2 Kings 16:7-20
"7 So Ahaz sent messengers to Tiglath-pileser king of Assyria, saying, “I am your servant and your son. Come up and rescue me from the hand of the king of Syria and from the hand of the king of Israel, who are attacking me.” 8 Ahaz also took the silver and gold that was found in the house of the Lord and in the treasures of the king's house and sent a present to the king of Assyria. 9 And the king of Assyria listened to him. The king of Assyria marched up against Damascus and took it, carrying its people captive to Kir, and he killed Rezin.
10 When King Ahaz went to Damascus to meet Tiglath-pileser king of Assyria, he saw the altar that was at Damascus. And King Ahaz sent to Uriah the priest a model of the altar, and its pattern, exact in all its details. 11 And Uriah the priest built the altar; in accordance with all that King Ahaz had sent from Damascus, so Uriah the priest made it, before King Ahaz arrived from Damascus. 12 And when the king came from Damascus, the king viewed the altar. Then the king drew near to the altar and went up on it 13 and burned his burnt offering and his grain offering and poured his drink offering and threw the blood of his peace offerings on the altar. 14 And the bronze altar that was before the Lord he removed from the front of the house, from the place between his altar and the house of the Lord, and put it on the north side of his altar. 15 And King Ahaz commanded Uriah the priest, saying, “On the great altar burn the morning burnt offering and the evening grain offering and the king's burnt offering and his grain offering, with the burnt offering of all the people of the land, and their grain offering and their drink offering. And throw on it all the blood of the burnt offering and all the blood of the sacrifice, but the bronze altar shall be for me to inquire by.” 16 Uriah the priest did all this, as King Ahaz commanded.
17 And King Ahaz cut off the frames of the stands and removed the basin from them, and he took down the sea from off the bronze oxen that were under it and put it on a stone pedestal. 18 And the covered way for the Sabbath that had been built inside the house and the outer entrance for the king he caused to go around the house of the Lord, because of the king of Assyria. 19 Now the rest of the acts of Ahaz that he did, are they not written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah? 20 And Ahaz slept with his fathers and was buried with his fathers in the city of David, and Hezekiah his son reigned in his place."
The parallel account of Ahaz's appeal to Assyria in 2 Chronicles 28:16ff will help towards a better understanding of what really happened in Judah at this time. Ahaz was deeply harassed by his enemies, but instead of crying to the Lord, he turned to Assyria for help. His unfaithfulness was all the more blameworthy in that the prophet Isaiah gave him much en- couragement to believe that the Lord would help him (see Isaiah 7:4ff). He paid dearly for this failure to believe in the promises of God for the price of Assyrian help was, in effect, that Ju- dah became a vassal state and remained more or less so until the time of Josiah. The Chroni- cles account remarks very pointedly that Tiglath-Pileser was a source of distress rather than strengthening to him. Not only so - and here we see once more that one of the penalties of sinning is that we are obliged to continue sinning - Ahaz fell more and more deeply into sin and incurred the severe displeasure of the Lord. The story of the altar which he introduced into Jerusalem is explained in 2 Chronicles in terms which expose the extent of his spiritual declension. 'Because the gods of the kings of Syria help them, therefore will I sacrifice unto them' he argued (2 Chronicles 28:23), and exchanged the altar of the Lord for the heathenish atrocities. He wanted a god who would help him in any event, whatever his misdeeds were. This is the kind of god that modern man would like, and one is startled by the resemblance between Ahaz's attitude and the common superstitions of our own time. But the true and liv- ing God is not a flunkey, to be called upon and ordered about when men need to be extricat- ed from the scrapes their sins have brought them into. He is the LORD, the Righteous One, Who regards sin as an insult against His majesty, and Who will raise up enemies against His covenant people when they rebel against Him. It was not the gods of the Syrians, but the only true and living God Who helped them against Ahaz. But he was too blind to see this, as mod- ern man is also too blind to see this before his very eyes today in the vast and sinister power of Communism. The word of the Chronicler is devastating in its simple verdict! 'They (the false gods) were the ruin of him.' Exactly.