By Dr. Jeff Bonzelaar
Reading through I and II Kings can be, at times, like watching paint dry. Except for the crazy stuff surrounding Elijah and Elisha’s ministries, the books are a painful, four-hundred-year history of one king after another, repeating the mistakes of those who ruled before them. Same old, same old. Every now and then, however, there is a pleasant surprise, a turn of events, but by the end of this two-part series, the nation of Israel is pillaged, and the people deported.
As I recently made my way through the second of these books again, something revealing struck me about Hezekiah, a king of Judah (see 2 Kings 18-20). Unlike those preceding him, he followed the Lord wholeheartedly. In fact, so devout was Hezekiah in his faith, that the narrator writes, “There was no one like him among all the kings of Judah, either before him or after him” (18:5).
So far so good.
