Jezebel: Our Whorable Queen

QUEEN JEZEBEL IS A Baal-snogging, fake-teaching, boob-flaunting, pride-marching, man-manipulating, Yahweh-blaspheming, prophets’ blood-drinking monstrosity of a female.

And that’s being nice.

This daughter of Ethbaal, the Phoenician King, grows up surrounded by power, education, luxury, and evil. Of course, she doesn’t think of it as evil. No one sees their culture’s sins for what they are. It is like air to a child or water to a fish: it’s so much a part of us that we don’t even know it is there. She thinks her culture is the rule by which others should be measured. Yes, Israel is used to being surrounded by pagan neighbours and their debauched royalty. But now we have a problem. The problem is that this ghoulish gal now has a throne in the midst of God’s holy nation. It’s one thing for a boat to be in the sea. It’s quite another thing for the sea to be in the boat. And the nation is taking in wickedness of titanic proportions.

When Jezebel is given in marriage to the King of Israel, she probably has mixed feelings. Yes, it is good to marry a king. Perhaps not all of her sisters will manage to do so. But compared to her home city of Tyre, Samaria is a backwards, uneducated, hillbilly town. ‘Have you seen how tiny the shopping street is?!’ and ‘Can you even get good coffee in this place?!’ may have been some of her first reactions.

But this royal immigrant is not a passive woman. She is strong and active―a woman of great initiative. Of course, if a queen (or any woman) has a holy heart, her initiatives may mostly bear good fruit. But Jezebel’s heart houses the vomitus stench of all that is unholy. Yes, she may have thought her intentions were good. But even wicked people do what is right in their own eyes. History is filled with unspeakable evils birthed by the good intentions of hearts not governed by the fear of the Lord.

Jezebel has a vision for herself and she won’t let being married to a petulant and uncouth beta-king stop her. She will break glass ceilings and glass steeples. Our deviant diva will go where no Israeli queen has gone before. Her vision is to be this nation’s reformer and bring it to a place of greater spiritual enlightenment and sexual liberation. Her colourful and savvy gods of Baal and Asherah will not just be the deities she worships in private palace quarters. No. They will be set up as the new saviours of Israel. Promises of power, potency, and fertility will be the draw for the Israeli men and women. Charm and mystery will be the atmosphere of worship. Orgasm will be the sacrament.

She may have spoken of being open-minded and tolerant as a ruler before taking the throne. Evil often speaks of minority rights as long as it is a minority. But behind all the talk of equality is masked the animal drive for power. And once securely in power, Jezebel seeks to eliminate everything opposed to her teaching. The biggest obstacle to this lascivious legislation is the worship of Yahweh. She imports and trains nearly one thousand priest-magicians to police religious expression. With her own private army established, she puts on her makeup, smiles coyly, and begins to eat righteous men like air.

This is the historical norm. Whenever evil gets the influence it craves, it then proceeds to silence the good. Jezebel is a real, historical woman. But she is not a one-off. The dynamic that she embodies makes several cameos throughout scripture and history. We see her corruption in the days of Malachi and her qualities in the Galilean lady Herodias, as she seeks to destroy John the Baptist. Peter warns us in his second epistle of sensual heresies that are thoroughly Jezebellic in nature and we see her subverting what is good at the church at Thyatira as she leads God’s people into fake worship and immorality.

The Bible also ends with a vision of a world system described as a cataclysmic call girl who silences prophets and leads the nations into wrong religion and suicidal sex. This spiritual seductress does so by giving them spiked wine to drink, causing the nations to see themselves as enlightened, tolerant, and progressive as they follow her teaching. It is only later that the terror falls. Wherever in history this phantom appears, she comforts and kisses the brokenness of men; then she crumples their spirits like rubbish in the dustbins of their own souls.

We Ahab Men love Jezebel―if love is the right word. We certainly love ourselves through her. We eat up her smiles and her lies. She is bubble-wrapped candy floss with death at its heart. She numbs us to the emptiness of our own souls. In a sense, it is not that Jezebel is our ultimate problem. She is the fake solution to our problem. She makes us feel great about ourselves―but her potions only grow the shadows we carry within.

She is present in our 21^st Century whenever Christians are seduced by her pornography. It is then that they slowly begin to lose their spiritual conviction and boldness to speak. No surprise. It’s hard to wage war on demons with your trousers around your ankles.

Jezebel wields words of intimidation to silence those men who try to call us to holiness and repentance―especially repentance from sexual sin. Within our generation, she has castrated many of God’s would-be spokesmen with the scissors of intimidation. She marches at the head of an aggressive army having people fined or fired from their jobs for failing to bow the knee to her sexual and spiritual dogmas.

And she is after you. She wants you to be a spiritually impotent Ahab Man devoid of character, resolve, and backbone. Yes, you will dance. But only as her marionette.

Before a reformer can tear down Jezebel’s Baals and Asherahs in the world around him, he must first demolish them in his own heart. Any man who claims to be ‘Protestant’ but who fails to protest Jezebellic corruption in his own soul is a fraud. For it’s in our personal areas of corruption that all holy protesting must begin. For every man is a potential Ahab―and Jezebel seeks to play us all. 

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Extract from Elijah Men Eat Meat: Readings to slaughter your inner Ahab and pursue Revival and Reform (Get Here)