Joash is seven when he is crowned, and for as long as the priest Jehoiada is alive he does well. His big project is to fix the temple, neglected and looted under Athaliah — but twenty-three years in, the priests have collected the money and repaired nothing. So Jehoiada bores a hole in the lid of a chest, sets it by the altar, and lets the people give directly; the workmen are paid without an audit, “for they dealt faithfully.” Then Hazael marches on Jerusalem, and Joash empties the temple of its gold — the same gold — to buy him off. When Jehoiada dies, so does Joash’s religion.
A study in 2 Kings 12 · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 8 min read
All His Days Wherein Jehoiada Instructed Him
“And Jehoash did that which was right in the sight of the LORD all his days wherein Jehoiada the priest instructed him. But the high places were not taken away: the people still sacrificed and burnt incense in the high places.”
2 Kings 12:2-3
The verse carries its own quiet warning. Joash “did that which was right” — but the clause “all his days wherein Jehoiada instructed him” is doing a lot of work. His faith has a shape, and the shape is another person. It is real while the scaffolding is up.
Even at its best it is incomplete: the high places stay. The people keep worshipping the right God in the wrong places, and the king does not press the point. It is the same half-reform that runs all through Kings — take down what is scandalous, leave what is popular.
Why Repair Ye Not The Breaches Of The House?
“But it was so, that in the three and twentieth year of king Jehoash the priests had not repaired the breaches of the house. Then king Jehoash called for Jehoiada the priest, and the other priests, and said unto them, Why repair ye not the breaches of the house? now therefore receive no more money of your acquaintance, but deliver it for the breaches of the house. And the priests consented to receive no more money of the people, neither to repair the breaches of the house.”
2 Kings 12:6-8
The king had a good plan: let the priests take the offerings, each from the people he knows, and use them to mend the temple. Twenty-three years later the money has come in and the walls are still cracked. Nobody is accused of theft, exactly; the funds have simply been absorbed by the people handling them, and nothing has been built.
It is the ordinary failure of a system where the collectors and the spenders are the same people and no one is really watching. Good intentions and a steady income stream, and the house of God stays in disrepair for a generation.
They Dealt Faithfully
“But Jehoiada the priest took a chest, and bored a hole in the lid of it, and set it beside the altar, on the right side as one cometh into the house of the LORD: and the priests that kept the door put therein all the money that was brought into the house of the LORD. … Moreover they reckoned not with the men, into whose hand they delivered the money to be bestowed on workmen: for they dealt faithfully.”
2 Kings 12:9-15
The fix is structural. The gift goes straight from the worshipper into a sealed box by the altar; the king’s secretary and the high priest count it together and hand it straight to the foremen; the foremen pay the carpenters and masons. Money never rests long enough in any one hand to disappear.
And then the striking line: no one demanded a reckoning from the workmen, “for they dealt faithfully.” A clean process and honest men — you need both. The chest made theft hard; the character of the workers made the accounting unnecessary. The temple gets repaired.
He Sent It To Hazael King Of Syria
“Then Hazael king of Syria went up, and fought against Gath, and took it: and Hazael set his face to go up to Jerusalem. And Jehoash king of Judah took all the hallowed things that Jehoshaphat, and Jehoram, and Ahaziah, his fathers, kings of Judah, had dedicated, and his own hallowed things, and all the gold that was found in the treasures of the house of the LORD, and in the king’s house, and sent it to Hazael king of Syria: and he went away from Jerusalem.”
2 Kings 12:17-18
When the threat is real, Joash’s instinct is not to seek God but to strip the temple he just spent decades restoring and ship the gold to a pagan king. The consecrated treasure of four reigns becomes protection money. What the chest gathered for God’s house, fear pays out to Syria.
The Chronicles account fills in why. After Jehoiada died, Joash listened to the princes, the nation slid back into idolatry, and when Jehoiada’s own son Zechariah stood up to rebuke it, Joash had him stoned in the temple court — the same court he had labored to repair.
“And they conspired against him, and stoned him with stones at the commandment of the king in the court of the house of the LORD. Thus Joash the king remembered not the kindness which Jehoiada his father had done to him, but slew his son. And when he died, he said, The LORD look upon it, and require it.”
2 Chronicles 24:21-22
His own servants finish it: they conspire and kill him in his bed, and Judah does not even bury him with the kings. A reign that started with a boy holding the law in the temple ends with that same man ordering a murder in its courtyard. Borrowed faith lasts exactly as long as the person you borrowed it from.
