2 Kings 11:1-4 • And I, Alone, Escaped to Tell You
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(This transcript was prepared using software tools and has not been reviewed for complete accuracy.)
Let me ask that you look in your Bibles now at 2 Kings, chapter 11. Second Kings, chapter 11, which I'm just going to confess to you, is an odd place to go for a Christmas message. Hopefully by the end of today you see the purpose. Second Kings, chapter 11, I'll read the first four verses in your Grace Bibles. That's page 317.
Again, I know it's an unusual place to go for Christmas. Let's stand as we would read this portion of God's Word.
Second Kings 11, "Now when Athaliah, the mother of Ahaziah, saw that her son was dead, she arose and destroyed all the royal family.
But Jehoshapha, the daughter of King Joram, sister of Ahaziah, took Joash, the son of Ahaziah, and stole him away from among the king's sons who were being put to death. And she put him and his nurse in a bedroom. Thus they hid him from Athaliah so that he was not put to death. And he remained with her six years hidden in the house of the Lord while Athaliah reigned over the land. In the seventh year, Jehoiada sent and brought the captains of the Karaites and of the guards and had them come out to him in the house of the Lord. And he made a covenant with them and put them under oath in the house of the Lord. And he showed them the king's son."
Let's pray together.
Heavenly Father, time and time again, in the history of your word, you have preserved the king's son, not just one that was human long ago, but through that line, your own son, the king of the universe, who would come for us. Help us to rejoice in it, to understand the hand of care that was being expressed so lovingly and so powerfully across time that we might know you both now and forever. Grant us to see the truth and the light of your word, we pray, in Jesus' name, amen. Please be seated.
We light these advent candles as a way of thinking about the past and how God was operating there.
I'm going to ask you to do that a little more intensely right now. If you could just focus on an advent candle and release your mind to go back to another time and place.
Imagine as you kind of lose focus on the present, you are taking to a place where, as the darkness begins to envelop you, you hear the whimper of a child.
The whimper goes away and you hear the breathing of other children.
As your eyes adjust to the darkness, you begin to recognize that you are in the nursery
of an elegant palace in an ancient land.
As your eyes adjust more, you see a shadow that moves along the wall.
It's not just a child's blanket. It's not just an infant raising an arm.
As your eyes adjust more, you recognize it is a man robed in black.
And then other shadows begin to move across the room among the cribs.
Suddenly you see the candle reflected in the gleam of a sword that is held over the crib of a child, and with horror you recognize that the shadows are assassins.
Here killing the babes. You're almost ready to scream in horror, but you stifle the scream because the curtain moves at the far end of the room and with the most subtle of motions you see the nurse of the children move halfway out of the curtain, take a child from the nearest crib, cover its mouth, and move down a hallway to a bedroom where the child is hidden before they race away to the temple of God where that child will remain for six years.
Until the night comes again when the high priest will gather together the captains of the guard and he will declare to them, "This is the sole surviving child of the lion." The lion of David. And he is the king.
What you have just witnessed is but one chapter in the greatest murder plot of the history of the world. It does not focus just in 2 Kings 11 where the seed royal of Israel is murdered except for one child. It is a murder plot that runs across millennia as it began even in the garden with our first parents Adam and Eve.
You may remember how God himself after the temptation of those two spoke to the tempter and said, "I will put enmity between you and the woman between your seed and her seed. You will strike his heel. You will hurt him, but he will crush your head."
And from that prophecy of the promised one, not only is there unfolding history for the coming of the Messiah, but unfolding opposition. For Satan himself knows that when that son of promise comes, the end of the rule of Satan upon this earth has begun.
And so the opposition is poured against the coming of that son time and time again. So it is pledged in a covenant cut with Abraham that from him would come not only many nations but the one who was to bless the nations. The promise is then given to David that he would be a king with an eternal kingdom and from his lineage would come the one who would have an eternal and universal kingdom.
