Idolatry's Curse

Today, we're sort of looking at Elijah's story after Ahab and Jezebel. Elijah has survived the two monarchs, King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. But let me start this morning with a little bit of a reflection on our political situation at the moment. They always tell us don't ever get political when you're a pastor. Tony Abbott is practically a shoe-in according to the polls for the election in September.

He is tipped very heavily to become the new prime minister of Australia. And unless a huge scandal were to happen in his party, it seems that Julia Gillard is on her way out. Wherever you find yourself on that political spectrum, it would be normal to expect that when someone new, a new leader, perhaps like Tony Abbott comes in, things are going to change. It's just normal to assume that. A new prime minister, a new era.

The Gillard government, as you probably know, have made decisions that some people wouldn't be very happy with, and Mister Tony Abbott has said that if he were to come into power, some of their decisions would be abolished. New leader, new policies. This morning we see that this is not always the case, however. A new leader doesn't necessarily mean new policies. A new leader doesn't necessarily mean change.

When we look at the final stages of Elijah's ministry, we come to a new king, a guy called Ahaziah. We see a new king but the same policies, the same attitude towards God. Not much has changed. If you have your Bibles with you, we're going to turn to Second Kings chapter one, and we're going to see what this man is about. We're going to see how things haven't really changed very much at all.

Second Kings chapter one, and we're going to read the entire chapter. I've been questioned, I don't think with any malicious intent, why we read so much of scripture? Why we don't just use a few verses to sort of sum up? And my reply is, our problem as Christians is not reading too much of the Bible. Our problem as Christians is not reading enough.

So it's important for us to understand what's going on here. It's important for us to absorb God's word as it trains us, as it teaches us, as it molds us. So we're going to read this chapter in Second Kings chapter one starting from verse one. After Ahab's death, Moab rebelled against Israel. Now, Ahaziah had fallen through the lattice of his upper room in Samaria and injured himself.

That's the new king, by the way. So he sent messengers saying to them, go and consult Baalzebub, the god of Ekron, to see if I will recover from this injury. But the angel of the Lord said to Elijah the Tishbite, go up and meet the messengers of the king of Samaria and ask them, is it because there is no God in Israel that you are going off to consult Baalzebub, the god of Ekron? Therefore, this is what the Lord says, you will not leave the bed you are lying on. You will certainly die.

So Elijah went. When the messengers returned to the king, he asked them, why have you come back? A man came to meet us, they replied. And he said to us, go back to the king who sent you and tell him, this is what the Lord says. Is it because there is no God in Israel that you are sending men to consult Baalzebub, the god of Ekron?

Therefore, you will not leave the bed you are lying on. You will certainly die. The king asked them, what kind of man was it who came to meet you and told you this? They replied, he was a man with a garment of hair and with a leather belt around his waist. The king said, that was Elijah the Tishbite.

Then he sent to Elijah a captain with his company of fifty men. The captain went up to Elijah who was sitting on top of a hill and said to him, man of God, the king says, come down. Elijah answered the captain, if I am a man of God, may fire come down from heaven and consume you and your fifty men. Then fire fell from heaven and consumed the captain and his men. At this, the king sent to Elijah another captain with his fifty men.

The captain said to him, man of God, this is what the king says, come down at once. If I am a man of God, Elijah replied, may fire come down from heaven and consume you and your fifty men. Then the fire of God fell from heaven and consumed him and his fifty men. So the king sent a third captain with his fifty men. This third captain went up and fell on his knees before Elijah.

Man of God, he begged, please have respect for my life and the lives of these fifty men, your servants. See, fire has fallen from heaven and consumed the first two captains and all their men, but now have respect for my life. The angel of the Lord said to Elijah, go down with him. Do not be afraid of him. So Elijah got up and went down with him to the king.

He told the king, this is what the Lord says, is it because there is no God in Israel for you to consult that you have sent messengers to consult Baalzebub, the God of Ekron? Because you will never leave the bed you are lying on. You will certainly die. So he died according to the word of the Lord that Elijah had spoken. Because Ahaziah had no son, Joram succeeded him as king in the second year of Jehoram, son of Jehoshaphat, king of Judah.

As for all the other events in Ahaziah's reign and what he did, are they not written in the book of the annals of the kings of Israel? So far our reading. So we come to the end of an era in the political realm of Israel. Ahab had died just as Elijah had said. Ahab was in battle.

