t his commandments, which the LORD commanded Moses. And the LORD was with him; and he prospered whithersoever he went forth: and he rebelled against the king of Assyria, and served him not.”1 Kings 18:1-7
For a few weeks now I have been captivated by the above passage. Here we find Hezekiah, a son of one of the most wicked kings of Judah. Despite the wickedness of his father he has turned to the Lord and held fast. Dr. Wilbur Williams speculates that the cause for Hezekiah’s righteousness was embedded in the scarring childhood experience of likely having witnessed a brother being sacrificed to the gods. While this is more than possible we just do not know what or who made Hezekiah so sensitive to the tender whispers of God.
Perhaps what interests me more than why Hezekiah turned to the Lord is that he did and that this was a highly important fact in the eyes of the historians recording the book of Kings. It was not anything that Hezekiah built or did that elevated his status to one of greatness among the pantheon of kings. Rather, it was who he was in his relationship to God that claimed his rightful place near the top of the list of great kings.
All of this began to cause the wheels of my mind to begin to slowly begin to turn. In our own family histories we all too often lift up the Solomons and even the Ahabs as examples of virtue. Consider Solomon. Do you have a Solomon in your family? You may very well. He was a wise king. He was a wildly wealthy king. In his earliest years he was a quite faithful king. Yet as he aged he drifted form the Lord. He married many times poorly and his wives eventually led him from the Lord. Solomon had money and wisdom but ultimately forfeited his legacy for women (in a manner of speaking). Certainly there is someone in your family tree of whom you may say the same thing. Too often when we recount family histories to our children we emphasize he relative who was wealthy while ignoring the more important consideration of their faithfulness to God.
This all was driven home to me powerfully over the last Easter weekend. We had gone back home and were staying in the home of my grandparents. While looking through the library I found a book I had flipped through before; a history of the county issued in 1988. It was a history that had been compiled from the various biographies of local residents. Of course, in time I ran across the biographies of my grandparents and various other relatives, but it was the biography of a particular grandfather that struck me. Many of the other biographies highlighted personal achievements, the churches and clubs of which the person was a member, the names of their parents and children, and normally a few notes about them as a person. My grandfather’s biography, however, was different. The last sentence of his biography, submitted then by my grandmother, read something like this: “Any one who knows him knows that he loves his God and strives for perfection in all he undertakes.”
Well, we need more biographies like that (and like Hezekiah's). Most people were so concerned with listing their rotary club memberships and county fair awards that they had let a statement like this one go unmentioned. Too bad. In the end the whole situation has me considering writing a “spiritual” history for my family. I have no doubt that such a situation is likely to be complicated. How do you ask a relative about their spiritual state and experiences when you know they are not where they perhaps should be? Anyway, I’m thinking about it. If I do undertake it, it will be my summer project and will require a lot of work and encouragement and some help from grandparents in recording the spiritual biographies of those who have gone on before. I wonder which I uncover more of, Hezekiahs or Ahabs…What do you think?
