2 Kings 15–17 — The narrator finally steps back and tells you why the kingdom fell. The answer has been accumulating for chapters. It is the high places. And a question followed me out of the text: if the way to God is narrow, does that mean the room on the other side is small?
The Texts
“He did what was evil in the sight of the LORD… He even burned his son as an offering, according to the despicable practices of the nations whom the LORD drove out before the people of Israel. And he sacrificed and made offerings on the high places and on the hills and under every green tree.”
— 2 Kings 16:2–4
“When he saw the altar that was at Damascus, King Ahaz sent to Uriah the priest a model of the altar, and its pattern, exact in all its details.”
— 2 Kings 16:10
“And this occurred because the people of Israel had sinned against the LORD their God, who had brought them up out of the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and had feared other gods and walked in the customs of the nations whom the LORD drove out before the people of Israel.”
— 2 Kings 17:7–8
“They set up for themselves pillars and Asherim on every high hill and under every green tree, and there they made offerings on all the high places, as the nations did whom the LORD carried away before them.”
— 2 Kings 17:10–11
“They despised his statutes and his covenant that he made with their fathers and the warnings that he gave them… Therefore the LORD was very angry with Israel and removed them out of his sight.”
— 2 Kings 17:15, 18
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
— John 14:6
“After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.”
— Revelation 7:9
The Observation
2 Kings 15 is a list of kings falling like dominoes. 2 Kings 16 is Ahaz — he sees a pagan altar in Damascus, likes the design, sends the blueprints back to his priest, and has it built in the LORD’s temple. He keeps the building and replaces the furniture. 2 Kings 17 is the narrator stepping back from the story to deliver the verdict. The kingdom fell because the people walked in the customs of the nations, set up high places on every hill and under every green tree, and despised the covenant. The narrator has been counting this sin against every king for chapters. Here he finally tells you why it mattered.
What Came Out of Studying It
The arc of one place. The high places are everywhere in Kings, but the principle they violate goes back much further. Abraham built altars wherever God appeared to him — Shechem, Bethel, Hebron, Moriah. The patriarchs met God where God came to them. Worship was distributed because the promise was still unfolding and the people had no land and no fixed dwelling.
The tabernacle gathered worship into one place — one tent, one altar, one ark — but the one place moved. God traveled with his people. Then Deuteronomy 12: when you enter the land, destroy the high places of the Canaanites. Worship only at the place the LORD will choose to put his name. One place. The command is forward-looking. There is a rest coming, an inheritance. When it arrives, worship will be gathered.
The temple made the teaching architectural. You move from the outer courts inward through increasing restriction — court of the Gentiles, court of women, court of Israel, court of the priests, Holy Place, Holy of Holies. One man goes into that last room, once a year, with blood. The narrowing of space teaches the narrowing of access. The temple says in stone what the law says in text: the way to God is singular, mediated, and costly.
What the high places said. Every alternative altar, every local shrine, every hilltop offering said something whether the worshiper knew it or not. It said: you can come to God here, on this hill, under this tree, with whatever you bring. You do not have to go up to Jerusalem. You do not need the priests God appointed or the sacrifices God commanded. The high places claimed that the narrowness of God’s chosen way was unnecessary. They lied about the nature of God and the condition of man. They said you can come to God casually. The temple — the blood on the altar, the curtain before the Holy of Holies — said otherwise.
The instinct and the error. But the desire behind the high places was a real desire. Wanting to worship God near where you live, in your own community, without a long pilgrimage — that is a human longing. And the instinct that God is too large for one building is theologically correct. Solomon said so at the dedication. God shares the longing to be near his people. The whole arc of Scripture is God drawing near.
Under the old covenant, the nearness could only come through the means God appointed. Jeroboam had the instinct that worship should be accessible beyond Jerusalem. He was wrong about why, wrong about how, and wrong about what he put in place of the temple. The high-place worshipers had the instinct that God should be near. They anticipated something real — something God was going to do — but they anticipated it by disobedience rather than by faith.
The repeated condemnation in Kings — “he walked in the way of the kings of Israel,” “the high places were not removed” — is the narrator insisting, generation after generation, that the instinct does not justify the action. God will make worship accessible. God will come near. God will dwell with his people. He will do it his way, in his time, through his appointed means. Until he does, the command stands. One place. One altar. Go up to Jerusalem.
