2 Chronicles 25-28 CSB
But when he became strong, he grew arrogant, and it led to his own destruction. He acted unfaithfully against the Lord his God by going into the Lord’s sanctuary to burn incense on the incense altar. The priest Azariah, along with eighty brave priests of the Lord, went in after him. They took their stand against King Uzziah and said, “Uzziah, you have no right to offer incense to the Lord—only the consecrated priests, the descendants of Aaron, have the right to offer incense. Leave the sanctuary, for you have acted unfaithfully! You will not receive honor from the Lord God.” Uzziah, with a firepan in his hand to offer incense, was enraged. But when he became enraged with the priests, in the presence of the priests in the Lord’s temple beside the altar of incense, a skin disease broke out on his forehead. (26:16-19)
I’ve often said that you are not remembered for how you start or for how you run, but for how you finish. Of course, this is an oversimplification because it is important that you start well in your spiritual life and that you run the race with integrity. Still, the Scripture (and History) is rife with examples of people who started out doing great with the best intentions but fell short in the end. Uzziah was one of those people. He was a beloved King of Judah who brought great reforms and stood with the Lord at every turn. Yet, even the great Uzziah had his downfall. He came back to the Lord in the end, but the end of his reign was overshadowed by the events in the text above.
Like many before him, he started well but after becoming “strong” or successful, or rich, or whatever (you fill in the blank) he began depending on his own strength and past success and not depending on God. Yet, this story has some bright spots in it. One is that there were brave priests who were willing to take their lives into their hands and stand up to the King. All of us need people in our life who will do the hard (and sometimes dangerous) work of telling the truth and holding us accountable. The difference between Uzziah’s end and others who went astray was that there were people who cared more about doing what was right than pleasing man. If you read the rest of the story you will see that they drug him from the temple, and if you read Isaiah you will see that Uzziah died a beloved King.
The older I get the more I realize two things that we see demonstrated in this story: 1) Faithfulness does not get easier the older you get, and 2) We all need people in our lives to hold us accountable. I think the mistake that we often make as we get older is that we think we are more “experienced” than those around us and have nothing to learn from them. This is the blind spot of experience. The spiritual battle doesn’t wane just because you have been around a long time, and while “experience” is useful it doesn’t mean you have everything figured out. The world is constantly changing and the battle gets tougher every day. Blessed is the man who remains teachable until the day he dies and who surrounds himself with friends, colleagues, and loved ones who have his permission to keep him straight.
