Spiritual Failure Leads to Political Failure. 1 Kings 13:1-34

 

When the northern kingdom split from the southern kingdom and they appointed Jeroboam to be the king he began to think about how he could secure his dynasty, forgetting what God said: “If you obey me and walk with me I will establish your house.” He wants to establish his house on his own terms and he is afraid that if the people in the north keep going down to Jerusalem every two or three months for one of the pilgrimage festivals, such as Passover, Pentecost, Yom Kippur, that they would see the splendour of the temple, the splendour of the blessings that God had given the southern kingdom, and he would lose his power base. So he completely forgets the objective divine viewpoint that God had given him, informing him that God was splitting the kingdom and he wasn’t going to put it back together, and so we see that in his soul he is enslaved to the darkness of human viewpoint. That is the same picture that Paul gives in Romans chapter six where he talks about the fact that we are all born slaves to the sin nature because there is nothing else that we can do; that is the only nature that any human nature has when they are born. They are born with a sin nature and even though they can chose to do moral things or immoral things it all flows out of the sin nature and we are born, as Paul says, slaves to unrighteousness. In the darkness of sin every human being is enslaved in his soul. The only way to have soul freedom comes by responding to the grace of God. In the Old testament they believed that God would send a Messiah, a saviour who would redeem them and establish a kingdom; in the New Testament we look back to the fact that Jesus Christ died on the cross and we trust in Him, so that in Galatians chapter five we are told that we have freedom. Christ has set us free from the tyranny of sin and unrighteousness. So it is only when there is an external category of righteousness, an external category of right and wrong, that we can live and establish and implement within a culture, that there can be true freedom. That can only come from the influence of believers as they function as salt in life within a fallen world. We will never “redeem the culture”; it is impossible, it is a silly phrase. The culture is the cosmic system. But we can have an impact and provide that which gives stability to the culture, that which gives an objective frame of reference for the culture.

 

Jeroboam has rejected that. In negative volition civilisation after civilisation rejects the truth and substitutes the fantasy of the rebellious creature, and then attempts to live his life and construct all of society around the fantasy concept that is antagonistic to the will and the Word of God. Jeroboam now has to justify what he has done. He is then operating on the arrogance skills and not only is he involved in self-deception, he is now involved in self-justification and is going to establish his self-justification on the basis of a religious framework. At the very centre of every system of thought there has to be a focus and an explanation of ultimate reality, and that ultimate reality is either that there is nothing or there is God, or some sort of god. That is the only option. So the very core of any thought system rests upon some idea related to religion, to some sort of spiritual ideology. That then informs everything else whether it is the divinity of the ancient Egyptian kings or whether it is based upon the truth of God’s Word as was seen in the influence on the United States of America in the 16th and 17th centuries. Whatever it is there is always some foundation. That foundation shifted in the USA in the 19th century and the satanic cosmic system chipped away, bit by bit, piece by piece, progressively through the 19th century through various philosophical systems until by the end of the century there was a radical shift in the way people thought about God and Christianity. Christianity itself at the beginning of the 20th century was enmeshed in an enormous battle against liberalism which was attacking the very foundation of Christianity: the infallibility of the inerrant Word of God, the deity of Christ, the reality of miracles, substitutionary atonement, the literal second coming of Christ. These were considered the fundamentals of Christianity.

 

We have to recognise that at the core of every political system, every thought system, there is some sort of religious idea. Jeroboam recognised this and he knew that he had to shift the spiritual orientation of the people in the northern kingdom or he would possibly lose everyone if they kept going down to Jerusalem and saw the glory of the temple there. So he began a process of historical and religious revisionism. He built an altar in Bethel and another in Dan. He set up these golden calves and said: “This is the god who brought you out of Egypt.” It is a historical revisionism but it is a religious revisionism at its very core. We see these same kind of lies being promoted today and believed today. We see ideas such as we are not the product of the creation of a personal, infinite God, we are the products of evolution; so we have the Darwinistic myth that is necessary for a pagan culture. If you are going to reject God and a creator-God who creates everybody you have to have some sort of origin tale in order to explain how we got here. To go along with that type of creation myth there has to be an explanation of the nature of man, and so at the same time we have the rise of Freudian psychology and secular psychology to explain man totally within a closed and mechanistic type of universe. There were other explanation systems that came up but you can’t have a society function without some sort of economic theory and so at the same time there was Karl Marx and the rise of Marxism in relation to explaining labour and capital, etc. It is no chance that all these things came together and were developed and thought out within two decades of one another. They all come out of the same soil, and that soil was the soil that was prepared by the radical Enlightenment that came out of the 1600s and 1700s and truly became established by the subjective epistemology that came out of Emmanuel Kant. So we have this historical revisionism that came out of the origin myths of Darwin and these other systems.

