National Apostasy
71
Instead of humbling himself before God because of his mistake,
“Asa was wroth with the seer, and put him in a prison house; for he
was in a rage with him because of this thing. And Asa oppressed some
of the people the same time.”
Verse 10
.
“In the thirty and ninth year of his reign,” Asa was “diseased in
his feet, until his disease was exceeding great: yet in his disease he
sought not to the Lord, but to the physicians.”
Verse 12
. The king died
in the forty-first year of his reign and was succeeded by Jehoshaphat,
his son.
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Two years before the death of Asa, Ahab began to rule in the
kingdom of Israel. From the beginning his reign was marked by a
strange and terrible apostasy. His father, Omri, the founder of Samaria,
had “wrought evil in the eyes of the Lord, and did worse than all that
were before him” (
1 Kings 16:25
); but the sins of Ahab were even
greater. He “did more to provoke the Lord God of Israel to anger than
all the kings of Israel that were before him,” acting “as if it had been a
light thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat.”
Verses 33, 31
. Not content with encouraging the forms of religious
service followed at Bethel and Dan, he boldly led the people into the
grossest heathenism, by setting aside the worship of Jehovah for Baal
worship.
Taking to wife Jezebel, “the daughter of Ethbaal king of the Zi-
donians” and high priest of Baal, Ahab “served Baal, and worshiped
him. And he reared up an altar for Baal in the house of Baal, which he
had built in Samaria.”
Verses 31, 32
.
Not only did Ahab introduce Baal worship at the capital city, but
under the leadership of Jezebel he erected heathen altars in many
“high places,” where in the shelter of surrounding groves the priests
and others connected with this seductive form of idolatry exerted
their baleful influence, until well-nigh all Israel were following after
Baal. “There was none like unto Ahab,” who “did sell himself to work
wickedness in the sight of the Lord, whom Jezebel his wife stirred up.
And he did very abominably in following idols, according to all things
as did the Amorites, whom the Lord cast out before the children of
[115]
Israel.”
1 Kings 21:25, 26
.
Ahab was weak in moral power. His union by marriage with
an idolatrous woman of decided character and positive temperament
resulted disastrously both to himself and to the nation. Unprincipled,