(Based on a message preached at First Baptist Church Chamois, MO on September 10, 2023. This is not an exact transcription.)
Introduction: Except for Adam, Eve, and the first generation of children (Cain, Abel, Seth, etc.) everybody has at least four grandparents! Some were good, and, sadly, many were not. This message takes a look at one of the worst, if not the worst, grandparent ever.
Let’s take a look at the text, from the Old Testament book of 2 Chronicles:
Text: 2 Chronicles 22:1-4, New American Standard Version 1 Then the inhabitants of Jerusalem made Ahaziah, his youngest son, king in his place, for the band of men who came with the Arabs to the camp had killed all the older sons. So Ahaziah the son of Jehoram king of Judah began to reign. 2 Ahaziah was twenty-two years old when he became king, and he reigned for one year in Jerusalem. And his mother’s name was Athaliah, the granddaughter of Omri. 3 He also walked in the ways of the house of Ahab, for his mother was his counselor to act wickedly. 4 So he did evil in the sight of the LORD like the house of Ahab, for they were his counselors after the death of his father, to his own destruction.
A few words about another mid-September day
Before I begin the message, may I share a little about 9-11? Some of you weren’t even born when this took place, when two airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City, killing over two thousand people. Some have never been identified, even to this day. There was also another crash into the Pentagon, near Washington DC and that crash killed hundreds of people there. Another flight, and you may have heard of Flight 93, was headed, some think, for the White House but some of the passengers took action and made the plane crash into an empty field. We may never know how many lives were spared because of what these heroes did.
I can remember that day to this day. I was a substitute teacher that day, when a little before lunch time the principal came dashing into the classroom. He had a photo of Plane 1 hitting the World Trade Center, showing the flames, etc. and I honestly thought this was a joke of some kind. People have reworked pictures for many years and at first I thought this was one of the same but it wasn’t long before a lot of us realized this was no joke.
It was real.
And the world has never been the same. Let’s always remember and always be alert. Our nation is worth defending, no matter what. Now let’s go on to the message.
What we know about Athaliah
We know Athaliah’s parentage: she was the daughter of Ahab, king of the Ten Northern Tribes, and Jezebel, daughter of Eth-Baal, king of Sidon. These names speak volumes, as the old saying goes, to those who know their Bibles: Ahab was probably the worst king of the Northern Tribes, and Jezebel was one of the most wicked women ever. She brought the worship of Baal, one of the Sidonian “deities” and no doubt hundreds of priests and prophets to make sure the Israelites followed her faith to the letter.
Jezebel also “helped” Ahab on at least one occasion. There was one man, named Naboth, who owned a vineyard neat the king’s palace. Ahab made him an offer he hoped Naboth wouldn’t refuse, but Naboth said No and Ahab was upset, to say the least.
Then came Jezebel who asked Ahab what was wrong. He told her and in so many words she said, “Leave it to me, I got this” or words to that effect. And she did: she arranged a sham or show trial, had Naboth convicted and executed for a made-up charge, and she probably thought everything was sunshine and roses for her and Ahab. The whole story is in 1 Kings 21.
But one of the worst things she ever did was persecute God’s prophets. After a while, there weren’t very many of God’s true prophets left in the North. Obadiah, a believer in the God of Israel, did what he could to provide “bread and water”—both scarce in those days—for maybe two groups of fifty prophets each.
Still worse was her threat to Elijah: after he had seen God’s power displayed on the top of Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18), and heard the crowd assembled there return to worshiping the True God, Jezebel sent one of the coldest letters ever made. In brief, she said, “Let my gods put me to death if you’re still alive by tomorrow about this time”!
Elijah ran for his life, maybe 100 miles, to get away from her! Think about it, Mount Carmel is near Haifa, in northern Israel and Mount Sinai/Horeb is way down in the Sinai Peninsula! This was no 100-meter dash; he was going as fast as he could to avoid her!
Now, that’s just a glimpse of Jezebel, Athaliah’s mother. You can see what kind of DNA Athaliah got from her.
Think about this: she was half-Hebrew, being Ahab’s daughter; half-pagan/Sidonian/Gentile, being Jezebel’s daughter; and she was 100 per cent evil, being Satan’s daughter. It would be very hard indeed to live as a believer in God, the True God, in an environment like the whatever-it-was in Ahab’s house.
This parentage of hers went all the way to the depths of Athaliah’s soul. Now we’ll see how she affected the kingdom of Judah after her wedding to the king of Judah.
