Then the king of Assyria gave this order: “Have one of the priests you took captive from Samaria go back to live there and teach the people what the god of the land requires.” So one of the priests who had been exiled from Samaria came to live in Bethel and taught them how to worship the LORD. Second Kings 2:27-28

This guy fascinates me. Before he came back to Bethel, the people were so rotten God was sending lions in to devour them. That sounds barbaric to our modern ears. But these folks were feeding their children to the fire and such things. It was a pretty different world than ours today.

Or, maybe not so much.

Anyway, this lone priest of God is sent back from exile in the horrid land of Assyria to live in his homeland again. In Bethel. The king had emptied the land and then tried to repopulate it with folks imported from other nations. That wasn’t working out so well. So, here is the priest. His one assignment from the king is to teach the people what the god of the land requires. And he does. He taught the people how to worship the One True God.

One sentence in the Bible, but it must have taken a lifetime to achieve. Can you imagine? Now, here is the hard part. The people never changed. They learned to worship God, all right. The equivalent of singing hymns, paying tithes, and showing up for church, I suppose. But they never stopped doing the detestable things mandated by their own worship of other gods. They never stopped throwing their kids in the fire.

So, did the priest fail?

I don’t think so. I don’t think our success is ever measured by how the other person responds. We are only measured by how well we obeyed what we have been asked to do. He went to Bethel. He taught them what the God of the Land required. The rest was simply not his story, as C.S. Lewis once said.