When God Spoke Through a Pagan King

If you pay attention while reading the Bible you will occasionally bump into passages that surprise you. Passages that you immediately reread, assuming you must have missed something. Passages that, even after being reread three or four times, still say the surprising thing they said the first time. Often the confusion is not knowing what the text is saying, but wondering if it is really saying what it seems to be saying.

If you’re like me, that’s normally a good time to go grab a commentary. “Must be I’m missing something,” you mutter to yourself. And so you’ll read people who know more than you about Bible study, people who have read through the passage many times and thought about it for a while. Sometimes they will bail you out by showing you something you missed. Sometimes they’ll dance around the question and leave you confused.

Let me encourage you that, if you find yourself confused by what your Bible is saying, don’t just shrug your shoulders and move on. Dig in. Study, think, pray, keep digging. It may be that the reason you are confused is that the Bible is saying something you have never thought of, or might even initially disagree with. If this is true, you should be excited! You might have just found an area where you are wrong, and if you let it God’s Word will correct your wrong thinking so that you think more like God!

Perhaps an example will help make this rather abstract discussion more concrete. Let’s examine the death of Josiah in 2 Chronicles 35:20-24:

After all this, when Josiah had prepared the temple, Neco king of Egypt went up to fight at Carchemish on the Euphrates, and Josiah went out to meet him. But he sent envoys to him, saying, “What have we to do with each other, king of Judah? I am not coming against you this day, but against the house with which I am at war. And God has commanded me to hurry. Cease opposing God, who is with me, lest he destroy you.” Nevertheless, Josiah did not turn away from him, but disguised himself in order to fight with him. He did not listen to the words of Neco from the mouth of God, but came to fight in the plain of Megiddo. And the archers shot King Josiah. And the king said to his servants, “Take me away, for I am badly wounded.” So his servants took him out of the chariot and carried him in his second chariot and brought him to Jerusalem. And he died and was buried in the tombs of his fathers. All Judah and Jerusalem mourned for Josiah.

Did you see it? The small, strange phrase that states “He did not listen to the words of Neco from the mouth of God” (2 Chronicles 35:22). What does that mean? It’s not surprising that the Pharaoh claimed to be doing the business of God. Of course he would say that. But is the biblical author agreeing with him? That just doesn’t seem to be right. Neco was a pagan ruler, a Pharaoh of Egypt. He was not a prophet. So what is this passage really saying?

Well, a quick dip into the Hebrew is disappointing. Translating literally, this passage says “and he [Josiah] did not listen to the words of Neco from the mouth of God.” So, nothing funny is going on in the original languages. Well, maybe the commentaries can get us out of this one. But a quick look through several of them shows that this passage says exactly what it seems to be saying. God had apparently told the Pharaoh of Egypt to go and fight quickly, and the ruler was right to tell Josiah to stay out of it. Neco, the pagan, spoke on behalf of God to Josiah. Josiah ignored God’s words by the pagan king, and was killed as a result.

So what do we do with this? Well, I think we take it at face value and say that, at least in this instance, God spoke through a pagan king. God expected Josiah to take seriously Neco’s warning and back down. Josiah didn’t, and that is why he died. Apparently, God sometimes speaks to us through the most unexpected of means. This doesn’t mean that everything we hear is God speaking to us, or that every time Neco spoke he spoke for God. But on this occasion he was, and Josiah ignored him to his own peril. Interestingly, as John Thompson of the NAC commentary on 2 Chronicles points out, nowhere do we read Josiah asking the Lord before going to battle. The king of Egypt said, “Here’s what God told me,” and Josiah didn’t even check.

What does this mean for us? It means that there will be times when God tries to give us wisdom from very unexpected sources. I think we should be warned that, like Josiah, our pride and our hubris can grow to the point that we stop checking with God. When that happens, God just might send us advice from very unconventional sources, and when we ignore that wisdom we ignore Him. It means we must be willing to do the hard thing and be humble enough to consider if our critics are right.

This doesn’t mean every criticism we receive is justified or that we should always listen to all advice we get. But some criticisms are warranted, and some wisdom comes from the least likely of sources. We should be willing to look for God’s wisdom wherever He might send it, always comparing it to the standard of Scripture. Rather than easily dismiss someone we don’t like because they say something we don’t like, we should consider seriously if they are right and we should listen. They just might be right, and by listening to them we might just be saving ourselves from a whole lot of pain.

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Ben Hicks is the Associate Pastor at Colonial Hills Baptist Church in Indianapolis. This article originally appeared on his Substack.

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