2 Kings 11:1-3
"11 Now when Athaliah the mother of Ahaziah saw that her son was dead, she arose and destroyed all the royal family. 2 But Jehosheba, 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 put to death, and she put him and his nurse in a bedroom. Thus they hid him from Athaliah, so that he was not put to death. 3 And he remained with her six years, hidden in the house of the Lord, while Athaliah reigned over the land."
The sacred historian now turns to events in Judah, the southern kingdom, and introduces us to one who has come down in history as 'the bloody Athaliah'. And she was well named, for these verses record her terrible and unnatural act of butchery in murdering all her grandchildren. Why? Because she wanted power and the throne. There is nothing quite so ruthless as vaunting ambition - it is a dangerous, monomaniac condition in which everything and everyone, friends, loved ones and family alike, is trampled upon or pushed out of the way that the desired end might be gained. It is demonic in origin, and this opens up an important lesson for us. For behind the events recorded here we need to see a deeper significance. The house of Judah stood in the line of the promise, and had its place in the strategy of God for world redemption. This dreadful massacre was an attack by the powers of darkness upon the continuity of the promise made by God to Abraham that in his seed all families of the earth should be blessed - an attack on the house of David. One thinks of the picture in Revelation 12:4 of the devil standing before the woman ready to devour the child as soon as it was born, and of Herod's attempt to kill all the boy children in the hope of destroying the infant Messiah. Athaliah's action is simply another instance of Satan's malevolent design to destroy the plan of God's salvation. We may never know how much evil we do when we sell ourselves to the devil.