Someone randomly shot an arrow right through the back of the battle and the arrow miraculously found a chink in the armour and mortally wounded Ahab. Ahab bled to death on his chariot, the Bible says. To some time later as well, Jezebel would die by being thrown out of her window by her chamber servants. And they both died horrendous deaths as had been predicted, as had been prophesied by Elijah because of idolatry. Now we come to their son, Ahaziah, in verses 51 to 53 of the previous chapter in First Kings 22.

We see that their son succeeded Ahab as king. We read that this man, Ahaziah, in his second year of reigning as king falls through a lattice. Now, we don't know anything more than this. He takes a fall from his palace somewhere or somehow in Samaria. It obviously injures him.

He breaks a leg or he breaks his back or something like that, and he is bedridden. He cannot get out of bed. In this situation, he asked some of his messengers to go to Ekron, one of five Philistine towns, and to inquire of the god Baalzebub, whether he's going to survive. Now, the name Baalzebub was probably a patron god of this town, Ekron. In the ancient Near East, each town would adopt a deity.

Even in Jesus' time, little towns would have a temple dedicated to one god. So there'd be a temple for Zeus, there'd be a town for Aphrodite, there'd be a town for Hermes or whoever. And so this is probably the local deity or the deity of Ekron. In Hebrew, Baal Zebub is translated "lord of the flies." Lord of the flies.

Scholars don't really know exactly where this comes from. Why the name? There's obviously some meaning to it, so there's speculation. Some say that it could mean that he was a god of medicine. I don't know how flies could be equated with medicine.

Others say that it was a god of death, which makes a bit more sense, right? Others say that it was a god that brought relief from plagues of flies that were common in the East. But whatever it was, Ekron, this Philistine town was also very well known for divination, for fortune telling. And so it seems that Ahaziah, wanting to know what his future looked like, sent some messengers to go to the false prophets there and to inquire and to do a few tarot card readings and read a few horoscopes and so on to find out what was going to happen to him.

On the way there, they meet Elijah. Elijah is told by God this is going to happen and go and speak with those guys. He asked them, guys, is it because there's no God in Israel that you are going to a Philistine town to find out, to inquire about your king's future? They go back and we obviously hear about God's judgment on these poor captains that are just doing their job. They just have to go to see Elijah and bring him to the king.

Elijah is blessed with the permission, I guess, to cast down fire upon these guys. And it's again a sign of God's judgment on and His disappointment in the idolatry that the leader of His people had gone into. Elijah confronts Ahaziah after two platoons have been wiped out. And the third captain begs for his life. And God says to Elijah, okay, you've made your statement.

Go and see the king. Elijah comes to the king. Interestingly, the king knows who this Elijah guy is. You know, he says, who is this man that said this to you? Oh, he's a guy with a big garment.

He's hairy and he's got a leather belt. And the king knows exactly who that is. It's Elijah. And so Elijah comes and he pronounces this death sentence over the king. And just as he had prophesied, the king dies.

We don't know how long after that, but he didn't get out of his bed and he passed away. The amazing thing is, again, and it's not made explicit here, but the promise that God made to Ahab and Jezebel as judgment against their idolatry was that Ahab's lineage would be cut down. Ahab's lineage, his heritage wouldn't continue to be kings and princes of Israel. And we see here that Ahaziah was a king for only two years and in that time didn't have a son. He thought he had would have a long life.

And no son was born to him and that was the end of Ahab's line. God's punishment for his idolatry. The interesting thing that we find here is that continuing in idolatry. When Ahaziah found himself in a desperate situation, his heart was made evident. The idolatry in his heart, his theology was made evident.

When people come to desperate situations in life, their theology is made evident. You will see what people really believe about God when they are faced with chronic pain. When they are faced with a child with cancer. When they are faced with very desperate situations. Ahaziah grew up with the values of his mum and dad, teaching him about the fertility gods of Baal and Asherah.

Teaching him that when you want good things in life, you go to these gods and they'll look after you. They believed that their fertile land was given to them by fertility gods. If you worship these gods, these idols, if you sacrificed to them, if you prayed to them, they would bless you. They would make you prosperous. They would make you rich.

Ahaziah valued prosperity. Ahaziah valued health. I mean, who of us don't? But this god, Baalzebub, offered him a prosperity gospel. And that's why he went to this god. He didn't turn to the living God, the God who over and over and over again showed His power to the people of Israel.

He knew who Elijah the Tishbite was. He wasn't ignorant. He knew who that man was. He knew Elijah who had spent years trying to win his parents back from their rebellion against God. He heard about all that Elijah had done.

The fights that he and his dad had. But the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. And Ahaziah wholeheartedly chose an idol over God and again, God was forced to remove this idolatrous king from the throne. It's so easy when we read these stories you think, wow, those guys are so thick. I mean, Mount Carmel, you know, fire falling onto a pile of stone and wood soaked in water and burning it all up.

