You can't spend any serious amount of time in the Book of 2 Kings without eventually asking some difficult questions about "the high places" in your life. 2 Kings 15:31-38 is a good example. It's talking about a King named Jotham of Judah. It starts off by saying that "he did right in the eyes of the Lord"-- and for the record, this is pretty rare, in of itself. Most of the Kings who get mention in 2 Kings are noted for their wickedness. Of very, very few is it said that they actually did right in YHWH's sight. So this should cause us to sit up and take notice.
But then comes the qualifying small print: "Only," it adds, "the high places were not removed. People continued to sacrifice and burn incense there" (v. 35).
The idea in 2 Kings is that, unlike the surrounding pagan nations, that would have had shrines and temples to their Ba'als and Ashteroths sprinkled all over the countryside, God's people were meant to have one single place of worship for the people, the Temple in Jerusalem. This is a big deal in the Hebrew Scriptures. There's only one place where YHWH can and should be worshipped, and maintaining that one place helps to ensure that his worship doesn't get watered down and mixed up with the worship of other things and other gods. The "high places" in 2 Kings compete with and muddy-up the single-minded, single-hearted devotion to him that God wants for his people.
And it's interesting: however good any of the kings in 2 Kings might have been, it's (almost) always qualified with this disclaimer: only they didn't tear down the high places. And we're meant to find something, I think, humbling and challenging in this. Because like Jotham, we, too, have things that compete with, or muddy up, single-minded devotion to God.
I won't go into detail on the high places in my own life, except to say that Jotham's example leaves me praying, that God would gently but surely point them out to me, and help me put an end to any sacrifice or worship that may be going at their altars. May his mercy give us all grace to tear down the high places.
The High Places, a devotional thought
Labels: 2 kings, devotionals, worship
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