Ahaz and the altar from Damascus. Chapter 16 is the sharpest version of the error. Ahaz goes to Damascus to meet Tiglath-pileser and sees an altar he likes. He sends the design to Uriah the priest and has it built in the temple court. He moves the LORD’s bronze altar aside. He does not tear the temple down. He keeps the building and replaces the furniture. That is syncretism inside the walls — the most dangerous kind, because it still looks like the temple from the outside.
The curtain torn from the top. Jesus hangs on the cross. He dies. The curtain of the temple tears from top to bottom.
The common telling stops at “now we have access.” The curtain that kept us out is removed. We can enter the Holy of Holies. That is true, and Hebrews says it plainly: we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh.
But the curtain tore from the top. From the inside out. God came out. The presence that had been confined to the Holy of Holies — confined by God’s own command, because sinful people would die in the unmediated presence of holiness — that presence was released. God left the building. The temple had contained God by divine accommodation. The cross ended the containment.
The temple’s destruction in AD 70 followed. The temple had served its purpose. It taught Israel and through Israel the world that access to God is singular, mediated, and costly. One place. One altar. One sacrifice. Then the one sacrifice was offered — the Son of God himself — and the teaching was fulfilled. The shadow gave way to the reality. The building could come down because the body it pointed to had been raised up.
Pentecost. Fifty days after the resurrection, the Spirit fell on people. Tongues of fire rested on individual heads. The many languages spoken reversed Babel. The nations were being gathered — by the Spirit speaking the gospel in every tongue.
And the church went out. Away from Jerusalem. To Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth. The presence of God went with them because the presence was in them. The individual believer is a temple. The gathered body is a temple. Wherever two or three are gathered in his name, he is there.
This is what the high places were reaching for, fulfilled in a way no Israelite could have predicted. The worship became distributed — because God poured out his Spirit and went with his people. The one place became every place where Christ is worshiped in spirit and truth, because the one sacrifice has been offered once for all and the one mediator is seated at the right hand of God.
The principle fulfilled, not loosened. Under the old covenant: one way to God, through one mediator, at one altar, with one sacrifice. Under the new covenant: one way to God — through Christ. One mediator — Christ. One sacrifice — offered once for all. The narrowness has been intensified. There is one person in all of history through whom anyone can come to God. The exclusivity of Jerusalem pointed to the exclusivity of Christ. The one place was always pointing to the one person.
But the one person is not confined to one location. Christ is risen. Christ is ascended. Christ is present by his Spirit wherever his people gather. The access point is personal, not geographical. You go to Christ. And Christ is wherever the gospel is preached and believed and the Spirit is at work.
The question that followed. Sitting with this — the one place, the one altar, the one way, all pointing to the one person — I kept circling back to Jesus’ words about the narrow gate. “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”
That passage has been read as a headcount. Only a few will be saved. The elect are a remnant. The majority of the human race ends in destruction. And once you read it that way, the question it produces is always: am I among the few? And you answer that question by comparison — am I more serious than the many on the broad way? That is the Pharisee’s prayer in Luke 18: “God, I thank you that I am not like other men.”
What Jesus is doing. The narrow gate comes at the end of the Sermon on the Mount. Three chapters of kingdom life — the Beatitudes, the law fulfilled, prayer, trust, not judging — and then this conclusion: the way I have just described is narrow. It requires a new heart, a new direction, a death to the old way. Jesus is describing the character of the way, the costliness of it.
Luke 13 makes it sharper. Someone asks Jesus directly, “Lord, will those who be saved be few?” Jesus does not give a number. “Strive to enter through the narrow door. For many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able.” He turns the speculative question into a pastoral command. Do not count heads. Enter the door.
Warfield. B. B. Warfield wrote an essay called “Are They Few That Be Saved?” where he argued that the passages typically cited for the doctrine of the fewness of the saved do not support the conclusion built on them. On Luke 13, he pointed out that Luke placed this exchange immediately after the parables of the mustard seed and the leaven — parables about the kingdom starting small and growing until it fills everything. Luke would not have put side by side words announcing the complete conquest of the world by Christ’s kingdom and words declaring that only a few would be saved.
On Jesus’ non-answer, Warfield argued that the important thing for the hearers is to address themselves strenuously to their own salvation. Jesus announces the difficulty of salvation, not the number of the saved.