Isn't that just a huge sign of God's evidence or God's realness? Why worship a dumb idol made out of wood or stone? Why witness the power of God yet go back to these things? We have to remember that their idolatry, however, wasn't a complete rejection of Yahweh. It was just that they worshipped Yahweh alongside other gods.

See, this is the thing. We sometimes think that they wholeheartedly went after one god. But the thing is, most people were polytheists. They believed that many gods existed. We go to many different gods for various things.

And so they worshipped God, the living God, alongside a whole host of other lesser gods or false gods. In fact, most scholars would say that the Israelites would say that Yahweh was their God. He was the supreme God, but all these other idols were lesser gods under Yahweh's control. In ancient Greece, you had the myth of Zeus, the supreme god who was boss over Hermes and Aphrodite and all these other gods. And in the same way, they probably thought that this was Yahweh as well.

So there would be gods of health, there would be gods of rain, of water, of animal husbandry. And so maybe Yahweh was just the boss over these other ones. So God's not completely out of the picture. It's just that there were other options available. Other gods that people also valued.

It might be easy for us to sit here and judge their actions and go, that's, you know, ridiculous. But if you boil everything down, if you boil everything down, there's not much difference in the motives of people then and now. And we see that much of what they did and why they did it is still very active in our world today. According to Genesis, right in the beginning, God created mankind to worship and serve God. God made mankind to worship and serve God, and then to rule over all of creation.

That was the two main things. To be God's stewards of this earth. But instead, mankind fell into sin. When the apostle Paul talks about this event, he does so by describing it in terms of idolatry, interestingly enough. He says in Romans 1:23-25 that we refuse to give God the glory which He rightly deserves.

In other words, making Him the most important thing in our life. We refuse to do that, and instead, choose certain things of creation to glorify instead. So what happens in essence, in human rebellion against God, is that we reverse the order that God originally created. Now, instead of worshipping God and ruling over creation, human beings come to worship creation and become slaves to the things that were created. When God saw how this innate desire of the human heart had corrupted humanity, He eventually sought to correct it by giving the Ten Commandments.

And if you know the Ten Commandments, the first two are a guard against idolatry. Love the Lord your God, and do not have any other gods before you. Do not create idols for yourselves. The first law prohibits worshipping other gods. The second commandment prohibits worshipping God idolatrously.

Or as we would want Him to be, creating God in our image. The commandments make it clear. We will either worship God or we will worship something we create to be God. It's one of those two options. Either worship God or worship something that's created.

Every human personality, every human community, every human world view will be based on some ultimate concern or some ultimate allegiance to something. That is what we were created to do. We were created to worship something. We were created to desire a master, to desire a king. In fact, the prophet Jeremiah says that our relationship with idols is like a love addicted person to his or her lover.

Idols manipulate the heart into a complete dependence on them, and they completely capture the heart. It's like that feeling when you fall in love for the first time, there's nothing else you can think about but that person. They become our lords. And whatever is our lord controls us. The person who seeks power is controlled by power.

The person who seeks money is controlled by money. The person who seeks acceptance is controlled by the people he or she wants to please. We do not control ourselves, we are controlled instead by the lord of our life. Why do we steal? Why do we lie?

Why do we fail to love? These things we call sins. This is what the Bible identifies as sins. Why do we do it? Because we are sinful.

Yes, we are weak, perhaps. But more specifically, because there is something besides Jesus Christ that has value, the utmost value in our lives. We feel we must have that in order to be happy. We do it because there's something that is more important to our hearts than God.

Idolatry. Idolatry is the sin beneath the sin. If you really think about it, it's not just one of them. It's actually the cause of sin. It leads us to make bad choices, to rebel against God.

This is what Ahaziah's problem was. I mean, he had a terrible accident. We don't know, it doesn't say necessarily that this was caused by God, it just happened. How he reacted to it, though, showed the motive of his heart. It showed, you know, his desire for prosperity and for health and obviously, you know, let's go and then sort this out.

Idolatry is the sin beneath the sin. Every one of us live lives with values. We value family. We value health. We value good things.

All of these things are good. Money is good. Power is good. Status is good. It is all created by God to be good.

But what happens and what wreaks havoc is having a value that becomes a centre value in our lives. An idea, an object, a person in which you have an interest or from which you derive significance. The problem is these values compete. These values compete. You can only have one ultimate value.

And in time, one value becomes the centre value by which all other values are judged. A person has an idol when a value is so central in their life that they believe they cannot be happy without it. A value becomes an idol when it becomes so central in their life that they believe they cannot be happy without it. For example, money can be an idol. Of course, we know that.

