“A Leper until the Day of His Death”
The reign of Azariah, or Uzziah, in Judah was very splendid. Fifty-two years of almost unbroken prosperity! The story is told in the glowing periods of 2 Chronicles 26:1-23. Here, too, we learn that his sun suffered an eclipse because he persisted in the sacrilegious endeavor to combine the office of king and priest-the exclusive prerogative of Messiah. See Zechariah 6:13. As a leper he was excluded from all contact with his fellows, and dwelled in a separate house, while his son Jotham acted as his viceroy.
For more than thirty years preceding its dissolution, the Northern Kingdom was terribly distracted. Anarchy, idolatry, high-handed crime, and immorality of a flagrant description swept like a hurricane over all classes. Rent by these evils, and with no strong men like Hezekiah and Isaiah then in Judah to place their hands on the helm, the kingdom drifted to destruction. The sacred books give but brief and disjointed accounts of the last times of the kingdom of Israel, because God has no pleasure in the process of decay. He has no pleasure in the death of individuals or in the nation that dieth, but rather that “they should turn unto Him and live.”