Fresh Springs (Heb. 3; 2 Chron. 14-16; Eph. 6)
The writer of Hebrews 3:12-13 warns me:
Take care, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day as long as it is called today that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.
Sin is deceitful. The heart is deceitful. Apart from Christ and His Spirit in me, I cannot even recognize that I am petting the unbelief in my heart. The thing is, more than anything, I want to end well, and it is that I sometimes I worry about (ironically) the most. Not to justify my worry in any way, but when I read my Bible, I see evidence that persevering in the faith trends toward the supremely difficult. Every single time I reach 2 Chronicles 14-16, I come to this same crisis of faith (which tells me I need to keep reading even this OT section about dead kings regularly), so please forgive me if this seems repetitive, and let me explain the context in case you aren't familiar.
In a time when kings were abominable, Asa “did good and right in the sight of the LORD his God” (2 Chron. 14:2, NASB), removing foreign alters and high places, tearing down the fruit of the idolatry of the people of Judah who had strayed far from God. He even eventually removed his own mother from the official position of queen mother because of her repulsive idolatry. Confronting your own mother, burning the evidences of her sin, driving her from what she would have considered her rightful place couldn’t have been easy. This man did the hard stuff and had a heart that was blameless “all his days” (2 Chron. 15:16-17). He undid the idolatry his fathers had done before him (1 Kings 15:12).
All this was after he had to face an army of a million men and 300 chariots. Instead of cowling in fear or trying to fight in his own strength (580,000 men vs. one million—not the best odds), he simply cried out to God, acknowledging that no one else could help them. Asa prayed, “We trust in Thee and in Thy name have come against this multitude. O LORD, Thou are our God; let not man prevail against Thee” (2 Chron. 14:11). And God did the miraculous, impossible work of routing the Ethiopians before Asa. Did you catch that? GOD DID THE WORK they could not do themselves and allowed them to clean up behind him, reaping the benefit of His going before them.
Afterwards, God sent a personal warning to Asa to continue to seek Him. The warning included both reward and consequence: seek God, find Him; forsake God, be forsaken. After not having a priest to teach them or the law to guide them for a very long time, in their desperation Judah as well as Benjamin did seek after God, and He did let them find Him even though the road back to God was fraught with “many disturbances” and afflictions, years of war without any peace to anyone in the land (2 Chron. 15:6). In the midst of this, God’s word to Asa was clear: “But you, be strong and do not lose courage, for there is reward for your work!” (v. 7).
Asa obeyed God’s words and did what God required. He restored the altar of the LORD after tearing down all the abominable idols in the hill cities he captured. After five years of conflict and war and striving to complete the work God gave him to do, he gathered everyone together in Jerusalem and entered into covenant with God to “seek the LORD God of the fathers with all their heart and soul” (2 Chron. 15:10-13) and made no concessions for those who felt otherwise inclined. All earnestly sought God; He let them find Him; He gave them peace, rest on all sides. And for 20 years, there was no more war. Nice! But the story doesn't neatly end there. It gets real.
Did you catch that word peace. The thing most all of us crave. The thing that often leads us away from trusting in God. When I am comfortable and lacking nothing, I am in danger of forgetting the One who gave me the peace. I need to be constantly vigilant. Asa, in his time of need, desperately cried out to God and relied on Him but Asa, in his time of peace, relied on his own strength to solve a problem instead of once again relying on God. Matthew Henry rightly says this: “It is a foolish thing to lean on a broken reed when we have the rock of ages to rely upon.” Asa took money from God’s own treasury and used it to bribe another king to break a treaty in place with Israel and help him, and it worked, but his lack of reliance on God for help came with a cost.
God sent another message to Asa, this time about his lack of reliance on Him, and it made Asa "enraged" to be confronted by his sin. Instead of repenting, he was offended at God’s message and at His messenger. God, whose “eyes . . . move to and fro throughout the earth that He may strongly support those whose heart is completely His” (2 Chron. 16:9) called Asa’s foolishness out and told him that from then on he would surely have wars. God, who looked to support him, instead had to reprove him in his sin.
In his rage, Asa acted out, much like we tend to do. First, Asa imprisoned the messenger who spoke God’s truth to him. Then, in his anger, Asa oppressed some of the people. When he failed to humbled himself, Asa became oppressed. Asa’s anger became the last chapter of his life—five angry years full of misery and conflict and pain, five years of seeking anything to help but the LORD. This man who began well and ruled well and is remembered for having a heart like David died miserably never seeking the LORD even when the LORD graciously gave him physical pain that might have turned his heart back to Him. Matthew Henry made a comment that “we trust in God when we have nothing else to trust to, when need drives us to him; but, when we have other things to stay on, we are apt to stay too much on them and to lean on our own understanding as long as that has anything to offer; but a believing confidence will be in God only, when a smiling world courts it most.” Asa trusted in his physicians alone never once seeking God's help. His physicians failed him where His God never did.
I don’t want to end my life like Asa. I want to get up each day and let God through His word put His armor upon me. Spurgeon’s take on this: “the greatest faith of yesterday [like Asa’s] will not give us confidence for today, unless the fresh springs which are in God shall overflow again.” I want the Spirit's life-giving water to continually flow through me.
I want to seek Him early and eagerly and often in everything I do, understanding that the battle is spiritual, having my feet “shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace,” my shield of faith in place so that God can “extinguish all the flaming missiles of the evil one” and allow me to stand firm, “having done everything” I can possibly do to “resist in the evil day” (Eph. 6:10-16). I know I desperately need the helmet of salvation, the sword of the Spirit, the word of God. I need to pray all the time in the Spirit being alert “with all perseverance and petition for all the saints” (Eph. 6:17-18). I want to accept truth when it deals with my own sin and have a heart that becomes humble, not angry, when confronted. I want to hear the truth of God’s word and apply it to my own heart willingly. I don’t want to shoot the messengers God sends me when I need to repent!
The walk through this world is weighty, overwhelming even at times, but because it is fearful, God equips us. God establishes us. God preserves us. God does the work, but I must persevere in using the faith He has given me, the word that sustains me, the Spirit within me to seek Him continually.
God, give me the strength to persevere to the end no matter what comes my way, to boldly open my mouth and speak truth about the mystery of the gospel. This is my prayer. God help me.
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