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Updated: May 10, 2025
It happened that when Elisha was an old man there can to him King Joash, who had been made king when he was only seven years old. Joash was now a young man and was trying to do right in the sight of the Lord. But he felt the need of the prophet's aid, and he came to Elisha and said: "My father, my father, you are more to Israel than its chariots and horsemen."
Some years were apparently wasted by the dawdling sluggishness of the priests, who, for some reason or other, did not go into the proposed restoration heartily. Joash seems to have suspected that they would push the work languidly; for there is a distinct tinge of suspicion and 'whipping up' in his injunction to 'hasten the matter.
For two hundred and fifty-two years it did not leave off seething and pulsating, until, finally, Nebuzaradan, captain of Nebuchadnezzar's guard, ordered a great carnage among the Judeans, to avenge the death of Zechariah. Joash himself, the murderer of Zechariah, met with an evil end. He fell into the hands of the Syrians, and they abused him in their barbarous, immoral way.
No doubt Joash was guided by Jehoiada in setting about the restoration, but the fact that he gives the orders, while the high priest is not mentioned, throws light on the relative position of the two authorities, and on the king's office as guardian of the Temple and official 'head of the church. The story comes in refreshingly and strangely among the bloody pages in which it is embedded, and it suggests some lessons as to the virtue of plain common sense and business principles applied to religious affairs.
Then Gideon made of the gold a priestly robe to wear when asking questions of Jehovah, and placed it in his own city, Ophrah. Gideon died at a good old age and was buried in the tomb of Joash, his father, in Ophrah of the Abiezerites. Jephthah, the Gileadite, was an able warrior, but he was the son of a wicked woman, and had fled from his relatives and lived in the land of Tob.
The first example is of Joash. He began well, and went on in a godly reformation all the days of Jehoiada; but, it is observed, "That after the days of Jehoiada, the princes of Judah came, and did obeisance to the king, and he hearkened unto them."
Its principal human helper was 'fallen sick of the sickness whereof he died. And to his death-bed came, in a passion of perplexity and despair, the irresolute weakling who was then king, bewailing the impending withdrawal of the nation's best defence. The dying Elisha, with curt authority, pays no heed to the tears of Joash, but bids him take bow and arrows.
Still further, we see in Joash what a strange, awful strength of obstinate resistance, a character weak as regards its resistance to man, can put forth against God. He never attempted to say 'No! to the princes of Judah, but he could say it again and again to his Father in heaven.
In this text of Scripture you have the solemn enthronizing of Joash, a young king, and that in a very troublesome time; for Athaliah, the mother of Ahaziah, had cruelly murdered the royal seed, and usurped the kingdom by the space of six years.
These glad givers may remind us not only of the one condition of acceptable giving, but also of the need for clear and worthy objects, and of obvious disinterestedness in those who seek for money to help good causes. The smallest opening for suspicion that some of it sticks to the collector's fingers is fatal, as it should be. IV. Joash was evidently a business-like king.
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