Call his name Jezreel - that is, in its first sense here, “God will scatter.” The life of the prophet, and his union with one so unworthy of him, were a continued prophecy of God’s mercy. The names of the children were a life-long admonition of His intervening judgments. Since Israel refused to hear God’s words, He made the prophet’s sons, through the mere fact of their presence among them, their going out and coming in, and the names which He gave them, to be preachers to the people. He depicted in them and in their names what was to be, in order that, whenever they saw or heard of them, His warnings might be forced upon them, and those who would take warning, might be saved. If, with their mother’s disgrace, these sons inherited and copied their mother’s sins, then their names became even more expressive, that, being such as they were, they would be scattered by God, would not be owned by God as His people, or be pitied by Him.
I will avenge the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu - Yet Jehu shed this blood, the blood of the house of Ahab, of Joram and Jezebel and the seventy sons of Ahab, at God’s command and in fulfillment of His will. How was it then sin? Because, if we do what is the will of God for any end of our own, for anything except God, we do, in fact, our own will, not God’s. It was not lawful for Jehu to depose and slay the king his master, except at the command of God, who, as the Supreme King, sets up and puts down earthly rulers as He wills. For any other end, and done otherwise than at God’s express command, such an act is sin. Jehu was rewarded for the measure in which he fulfilled God’s commands, as Ahab who had “sold himself to work wickedness,” had yet a temporal reward for humbling himself publicly, when rebuked by God for his sin, and so honoring God, amid an apostate people. But Jehu, by cleaving, against the will of God, to Jeroboam’s sin, which served his own political ends, showed that, in the slaughter of his master, he acted not, as he pretended, out of zeal 2 Kings 10:16 for the will of God, but served his own will and his own ambition only.
By his disobedience to the one command of God, he showed that he would have equally disobeyed the other, had it been contrary to his own will of interest. He had no principle of obedience. And so the blood, which was shed according to the righteous judgment of God, became sin to him who shed it in order to fulfill, not the will of God, but his own. Thus God said to Baasha, “I exalted thee out of the dust, and made the prince over My people Israel” 1 Kings 16:2, which he became by slaying his master, the son of Jeroboam, and all the house of Jeroboam. Yet, because he followed the sins of Jeroboam, “the word of the Lord came against Baasha, for all the evil that he did in the sight of the Lord, in being like the house of Jeroboam, and because he killed him” 1 Kings 16:7. The two courses of action were inconsistent; to destroy the son and the house of Jeroboam, and to do those things, for which God condemned him to be destroyed. Further yet. Not only was such execution of God’s judgments itself an offence against Almighty God, but it was sin, whereby he condemned himself, and made his other sins to be sins against the light. In executing the judgment of God against another, he pronounced His judgment against himself, in that he that “judged,” in God’s stead, “did the same things” Romans 2:1. So awful a thing is it, to be the instrument of God in punishing or reproving others, if we do not, by His grace, keep our own hearts and hands pure from sin.
And will cause to cease the kingdom of the house of Israel - Not the kingdom of the house of Jehu, but all Israel. God had promised that the family of Jehu should sit on the throne to the fourth generation. Jeroboam II, the third of these, was now reigning over Israel, in the fulness of his might. He “restored the coast of Israel from the entering of Hamath” 2 Kings 14:25, i. e., from the Northern extremity, near Mount Hermon, where Palestine joins on to Syria, and, which Solomon only in all his glory had won for Israel, “unto the sea of the plain” 2 Chronicles 8:3-4, the Dead sea, regaining all which Hazael had conquered 2 Kings 10:32-33, and even subduing Moab also (see the note at Amos 6:14), “according to the word of the Lord by Jonah the son of Amittan.” He had recovered to Israel, Damascus, which had been lost to Judah, ever since the close of the reign of Solomon 1 Kings 11:24. He was a warlike prince, like that first Jeroboam, who had formed the strength and the sin of the ten tribes. Yet both his house and his kingdom fell with him. The whole history of that kingdom afterward is little more than that of the murder of one family by another, such as is spoken of in the later chapters of Hosea; and Israel, i. e., the ten tribes, were finally carried captive, fifty years after the death of Zechariah, Jeroboam’s son. Of so little account is any seeming prosperity or strength.