I have long been fascinated with the
evil king Ahaz of Judah whose wicked reign is noteworthy for its open opposition to the
revealed will of God (Isa. 7:10-12). The corrupting influence of his own idolatry is
vividly set forth in Second Kings 16:7-16.
While on a trip to Damascus to meet with the king
of Assyria with whom Ahaz has just entered into an illegal military alliance against Aram
and Israel, the Judean king spies an altar that stirs his own pagan designs for remodeling
the obviously outmoded and irrelevant worship of his homeland along pagan lines. He
sends the blueprint back to Jerusalem with instructions for Urijah, the high priest, to
make the needed changes in the temple floor plan immediately. And what plans they
are!
The great bronze altar, the altar of
sacrifice, was to be removed from its prominent place just outside the entrance to the
sacred enclosure, and it was to be placed to the north of the new altar which was to
become the altar of sacrifice (2nd Kings 16:14-15). The bronze altar was to be
relegated to the lesser role of a kind of "crystal ball" by which the king would
"inquire" (vs.15). The Hebrew word for "inquire" is from
bakar which means "to seek" or "to search." In other words,
the temple had become "seeker sensitive."
Gone was the majesty and the awesomeness of
God. The entire truth of judgment visible in the bronze altar -- that only as God
judges our sin via sacrifice can any man ever hope to approach Him - was now relegated to
the periphery of revealed religion. Indeed, whenever and wherever the truth of
judgment, and, with it, God's holiness and man's utter sinfulness, recedes into the
background, man himself assumes the dimensions of sovereignty. He refashions worship
in a "seeker-friendly" image conducive to his own idolatrous notions, and the
true seeker of sinners, God, Himself, recedes in importance, or is banished altogether.
Thus, the irreverence of Ahaz revealed sin of the deepest dye.
To reduce one's approach to the infinite and
Almighty God down to the product of mere human inquiry is to exalt the fallen intellect in
an idolatrous way, and it places God in the passive role of the sought instead of the
active pursuer of souls the Bible everywhere reveals Him to be. The Bible says no
man seeks after God (Rom.3:11). In the darkness of our depravity and fallenness we
have neither the light nor the sight to mount such a search nor the heart to move us to
such inquiry. And any search by man leading to a saving knowledge of the truth as it
is in Christ, is the product of the Lord's gracious calling out of sin, darkness and death
(Rom.8:29-30; 2nd Tim.1:9; 1st Pet.2:9).
The great bronze altar situated so
prominently in the old tabernacle and in the later temple testifies eloquently to the fact
that man, the sinner, cannot seek such a God of awesome holiness and terrifying wrath, for
to do so apart from the proper remedy of his sin would have spelled his eternal doom.
Thus, God hid Himself mercifully behind the restricted access of Old
Testament ceremony and ritual, and the bronze altar stood forth to condemn the folly of
approaching such a God without a prior remedy of the cause of man's alienation from God -
his sin and rebellion. In removing the bronze altar from its prominent place in the
ancient temple, Ahaz was rejecting belief in the seriousness of sin and of the necessity
of its judgment. Indeed, his temple remodeling betrayed a hatred of God and of
God's ways, and, most heinously of all, it betrayed a hatred of God's redemption in Christ
typically prefigured in the great bronze altar and the sacrifices associated with it.
Sadly, I must conclude that the modern
church-growth movement with its insistence on "seeker-sensitivity" finds a
biblical soul mate in this wicked king of Judah, hardly the kind of company professing
Christians would wish to keep! And yet this movement routinely repeats his ancient
folly in its incessant pandering to sinners as a "sovereign audience" whose
"felt needs" must drive the ministerial thrust of the church, and sensitivity
for whom must dictate a muting of the offensive aspects of the gospel message. Thus,
in the remodeling spirit of an Ahaz, we rid our sanctuaries of crosses, we downplay
references to sin and judgment and wrath in our sermons, and we make
our pilgrimages to the modern "temples of Damascus" where all kinds of
"ministry models" abound just waiting to be copied and transplanted!
What the contemporary church desperately
needs is not another trip to a modern- day Damascus for a more approachable deity; it
needs to walk the Damascus Road of repentance and trust in an unapproachably holy
and sovereign God, and to be humbled to the dust in recognizing along with Paul, the proud
Pharisee, that the God (or gods) we've busied ourselves with are no gods at all, and, like
the Philistine idols, need desperately to be abandoned (2nd Sam.5:21). With Paul,
the church needs to cry, "Who are you, Lord?" And to faithfully minister
for Him in the light of His response, regardless of the unpopularity of the message!