1 Kings 14

King Jeroboam I1 was a doer, not a philosopher; he was a man who first caught Solomon’s attention because he was busy, efficient, dependable, and productive (11:26–28). He was the ideal popular leader who knew how to fight the people’s battles and champion their causes. Ask him about his personal faith in the Lord and his answers might be a bit foggy. He had lived in Egypt long enough to develop a tolerance toward idolatry as well as an understanding of how religion can be used to control the people. In this skill, Jeroboam was one with Nebuchadnezzar (Dan. 3), Herod Agrippa I (Acts 12:19–25), and the Antichrist (Rev. 13, 17), and today’s latest demagogue. But Jeroboam made three serious mistakes during his twenty-two-year reign.

We don’t read in Scripture that Jeroboam sought the Lord’s will, prayed for spiritual discernment, or asked the Lord to make him a godly man. He prayed for healing for his arm, and now he asked the prophet Ahijah to heal his son, the crown prince and heir to the throne. It’s obvious that physical blessings were more important to him than spiritual blessings. Like many nominal believers and careless church members today, the only time Jeroboam wanted help from God’s servant was when he was in trouble.

The pretending wife (vv. 1–3). Abijah wasn’t a little child at this time. He was old enough to be approved by the Lord (v. 13) and appreciated by the people, for they mourned over him when he died (v. 18). No doubt the godly remnant in Israel pinned their hopes on the young prince, but God judged the royal family and the apostate citizens by calling the boy away from the cesspool of iniquity that was called Israel. “The righteous man perishes, and no man takes it to heart; and devout men are taken away, while no one understands. For the righteous man is taken away from evil” (Isa. 57: nasb).

The king wanted help from the prophet, but he was too proud to admit it or to face Ahijah personally. The prophet still lived in Shiloh (11:29) because he was too old and infirm to relocate in Judah, and he wanted to be faithful to the very end and warn Jeroboam of the consequences of his sins. Did the king think a disguise would fool the godly prophet, blind as he was? Ahijah could see more in his blindness than Jeroboam and his wife could see with their gift of sight. The gifts the queen carried were those of a common laborer, not gifts fit for a king to give.

The discerning prophet (vv. 4–6). It was about twenty miles from Tirzah to Shiloh, but the prophet knew she was coming before she even arrived in the city. The aged prophet knew who was coming, why she was coming and what he was supposed to tell her. “The secret of the Lord is with those who fear Him” (Ps. 25: nkjv). “Surely the Lord does nothing, unless He reveals His secret to His servants the prophets” (Amos 3: nkjv). Jeroboam sent his wife to Ahijah, but Ahijah said that he was sent to her! He gave her the message she was to give to her husband, and it wasn’t a very happy one.

The revealing message (vv. 7–16). First, the prophet reminded Jeroboam of God’s grace in the past (vv. 7–8a). The Lord had chosen Jeroboam and raised him from being a district leader to ruling over the northern kingdom. God had torn ten tribes away from the house of David and had given them to Jeroboam. But then Ahijah revealed Jeroboam’s sins in the present (vv. 8b-9). Unlike David, who had a heart wholly dedicated to the Lord, Jeroboam did more evil than Saul, David, and Solomon put together. He turned from the true God of Israel and made false gods, and then allowed the people of the ten tribes to worship them. He organized a counterfeit religion, provoked the Lord to anger, and refused to listen to the prophets who were sent to warn him.

This led to Ahijah’s revelation of Jeroboam’s future (vv. 10–16). To begin with, unlike King David, Jeroboam would not establish a dynasty, even though God had promised to bless him with a “sure house” if he obeyed the Lord (11:38). All of Jeroboam’s male descendants would be cut off; the Lord would make a “clean sweep” of Jeroboam’s family and take away every potential heir, just the way servants remove dung from a house. (God didn’t think much of the king’s children!) But even worse, none of them except Abijah, the ailing crown prince, would have a decent, dignified burial. Between the scavenger dogs in the city and the carrion birds in the fields, the children’s corpses would be devoured and never buried, a terrible humiliation for any Jew.

Then Ahijah got to the matter at hand, the future of the sick heir to the throne. Abijah would die, have a dignified burial, and be mourned by the people. The one son of wicked Jeroboam who could have ruled justly would be taken from them, not because he was wicked but because he was good and God wanted to spare him the suffering that lay ahead of the kingdom (Isa. 57:1). As he looked ahead (v. 14), Ahijah then saw Nadab, Jeroboam’s son and heir, reign for two years and then be assassinated by Baasha, a man from the tribe of Issachar (15:25–31). Baasha would not only kill Nadab, but he would exterminate the family of Jeroboam, in fulfillment of Ahijah’s prophecy (15:29).

