2 Kings 1:1-6 Then Moab rebelled against Israel after the death of Ahab.… Ahaziah, the man of whom this chapter speaks, was the son of Ahab and of Jezebel. He was badly born. Some allowance must be made for this fact in estimating his character. Ahaziah fell through the lattice, and in his helplessness he became religious. Man must have some God. Even atheism is a kind of religion. When a man recoils openly from what may be termed the public faith of his country, he seeks to apologise for his recoil, and to make up for his church absence by creating high obligations of another class: he plays the patriot; he plays the disciplinarian — in some way he will try to make up for, or defend, the recoil of his soul from the old altar of his country. It is in their helplessness that we really know what men are. The cry for friendship is but a subdued cry for God. Sometimes men will invent gods of their own. It is said of Shakespeare that he first exhausted worlds, and then invented new. That was right. It was but of the liberty of a poet so to do. But it is no part of the liberty of the soul. Necessity forbids it, because the true God cannot be exhausted. Who can exhaust nature? Who can exhaust nature's God? Still, the imagination of man is evil continually. He will invent new ways of enjoying himself. He will degrade religion into a mere form of interrogation. This is what Ahaziah did in this instance: "Go, inquire of Baal-zebub" (ver. 2). All that we sometimes want of God is that He should be the great fortune-teller. If He will tell us how this transaction will turn out, how this speculation will fructify, how this illness will terminate, how this revolution will eventuate — that is all we want with Him; a question-answering God; a God that will specially take care of us and nurse us into strength, that we may spend that strength in reviling against His throne. How true it is that Ahaziah represents us all in making his religion into a mere form of question-asking; in other words, into a form of selfishness! Nothing can be so selfish as religion. (J. Parker, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Then Moab rebelled against Israel after the death of Ahab. |
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