2 Kings 10:1-12a
"10 Now Ahab had seventy sons in Samaria. So Jehu wrote letters and sent them to Samaria, to the rulers of the city, to the elders, and to the guardians of the sons of Ahab, saying, 2 “Now then, as soon as this letter comes to you, seeing your master's sons are with you, and there are with you chariots and horses, fortified cities also, and weapons, 3 select the best and fittest of your master's sons and set him on his father's throne and fight for your master's house.” 4 But they were exceedingly afraid and said, “Behold, the two kings could not stand before him. How then can we stand?” 5 So he who was over the palace, and he who was over the city, together with the elders and the guardians, sent to Jehu, saying, “We are your servants, and we will do all that you tell us. We will not make anyone king. Do whatever is good in your eyes.” 6 Then he wrote to them a second letter, saying, “If you are on my side, and if you are ready to obey me, take the heads of your master's sons and come to me at Jezreel tomorrow at this time.” Now the king's sons, seventy persons, were with the great men of the city, who were bringing them up. 7 And as soon as the letter came to them, they took the king's sons and slaughtered them, seventy persons, and put their heads in baskets and sent them to him at Jezreel. 8 When the messenger came and told him, “They have brought the heads of the king's sons,” he said, “Lay them in two heaps at the entrance of the gate until the morning.” 9 Then in the morning, when he went out, he stood and said to all the people, “You are innocent. It was I who conspired against my master and killed him, but who struck down all these? 10 Know then that there shall fall to the earth nothing of the word of the Lord, which the Lord spoke concerning the house of Ahab, for the Lord has done what he said by his servant Elijah.” 11 So Jehu struck down all who remained of the house of Ahab in Jezreel, all his great men and his close friends and his priests, until he left him none remaining.
12 Then he set out and went to Samaria."
There are two things we must remember in reading this grim and gruesome story. The first is that divine justice was being meted out to an apostate house whose very memory God felt it necessary to exterminate from the body politic of Israel. One has only to think what ex- tremities of evil might have been perpetrated by such an evil progeny as Ahab's was to under- stand the harsh realism of the holy God of Israel in so dealing with them. The second thing we should grasp is that evil had become so rampant in Israel that God had given it its head, so to speak, and had stood back from it, having given men over to a reprobate mind. This is the real explanation of the atrocious and inhuman barbarism recorded here. It is not that God could ever condone it for a moment; it was because they were God-forsaken that they had descended to such depths. And yet, in that God-forsakenness, God still had the last word, and used and controlled the situation for His own sovereign purposes. This is the explanation of how God can use the spectre of Bolshevist totalitarianism as an instrument of chastisement against our decadent Western civilisation today while in no wise condoning the atheistic inhumanities that characterise the Communist movement. God is in easy control of world-situa-tions, and manipulates them as He wills in the fulfilment of His grand designs.