God’s Word for You

2 Chronicles 25:18-24 Why provoke trouble

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Saturday, May 3, 2025

18 But Jehoash King of Israel sent word to Amaziah King of Judah, “A thorn bush in Lebanon sent word to a cedar on Lebanon and said: ‘Give your daughter to my son as a wife.’ But a wild animal in Lebanon was passing by and trampled down the thornbush. 19 You say, ‘Look, I have defeated Edom,’ and your heart has lifted you up in pride. Now stay at home; why should you provoke trouble so that you fall, you and Judah with you?” 20 But Amaziah would not listen, for this was God’s doing, in order to hand them over to their enemies, because they had sought the gods of Edom. 21 So Jehoash King of Israel went up, so that he and Amaziah King of Judah faced one another in battle at Beth Shemesh, which belongs to Judah.

The saber-rattling of the war involved a fable. We see the same sort of thing spoken in Judges 9:8-15. A mere thorn bush (the king of Judah) is getting above itself by asking a mighty cedar for its daughter’s hand in marriage for the son of the thorn bush. But some animal walking past (a fox or wild dog) has stepped carelessly on the thorn bush and trampled it. The fable was clever; it put Amaziah in his place even while acknowledging his victory over the Edomites. But the message of Jehoash was clear: “Stay at home.”

Here we have a clear statement that God’s hand was in this war. He wanted to bring Amaziah and his people to repentance through a disastrous attack and defeat. No one will ever want forgiveness if they do not first know that they are sinners, or do not feel sorry for their sins, or if they still believe that they can help themselves out from under the burden of sin and into heaven. Therefore God allows troubles or sends crosses of his own design—such as the defeat that was on its way to Amaziah and his people—to bring the sinful heart and mind to the point where it can no longer ignore sin or even begin to attempt to overcome sin, but says, “What a miserable wretch I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24). Then the gospel may approach and do its healing work.

22 Judah was defeated by Israel. Every man fled to his tent. 23 It was at Beth Shemesh that Jehoash King of Israel captured Amaziah King of Judah, the son of Joash, son of Ahaziah. He brought him to Jerusalem and broke down the wall of Jerusalem from the Ephraim Gate to the Corner Gate, a distance of four hundred cubits. 24 He took all the gold and silver, and all the articles that were found within the Obed-Edom chamber in the house of God. He also plundered the treasuries of the king’s house, took his sons as hostages, and returned to Samaria.

Beth Shemesh is a term meaning “House of the Sun.” It was a fortified city about twenty miles west of Jerusalem. It sat low on the rim of a valley just two miles from the Philistine border. The valley was still covered in corn and wheat fields as recently as 1940, just the same as it had been when the men harvesting their wheat looked up and saw the Ark of the Covenant passing by, sitting atop an undriven wagon pulled by oxen (1 Samuel 6:13-15). Today it is a suburb of Jerusalem, with small archaeological sites behind wire fences just a few feet from housing subdivisions and paved streets and highways. The Israelites led by Jehoash defeated the Jews and captured King Amaziah. A neat little touch is given by our author who says that each warrior who escaped “fled to his tent.” The men may have lived in houses with thatched rooftops back in the cities of Judah, but here they returned to their tents. Either this means that they went back to wherever they had encamped the night before, or else they went back into the fields where they farmed or worked as shepherds, or to their more humble dwellings in the villages of Judah. But they did not return to Jerusalem.

Jehoash, on the other hand, certainly did go up to Jerusalem. Taking the captured king with him, he attacked the city from the north or northwest, smashing down a large section of wall about two hundred yards long (a cubit is the length of a man’s arm from his elbow to his fingertip—about 16 to 18 inches for a typical adult). The Corner Gate was the far northwestern end of the city’s northern wall (Jeremiah 31:38) and the Ephraim Gate was, therefore, two hundred yards away (Nehemiah 8:16), which corresponds with the “Damascus Gate” (as it is called today) which is near the center of the old north wall, to the east of the Corner Gate. An important road leading north would have gone through Ephraim (and its capital, Samaria) and eventually to Damascus in Syria to the north.

This north section of the city was the area of the temple, and so Jehoash and his men simply cut their way through whatever guards were at hand and plundered the temple. Obed-Edom is a reference to the farmer of Gath who watched over the Ark for three months before it was brought to Jerusalem by David (2 Samuel 6:10-11). Later, Obed-Edom became the doorkeeper for the Ark when David moved it into the city (1 Chronicles 15:24-25). Obed-Edom’s father, Jeduthun (1 Chronicles 16:38) might possibly be the “Jeduthun” mentioned in the headings of Psalms 39, 62 and 77. So the “Obed-Edom” of our passage may refer to “the chamber of Obed-Edom” (as I have translated it) or “that had been in the care of Obed-Edom” (NIV-1978). Obed-Edom the man had been a contemporary of David, almost two hundred years before.

The last detail of the war, besides the destruction and the plunder, is the capture of Amaziah’s sons. We are not told what happened to these young men. Were they the ransom price for the return of the king? They might have been ransomed later on, or they might have been executed. What we do know is that one son of Amaziah, a boy called Azariah, survived and became Amaziah’s successor. Little Azariah was just one year old when Jehoash died. Was Azariah one of the captives, or had he escaped capture just as Joash had escaped his wicked grandmother, Athaliah? The Holy Spirit will tell us when we arrive in heaven.

Amaziah had been brought low because of his idolatry and unbelief. When the law crushes us, the Lord brings us so low that we have no place else to look except up, to him. Only the devil or the most hard-hearted women or men would refuse to look up. But when, after our spirits have been beaten down by the law, and the sweet gospel is offered, that gospel covers over every sin, every doubt, every moment of arrogance. The man who has challenged the word of God to claim that it cannot be true can be forgiven even of that. The woman who has spit in the face of Jesus because she wanted to live in her own wretched world of sin and iniquity, can be forgiven even of that. The only danger left is to reject he gospel itself. But put your trust in Jesus! His forgiveness is far greater than we can imagine. Why provoke trouble so that you fall? Cling to Jesus forever.

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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