“Joash did what was right in the eyes of the LORD all the days of Jehoiada the priest.”
— 2 Chronicles 24:2 (ESV)
There is a qualifier in that sentence that deserves more attention than it usually receives.
Not all the days of his life. Not all the days of his reign. All the days of Jehoiada. The faithfulness is real, but it is rented. It lives in the presence of one man, and when that man is gone, so is the steadiness that made Joash’s early years worth admiring. The Chronicler knows exactly what he is doing by phrasing it this way. He is not simply recording history. He is sounding a warning.
The story begins before the throne, in the middle of a bloodbath. Athaliah has seized power and set about destroying the entire royal family. The covenant line is being cut off. Yet one child survives — Joash, hidden in the house of the LORD for six years while Athaliah reigns.
His survival is not accidental. It is communal — but it is also covenantal. Behind every human act of concealment and protection stands the hand of God, preserving the Davidic line, honoring the promises He made to David and to the house of Israel. Athaliah can seize a throne. She cannot annul a covenant. Jehosheba hides him. Jehoiada raises and protects him. The Levites and the heads of the fathers’ houses gather around him and pledge their allegiance before the plan is executed. When the moment comes to crown him, the Chronicler gives us one of the more dramatic scenes in all of Chronicles:
“And they brought out the king’s son and put the crown on him and gave him the testimony and proclaimed him king. And Jehoiada and his sons anointed him, and they said, ‘Long live the king.’” — 2 Chronicles 23:11 (ESV)
This is a coronation. But it is also something considerably more than that.
Joash does not rise to power as an autonomous figure. He is surrounded by covenant witnesses, by armed Levites stationed at every door, by the structure of worship and law that he has been raised within. The crown goes on his head — but so does the testimony. The law of the LORD goes into his hands.
That detail reaches all the way back to Deuteronomy. Moses had been explicit about what a king of Israel was to do the moment he ascended to the throne:
“And when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law, approved by the Levitical priests. And it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the LORD his God by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them, that his heart may not be lifted up above his brothers, and that he may not turn aside from the commandment, either to the right hand or to the left.” — Deuteronomy 17:18–20 (ESV)
Jehoiada is not improvising a ceremony. He is executing the covenantal design for Israelite kingship to the letter. The scroll placed in Joash’s hands is the document Moses prescribed — the very instrument designed to keep a king humble, tethered to the law, and accountable to the LORD rather than to his own unchecked will. Jehoiada has done everything in his power to set this child-king up for success within the framework God Himself provided.
At its deepest level, accountability is covenantal. It is the practical expression of a people living under a God who makes promises and calls His servants to remain faithful to them. The testimony Joash receives is not a policy document. It is a covenant instrument. The Levites surrounding him are not simply security personnel. They are covenant guardians. The crown and the scroll together are saying the same thing: you belong to the LORD, and the LORD has not left you without a word to live by.
He is a king, but he is a king who belongs to a people, and that people belong to the LORD.
Jehoiada then makes it explicit:
“Then Jehoiada made a covenant between himself and all the people and the king that they should be the LORD’s people.” — 2 Chronicles 23:16 (ESV)
Before Joash is sovereign, he is accountable. Before he wields authority, he is placed beneath it. The ceremony does not put him at the center. It puts the LORD at the center, and positions the king within a community that has pledged to remain there with him.
For a season, Joash governs well. He dismantles the house of Baal. He sees the neglected condition of the temple and determines to repair it — a costly and sustained effort that requires organizing the collection of funds, establishing a chest at the gate of the house of the LORD, and commissioning skilled workers to restore what had been left to decay.
These are genuine accomplishments. The Chronicler does not minimize them. Joash was not a bad king who occasionally appeared good. He was a king who, within the structure of covenant accountability, accomplished real and lasting good.