And then when that child came, he was announced by the angels and the pregnancy of the Virgin Mary was the proof that he was here.
Many glorious things that we celebrate at this time, but sometimes we forget that the promise of light to come was over and over again shattering darkness that was intent and it was in such real terms of life and death that sometimes we have trouble even fathoming what God had to do to maintain the coming of the child in the manger. Why do we need such accounts?
Because we need to remember that this isn't just sentiment and tradition, that God entered a world of hardship, of sin, of tragedy and circumstance. And the reason we trust him is not because every day is Christmas, but because he was the God who showed he could overcome the darkness with his light. And when we face the darkness of our lives, of our sin and our circumstances, that's the God we need to know, the God who could truly bring light to darkness. Can he do it? Over and over again he was showing us in his word he can at least preserve his light for his people in a moment. I know this is an unusual text for you, the circumstance not familiar, but here is what is happening. There is a wicked queen, not named Maleficent, but Athaliah.
Athaliah has been put into an arranged marriage. She is the child of King Ahab, and now here's a name that you will know, Queen Jezebel.
And she has been wed to the king of the southern kingdom in this arranged marriage to create an alliance that will unite the kingdoms.
But Jehoram, her husband, dies.
And one year later, her son Ahaziah, the rightful king, dies as well. And now Athaliah recognizes the only thing that stands between her and the rule of the throne of Israel are her own grandsons.
They are the rightful seed royal, descendant of David, kings of Israel. And so she has them all murdered.
Except one who escapes alive to fulfill the promises of God. If you had been there, you would have said, "Didn't God know?
Was he asleep? Did he not know what was going on?" But the fact that he preserved the one child who escaped alive to fulfill the promises of God was God affirming once again to his people. Even though the darkness can encroach upon any single moment, God is also in that moment. It's the message that we actually need to know when the darkness comes, when life has gone smoothly, when it seems like everything is light, and then suddenly the darkness closes in. I need to know that when the darkness closes in, God is in the darkness too. He's in that moment too, even when it may not seem like it. Do we need to know that in this community?
I think of November 17, 2013, when the Paul and Amy English family lost everything in the tornado.
In that moment, you would have certainly thought God was absent or asleep, not for his people. Hard times, deep darkness for a family.
One of the things they simply had to do to dig out of the darkness was to purchase a new family vehicle. And those of you who are from the Washington area know that family cars just disappeared off the lots like that. There were not family cars available in this area. And as a consequence, they planned a day to drive to Chicago and get a new family car.
The two and a half hour drive turned into five hours because of a blizzard on that day. Well, God, aren't you going to help now either?
They got to the dealership, and as they began to search for the family car, the one that they needed, the one that met the qualifications was beyond their budget.
And yet because it was already late, because they had to get the job done, because they needed a car, they decided to extend over their budget and do what had to be done.
I'll let Amy tell you in her words what happens next.
As we were leaving from the purchase of the car, the salesman gave us his business card.
When I looked at the card, my jaw dropped. The salesman's name was Emmanuel Washington.
What does Emmanuel mean?
God with us. She actually said she told him, "Do you know that your name means God is with us in Washington?"
Fluke.
Strange circumstance?
Maybe.
But for the moment, the realization that in the darkness of the moment, God was still there.
There was more to learn.
Amy picks up the story again. We drove to a relative's home with snow cascading over the road. They were surprised at how long it had taken to complete our purchase, but they were pleased that we found a car. They also mentioned that a friend of theirs had heard of our situation and written a check for us.
We opened it and found out it was the exact amount that we had spent over budget to purchase the new car that we needed.
Darkness was in the moment.
God was in the moment too.
What God was doing through the circumstances of their lives as He does over and over again in Scripture is He's training the eyes of the faithful to see the light in the darkness. Those of you who know the English family know there was more darkness to come. There would be a daughter diagnosed with cancer in the next year.
And again, the reality that they had to understand and had been trained to see is that there's gravel, but there's often gold in the gravel, even when the pan is dark.
