2 Kings 16:1-4
2 Kings 16:1
In the seventeenth year of Pekah the son of Remaliah, king of Israel
2 Kings 16:1
Ahaz the son of Jotham king of Judah began to reign.
He was the bad son of a good father, and under him the kingdom of Judah relapsed into the sad state out of which Jotham had raised it.
2 Kings 16:4
He was not satisfied with the ordinary idolatries, but sought out the vilest forms of superstition, and practised the unnatural and cruel rites peculiar to the demon Moloch. Old historians assert that the image of Moloch was of brass, and when heated red-hot, children were placed in its arms to be consumed. What shame that the ruler of the chosen people should be guilty of so terrible a crime as to expose his own son to such a death! We may well blush for human nature: an old divine once quaintly said that it was half beast and half devil, and he was very near the mark.
Isaiah 1:2-9
In such times as those of Ahaz the word of the Lord, as contained in the first chapter of Isaiah, was greatly needed.
Isaiah 1:2
It is not the heathen nor strangers that the Lord here upbraids, but his own highly-favoured people, his lovingly-nurtured children, in whom sin was doubly sinful.
Isaiah 1:3
Men are more brutish than the beasts. They receive all at the Lord’s hands, and then utterly forget him. Alas, Lord God, that thou shouldst thus be treated!
Isaiah 1:5, 6
During the reign of Ahaz the troubles of the people were extreme, as we shall see in succeeding readings, but they were none the better for being afflicted. The nation was like a man who had been beaten till there remained no place for another stripe; yet still they loved their idols and their sins.
Isaiah 1:7, 8
Jerusalem stood alone, and in great dilapidation, like the temporary hut which the keepers of a vineyard put up hurriedly to shield them from the sun. Their palace city was like a hovel, and where once cities clustered in every vale and hung on every hillside, all was desolation.
Isaiah 1:9
So wicked were they, that, but for the faithful few, God would have cursed the land as he did the cities of the plain. Oh, wretched plight of a favoured people. The Lord save our country from the same backsliding!
Oh, shall I never feel
The meltings of thy love?
Am I of such hell-harden’d steel
That mercy cannot move?
Chasten’d full sore I am,
And bruised in every part,
But judgments fail to break me down
And subjugate my heart.
Look on me, Lord of love!
O turn thy gracious eyes!
Then all my soul to penitence
Shall melt with sweet surprise.
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