The Pride of Joash, King of Judah

We read of something like this in the book of Chronicles. Joash, king of Judah, was called to the throne at the age of seven by Jehoiada the priest, and the witness of Scripture praises him for all his actions as long as that priest lived. But hear what Scripture tells of him after Jehoiada’s death: how he was puffed up with pride and given over to a most disgraceful condition. “But after the death of Jehoiada the princes went in and worshiped the king, and he was won over by their attentions and listened to them. And they forsook the temple of the Lord, the God of their fathers, and served sacred groves and idols, and great wrath came upon Judah and Jerusalem because of this sin.” And a little later: “When a year had come round, the army of Syria came up against him. They came to Judah and Jerusalem and killed all the princes of the people, and they sent all the spoils to the king at Damascus. And although the Syrians who came were very few, the Lord delivered a vast multitude into their hands, because they had forsaken the Lord, the God of their fathers. And on Joash they carried out shameful judgments. And when they departed, they left him in great diseases.” [a]

You see how the result of his pride was that he was handed over to shocking and filthy passions. For the one who is puffed up with pride and has allowed himself to be worshiped as God is, as the apostle says, “given over to shameful passions and to a debased mind, to do what is not fitting.” And because, as Scripture says, “everyone who exalts his heart is unclean before God,” the one who is puffed up with swelling pride of heart is handed over to the most shameful confusion, to be deceived by it. The purpose is that, humbled in this way, he may know that he is unclean through impurity of the flesh and the knowledge of impure desires, something he had refused to recognize in the pride of his heart. It is also that the shameful infection of the flesh may expose the hidden impurity of the heart, which he contracted through the sin of pride; and that, through the open pollution of his body, he may be proved impure, he who did not see before that he had become unclean through the pride of his spirit.