Today’s reading: 2 Chronicles 16-17; Revelation 1
It doesn’t matter how faithful you’ve been in the past, if you don’t continuously choose to remain faithful, sin will creep in and lead you astray from the Lord.
King Asa started out so well. 2 Chronicles 14 tells us that, “Asa did what was good and right in the eyes of the Lord his God.” As a result, God gave him and his kingdom peace for 10 years. Then, when the army of Ethiopia came against Judah, Asa tuned to the Lord and He delivered them from the massive and powerful army that had come against them. After this, a prophet came and reminded Asa to stay faithful, and Asa’s response was to pursue even greater faithfulness to Yahweh. As a result, God gave them peace for another 25 years.
But then, in chapter 16, when Baasha, king of Israel, started moving against Judah, rather than trusting in the Lord as he had previously, Asa turned to the king of Syria for help. In fact, more than just seeking help from Syria, Asa took money out of the temple to pay for their help. This means it wasn’t just a thoughtless reaction, but an intentional choice to trust Syria over Yahweh, taking what had been dedicated to Yahweh and giving it instead to the Syrians.
This could have been considered a simple lapse in judgement, but then when God sends a prophet to confront Asa about his breach of faith, rather than admitting his wrong and repenting, Asa throws the prophet in prison and lashes out against his people as well. Then, to show us where his heart remained, when Asa fell sick, a sickness that was evidently severe enough to lead to death, even in that he did not seek help from the Lord.
Asa is an important warning to the faithful Christian, expressly because he started out so well. Not only did Asa do what was right before the Lord when establishing his kingdom and when it was easy, but he also made the difficult decision to trust in the Lord in the face of overwhelming odds, setting him and his people on a course of faithfulness for decades to come. But, evidently, his heart started to drift over those decades. Asa never overtly rejected the Lord during those years, but when he is again confronted with an opportunity to trust in the Lord (and in a lesser way than he had in the past), he didn’t hesitate to trust instead in his own resources, wisdom, and connections. And his response to being confronted about that choice shows us further the disposition of his heart at that point.
We can’t hang our hats on past faithfulness to the Lord and expect we will stay faithful and finish well. The faithful life is one of continued, daily choices toward faithfulness, in the big things as well as the small, that keep our faith rooted and anchored in the Lord, not drifting slowly and gradually from that anchor.
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