(4-7).”
Here is a king who enjoys a time of peace. There are only minor skirmishes between cranky border guards along the northern border with Israel. He could have sat back and counted his money. He could have told everybody to take out a second and buy seashore cottages and get into surfboarding. But he didn’t.
He told them to get their house in order. He commanded his people to get rid of the ramshackle nature worship that had crept in under the guise of worshipping the Lord. He told them to worship God the way God wanted to be worshipped, with sacrifices in the Temple at Jerusalem and with holy lives and ready ears to hear the Word taught in their towns and villages.
But he didn’t stop there. As King Asa felt responsible for the spiritual welfare of his people he felt a heavy burden for their physical safety. There were lots of villages in Judah that, over the years, had become towns. There were enough people and possessions in them to make them attractive targets for raiders or invaders. So he and his people did the back-breaking work of building walls around these towns. We gripe when we’ve got to hire someone to build walls around our property with pre-cast blocks that machines bring in. How would you like to be digging up rocks and loading them onto donkey carts, lifting them into place and hoping the mortar dried quickly? Some of the cities had out-grown their walls so walls had to be extended, while other city walls needed renovation.
Asa knew the Lord had given them this time of peace to do the hard work of necessary for the spiritual and physical welfare of his people. His faith in the Lord worked, it worked hard. He wasn’t going to be