Utumishi Blog

That’s what we find in 2 Chronicles 16.

First, a dissection of pragmatism:

• Costly – ‘Then Asa took silver and gold from the treasures of the house of the LORD… and sent them to Ben-Hadad king of Syria/Aram’ (v2).  He’s banking on a good return – the lifting of an economic blockade (v1) – but pragmatism does cost.  Whether its dodgy politics or slick marketing or backhanders in business or kitu kidogo for the policeman, there are no free lunches.  The world works by “You get what you pay for” – so it’s costly.
• Conservative – ‘”Let there be a treaty between me and you,” he said, “as there was between my father and your father”‘ (v3a).  Pragmatism always has a precedent.  “That’s how my father did it and his father did it.”  It’s traditional, conservative – it’s just how we do things.
• Covenant-breaking – “See, I am sending you silver and gold. Now break your covenant with Baasha king of Israel” (v3b).  Pragmatism values money and results over keeping a word.  Asa is working on the basis that if he can give enough cash then the treaty signed between Israel and Aram will be worthless.  That’s how our world works – I say that I will come to this meeting or this event at this time on this date but then I get a better offer and I break my word.
• Competent – “Ben-Hadad listened… Baasha stopped… Asa built…” (v4-6).  Pragmatism actually works. Very often it does get results. Let’s not be super-spiritual about this. The Bible is very realistic that pragmatism works, that often ungodly people with ungodly motives and ungodly methods do achieve their ungodly goals.
• Condemned – It’s all looking fine for Asa and Judah but then God spoils it all by sending his verdict through his prophet: “You’ve been foolish and now you will have war” (v7-9).  But what exactly is it that Asa has done wrong?

A definition of pragmatism:

“You relied on the king of Aram/Syria and not on the Lord your God” (v7a).  That is pragmatism.  Asa relied on World not the Lord.  And not only that – he’s missed the opportunity to overcome the World – “…the army of the king of Aram/Syria escaped” (v7b).  Asa has stopped viewing God’s enemies as those who need to be brought to submission under Yahweh and he’s started viewing them as his salvation.  To translate it into New Testament terms – he has stopped viewing the World as Lost, stopped viewing them as a mission field, and started looking to them for answers and help and strength.   The Apostle Paul had to write to the church in Corinth and say, ‘What are you doing dragging church politics into the civil courts? What are you doing going yoking yourself to unbelievers? What are you doing going into business with the world?’ (1 Cor. 6; 2 Cor. 6).  Yes we can sometimes learn from the world – Jesus said that sometimes the children of the world are shrewder than the children of light.  But God forbid that we forget that the world is lost and look to it as our saviour – as the place to get strategies for church growth or models of leadership, as the place to get help to fight our internal church politics battles, as the place of financial salvation.

 But why did Asa go pragmatic?  Why do we?  A diagnosis of pragmatism:

1. Forgetting the past – “Were not the Cushites and Libyans a mighty army with great numbers of chariots and horsemen? Yet when you relied on the Lord, he delivered them into your hand.” (v9). Earlier in his reign Asa had faced an army of a million men charging out of Africa, he cried to the Lord and the Lord fought for them (2 Chron. 14:9-12) but he’s forgotten those days.  We become pragmatic when we forget that all the great revivals of the past were not built on pragmatism – slick marketing campaigns or cleverness or money – but built on prayer and the word of the Cross.  And what was the great past battle?   The Cross.  Was the cross pragmatic?  Would an executive strategist dreamt up the Cross?  Never.  Weakness, blood, humiliation, wrath, love, covenant-keeping, free grace.
2. Forgetting the character of God – “For the eyes of the Lord range throughout the earth to strengthen”(v9a).  God is not some distant dictator.  It’s not even that he’s a grudging giver.  He’s actively going up and down seeking out people to help and strengthen and lift up.  We become pragmatic when we forget God is an ever-present help, a generous Father, a God of overflowing grace and we think we’ll just have to get on with it ourselves our own way.
3. Forgetting our first love – “…those whose hearts are fully committed to him” (v9b).  It’s a heart issue. At the end of 1 Kings 15 Asa’s heart prized the Lord God above everything. One demonstration of that was his putting his treasure into the Temple (“where your treasure is there your heart is…”).  What happens in 16:2? He takes it all out again!  He moves his treasure from the Temple to Damascus.  His heart is going from the Lord to Ben-Hadad.  The Temple is not just any old religious building, it’s not a church – it’s where you find the Word of God (the great Ark of the Covenant), it’s where you find forgiveness (through sacrifice), it’s where you find God himself.  13 chapters of the book of Chronicles are devoted to the setting up of the Temple.  It’s a BIG deal.  We get to the New Testament and we find the Temple is Jesus (John  2:19-21).  What’s the point – what is at the core of Asa’s problem – what is at the core of revival-stopping pragmatism?  It’s deserting Jesus. It’s losing that first love for Jesus. It’s forgetting that we are nothing without him. As a nation, Judah’s whole identity and strength was in the Lord. With him they were the most exalted nation on earth. Without him they were absolutely nothing.  What Asa does here is he forgets that and he starts operating like every other king of every other king: he sees an economic and political problem and he solves it by economics and politics. 

God forbid that as a Church we should forget that Christ is our everything and without him we are nothing. God forbid that as iServe Africa or any Christian organisations we should start thinking of ourselves just as any other civil society organisation.  God forbid that personally we should forget that Christ is our life, that the life we live in the flesh is only by faith in the Son of God who loved us and gave himself for us.  Let’s pray for a revival of a heart love and prizing and complete dependence on Christ – his Word, his Sacrifice, his presence – that sends us out into the world not as our saviour but as the mission field, not to find solutions but to preach the gospel of The Saviour.