d and commanded by God may itself become
an object of divine punishment, if it be not performed from love and
obedience to God, but from culpable selfishness. But that Jehu was
actuated by motives so bad, is sufficiently obvious from the
circumstance, that he himself did the very thing which he had punished
in the house of Ahab. _Calvin_ rightly remarks: "That slaughter is, as
far as God is concerned, a just vengeance; but, as far as Jehu is
concerned, it is open murder." But yet, this deed cannot be regarded as
the principal crime of Jehu and his family. We must not overlook other
crimes far more heinous, and consider the guilty blood shed by them as
the sole ground of their punishment. That this was indeed considered as
guilt, but only as a lower degree of it, is clearly seen from 1 Kings
xvi. 7, where destruction is announced to Baasha, who had destroyed the
house of Jeroboam I., "on account of all the evil which he did in the
sight of the Lord, in provoking Him to anger with the works of his
hands, so that he may be like the house of Jeroboam, and because he
killed him." The main crime is, that Baasha had become like the house
of Jeroboam. [Pg 206] What he perpetrated against this house is the
minor crime, and becomes a crime only through the former.--It is worthy
of notice that "the blood of Jezreel" exactly corresponds, according to
our explanation, with the expression, "so that he may be like the house
of Jeroboam." It may be further noticed, that, in the deed of Jehu,
every better feeling cannot be excluded. If the command of God had been
used by him merely as a pretext, we could not account for the praise
and the promises given to him on account of this very deed, 2 Kings x.
30. It is true that the limitation of the promise shows that pure
motives alone did not prevail with him.[4]--"The bloody deed to which
the house of Jehu owed its elevation" nowhere else appears as the cause
of the catastrophe which befell this house. That which he had done
against the house of Ahab, whose sins were crying to heaven for
vengeance far more than those of Baasha, is, in 2 Kings x. 30, 31,
represented as his _merit_. His _guilt_ consisted in his not departing
from the ways of Jeroboam, and in his making Israel to sin. It is this
guilt alone which, in the Book of Kings, is charged against all the
members of his family,--against Jehoahaz, the son of Jehu, in 2 Kings
xiii. 2; against Jehoash, in 2 Kings xiii. 11; against Jeroboam, i