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This morning I read I Kings 15:1-16:3

As I read, I was struck by the way King Asa was remembered. The way he is remembered taught me a lesson that is applicable today. First, his grandmother is named in his genealogy. This is significant because women are not regularly mentioned in genealogies in the Bible. His grandmother was Maachah. I Kings 15:9-10 says, “In the twentieth year of Jeroboam king of Israel, Asa became king over Judah. And he reigned forty-one years in Jerusalem. His grandmother’s name was Maachah the granddaughter of Abishalom.” Verses 11-13 read, “Asa did what was right in the eyes of the Lord as did his father David. (12)And he banished the perverted persons from the land and removed all the idols that his fathers had made. Also he removed Maachah his grandmother from being queen mother, because she had made an obscene image of Asherah. And Asa cut down her obscene image and burned it by the Brook Kidron.

This story strikes me for three reasons; it teaches me three things. First, if you are going to go into the annals of history, you don’t want to be remembered for doing the wrong thing. Second, sometimes the sins of a father can be so repulsive that instead of following the father’s example, the child goes in the complete opposite direction. Before Asa is mentioned, I Kings records history of one king after another who followed his father’s (sinful) example, but Asa is different. Asa’s father was Abijam ,who (1) “[Reigned] in the eighteenth year of King Jeroboam” and reigned only three years and walked in all the sins of his father” (4). “Nevertheless, for David’s sake the Lord his God gave him a lamp in Jerusalem, by setting up his son after him and by establishing Jerusalem…” Third lesson: sometimes a child has to name and draw attention to the sins of their family in order to establish a new pattern of following the Lord.

I happened to be looking for women in the scriptures when I read this excerpt. To my dismay, the woman in this excerpt was remembered for doing the wrong thing, but obviously, I shouldn’t draw any general conclusion about women from this small account of Asa’s grandmother. In addition to the three lessons I learned above, I felt like I also experienced a warning about how to read the bible. When I come to the scriptures with pure motives, I will always find direction for my life, but if I approach the word of God with an agenda, I could miss out on an important lesson God is trying to teach me.