And there is light in the darkness because God is even in the dark.
Now that can just be the account of a single passage in Scripture, or it can be a single moment in the life of a family in this church. But what God is doing in His Word is He is saying, "I am not just being faithful to provide light in darkness in a moment. What I am showing you by my word is that I am faithful to bring light to darkness across millennia."
It's not just fluke. It's not just circumstance. It is the account that God tells over and over again, even if we were just focused on this moment on the strange account of Athaliah. I mentioned to you that Athaliah married King Jehoram in this arranged marriage. Now she had learned her path of empire building by murdering siblings from her own husband, Jehoram.
What he had already done is he had murdered six of his siblings in order that he would have no rival for the throne of Israel. By his own hand, Jehoram had made it that only one escaped alive to fulfill the promises of God.
His son was Ahaziah.
As Ahaziah was growing up, his siblings were kidnapped by an enemy. Only Ahaziah survived alone to preserve the promises of God of light to darkness. He ruled for only one year before he died.
He had sons. They could take his place. But Athaliah murdered them all, except one who escaped alive to fulfill the promises of God to bring light to darkness. In three generations, three times the promise of God came within one life of being extinguished. And yet God maintained his promise. It had been his pattern long before that. You remember the promise of the coming Messiah began in the garden of Eden itself as as Adam and Eve were told, "There will come one who will crush the head of Satan." And what that meant one was it was battle on. Satan is now going to try to stop that from ever occurring. And the opposition occurs right at the very beginning.
As with the two sons of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, you recognize that evil and death began to characterize them so that only through the line of Seth was God going to maintain his promise of bringing light to darkness. Only one line was left alive to do the promise that God had so, so said to his people had to occur. But it wasn't just to happen with Adam. You recognize that that family of Adam through the line of Seth didn't just prosper in number,
but in evil.
For after that first family, sin and evil so prospered in the world that ultimately God would save his own people, every thought of the imaginations of their heart was only evil continually.
And to purge the world of evil, a flood came where all, all were immersed except for one family.
The family of Noah was saved alive alone to do the work of God. And of those children of Noah who survived, you may remember immediately afterwards there was great evil that surrounded them and they participated in so that only one family, one line, the line of Shem was maintained for the purposes of God. One line alone survived that God might fulfill his promise to bring light to darkness. And from Shem you may remember ultimately came Abraham, a man who has promised to be a father of many nations. One problem, no children.
One illegitimate son.
And then when he was a hundred, one son named Isaac who almost lost his life by being sacrificed by his own father. He came within a heartbeat of not surviving at all until as his father was raising his hand to offer the sacrifice, God said, "I will provide the sacrifice." And by that one who escaped, God saved his promise again. To Isaac would come Jacob and to Jacob the grandsons.
Remember the 12 brothers of Joseph who would be the leaders of the 12 tribes of Israel. The tribes would multiply but there would be a problem.
None of the brothers would survive because of the famine that would come upon the land. The only way that they were preserved at all to maintain the promises of God for a nation to come out of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is because one of the brothers through the treachery of the rest was sold into slavery in Egypt and there he alone was kept alive to rise in power so that when the other brothers would have died of starvation, he was able to preserve them and the family because God saved one alone from all the brothers by their own treachery. They meant it for evil. God intended it for good.
And in Egypt, the nation prospered and multiplied. So much so that a Pharaoh grows scared. There are too many of these tribes of Israel.
So all of you who are delivering babies to these Israelites, you now have an order from Pharaoh.
Murder them as they are born.
And they are murdered.
Except for one who is saved alive, put into a basket of reeds and pitch and launched down the river to go into the bulrushes where the daughter of the same Pharaoh who has ordered the murders is bathing and as a consequence, this child who would become the deliverer of Israel is taken into Pharaoh's own household. He alone survives who is to be the deliverer of the people of Israel.
