It begins in almost a comic way, with a young prophet sent by Elisha on a mission, for the secret anointing of Jehu son of Jehoshaphat as the new king of Israel. The unnamed prophet anointed Jehu in a private room, and then fled (II Kings 9:1-10). Jehu’s friends wanted to know what “that madman” had said, and Jehu replied, “You know the sort and how they babble” (9:11). So he told them what the prophet had said, and they responded by spreading their cloaks on the ground before him and blowing the trumpets and proclaiming him king (9:13).

As the story unfolded, Jehoram, Ahaziah, and Jezebel all wanted peace with Jehu (9:22, 9:31): but “what peace can there be” (9:22) in the face of whoredom, sorcery, and idolatry? King Jehu himself shot the arrow that killed Jehoram; his soldiers mortally wounded Ahaziah, and sympathizers threw Jezebel down from the palace tower (9:23-26; 9:27; 9:30-33). He negotiated the beheading of the remaining seventy sons of Ahab (10:6-7); he killed – presumably by commanding his men to do it, though the text simply says “he killed” – all of Ahab’s close friends and priests (10:11, 17), and some 42 relatives of Ahaziah (10:13-14). He then arranged the slaughter of all the prophets, priests, and followers of Baal that he could round up (10:19-25).

It is an impressive amount of bloodshed. It removed all the potential rivals to Jehu’s kingship, even while he could attribute all these deaths to his “zeal for the Lord” (10:16). Yet killing his enemies, or the enemies of the Lord, turns out to be the easy part: in all his zeal Jehu did not succeed in turning himself aside from idolatry (10:29), nor in following the law of the Lord in his heart (10:31).

It is difficult to take religious zeal seriously when its violence makes it look so much more like realpolitik than piety – especially when it turns out that personal devotion is in fact missing. Perhaps Jehu was anointed by God as king in preference to the family of Ahab; after all, you could be quite terrible and still be preferable to Ahab. Yet Jehu is hardly the example of godliness that we would hope for.

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Help us, Lord! We are so prone to imagine that we just need to muster the strength to wipe out all those other sinners. Yet if we actually could do that, we would still be so far from solving the sin problem that is so desperately established within our own souls. Only you can save us from ourselves!