God’s Word for You
2 Chronicles 24:17-22 The blood of Zechariah
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Monday, April 28, 2025
17 Now after the death of Jehoiada the officials of Judah came and bowed down before the king. And at that time the king began to listen to them. 18 They abandoned the House of the LORD, the God of their fathers, and they began to serve the Asherahs and the idols. So wrath fell down upon Judah and Jerusalem because of their guilt. 19 Yet God sent prophets among them to bring them back to the LORD; they testified against them, but they would not pay attention. 20 Then the spirit of God came upon of Zechariah son of Jehoiada the priest. He stood before the people and said to them, “This is what God says: Why do you disobey the commandments of the LORD? You cannot prosper! Because you have forsaken the LORD, he has also forsaken you.” 21 But they plotted against him, and at the king’s command they stoned him to death in the court of the house of the LORD. 22 King Joash did not remember the kindness that Zechariah’s father Jehoiada had shown him, but killed his son. As he lay dying, he said, “May the LORD see and seek to punish!”
King Joash was over thirty by the time Jehoiada died, but he did not stay faithful to the Lord even after a lifetime of faithfulness. Without the direct involvement of Jehoiada, he began to make mistakes. The first was to allow his princes to worship as they pleased. A series of prophets (Elisha was alive at this time but was working in the north) came to warn the king, but they were ignored. When Jehoiada’s own son, Zechariah, was driven to speak by the Holy Spirit, it made no difference. It’s possible that the three quick sentences of his prophecy that are recorded are in fact themes of several longer sermons. The first is the question, “Why do you disobey the commandments of the LORD?” Joash had been eager about obeying the Laws of Moses, and he had even taken old Jehoiada to task when things didn’t move along quickly enough (24:6). But now he had forsaken God completely. The second statement (or sermon) is a warning: “You cannot prosper!” Without God’s blessing, how could the king or his people expect anything good to come to them? This was followed by an even bigger warning: “Because you have forsaken God, he has forsaken you.” This was the last straw. Joash’s princes conspired against him, and Joash himself was even brought into their conspiracy, and they stoned the prophet to death in the courtyard of the temple. This was a man Joash had grown up with, probably looked up to, and yet he murdered him because he spoke the truth to correct his behavior and hoped to bring about repentance. Joash would not tolerate a man who disagreed with him, and so he killed him.
Here we read the story that Jesus uses as an example of the wickedness of those who shed innocent blood (Matthew 23:35, Luke 11:51). A question that will come up in Matthew is, why does the Lord Jesus say, “Zechariah son of Berekiah,” and not “son of Jehoiada”? There are several possible answers to this, of unequal quality.
1, Matthew might have made a mistake in quoting Jesus. But this flies in the face of divine inspiration. For Peter says, “Men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21).
2, Jesus might be thinking of both Zechariahs. The Gospels sometimes take two accounts and put them together with one reference, such as when Mark says, “It is written in Isaiah the prophet” (Mark 1:2) but then quotes both from Isaiah and from Malachi.
3. He might have been called “son of Berekiah” for spiritual reasons since Berekiah means “blessed one” (= benedictus). This was the opinion of St. Jerome.
4, “Berekiah” was another name for Zechariah son of Jehoiada. Luther adopts this explanation: “His father Jehoiada had the surname Berekiah, perhaps because he had bestowed many good things on that king (Joash) and on the people, for which reason they called him the blessed one. But then after his death, to express their gratitude, they killed his son. This is exactly how things usually go in the world, as the proverb says: If you help a person to escape the gallows, he in turn gives you a hand onto the gallows. So it happened with the Son of God; God bestowed everything that is good on all the world, and the world crucified his dearly beloved son—as is prefigured by this” (Luther, Sermon on Matthew 23:34-39).
5, It is further possible that Jesus means the son of Jehoiada, but uses a nickname like “Blessed One” for him, even though he was killed long before many other more famous prophets were put to death by the wicked kings of Judah. Isaiah was one, but since Isaiah’s actual death is not recorded in Scripture, Christ wants us only to give attention to those accounts that are definitely recorded through the inspiration by the Holy Spirit.
6, It is also possible that Jesus was not thinking about Zechariah son of Jehoiada, but about the prophet who was the son of Berekiah. He, too, might have been killed in the new temple by the people.
Of these I prefer the two that are put forward by Luther (numbers 4 and 5 above), which both take the text of the Bible as the truth without error.
Zechariah’s dying words were a warning and a curse: “May the LORD see, and seek to punish!” The verb darash “seek” has the sense of “demand, require” in many places, usually with a theological meaning. Where the Lord is the subject, the object of what he seeks is frequently “blood” (Ezekiel 33:6; Psalm 9:13), “soul” (Genesis 9:5b), “a vow” (Deuteronomy 23:22), “sheep” (Ezekiel 34:10) and “a sacrifice” (Ezekiel 20:40; Micah 6:8). In a few places, including the verse before us, there is no stated object (that is to say, to seek what?), but punishment is always implied (see also Deuteronomy 18:19; Psalm 10:4 and 10:15). Introducing “vengeance” into the text is a choice of some translations that is bound to confuse readers.
The Gospel in this passage is only to be found when Zechariah’s murder is seen as a type, foreshadowing the crucifixion of Jesus. This is how Jesus himself took it, and while Zechariah’s blood did not atone for anything, the blood of Jesus atoned for all sins of all mankind (Hebrews 10:10). And on account of his death, the mercy of God is given to us through the resurrection of Christ from the dead (1 Peter 1:3). It is not for us to seek punishment or revenge on anyone, but to rejoice that our names are written like Zechariah’s in the book of life.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.