God did it over and over again. And from these people now established, God says, "I will choose one." The unlikeliest of them. His name is David to be their king. And from his line shall come the promised one. But how unlikely. Think how this child David is in danger of his life over and over again. First, the children's story of Goliath, you know, that we don't recognize what's happening. Here is Satan himself bringing history to the fore in the person of Goliath to wipe out the Lord's anointed.
And it wouldn't just be a pagan giant. But over and over again, King Saul by sword and by spear comes within a hair's breadth of eliminating the Lord's anointed. And then finally, when David assumes the kingship, David's own son Absalom comes within a hair's breadth of murdering his father so that David has to leave the palace and go up the Mount of Olives, weeping as he goes that he has been driven from his own palace and his life is in danger at the hands of his own son. But what God does is he again allows one to escape alive in order to maintain his promises. But now you see the problem is even worse because God has declared it's from the line of just one, not a family. It's one man that I will provide a redeemer. And so Satan can say, "Now I know where to focus my efforts."
And time and again, the efforts of evil go against the household of David so that under Jehoram, under Ahaziah, under Atholiah, one survives alone to maintain the promises of God. The promises are maintained until one child is born in Bethlehem and laid in a manger
and a star announces his birth. What wonder, except that the star is like laser light pointing at where he lives for an insecure king who does not want to be challenged. And so Herod says, "Kill all the babes who are born in Bethlehem under age two." And they are all murdered. A cry went up in Rhema, Rachel weeping for her children, except one was saved alive and it was the Lord Himself.
This millennia, the Lord works over and over again against the assaults of sin and circumstance, Satan and evil, to provide for His saving Son to come for us. Why do we have these amazing accounts?
It's surely to have us know the display of the mighty hand of God. He is not just the God of a moment. He is the God of millennia.
He's not going to be outgunned. He's not going to be outsmarted. He keeps working by power and wisdom to maintain His promises against all odds. The light keeps shining in the darkness, though the light seems at times to be so close to being quenched. God always revives the light. God always keeps it burning. God always keeps His promises in effect.
And what we are left to believe is this is a mighty God and we have seen His mighty hand. But we are meant to see more.
Not just the mighty hand of God, but how much we need it.
After all, when we begin to see what evil, what devastation, our enemy, the enemy of our souls intends against the Lord's anointed, we begin to recognize this. This Bible has a special purpose and it's a purpose much of the world does not understand. Much of the world thinks the reason we have this Word of God, this Bible, is so that we will go through a little behavior reform.
That we'll live a little bit better. That we'll be nice people. That we'll be good people. And you have to recognize while there is much here about niceness and goodness, that is not the purpose of the book. This is a book about redemption, not about personal righteousness. This is about how God must work in our behalf, how He must do what we cannot do. If the book were only about, "Listen, you need a few rules to straighten up your life," that would be an easy book.
But what God is recording over the millennia is to saying, "I must preserve my people. I must provide for those who have an enemy beyond their understanding, beyond their strength. And I will provide for them and I will protect them and I will maintain my promise.
Because what we instinctively believe is that I am the maker of my own rescue from my sin and circumstance. I'll just do a few good things and God will love me for that and God will take care of me." And God is saying, "That is not the answer.
What you do is not the answer. That is not the story this book is telling, that what you do is going to fix the problem."
I will tell you, I have not seen a more remarkable or unsettling video than the one that our own campus outreach recently produced as Mike Jackson began to go to our area's local college campuses and ask young people here in kind of the Bible Belt of the Midwest what their hope of heaven was.
And it was remarkable. It was almost as though they were reading from a script. "Well, I'm a good person.
I'm not a terrible person. I haven't murdered anybody.
I think God will appreciate that I'm trying to do the best I can."
And the message over and over and over again is, "You know, I just need to qualify myself."
And the Bible is not about that story.
The Bible is saying God must make a way that we cannot make for ourselves. And this is not simply a book about a little behavior reform. It is about a redeemer whom God must provide for His people because they cannot provide for themselves.
