Jehu's Zeal

June 9, 2009

Today's Reading: 2 Kings 9-10 and 2 Corinthians 11

Today’s reading is about Elisha going to a man named Jehu, and he anoints him to be king. Sometimes this doesn’t go well. Saul was the man who hid from the anointing of God, but Jehu takes it to the other extreme.

In fact, he makes certain that anything that is touched by Ahab is completely eradicated. He knocks off seventy heads for gosh sakes, then he goes for the entire family. Then he goes for Baal worshipers, and takes out a whole temple full of them.

Jehu says that he has “zeal for the Lord”, but it really isn’t. You see, zeal is willingness to go all the way for God, and this man did not. Jehu left the golden calves of Jeroboam at Bethel and Dan active.

Isn’t that just the way? Have you ever done a job for someone, like your employer, and then they say “it’s not good enough”. Yeah, I have had that happen to me before. It’s always “we love your work, but we need some more of it done”.

Of course, but here is the thing about doing works. We can never do enough of them. This is why it is so interesting to see Paul boasting about his works. Actually, he wasn’t really boasting, but more as laying out a bulleted list about the things that makes him weak. Don’t ask me why he does this. Maybe it’s because Paul knows how useless works are.

Not only that, we have a way of doing all of the wrong things. Haven’t you ever noticed that on a day where you have a ton of things to do, you end up doing the things that often have little to do with your to-do list?

Yeah, that happens to me, a lot. Life is too darn short, and you just can’t do a lot of stuff in the time that you are allotted, seriously. I suppose you could give up, and not try, but that really isn’t what you want to do.

The point is to keep track of what works are really important, and don’t try to do them all at once. God knows how limited life is, and He will be there. Now, God is really great that way, knowing what we have to do in our life. It’s all planned out, and there is nothing we can do about it. So, we should do as much as we can, and don’t get frazzled that we can’t do enough.