Then the blind prophet looked even further ahead (vv. 15–16) and saw the entire kingdom of Israel defeated by the enemy (Assyria), rooted out of the land, and scattered among the nations. This happened in 722 BC. The kingdom of Israel had a new religious system, but they were still under the Lord’s covenant (Lev. 26; Deut. 28—30). That covenant warned that their disobedience to God’s law would bring military defeat and national dispersion to the nation (Deut. 28:25–26, 49–52; Lev. 26:17, 25, 33–39; and see Deut. 7: and 12:3–4). What would be the cause of this terrible judgment? “[T]he sins of Jeroboam, who did sin, and who made Israel to sin” (v. 16). Just as David was God’s standard for measuring the good kings, Jeroboam was God’s example of the worst of the bad kings. See 1 Kings 15:34; 16:2–3, 7, 19, 26, 31; 22:52; 2 Kings 3:3; 9:9; 10:29, 31; 13:2, 6, 11; 14:24; 15:9, 18, 24, 28; 17:21–22.

The distressing fulfillment (vv. 17–20). Jeroboam apparently had a palace in Tirzah as well as the palace in Shechem, and it must have been at the edge of the city. Ahijah had told Jeroboam’s wife that the child would die as soon as she entered the city (v. 12), but v. 17 indicates that he died when she stepped on the threshold of the door. All Israel did mourn the loss of this son and they gave him a funeral suited to a crown prince. The king’s hand had been healed and his altar destroyed (13:1–16), and now his son had died. His army would be defeated by the king of Judah, also named Abijah (2 Chron. 13). How many times did God have to warn him before he would repent?

Nobody could sin like Jeroboam, son of Nebat. During his twenty-two years as king of Israel, he led his family and the nation into ruin. One day Jeroboam died and was succeeded by his son Nadab who was assassinated. The day would come when not a single male descendant of King Jeroboam would be alive, nor would you be able to identify the ten tribes of Israel.

“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.…” Thomas Jefferson wrote those words in 1781, The kingdoms destroyed (1 Kings but they are just as applicable to us today. 15:1—22:53)

Then I hated all my labor in which I toiled under the sun,” Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes, “because

I must leave it to the man who will come after me. And who knows whether he will be a wise man or a fool?” (Eccl. 2:18–19 nkjv).

His successor was his son Rehoboam, who occasionally made a shrewd decision but for the most part was a foolish ruler. At the beginning of Rehoboam’s reign, a selfish decision on his part divided the nation, and during his fourth year, Rehoboam decided to turn from the Lord and worship idols, and that brought the judgment of the Lord. His reign could hardly be called successful.

According to 1 Kings 14:21, Rehoboam was fortyone years old when he began to reign. Since Solomon reigned for forty years (11:42), this means that Rehoboam was born before Solomon became king. But the same text informs us that Rehoboam’s mother was an Ammonite woman named Naamah, which means that the Egyptian princess Solomon married was not his first wife (3:1). His father David had married a princess from Geshur, a nation in Syria, and she became the mother of Absalom (2 Sam. 3:3). This was undoubtedly a political move on David’s part, so perhaps Solomon’s marriage to an Ammonite woman didn’t upset David in his latter years. The Hebrew text of 14: reads “Naamah the Ammonite” (italics mine), suggesting that she was distinguished above the other Ammonite women in the court. This would include Solomon’s Ammonite wives and concubines, which Rehoboam inherited when he became king.

What life does to us depends on what life finds in us. During Rehoboam’s reign of seventeen years, the way he responded to situations revealed what kind of a person he really was. At least four characteristics stand out in his short reign.

Rehoboam walked with the Lord for three years after becoming king (2 Chron. 11:17), but in the fourth year of his reign, when his throne was secure, he and all Judah turned away from Jehovah to worship idols (2 Chron. 12:1–2). “And he did evil, because he did not prepare his heart to seek the Lord” (2 Chron. 12: nkjv). The phrase “forsaken [abandoned] the commandment of the Lord” occurs frequently in the record of the reigns of the kings of Judah and Israel (1 Kings 18:18; 19:10, 14; 2 Kings 17:16; 21:22; 22:17; 2 Chron. 12:1, 5; 13:10–11; 15:2; 21:10; 24:18, 20, 24; 26:6; 29:6; 34:25). David had warned Solomon about this sin (1 Chron. 28:9, 20) and so had the Lord Himself (1 Kings 3:14; 9:4–9; 11:9–13), but Solomon in his latter years worshipped both the Lord and the abominable idols of the heathen. Solomon was influenced by his pagan wives to worship idols; perhaps Rehoboam was influenced by his Ammonite mother. Whatever the influence, the king knew that he was breaking the covenant and sinning against the Lord.