That's a hard message to hear. It's a hard message to hear even when our culture sometimes say, "You know what it means to be a Christian is you just need to believe in God."
Well, I'm not exactly sure what that means to a lot of people. I think of a good man that I heard speaking recently, and he spoke with great honesty.
He said, "Until my career came apart, I believed in God.
But I lived as though I thought I had the talents and the abilities to self-direct my own life."
I just exercise my abilities. I just exercise my gifts and do a little good stuff, so God bless. And I'll self-direct my own life.
The message of the Scriptures is life is harder than you can imagine and the force is against you larger than you can control. And for that reason, you need the help of the hand of might that God is maintaining, not just your own hand.
Another man whose long-term marriage had come unglued, "I never thought I would be in this place," he said.
"I never imagined I could be. I did not know the darkness could be this intense. I did not know it could creep up on you this way."
Another man whose addiction to prescription painkillers have now devastated his family and his career, prescriptions that he began taking because he had a backache. I mean, it just started so innocently, so without any apparent evil or difficulty coming in, it's like just taking some prescription painkillers.
And he said later, "I never would have imagined how invulnerable I could feel while I was on the drugs, nor how vulnerable I actually was to them controlling my every thought and action in every waking moment of my life."
Force is more powerful than you.
God is saying to us over and over again, "I'm not asking you to fix this problem. I'm asking you to believe that I'm the one who fixes the problem and I've proven to you over and over again the might of my hand and the necessity of my hand to maintain the redemption of my people. I'm the one who provides. I'm the one who sent the babe in the manger.
But I had to. I had to maintain the promise because God's people would be lost without my provision and their behalf." Over and over again, God is saying to us, "Do not look to the work of your hand, but to the work of God's hand." Why should you do that?
I recognize it's not really even enough to say that God maintains the light in the darkness of a moment.
Or even that God maintains the light in the darkness of millennia if you do not trust the God.
If there's not sound reason to say, "I have to commit my heart to him to trust in him to depend upon him." Why would you do such a thing? Not just because he maintained the light in a moment, not just because he maintained the light in millennia, but because he maintained the light through his son.
I have tried to echo the words of the narrator of Moby Dick. You may remember the end words of the narrator of the great American novel, "And I alone am escaped alive to tell thee." As the narrator explains, because he has stepped aside from the evil of the white whale and the madness of Captain Ahab, who wanted vengeance on a dumb beast, that because he has stepped aside, he has been preserved, and I alone am escaped alive to tell thee. You recognize the Bible is telling the opposite story.
For there was one who came into this world and stepped aside from sin and darkness and unrighteousness to live a perfect life for you and for me, but he was the one who did not escape alive, but was crucified for my sin and for your sin. What is that story all about? I mean, again, if you had stood at the cross, you would say, "Where is God? Is he asleep or absent?" I mean, why is this happening? And I don't know if you were counting as I was going through all those accounts in scripture where we came down to just one who maintained the light of the gospel through the darkness, over at least a dozen times across the millennia. Does the promise of God come down to just one life and is maintained? What is God saying?
But that he has shown his record, he has shown his capability. He can preserve a life, he can do it. If this Jesus, who was the very Son of God, who was announced by the host of heaven, who could control the armies of angels by the tens of thousands, who could, with a word, calm the wind and the waves, if that Jesus were to die, it's not just because he couldn't help it.
It's not just because God couldn't help it. It's because that was the plan.
That is what God intended. And he has shown over and over again that the fluke in the story of Jesus' life was his crucifixion. What God has done for millennia is he has maintained his promise of a Redeemer. The thing that's out of place, the thing that doesn't fit with the others, is the death of Jesus.
That's what doesn't make sense unless you say it was the very purpose and plan of God, that he who was without sin became sin for us so that in him, as we hide ourselves in him, we would become the righteousness of God. Not by our works, but by dependence upon his work in our behalf. That's the message of the gospel. That's what we celebrate this Christmas. And the reason that we believe it is not just because he stayed in heaven's glory, nor because he lived in a palace here, but because he entered the darkness when he did not have to.