But the structure matters. The formation matters. The Levites who had guarded him on the day of his coronation, the priest who had raised him in the temple, the covenant community that had pledged to be the LORD’s people — these were not incidental to Joash’s early faithfulness. They were the conditions of it. His goodness grew inside a structure that named and corrected and guided it. Remove the structure, and we would soon learn how deep the roots actually ran.
Jehoiada lives to 130 years old. The Chronicler records that he was buried with the kings — an extraordinary honor for a priest — because he had done good in Israel, toward God and toward His house. It is a fitting tribute. Jehoiada had done what accountability is supposed to do: he had kept a king, a people, and a house of worship tethered to the covenant when every pressure was pulling toward drift.
Then he dies.
The next verse arrives like a door swinging open:
“Now after the death of Jehoiada the princes of Judah came and paid homage to the king. Then the king listened to them, and they abandoned the house of the LORD, the God of their fathers, and served the Asherim and the idols.” — 2 Chronicles 24:17–18 (ESV)
The speed of it is almost unbearable. The priest is barely buried before the princes are in the room. And Joash — the king who had repaired the temple — listens. He does not force the issue. He does not fight the drift. He simply lends his authority to a different direction, and the house of the LORD begins to be abandoned.
This is how it usually happens. Temptation rarely announces itself. Self rarely demands an audience. They move in quietly, through voices that are already close, through counsel that is easier to receive than the kind that requires something from us. Jehoiada had known how to ask the hard question. The princes of Judah knew how to pay homage. And Joash — no longer anchored to the voice of the priest, no longer formed daily by proximity to the covenant — found the second kind of counsel easier to absorb.
The LORD sends prophets to call the people back. None of them are received.
Then Zechariah, the son of Jehoiada himself, stands in the court and delivers a word:
“Thus says God, ‘Why do you transgress the commandments of the LORD, so that you cannot prosper? Because you have forsaken the LORD, He has forsaken you.’” — 2 Chronicles 24:20 (ESV)
Zechariah is not a stranger. He is the son of the man who hid Joash in the temple as an infant, who raised him, who crowded the coronation with Levites and covenant and law. Joash knows exactly what that family gave him. And he commands the stoning.
“Thus Joash the king did not remember the steadfast love that Jehoiada, Zechariah’s father, had shown him, but killed his son. And as he was dying, he said, ‘May the LORD see and avenge!’” — 2 Chronicles 24:22 (ESV)
It is not a single step. It is a descent: the trusted voice is gone, a new voice is welcomed, the old commitments are quietly set aside, correction is rejected, correction is silenced — and then the man who once built the house of the LORD is capable of murdering the son of the man who raised him.
The story of Joash does not end well. The armies of Syria depart after wounding him severely. His own servants conspire against him. He is killed on his bed and buried in the city of David — but not in the tombs of the kings. The child who was once hidden and protected, surrounded by covenant and armed guards and the testimony of the law, dies in isolation and dishonor.
Accountability is important not because leaders are bad, but because we are human. Even the gifted, the sincere, the fruitful, the long-formed — every leader carries within himself the same capacity for drift that brought down the king of Judah.
To operate without accountability is not merely unwise. It is dangerous. The absence of external voices does not produce freedom. It produces a vacuum, and vacuums do not stay empty. Self moves in. Unchecked desire finds language. Authority begins to serve the one who holds it rather than the people it was given to protect.
This is true in leadership. It is true in ministry. It is true in personal life. The assumption that maturity has moved us beyond the need for accountability is itself one of the clearest signs that we need it most. Joash was not a child when he murdered Zechariah. He was a grown king, experienced in governance, a man who had once held the testimony of the covenant in his hands. The years of good work did not immunize him against the drift that came when the accountability was gone.
Accountability is not suspicion. It is protection. It is, at its root, a covenantal posture — the daily, practical expression of belonging to a God who calls His people to remain faithful to the promises they have made and the community He has placed them within. Moses prescribed the scroll so the king’s heart would not be lifted up above his brothers. Joash held that scroll. His heart lifted anyway. It is not the structure that constrains ability. It is the structure that keeps a heart from being lifted up — and keeps ability pointed in the right direction.
