Made It A Latrine

⏱️ 4 minutes.

They also broke down the sacred pillar of Baal and broke down the house of Baal, and made it a latrine to this day.
— 2 Kings 10:27

Here we see the extreme measures that King Jehu took against the worshippers of Baal. He gathered all the prophets and priests of Baal under the pretence of a great sacrifice, and then eliminated them. But he did not stop there. He went to the very places where their sacrifices had been offered and their temples had stood — and the text goes to deliberate lengths to describe the level of thoroughness involved. The house of Baal, the temple where their worship had taken place, was torn down and turned into a latrine — a place of filth and waste — and it remained so to that day.

God’s Contempt for False Worship

While this might appear extreme by our standards, it is entirely fitting when one understands the depth of God’s contempt for the worship of other gods. The worship of false gods is not a minor offence — it is a profound insult to the true and living God. God Himself calls it an abomination. It is no coincidence that the very first of the commandments given to Moses on Mount Sinai addressed this directly:

I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before Me.
— Exodus 20:2-3

The problem with worshipping false gods is not only that it robs God of the glory that belongs to Him alone. It also does something deeply destructive to the worshipper — it removes the heart from its rightful adoration of the true God and draws it after something dead and worthless. And Psalm 115:8 warns us of the terrible consequence of this:

Those who make them will become like them, everyone who trusts in them.
— Psalm 115:8

The preceding verses describe these idols in devastating terms — they have eyes but cannot see, mouths but cannot speak, ears but cannot hear, hands but cannot touch, feet but cannot walk. And those who worship them become spiritually dead in the same way. Jeremiah declares:

But the LORD is the true God; He is the living God and the everlasting King. At His wrath the earth quakes, and the nations cannot endure His indignation.
— Jeremiah 10:10

Paul goes further still:

Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.
— Romans 1:22-23

Purging Sin From Our Lives

What Jehu did to the house of Baal is a picture of what we need to do with sin in our own lives. Just as idolatry robs God of His rightful worship and replaces Him in the heart with something else, so sin in our lives tends to do the same — displacing God from the centre of our hearts and replacing Him with something else, whether another god or simply self-exaltation.

We too, like this king, need to come to a place of being willing to purge sin from our lives — taking the most decisive and thorough measures to ensure that sin does not become our way of life.

Jesus was uncompromising on this point:

If your eye causes you to stumble, throw it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye, than, having two eyes, to be cast into hell.
— Mark 9:47

And Paul writes to the Romans in the same spirit — urging believers to put sin to death, to mortify it, to refuse to let it rule over them:

For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.
— Romans 6:14

Enabled by the Spirit

What is deeply encouraging is that we do not fight this battle in our own strength. By the power of the Holy Spirit and the grace of God, we have been enabled to fight against the besetting sins in our lives. We are no longer slaves to sin — sin no longer has the final word over us.

May we then be a people who leans fully upon the work of the Holy Spirit and the sufficiency of Christ’s atoning sacrifice on the cross, as we are sanctified day after day — becoming more and more dead to sin, and more and more alive to righteousness.

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with you all.
— 2 Corinthians 13:14

Amen.