THE KING WHO WOULD NOT DIE
THE
KING WHO WOULD NOT DIE
By
Robert Allen
CHAPTER
TWELVE
The next day the nation inaugurated
King Joash. Though the crown had already
been placed on his head, he had not yet ascended the throne. Jehoiada summoned all of the captains of
hundreds who pledged loyalty to the son of David along with the nobles and
governors of the people to the temple.
They dressed Joash is a beautiful purple robe and place the crown upon
his head. When he stepped out into the
courtyard he gasped as Athaliah’s royal chair appeared carried by four
servants. A quick shiver of fear ran
down his spine until he reminded himself she had died the day before. The chair now belonged to him and would carry
him in the great parade from the temple to the palace.
First marched the Levites who had
protected him the day before. The swords
and shields had been returned to the armory and in their place they carried ram’s
horns and cymbals. They marched in perfect order, twenty in a line, singing and
blowing the horns and banging the cymbals as they marched.
After them came the priests,
resplendent in their pure white robes, each with a burning censor in his
hand. The censors had been filled with
coals of fire from off the altar that very morning.
Jehoiada, the high priest, towered above
the rest of them in his official garments and mitre. Everyone moved slowly in order to help him
keep the tall mitre balanced on his head.
King Joash sat proudly as the
chair-bearers rose to their feet with Queen Athaliah’s chair and him on their
shoulders. From that height he could see
everyone and everything. He understood
why the queen loved to ride above the crowd.
He waved happily to the people and they returned the greeting as the
procession moved slowly across the bridge on the western side of the temple and
then down through the valley through the middle of the city toward the palace.
Bringing up the end of the procession
marched row upon row of soldiers. The
captains of hundreds had brought their troops with them just in case of
trouble. But everyone in the city
rejoiced to be rid of the wicked queen so no one needed to worry about
that. The soldiers cheered and sang
songs of praise right along with the people in response to the Levite choir. The day of rejoicing had come to the nation of
Judah.
Not everyone joined in the rejoicing
however. As they passed from the lower
city through the high gate, King Joash thought he spied Matt in the crowd. He waved excitedly, but Matt ignored
him. No one had told Joash about Mattan
the priest’s death in the house of Baal the day before, so he didn’t understand
why Matt would be angry. But Matt harbored
great anger and nurtured immense hatred.
He blamed Joash for the death of his father even though it had not even
been the young king’s idea to attack the temple of Baal. He determined right then to get revenge for
his father’s death, no matter how long it took.
The next several years passed quickly
for the young king. He still traveled up
to the temple every day for classes with Iddo.
But after class there wasn’t time for swimming and fishing and hunting
with Zechariah. Instead he attended
sword mastery classes with the palace guards, sat through endless discussions
between Jehoiada and other older men concerning the affairs of the kingdom and
spent hours on his throne receiving visitors.
Joash knew that a king needed to listen to the ancient wisdom in
preparation for the day when he would be making decisions himself. But he still thought it boring to spend four
hours discussing whether a woman who carried water up from the pool of Siloam
should be required to walk around the outside of the wall rather than entering
the city and walking through the Valley Road.
He couldn’t see that it made any difference at all. But the old men argued that the older women
had always carried their water pots outside the wall. It was a long tradition and they couldn’t
start breaking tradition or soon all their traditions would be gone. So he sat and listened.
One day the discussion centered around
the issue of the high places where people worshipped in the areas outside
Jerusalem.
“They have to go,” thundered
Jehoiada. “The law of Moses requires all
worship to take place in the temple. It
is the house of God, the dwelling-place of the Shekinah glory.”
“Moses wrote about the tabernacle,”
another man protested. “We no longer
have the tabernacle and even when we did it was not located in Jerusalem. The
tabernacle abode in Shiloh and other places.
From the beginning many places served as locations to worship Jehovah.”
“The temple replaced the tabernacle,”
said Jehoiada. God dwells between the
Cherubim and His glory fills the holy of holies. When people worship under ever green tree and
on every high hill that glory is diminished.
The temple will not survive.”
“They all come three times a year for
the feasts,” another old man argued.
“Why not allow worship closer to their homes the rest of the year?”
So the discussion continued, never
coming to any conclusion. Joash knew the
people worshipped in groves, but since they had promised to worship Jehovah on
those high places, he just didn’t see that it made that much difference.
In a small village west of Jerusalem
called Ramah lived a mother and son who worshipped in a grove, but they were
not worshipping Jehovah. Matt and his mother had fled from Jerusalem after
Mattan had been killed. They knew they
couldn’t continue to worship Baal openly because the soldiers had been given
instructions to destroy all Baal worshippers in the land. But they had no intention of worshipping
Jehovah who they blamed for the death of their husband and father. So they made themselves a golden calf.