Athaliah’s wedding to Jehoram, king of Judah, probably made big news in those days. Ever since the split into the two kingdoms, each of these two nations had more or less been at war. The books of Kings and Chronicles give accounts of these wars. But now, with the marriage of the crown prince of Judah (the South) and the heiress to the throne of Israel (the North), maybe people thought there would be peace in all Israel finally. England and France had the “Hundred Years’ War”, and there had been war of various kinds between Judah and Israel for even longer.
Well, there it is, an ungodly woman married to the son of a good king but he went bad. Jehoram had already shown a bit of evil when he had all of his brothers killed after his father Jehoshaphat died. Now that he’s married to one of the most evil women to walk the earth, there were only two choices: fight for the good or yield to the bad. We know how that turned out.
But even if only married for a brief time, Jehoram and Athaliah produced a number of children. Ahaziah was the youngest and the only one to survive the murder of his brothers when Arabs and the Philistines came to pay a visit to Judah (!—see 2 Chronicles 21:16-17). The people of Judah might have wondered about this new king, whether he would be like his grandfather Jehoshaphat or his grandmother Jezebel and mother Athaliah.
It didn’t take long to find out. Sure enough, he “walked in the ways of the house of Ahab” and here is one crucial reason why:
His mother—his own mother!—was his counselor to do evil! There may be, and part of me wishes there is, a special place in Hell for all people who deliberately try to corrupt children, trying to encourage them to follow evil rather than good and wickedness instead of godliness. That was the problem with Athaliah, even though she may have attempted to justify what she did by saying, “Oh, I only wanted Ahaziah to follow my faith. See, he even has the name of Israel’s God in his own name, just like me! (IAH as a suffix is a shortened form of YHWH or Jehovah).”
And her strategy worked. Ahaziah was just as evil as his mother and other relatives in Samaria, the “house of Ahab”. Worse, Athaliah wasn’t the only counselor for him to do evil; there were a good number of these counselors assisting him in this downward path.
For Ahaziah, that downward path came to an end when Jehu, son of Nimshi, came to Jezreel and put both Ahaziah and another Jehoram, son of Ahab, king of Israel to death. Ahaziah had only reigned for one year, hardly enough time to do anything worthy of record, but his record stands even today as what happens or can happen even today if anyone refuses to live by God’s Word and commands.
Incredibly, Athaliah didn’t seem to express much grief over her husband’s loss. Maybe she secretly wanted him to go so that she could become queen in actual fact. Jezebel, her mother, had been the power behind the king for years but now, with the king dead and the throne empty, her greatest wish or hope was about to come true.
We’re not told much about the coronation, if any, or any other measures Athaliah tried to enforce during her all-too-terrible reign in Judah. We do know, according to 2 Chronicles 22:10-12, that one of the first things she did was to kill all—ALL—the “seed royal” of Judah.
Her own grandchildren!
Who does this? What parent would do this? What kind of grandparent would do this?
Athaliah did. And there doesn’t seem to be one word or indication of remorse about this. I still wonder what her reasoning would be, I mean, what did she hope to accomplish by her nearly successfully destroying her own grandchildren and heirs to the throne? Only she and the LORD God of Israel know for sure.
But there was one small wrinkle in her plan—one of the babies escaped. Baby Joash was saved when his aunt, Jehoshabeath, rescued him and kept him hidden somewhere in the Temple. Athaliah didn’t know about this, but that’s an entirely different story for another day. The important thing is that any grandmother who gives orders to see her own grandchildren murdered is among the worst people in history.
Let’s see if we can tie this all together. We know about Athaliah’s parentage; the daughter of a wicked king and even more wicked mother. She learned all about evil from her mother—and there was plenty to learn. And learn it she did, as we saw by her influence over her husband and son who became king of Judah. She was the counselor of Ahaziah to do wickedly and that is one of the worst things that could ever be said of any person.
But to show how she was the worst grandparent ever, once she found out Ahaziah was dead, she took (prompt?) action to have all of her own grandchildren murdered. Her intentions? We’ll never know down here but God did and God does even today.
I hope none of us will ever be as wicked, as evil, as this woman was. But the potential is there for any of us, all of us, to be just as bad or evil if we don’t follow God’s way. May we avoid the evil and embrace the good and always follow the Lord in all things.
I sure don’t want to be known as an evil person—do you?
Scripture quotations taken from the New American Standard Version of the Bible (NASV).