On Matthew 7, Warfield said that pressing “few” and “many” as a permanent ratio across all ages is to overread a similitude. There is no more reason to take “few” as a permanent census figure than there is to take the parable of the ten virgins as teaching the saved and lost are exactly equal. He pointed to the contrast between present and future in Jesus’ teaching — small beginnings, great expansions. The mustard seed becomes a tree. The leaven works through the whole meal. Warfield suggested that the number of the saved may finally exceed the number of the lost, and cited Hodge, Dabney, and Shedd as holding the same view.
Berkouwer and Miller. Berkouwer in The Return of Christ warned against taking the love of God as the point of departure for logical conclusions and insisted that there is only one necessity: “Woe to me, if I do not preach the gospel!” He resisted both the dogma of fewness and the dogma of universalism. The gospel’s answer to the question “how many will be saved?” is a command: preach Christ.
Jack’s instincts ran the same direction. He wrote that Reformed Christians “must abandon the idea of a Calvinist remnant.” He had studied Isaiah’s contrast between the old age and the new, and he concluded that the post-Pentecost church lives in an age of abundance: “Today we have the banquet of abundant grace!” The theology of fewness produces a fortress church that guards when it should go. Jack’s whole ministry ran the other direction. He sent people out. He planted churches. He went to Uganda, to Spain, to Ireland. He preached the gospel as though it had power to save, because it does.
The narrowness is about Christ. The way is narrow because there is one way. The door is one person wide because the door is one person. “I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved.” “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” The narrowness is exclusivity of means. The temple taught this. One place. One altar. One sacrifice. One way of access. The narrowness of Jerusalem was Christological — pointing forward to the one mediator. The narrowness of the gate in Matthew 7 is the same. One way in. The way is Christ. The number who enter by that one way depends on the power of the Spirit who draws people through it.
And Scripture gives us pictures of that number. Revelation 7:9: a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. No one could number them. The mustard seed becomes a tree. The leaven works through the whole lump. The stone in Daniel 2 becomes a mountain that fills the whole earth. The Abrahamic promise is that in his seed all the families of the earth will be blessed. All the families.
The “few” in Jesus’ immediate context is a present-tense description of his contemporaries. Most of Israel rejected the Messiah. That was empirically true. But the present difficulty does not determine the final harvest. The grain of wheat that falls into the ground and dies bears much fruit. The death looks like failure. The harvest is abundant.
What This Means for Me
The high places in 2 Kings 17 are my temptation in a different key. Any way to God that I construct on my own terms — any access I claim apart from Christ — is a high place. And the theology of fewness is its own kind of error. It takes the one door that God opened by the blood of his Son and turns it back into a test of human performance. It makes grace a competition. It produces a church that guards when it should go.
Jack spent his life dismantling that posture. Cheer up. God’s kingdom is greater than you could have ever imagined. The door is one person wide because the door is one person. And the room on the other side is a great multitude no one can number.
Key Scriptures
2 Kings 15:29 · 2 Kings 16:2–4 · 2 Kings 16:10–16 · 2 Kings 17:7–18 · Deuteronomy 12:2–14 · 1 Kings 8:27 · Matthew 27:51 · Hebrews 10:19–22 · Acts 2:1–11 · 1 Corinthians 3:16 · Ephesians 2:22 · Matthew 18:20 · John 14:6 · John 10:9 · Matthew 7:13–14 · Luke 13:23–24 · Revelation 7:9 · Daniel 2:35 · Genesis 12:3 · John 12:24 · 1 Timothy 2:5 · Hebrews 10:10
Prayer
Father, the kingdom fell because of the high places. Century after century, the wrong answer to a right question. They wanted you near. You wanted to be near. But you had appointed the way, and they would not walk in it.
I confess that I want to come to you on my own terms. Forgive me. There is one way in, and it is your Son, and he is enough.
Thank you that the curtain tore from the top. You came out. You poured out your Spirit and went with your people to the nations. Thank you that the mustard seed becomes a tree and the leaven works through the whole lump and the multitude before your throne is too large to count.
I read about kings falling and nations carried away and I look up and see the same world. War in Europe. War in the Middle East. Leaders building high places with other people’s lives. The cost of leaving you is never abstract. It is always bodies and exile and promises we broke that you kept. Have mercy on the leaders over us. Have mercy on us. We are building altars to gods who cannot save while you hold out the one way that can.
And yet you are the God who brings life from dead bones and raises beauty from ashes. You kept every promise Israel broke. When everything spirals beyond our control it has never left yours. I delight in a God whose saving work fills the earth. Your kingdom is greater than I could have ever imagined. Give me the joy of telling others what you have done and are doing and will do in Christ by the power of his Spirit.
Amen.
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