You can't serve two gods, Jesus said. You can't serve both God and money. It's a very easily identifiable one. But idolatry is insidious and hard to isolate. Money can be idolatry because it can be hoarded in order to control our life or our world.

These people that struggle with this don't spend their money, but save it. They're the ones that you will say, oh, wow. Those people are greedy. They're selfish. Others, however, use money to access social circles for making themselves beautiful or attractive.

See how that's much more difficult to identify? These people do spend money. They're not the Scrooge McDucks of this world. They do spend their money but they spend it on themselves. The same goes for sex.

Some people use sex in order to get power over others. Others in order to feel approved or to feel loved. And still others for pure pleasure or comfort. Work can become an idol. Although it has been created by God to be good, God said that we work to fulfil our purpose.

Work is a good thing that God created. But work can become an idol if it is pursued exclusively to the loss of responsibility to one's family. Family can become an idol if one is so preoccupied with the family that no one outside the family is cared for. Being well liked becomes an idol if the attachment to it means that you never risk disapproval.

You never say anything because it might offend. Being well liked can become an idol. All of these things, work, family, respect are good values. They are good things. But it's once they become that centre of our lives that we really run the risk.

What's the solution? What's the solution for idolatry? Our main problem is that we are looking to something besides Jesus Christ for our happiness. That is the problem with our world. We are looking for things other than Jesus to give us fulfilment.

You've been worshipping an idol and rejecting the true God if you do that. Every idol system is based on works salvation. If I work hard enough, if I have enough money, if I look good enough, God will be pleased with me. I will be okay. Life will be good.

If I strive after status or wealth, I'll be right. But we can never be good enough for God that way. We will never find fulfilment and joy that way. Paul tells us that the bondage to idolatry and sin can only be broken when we come out from under that sort of thinking. When we begin to believe the gospel of Jesus' salvation.

Only when we realise in a new way that we are right with God because of the work of Jesus on the cross is the idol's power broken over us. How do we do that? The Bible says the first thing is to repent. That's an old biblical word, is to turn away, to identify that in your heart, and to say, you know, I desire to break that habit, is to repent from our idols. And the second way is to rest and rejoice in the saving work of Jesus Christ.

To rest. We can never not have idols to worship. That's a really important thing for us to know. We can never not have idols. We were created to worship.

You can stamp one out. You can say, well, I know that I'm struggling with this area. It's something that's become a bit of an obsession in my mind. We can stamp it out. We can change our habits.

But if we don't replace it with Jesus Christ, something else is just going to come up. The only way we can overcome idolatry is to make God our object of worship. Our hearts yearn for affection. Our hearts yearn for a king, a master. And it's funny, you don't have to be a Christian to see that.

It's only when our affection is rightly placed on the Lord Jesus that we will find true happiness, that we will find true fulfilment and contentment. Everything else, everything else will leave you empty. Everything else will disappoint. Everything else will be tasteless and futile. If we are not grounded in a desire for Jesus Christ, if we do not seek Him daily as our source of life and strength, we will fall prey to the lure of the false gods.

You could have been around Elijah and have seen this amazing thing that God did. And a few decades later, you have Ahaziah going to Baalzebub, the god of Ekron. Why did that happen? Because they didn't make God their object of affection. They didn't make God their heart's desire.

They saw, wow, this is good. And they all said, Yahweh is God. Yahweh is God. And then just went home. And then they forgot.

If we are not grounded in a desire for Jesus Christ, we will fall prey to the lure of the false gods over and over again. So we are called to identify and to know what areas in our lives are susceptible to this. We can sit here and judge that and we say, Ahaziah, you are an idiot. How could you do that? But money, power, status, family, image, beauty, all those things are idols.

We see it all around us. It could even be your idol could even be guilt of having an idol. Anything that becomes an inordinate obsession of your heart and your mind. We're called to turn away from those affections in our hearts to repent, the Bible calls it. And when we break away from those things and replace them with Jesus Christ, to seek to make Him the greatest and the biggest desire in our hearts, to rejoice in Him, to desire Him, we will find completion and fulfilment and joy in Him.

Get to know Him through prayer. Get to know Him through studying God's word, through hearing His word preached, through worshipping Him, through regularly stopping, just stopping and reflecting on what He's doing in your life. How is God working with me? What is God teaching me? How is God blessing me?

Through that, through that, you will come to find happiness and fulfilment. The rest is futile. The rest will leave you with a bitter taste in your mouth. Seek God and taste that He is good.