When I see that, I don't just know that a God can maintain his purposes in a moment or across millennia. I know he's got the heart to take care of me because he sent his son into the darkness and to experience death when he had to do none of that. That's why I trust him. That's why I trust him beyond the darkness, not because as much as I rejoice in the amazing happenings of particular families, that I recognize other families have suffered. Other families are going through darkness right now. But we still trust because we have seen the record that the God who could have preserved himself from all that darkness and devastation and pain, chosen not to in order to provide for you and for me. And therefore, the one who has the mighty hand, I will trust with my eternity because
he has demonstrated how great is his heart as well as his hand.
I think of the account of the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
He may remember because of his opposition to Hitler was put into prison.
In prison with the deprivations and the devastations that were there, knowing almost sure death awaited him, he wrote to his own family at Christmas time.
This is what he wrote.
Although I am not clear about whether or how letters get to you, my family, I want to write to you.
And I want to ask you to remember the Aldorfer Christmas scene. Now, I've asked our guys to display that on the video wall. I hope you can see. This is the artist Albrecht Aldorfer.
And he writes, "Not the manger scene of sweetness and light, but the holy family in the ruins of a building looking as though it has been bombed out and destroyed."
There is a sense in which it's the better Christmas story, that Jesus doesn't just enter the room where there's the gentle mooing of the cows and the nice and gentle manger, and there is love and light and warmth all around.
The message of the Aldorfer painting is that Jesus entered the ruins of this world when he had to do none of it. And for that reason, we trust him.
It's really what Bonhoeffer urged his family. I'll continue with his letter.
This Christmas scene in which the holy family is depicted with the manger amidst the ruins of a broken-down house. So also we can and should celebrate Christmas despite the ruins about us.
As you sit together with the children and with all the Advent decorations, I will think of you.
We must celebrate. We must do this even more intensively now because we do not know how much longer we have.
Well for Bonhoeffer, it was another year and a half before he was hanged.
But his hope was forever, and his soul forever held, and his willingness to make the gospel shine even in darkness because he knew the record.
God had maintained his purposes, and he proved with the death of his own son how great was his heart, a heart that extended his care beyond the darkness of this world even to the light of eternity. That's why we trust him. We trust him in the darkness of the moment because he has been faithful in millennia, but he has shown me his heart for all eternity. That's why I trust him. What I hope you do this Christmas, I hope you celebrate. I hope you say, "How wondrous a Savior! Hallelujah! This Jesus came. The angels announced him. He was the fulfillment of the promises of the ages. Praise God he came.
And praise God he came to the darkness.
For now I know he is true light, light for my soul when I need it, light for my heart when I've lost all other hope. I remember this one. He didn't have to go through it all, but the one of the mighty hand showed a great heart.
And for that reason I trust him in the darkness. For all eternity he is the candle in the night. Praise him." Father, I pray for these people thanking you that they gather to celebrate Christmas, but praying at the very same moment, they would do it for the right reasons. Not just for sentiment and not just for presence and not just for family gathering, all that is precious and good and right.
But righter than it all is the glory of worshiping the Lord Jesus because he came to the darkness and suffered a death in our place when he had to do none of it. You proved that. He had to do none of it, but he did.
And so, Father, I pray for those who are here, that if there are any who are thinking they can self-direct their own course.
If there are those who believe that what this Bible is about is a little behavior reform to teach us how to be good people, that you would teach us there is a greater and better story.
It is about the God who knew the worst of us and sent his Son to claim us.
And as that mighty hand has extended to us, I pray that you would allow us to extend a hand now to say, "Jesus, help me in my sin and my circumstances to claim your love now and forever. Forgive my sin, guide my life, lead me to eternity. I trust you because you came to the darkness for me."
Grant this hope we pray to make a season bright.
In Jesus' name, amen.