The Chronicler’s portrait is a diagnosis. And every good diagnosis points toward what the disease actually requires.
The problem with Jehoiada — with every human accountability structure — is that it is mortal. The priest dies, retires, is removed, or is simply unable to see what we will not show him. Human accountability is necessary, but it is not ultimate. The counselor can always be outlived or rejected. And when the mortal mediator is gone, the structure he held up can collapse, if we built on him rather than on what he pointed toward.
The Letter to the Hebrews makes the decisive move:
“Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession.” — Hebrews 4:14 (ESV)
“Consequently, He is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them.” — Hebrews 7:25 (ESV)
Christ is not a better version of Jehoiada. He is the One Jehoiada served and foreshadowed — the faithful Priest whose ministry cannot be ended by death, removed by power, or rejected into silence. He always lives. He always intercedes. The accountability He provides is not contingent on His continued physical presence, because His intercession is constant and His access to the Father is unbroken.
And it is the Holy Spirit who makes that accountability present. Christ intercedes at the right hand of the Father; the Spirit dwells within us — convicting, guiding, and bearing witness to the truth when we are tempted to drift from it. He is the Counselor who does not retire, the voice of the LORD that does not fall silent when the priest is buried and the princes arrive. The accountability available to us is therefore Trinitarian in its fullness: the Father who holds the covenant, the Son who mediates it eternally, and the Spirit who applies it daily — if we are tuning our hearts to listen.
Proximity to Christ does not make human accountability unnecessary. It makes it rightly ordered. We draw near to Him, and from that nearness we learn to receive correction, to confess what we would otherwise justify, and to remain within the community He has given us. He is the answer to Joash’s tragedy — not by substituting for every human voice, but by being the One to whom every voice, every structure, and every leader must ultimately answer.
The invitation of Hebrews 4:16 is the Chronicler’s diagnosis met by its cure:
“Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” — Hebrews 4:16 (ESV)
Draw near — not to a priest who can be buried in the city of David, but to the One who always lives to make intercession. From that proximity, every other form of human accountability finds its proper place and its proper limit.
The story of Joash is not ancient history in any comfortable sense. It is a warning to every ministry that assumes good intentions can substitute for accountable structures, or that momentum earned in one season will carry forward without the structures that made it possible. We have seen what happens when the priest is buried and the princes arrive. We have watched houses of the LORD go quiet in a single season. And we have resolved not to build something that cannot survive the removal of any one person.
So we built accountability into our charter — not as a formality, not as a liability-management exercise, but as a theological conviction. The Board of Directors of Beehive Global Collective is not an advisory nicety. It is the institutional expression of a principle the Chronicler established and the author of Hebrews confirmed: no leader, no organization, no mission operates well outside genuine external accountability. I am grateful for their willingness to ask hard questions and speak into decisions. That is not always comfortable. It is not supposed to be.
We also believe that the teams we work alongside must operate within their own external structures. This is not procedural preference. It is a conviction about how sustainable mission is done.
In Kenya, that accountability flows through the Africa Gospel Church — a network with deep roots, long institutional memory, and the structural authority that keeps individual initiatives connected to the broader body. Our partners there are not lone voices. They are members of a communion.
In Vietnam, that structure is coming through our relationship with the Global Methodist Church. We are working alongside GMC leadership on the ground now, a partnership that is deepening in real time as we move through the GMC Annual Conference this September. Our Vietnamese partners will not be accountable only to us — a mission organization thousands of miles away. They will be accountable to a body that has chosen to stand with them and with the work of God in that country.
We believe this is not optional. Joash shows us what happens when a leader allows the voices that once restrained him to fall silent. Christ shows us the only accountability that endures — a High Priest who always lives, who always intercedes, to whom every mission, every organization, and every leader must finally answer.
We are grateful to be under that authority. And we are committed to walking alongside those who share that conviction.
From one man He made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from any one of us. Acts 17:26-27