Thanks for being patient with me during this series. There is so much going on sometimes, I have a hard time staying on one subject. Anyhow, back to King Hezekiah. If you havent read the first blog in this series then you might be a little confused with whats going on so I will try to catch you up in a line or two.
I have been reading the story of King Hezekiah in 2 Kings 18:1-20:21 over the past few weeks, and I have learned a great deal from his life that I wanted to share with you all. I shared lesson 1, here, a few days ago in another blog you should check out. Here is the 2nd thing I learned from the story of Hezekiah.
2. Sometimes God may require us to destroy what was once a blessing if it comes between us and our relationship with Him. (2Kings 18:4)
4 He removed the high places and broke the sacred pillars, cut down the wooden image[b]and broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made; for until those days the children of Israel burned incense to it, and called it Nehushtan.[c]
In this verse we are told about some of the measures that King Hezekiah took when he bacame king in order to return Judah to it’s place of worshiping the true God. We learned in the last post that Hezekiah’s father was a wicked king that turned his back on God and allowed his people to worship other gods. Hezekiah was not like his father for he loved and trusted the Lord and wanted his people to love and trust Him too. In this verse we see that Hezekiah had the high places and all the sacred pillars and idols erected to other gods destroyed, which is to be expected by a king seeking to rid his people of such things.
What jumped out to me was the end of the verse where we see he destroyed the bronze serpent that Moses was given by God. This serpent was given to Moses in Numbers 21:4-9. In this account we learn that the children of Israel spoke against God and Moses and God sent serpents among them to bite and poison them. The children of Israel came to Moses to repent and ask for help, and Moses went to God on their behalf. God instructed Moses to make a fiery serpent and attach it to a pole and when the people looked at it they would be healed. Can I pause right here and say how great our God is, even when we rebel against him he still returns to us and helps us out of whatever we get ourselves into.
So now we return to Hezekiah where we learn that the children of Israel had taken the very fiery serpent that God had given to heal them and made it into an idol that they worshiped instead of him. So Hezekiah, or King Hez and I am calling him in my personal study, LOL, destroyed it.
This reminded me of us..sometimes we pray for God to bless us with things we need or sometimes just Want, and our faithful and loving God comes through for us. Then we turn around and give more of our time, energy, and trust to the thing he gave us then we do to him. This is a classic case of idolatry, worshiping the created instead of the Creator. We pray for a job we want and God blesses us, then we spend more time at the job than we do with God and we don’t even share the Gospel while we are there. We ask God for a boy/girlfriend, then we spend more time with them than we do with God, which eventually leads us to fall into temptation and sin. We ask God for financial increase, and he blesses us with it, and we turn around and rely on the money more than God and decrease our giving instead of increasing it.
God is a loving Father and wants to be first place in our lives, not for his benefit but for ours. God is always good, and he desires to and will bless us with so many of the things we ask for. But when we allow the blessings God gives us to come between us and Him he will require us to tear them down. Not because he is angry at us and wants to punish us, but because he knows that having something in the way of our relationship with him is detrimental to us.
Much Love
Reuel Williams 