Second Kings 11 and we will read the first three verses. When Athaliah the mother of Ahaziah saw that her son was dead, she arose and destroyed all the royal heirs. But Jehoshabah, the daughter of King Joram, sister of Ahaziah, took Joash, the son of Ahaziah, and stole him away from among the king's sons who were being murdered. And they hid him and his nurse in the bedroom from Athaliah, so that he was not killed. So he was hidden with her in the house of the Lord for six years, while Athaliah reigned over the land." Let's pray. Almighty God, our Father in Heaven, we ask that You would help us to see Your providential hand in this text before us. Help us to see how important it is that we make the right choice, that we do the right thing, that we advance the progress of Your Kingdom in our moment-by-moment, day-by-day choices. Show us Yourself. Show us Your Son. We pray these things to you through your spirit and all God's people said, amen. I just would like to acknowledge up front that my first points under point one are straight from Dale Ralph Davis's commentary. He was too good to pass up and not use. So that is a good part of this sermon. Most of the application is mine. But the parts under point one come from him. This text deals with the historically conditioned promise of God. Davis compares the Davidic promise of a seed for David, one from David who would rule forever and ever. to a gigantic white plastic pipeline running on top of the ground from Nova Scotia to Mississippi. That pipeline is very long, and it's very exposed, and it's very fragile. And anybody with a coat hanger in New Jersey can find that pipeline and rip a big hole in it and let all the precious fluid out. Well, that, in a sense, is how exposed the Davidic line is. Remember, in the previous chapter, we saw Jehu murder the 42 brothers of Ahaziah. In the chapter before that, Jehu murdered Ahaziah, shot him through the heart with an arrow. No, that was Joram. Ahaziah was killed at the ascent that goes up by Ger. Well, after those slaughters, We have another slaughter that reduces the Davidic line down to the tiniest little thread. Satan knew God's promise. He knew that the Messiah was coming and he knew that if he could cut that thread, no Messiah, no salvation. So this text really and truly is about the lady who saved Christmas. Without Jehoshabah and her actions in our text tonight, we wouldn't have the carols, the trees, the singing, the celebrations. We wouldn't be here tonight. Because, of course, if Jesus had never come, why bother worshiping God? So we see, really, that God's promise of a Messiah is fully exposed to the accidents and attacks of history. God fulfills his promise contingently. And that means that his people's faithfulness to their callings makes a big difference for the progress of his kingdom. Our series on Kings started this way, if you remember. 1 Kings 1 deals with how the kingdom almost went to Adonijah. And it was only through ordinary people doing their jobs that the kingdom of God was preserved. Well, that same truth is evident here. God's kingdom almost withered and died on the vine in 2 Kings 11. It was only through God's ordinary people doing their jobs that it was preserved. So David's line in verse 1 is down to the thickness of a carbon nanotube, we could say. Virtually all of his descendants are gone. When Athaliah, the mother of Ahaziah, saw that her son, Ahaziah, was dead, she arose and destroyed all the royal heirs. Athaliah sees a chance for power and takes it. And she goes into the bedroom and starts killing these kids. Now, what's the background here? Well, the background is that Jehoshaphat made a marriage alliance for his son, Jehoram, with this woman, Athaliah, daughter of Ahab. Jehoshaphat apparently thought that that was a perfectly acceptable thing to do. Maybe even a smart policy move. But it wasn't so. If you marry an unbeliever, guess what's going to happen to your children? Now, hopefully they won't all be killed by their own grandmother. But certainly, to marry an unbeliever is to say, I don't really care whether my kids and grandkids walk with Christ. I'd be just as happy for all my grandkids to grow up as pagans. Because that's exactly what happened with Athaliah. Don't date an unbeliever. Don't think about marrying an unbeliever. Don't say, I love this man and I'll convert him. I love this girl and I'll convert her. It doesn't work that way. It certainly didn't work that way for Athaliah. So Athaliah, son of Ahab, possibly daughter of Ahab, possibly daughter of Jezebel too, is so angry, mad fury, of Yahweh's enemies. We saw this in our other reading, 1 Samuel. Saul mustered the entire army, dragged people off the farm, brought them out against David. Why? Was David really such a threat to him? No, David showed time and time again that he was not a threat to Saul's reign. But Saul's irrational hatred made him do everything he possibly could to try to wipe out David. And Athaliah's irrational hatred makes her do everything she possibly can to wipe out her own grandkids. This is messed up. A grandma loose in the bedroom with a long bloody knife. Grandmas are not supposed to do that. But Athaliah hated Christ. There's really no better way to say it. Jesus Christ is the most polarizing figure in human history. He himself said, whoever is not with me is against me. And whoever does not gather with me scatters. My mom shared with me one time, she was passing out tracts in downtown Fort Collins. She tried to hand one to a lady who dressed to the side angrily. Well, ten minutes later, the same woman comes driving by where my mom was standing on the street corner, stops right in the middle of traffic, rolls down her window, and screams this obscenity-laden tirade at mom before driving off. Mom