried him in his own tomb, which he had dug out for himself in David’s city, and laid him in the bed which was filled with sweet odors and various kinds of spices prepared by the perfumers’ art; and they made a very great fire for him.

Asa had been one of Judah's good kings. Early in his reign, facing a vast invading army, he had cried out to God and trusted him, and God gave him an astonishing victory. But this passage catches him late in life, and he is a changed man. Threatened again, he does not turn to God; he buys a military alliance with a pagan king instead. When the prophet Hanani confronts him, reminding him that the eyes of the LORD range through the whole earth to strengthen those whose heart is wholly his, Asa does not repent. He flies into a rage and throws the prophet in prison. And the final note is the saddest: some years later, struck with a severe disease in his feet, Asa did not seek the LORD, but only the physicians. The king who once trusted God with an army now would not even seek him in his own sickbed.

That is a portrait of a faith that erodes, and it is more frightening than an outright rejection of God, because it happens by slow drift in a man who started well. Asa did not renounce God; he simply, over the years, stopped relying on him, grew self-sufficient, hardened against correction, and by the end was reflexively turning to every human resource, alliances, physicians, anything, while no longer seeking God at all. The wholehearted trust of his youth had quietly leaked away, and he did not seem to notice it going.

That is a sobering trajectory to hold up against myself, because starting well is no guarantee of finishing well. It is possible to drift, over years, from a living trust in God into a practical self-reliance that turns to him less and less, that resents being corrected, that reaches for every human means and no longer thinks to seek him even in trouble. Asa is what that drift looks like at the end. Am I drifting, like Asa, from an earlier wholehearted trust into a self-reliance that seeks God less and less and bristles at correction, and where have I stopped seeking him even in the places I once would have?

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