God’s holy jealousy (vv. 21–24). When the Bible speaks of the Lord being “a jealous God” (14:22), it refers to His jealous love over His people, a love that will not tolerate rivals. Israel was “married” to the Lord at Mount Sinai when they entered into the covenant, and the worship of idols was a terrible breach of that covenant, like a wife committing adultery. Surely Rehoboam knew what God said to the nation at Mount Sinai: “For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God” (Ex. 20: nkjv). This same truth is included in the Song of Moses as well: “They have provoked Me to jealousy by what is not God; they have moved Me to anger by their foolish idols” (Deut. 32: nkjv; see also Ps. 78:58; Jer. 44:3). Paul used the marriage picture when he warned the church to avoid pagan idolatry (1 Cor. 10:22), and James called worldly believers “adulterers and adulteresses” (James 4:4).

The king allowed and encouraged the building of idolatrous shrines in the land (“high places”), the erecting of sacred stones (“images”) and phallic images and Asherah poles (“groves”). He also permitted the shrine prostitutes, male (“sodomites”) and female, to serve the people at these shrines, a detestable practice expressly forbidden by the law of Moses (Deut. 23:17–18). Idolatry and immorality go together (Rom. 1:21–27), and it wasn’t long before the pagan sins condemned by the law became commonly accepted practices in Judah (Lev. 18, 20; Deut. 18:9–12). The Jewish people were no longer a light to the Gentiles; instead, the darkness of the Gentiles had invaded the land and was putting out the light.

Before we pass judgment on the king and people of Judah, perhaps we had better examine our own lives and churches. Surveys indicate that, when it comes to sexual morality, the “born-again” people in the churches don’t live much differently than the unsaved people outside the church. The materialistic and humanistic idols of the unsaved world have made their way into the church and are both tolerated and promoted. The Lord punished Rehoboam for his sins. How long will it be before the Lord punishes His church?

God’s loving discipline (vv. 25–31; 2 Chron. 12:1–16). For a year, the Lord was patient with Rehoboam and the people of Judah, but by the fifth year of Rehoboam’s reign, the longsuffering of the Lord had come to an end. God directed Shishak, king of Egypt, to invade Judah with a huge army and, in spite of Rehoboam’s new defenses, he defeated town after town. (One Egyptian inscription states that Shishak took 156 cities in Israel and Judah.) When the Egyptians got as far as Jerusalem, the prophet Shemaiah once again appeared on the scene with a message from God, short and to the point: “This is what the Lord says, ‘You have abandoned me; therefore, I now abandon you to Shishak’” (12:5).

Whenever God’s people experience discipline because of their sins, they can make a new beginning by hearing the Word of God and humbling themselves before the God of the Word. This was the promise God gave His people when Solomon dedicated the temple (2 Chron. 7:13–14). Rehoboam and his officers humbled themselves before the Lord and He stopped Shishak from attacking Jerusalem. However, Judah was now subject to Shishak and had to pay him tribute. God’s people discovered that their “freedom to sin” brought them into painful and costly bondage to Egypt, for the consequences of sin are always costly.

To satisfy Shishak’s demands, Rehoboam gave him gold from the temple and from the king’s palace. This included the five hundred gold shields that Solomon had made for the palace (1 Kings 10:16–17). Rehoboam was too poor to make duplicate shields, so he replaced them with shields made of bronze, and the royal ceremonies went on as if nothing had happened. How often the precious treasures of former generations are lost because of sin and then replaced by cheap substitutes. Life goes on and nobody seems to know the difference. That’s what happened to the church at Laodicea (Rev. 3:17–19).

After the invasion of Shishak in 925 BC, Rehoboam reigned for twelve more years and died in 913 BC. Had he continued to walk with the Lord and to lead his people to be faithful to God’s covenant, the Lord would have done great things for him. As it was, his sins and the sins of the people who followed him left the nation weaker, poorer, and in bondage. As Charles Spurgeon said, “God does not allow His people to sin successfully.”

Rehoboam went the way of all flesh and died at the age of fifty-eight. We trust that the humbling that he and his leaders experienced lasted for the rest of their lives and that they walked with the Lord.