called me and said, I knew intellectually that people hated Christ, but I didn't realize that people hate Christ. Well, that's Athaliah. And that's really every enemy of God. Rather than face their own guilt and need for repentance, what? They try to wipe out his promise in history. Hatred of God is fundamentally and utterly irrational. It reminds us not to look for any love on the part of those who lack faith and hope. Faith, hope, and love go together. who are faithless and hopeless, are also loveless, as clearly was Aphaliah. But, thank God, there's a faithful person here. Jehoshabah, the daughter of King Joram, sister of Ahaziah, and also wife of Jehoiada the high priest, intervenes. Now, this woman saved Christmas. She's not mentioned in the index of the standard reference work, John Bright's History of Israel. People don't celebrate her on Christmas cards. There's no Jehoshabin cult like there is a cult of Mary. And yet, Jehoshabah managed to save one baby, little baby Joash, her nephew. Now maybe there was some kind of bold action here, maybe some kind of face-off with Athaliah. Maybe Jehoshabah switched one of her own babies in for baby Joash, and thus managed to save him. We don't know exactly what happened. Maybe it was a kind of inaction where she had taken Joash out for some other reason entirely, and only afterwards did she realize that she had thereby saved his life. The point is that her action saved David's line. She was faithful in that moment to say, wait, I maybe can't save them all from my mother-in-law, my step-mom-in-law, but I can save one. And she did. It's easy to think, what can a little person like me do for the kingdom of God? How significant are my actions really? Well, how significant was Jehoshaphat adopting, so to speak, one little kid? It will only save the entire kingdom of God and the entire plan of redemption. That's all. She did one little thing, but it was one little piece without which God's entire plan would fail. It's kind of amazing to think about. In our reform circles, we don't like to talk about that or speak in those ways. God's plan failing? How is that even possible? And from God's side, of course, it's not. But on the other hand, from our side, we can say, yes, there is a sense in which God's plan can fail. And we can get into a sophisticated analysis of what language of possibility means. You know, what might it mean to say that this piano could have been on Mars at this moment. It's the same language of possibility. Most of us would probably say, well, that's not possible. That piano couldn't have been on Mars. But based on what the language of possibility means, it is possible that God's plan could have failed if Jehoshaphat had said, oh well, I'm not going in there. I don't want to get murdered. I'm going to stay away. I'm not going to adopt my dead brother's little baby. Forget it. It's not what she said. Well, what does that mean? Well, really it shows us that God's work never has been done in the domain of supra-history, in this ethereal realm up here where God works his saving work without getting his hands dirty No, God's saving work is done in history, in the real world, in the daily reality that you and I experience. We tend to think of God's saving work as something that happened a long time ago and far, far away. In kind of this magical land where things were very different than they are for us. And it's true that material conditions of life were different. It was the same world with the same human beings in it, living in the same daily grind that you and I have. Different technology, same kind of people. Different place, but similar activities. God's kingdom was saved through the work of Jehoshaphat. Even now, God's plan for His world, God's plan of salvation is concentrated in a visible group of people called the church. Those who are working on behalf of the Kingdom of God are an identifiable, even an institutional group of people with faces, names, telephone numbers, addresses, and taxpayer identification numbers. The work and growth of the Kingdom of God depends in a very real sense on what the people in this room do with themselves. And it was precisely because of her faith in God's promise that Jehoshaphat was willing to risk her life to save this baby. And it should be precisely because of our faith in God's promise that you and I should be willing to risk our lives to do the right thing, to do what God has told us to do, is calling us to do, to obey Him in any particular moment. If there's a woman who's killing all her grandbabies, and you're about to do something that she doesn't like, do you think she would scruple to kill you? Probably not. Jehoshapah risked her life to save little Joash. And yet how often do we decide not to obey God? Because it might cost a little money, a little time, a little inconvenience, a little pride. But saving this baby Joash wasn't just saving a baby, it was saving the world. Saving the Savior of the world. Well finally, verse 3, Joash was hidden with her in the house of the Lord for six years while Athaliah reigned over the land. Now remember, the palace and the temple were right next to each other in Jerusalem. Joash lived less than 100 yards from Athaliah's front door for six years. It's kind of amazing to think that perhaps Athaliah hated God so much that in those six years she never went into the temple one time. Where better to hide someone from a pagan, from a God-hater, than in the place where the true God is worshipped? Well, that's exactly what Jehoshaphat did. But you know, Joash's presence there in the temple is like the presence of the kingdom of God. It's like two measures of leaven hidden in a bowl of dough. It's like a grain of mustard seed hidden in the ground. It's growing, but it's