“Hezekiah became king when he was twenty-five years old, and he reigned twenty-nine years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Abijah the daughter of Zechariah. And he did what was right in the sight of the Lord, according to all that his father David had done.”
2 Chronicles 29:1-2
King Hezekiah has become ruler in Israel. He followed his father, Ahaz, not a Godly man, to the throne. Scripture says Ahaz did not “do what was right in the eyes of the Lord”. In fact we are told that God allowed
punishment to come on Israel because Ahaz “became increasingly unfaithful to the Lord”.
Hezekiah’s mother was Abijah, the daughter of the wicked king Zechariah. Thus Hezekiah’s mother was raised in an evil home and then married an evil king. By all rights her son, Hezekiah should have been a godless, evil king. Yet God intervened in her son’s life. Perhaps He worked in the life of Abijah. She was an eyewitness of the evil of her own husband, evil which touched her own family. One event which may have impacted her heart was seeing Ahaz sacrifice his own sons in the fire to idols (which God strictly forbade in Leviticus 18:21). We don’t know if this happened to one of her sons but the horror of what she witnessed probably moved her to to seek the true God. If she became a believer she poured her heart into raising her son to love and serve the God of Israel. This boy, Hezekiah, became one of the great kings of Israel. He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord for 29 years. God records, “he did what was good and right and true before the Lord his God. And in every work that he began in the service of the house of God, in the law and in the commandment, to seek his God, he did it with all his heart. So he prospered.”
What can we learn? Not all God’s children are called to have a visible public ministry. Few of God’s children get several chapters written about them in the Bible. Yet that does not mean that one’s work is
unimportant. Abijah has two verses written about her in he Bible. From those verses we only know her name, her father, her husband and her son – just her family. Yet we see the influence she had on one person.
For all we know she was on this earth to make a deep impact on only one person, her son, and she did it well.
Abijah shows us that the principle of discipling another person and making a difference in their lives. We don’t know what other things this woman did in her life but God recorded tan important one. She impacted her child to walk with the Lord with all their heart. Behind every famous Godly person is another person who invested hours of mentoring and prayer. If this is what God calls you to do – do it well.
There is a second lesson we see in Abijah. If anyone had a reason not to have children it would be her. She saw her father become an ungodly, evil ruler. She watched her father be assassinated after just six months as king. Then she saw the king that followed her father assassinated after only one month on the throne. (This feels like the time of the assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the USA.) She must have looked at the ungodliness in the country and the wickedness all around her and wondered if it was wise to have children in that kind of environment.
Daniel’s parents likely felt the same way. The nation had turned against God and it was being threatened by evil and barbaric nations. In both these examples we see that trusting God in times of extreme wickedness and serving Him faithfully by reaching our family first
and discipling them to stand for God despite the cost is the standard for believers.
According To All That His Father Had Done God shows us the standard Abijah used to train up her son in the way he should go. He followed the example of David, the man who loved God with all his heart. How did Abijah know to do that? One hint might be in her name which means “God is my father”. She lived in a wicked family with a wicked father and husband yet she knew who her true father was and she taught her son about a king who followed him with all his heart.
She wanted her son to know God and and follow Him like David did. Her child touched an entire nation for God. That is the heart of the believing parent even in the midst of a wicked world.