2 Kings 1.
WHEN Ahab was dead, Moab rebelled against Israel; they had been a subject people while he reigned. Ahaziah, son of Ahab, fell through a lattice or window (made after the fashion of the East, of trellis work, admitting light and air while screening from view), and was sick.
When king Jeroboam’s boy was ill (1 Kings 14), he sent to a prophet of God to inquire about his recovery, though he had given up the worship of God, and had substituted idolatry; evidently, he had little confidence in the idol system he had set up. His successor seventy-five years later knew nothing of the true God, having been brought up in the atmosphere in which Ahab and Jezebel lived, and he sent messengers to inquire of the god of Ekron (Philistine city thirty-five miles southwest of Samaria), Baal-Zebub, or Lord of the Ely by name. This god was, we are told, regarded as a healer of diseases, being first a preserver against poisonous flies.
The blessed Book of God, the Bible, tells us what otherwise we should not know, that behind the idol is Satan; the sacrifices offered to idols were sacrifices to demons (1 Corinthians 10:2121Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers of the Lord's table, and of the table of devils. (1 Corinthians 10:21)). God would not tolerate the king’s inquiring of the idol, and sent Elijah to ask him if it was because there was not a God in Israel that he did so, and to tell him that he should not recover from the injury: he should surely die.
Angry at this intervention, Ahaziah sent bands of men from his army to take Elijah, and they were consumed when the prophet called down fire from heaven upon them. This was God’s answer to the daring of Satan among his people. The third of these parties was spared when Elijah’s power (as from the true God) was owned, and he went with them to the king when the angel of the Lord told him to go. So Ahaziah heard his doom directly from the prophet. He died, and his brother Jehoram became king in his stead, for he had no sons.
We have noticed before in connection with other reference to books not included in the Bible, that there were books of history known generally at the time the Old Testament Scriptures were written. These books, not being inspired, have perished, but God has seen to it that His Word should be preserved. We need concern ourselves with no alleged “missing books of the Bible.” We have all of them as far as is known, and they form, in the commonly accepted Bible, the full guide book for the children of God, as well as containing the full display of the natural heart, sinful and deceitful, desperately wicked, and the announcement of a free pardon from a holy God to all who will accept it. And have you accepted the terms, reader?
ML 09/25/1927