They patterned the calf after the idols
the Israelites in the northern kingdom worshipped ever since the days of King
Jeroboam. Matt and his mother fashioned
it very carefully in their home and then one night under cover of darkness Matt
loaded it on a cart, pulled it up the hill to the village high place and set it
up. The next day he rose very early and
walked up the hill with a sacrifice. As
soon as the sun came up he ran back into the city telling everyone to
listen.
“A golden calf has fallen down from
heaven,” he shouted. “There’s a golden
calf on the high place and no one knows how it got there. Surely God has blessed our village by sending
His own special representation to dwell among us.”
The people ran up the hill to see and
sure enough there was a golden calf which had not been there the day
before. Matt convinced them that they
were really special to have such a wonderful gift so the people began
worshipping the golden calf during most the year while still traveling up to
Jerusalem to worship Jehovah during feast days.
They did not see anything wrong with living their lives the way they
wanted to most of the year, as long as they performed their duty to God at the
proper times.
Joash had been king for eight years when
Jehoiada announced he had chosen a bride for him. Her name was Jehoaddan. She was sixteen, just like him, and came from
one of the prominent families in the capital city. Jehoaddan, however, failed to please the king
who resented the priest making such an important choice for him. She had a very long nose and a bad habit of
tilting her head back when she tried to look at anything closely. People often said behind her back that she
would drown if she ever got caught in a rain storm. Besides the nose, she squinted something
awful.
By this time Joash had been on the
throne long enough that he had grown tired of Jehoiada and the other men
telling him what to do. He thought
himself old enough to make some of his own decisions, but they kept treating
him as if he were still eight. They had
grown used to running the kingdom and didn’t seem to realize that he had grown
and learned from studying and listening.
He despised the fact that they treated him like a little boy.
The behavior of his old friend Zechariah
irritated him even more. Jehoiada’s son
knew he would one day be a priest and as a result he spent hours every day
reading the scrolls of Holy Scripture in the temple. When they did get together all he could talk
about was, “Moses says this,” and “Job says that” and “David wrote in this
psalm.” King Joash enjoyed visiting the
temple each week to worship but he couldn’t understand how Zechariah could
spent so much time with those dusty old scrolls. There were much more exciting ways to spend
time than reading ancient writings.
So King Joash and Jehoiada and
Zecharaiah grew further and further apart as the years passed.
When Joash turned eighteen he decided
the time had come for him to discover the lay of the land outside of
Jerusalem. Choosing six of his
bodyguards as companions he called for the strongest horse in the palace stable
and set off on a trip through Judah.
Riding south they came to the city of
Beersheba where his mother Zibiah lived.
She had never returned to Jerusalem even after he became king because
she had remarried and had a family down in Beersheba. Joash and his bodyguards spent a very
enjoyable week with Zibiah and her family.
From there they crossed over to the
Mediterranean Sea and rode up the coast to the city of Joppa. Large sailing ships from a land called Thrace
sat at anchor in the harbor. Joash
visited the bazaar and purchased beautiful rugs and furniture to send back to
the palace in Jerusalem.
The trip from Joppa back to the capital
led through the Judean hills. Most of the
nights on their trip they simply built a fire and slept out under the
stars. But during the trip back to the
capital the sky grew dark and threatened to rain. When the clouds broke open and they found
themselves soaked to the skin the king and his bodyguards decided they needed
to find shelter.
“There’s a small village up ahead,” one
of the guards shouted over the noise of the storm. “Perhaps we can find a place there to get out
of this rain.”
They spurred their horses on and dashed
into the village, the hooves of their horses splattering mud into the air
behind them. Pulling their mounts to a
stop in front of the largest house in the town, a guard jumped off and pounded
on the door.
“Hello in there,” he shouted. “Your sovereign, King Joash, needs a place to
stay for the night. He requests that you
open your home to him and his retinue.”
The door swung open widely. “Of course,” said the young man in the
doorway. Come in. Come in.
Just leave your horses there and I will have them stabled. We are pleased to welcome King Joash and his
men.”
The rain-soaked travelers did not wait
for a second invitation. Tossing their
reins to waiting servants they climbed down and dashed in out of the rain.
The host recognized the king immediately
although it had been many years since he had last seen him. But the king did not recognize his host. He had no idea they would be spending the
night in the home of his greatest enemy—Mattaniah bar-Mattan.
No comments:
Post a Comment