imperceptible. It's there, but you can't see it. The kingdom of God is still that way. The king of the kingdom of God is not visible. It isn't clear to the whole world that he's on the throne. He's hidden away in the temple of God in heaven right now. He reigns, but we don't see all things under his feet. So the application to us is, When push comes to shove, when things get hard, which kingdom are you going to pay attention to? Which kingdom is going to rule your life and direct your choices and guide your decisions? It's going to be the kingdoms of this world or the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ? Think about it. A Judean peasant halfway through Athaliah's reign Is he going to live based on what Athaliah says? Or is he going to say, no, my true king is David's son, and maybe David doesn't have a son right now, but God promised him an enduring dynasty, and that's where my allegiance is. Which king and which kingdom will you serve? So what are the implications of seeing the reality that God's promise is exposed to the accidents and attacks of history? What do we make of this? Well, first of all, God keeps his promises. God said, David, I will give you a descendant. And that's what he did. Your seed will sit on the throne before me forever. But secondly, we see that God plays by the rules. We've talked about this before. God set up the world in a certain way and said, here's how the world runs. And God never breaks in and says, I win because omnipotence. God works in the world according to the way he set up the world to work. You know, God could have given Athaliah an attack of meningitis and caused her to die or be incapacitated. He could have had her die in childbirth years before. He could have had her out traveling with Ahaziah and had her be shot through the heart by Jehu. But He didn't do any of those things. He left it up to Jehoshaphat to frustrate her homicidal mania. What does that tell us? It tells us that human actions actually make a difference for the Kingdom of God. Jehoshabah saving Joash actually changed something about God's Kingdom, actually furthered the progress of the Kingdom, just as Athaliah's action actually hindered the progress of the Kingdom. So that impact that we have is positive or negative. There's no such thing as a neutral action that doesn't serve the kingdom or hinder the kingdom, but that simply lets the kingdom be. Remember, the Lord Jesus is set for a sign that is opposed. There's no neutrality possible with regards to him. He is the most polarizing figure in history. And that means that we need to understand that our actions impact his kingdom one way or another. Really what that means is that no line can be drawn between big things and little things, unimportant things and important things when it comes to God's kingdom. Saving one little baby may not be much of anything. So it might have seemed at the time. Yet it was by saving Joash that Ahaziah, or that Jehoshaphat, saved the world. And it's the same thing, you know, you're not allowed to say, God, this act of obedience you're calling me to is too difficult. that's too hard and it has too little benefit to the kingdom. I can't do the thing you're calling me to do right now because it doesn't matter anyway. Right, the cost-benefit analysis, God, I've run it, and the cost majorly outweighs the benefits. But that's precisely what you can't know. The cost seemed high to save Joash, but the benefits were far, far greater. So that means that both God's providential government and our faithful obedience are operative at every stage of the kingdom. We can never stop and say, well, God will build this kingdom. Therefore I need do nothing. Nor can we say, well, God's not building the kingdom, so I better get after it. It's a both-and. The church builds itself, Ephesians 4. Christ builds the church, Matthew 16. We can't use one of those truths to deny the other. We affirm and embrace both. God preserved David's line. Jehoshabah preserved David's line. Your obedience really does make a difference for the kingdom. There is no trade-off here, no sense that God's sovereignty lessens the significance of human choices. He has chosen to build his work in history. And that's a sign to us that we as historical creatures are called to participate with him in building it. Will you give your life to save a little one or to obey God in some other way? Will you spend your time, your reputation, your money, your convenience to obey Jesus and to work for His kingdom? Do you do that? I know you do. Are you willing to continue to pledge your lives, your fortunes, and your sacred honor for Christ and His kingdom? We need to be like Jahashua, but we need to recognize God's kingdom is contingent in history. Yes, we will face the mad fury of Christ's enemies. We must never forget that our labor is not in vain in the Lord. Our work is valuable in His kingdom. The ordinary way the kingdom progresses is through the obedient service of its citizens. In this text, see God's hand and Jehoshaphat's. And in your life this week, see God's hand and the faithfulness of the people around you, your spouse, your children, your church family, your real family, your friends, your relatives. Work for God's kingdom because your faithfulness makes a real difference. Amen, let's pray. Heavenly Father, we pray that you would help us to work for your kingdom. Help us to desire the kingdom. Help us to love your kingdom. Help us to see that what we do for your kingdom truly makes a difference. We thank you, Father, that you have chosen to work in the realm in which we live. Exposed to the accidents and attacks of history. Help us to serve you, we pray. We ask these things in the name of the Lord Jesus with the help of your spirit. And all God's people said, Amen.