 

In order to justify their positions they began to attack the very foundations of the American republic. Other myths developed: the US was not a republic anymore but was a democracy. Kings and political leaders today do the same things that they did in the ancient world. They rewrite history, the promote myths in order to serve their own agenda and they promote the big lie. Three things about the big lie: the basic principle, the agent of the big lie technique, and soul issues. First of all, in terms of the basic principle, anything that is said loudly enough and frequently enough will come to be believed by the masses no matter how irrational it may be or how much lack of evidence there may be for it. If every time we turn on the television we are continuously told the same thing and we hear it over and over and over again, before long we will come to believe it, especially if it is hard to get alternative information. This is the basic element of propaganda. The agent of the big lie (the public lie technique) is in today’s world the news media. This is what happened during the time of the Bolsheviks in Russia and the Nazis in Germany. They destroyed any sort of journalism that contradicted what the communists or the Nazis said and they promoted only their favourite newspapers who would promote their lies over and over again. Today we have a news media that has willingly pandered to the certain political parties and political agendas because that is what their agenda is. This leads to the exposure of the fundamental issue which is a soul problem. This is the same thing we are going to see with Jeroboam. His soul is enslaved to unrighteousness. When there is little influence from Bible doctrine, when there are few believers that are proclaiming the truth and even fewer that wish to hear it, then there is no understanding of objective truth.

 

What we have seen if we sit down and analyse the trends of the last forty years is that is within the so-called evangelical or fundamentalist church the Christian influence has been fragmented by an incredible amount of false ideas about the Bible, about salvation—core doctrines that once weren’t even debated in many of these circles forty or fifty years ago are now questioned at the very seminaries that were the bulwark for those doctrines. There are positions in theology today that didn’t even exist then. The arrogance is palpable, and it is because everyone is doing what is right in his own eyes. The Christians have become as influenced by the relativism of the culture around them as the ancient Israelites were during the period of the judges, so that the average Christian and the average theologian today is no different from his counterpart in the secular world—he doesn’t think biblically anymore, he thinks in terms of the relativism of the culture. When the leadership has fallen into relativism and the pew has fallen into relativism then the voice from the church has been stifled. That is exactly what has happened. There is little influence from Bible doctrine today, there is no understanding of objective truth or objective standards, and when there is no objective truth and standards the soul becomes enslaved to its own lusts. The people then have only one value system and that is “whatever makes me feel good, whatever stimulates my emotions, whatever gives me a sense of stability and happiness, even if it is not real, as long as I have the façade, the dream, the hope that everything is just going to work out; don’t confuse me with any facts, I don’t want to analyse anything, I don’t want to know the truth, I just want to feel good.” That is the trend of today.

 

In contrast, when there is a large influence of Bible doctrine—which is what western civilisation saw coming out of the Protestant Reformation, what Great Britain saw during the period of the rise of the puritans, during the period of colonisation is North America—people have freedom in their souls. They understand that real freedom has to do with their relationship to Christ. Real freedom came because you trusted Christ as your saviour and at that instant the power of the sin nature, the darkness of the sin nature, the bondage of the sin nature is destroyed and man can have real freedom and real happiness, and there is real, true objective truth out there, and man can come under that and live in a way that glorifies God. But when the public lie becomes the accepted public opinion and you are evil for questioning it then we realise that Satan has won the day and satanic influence dominates and at the same time soul freedom has been lost. When soul freedom is lost political and economic freedom will follow very quickly.

 

This is the situation we see with Jeroboam. He is promoting the public lie: this golden calf is the god who delivered them from slavery in Egypt. He is building an entire religious system around this that is going to justify the existence of the northern kingdom. He has to build an origin myth for the northern kingdom in order to create a sense of confidence and pride and unity within those northern tribes so that they don’t fragment. He is brilliant in the way he does this according to the standard of human viewpoint thinking. So he establishes this altar. 1 Kings 12:33 NASB “Then he went up to the altar which he had made in Bethel on the fifteenth day in the eighth month, even in the month which he had devised in his own heart; and he instituted a feast for the sons of Israel and went up to the altar to burn incense.”  There are no chapter breaks in the original. While he is beginning this whole religious system and while he is cleansing and establishing this altar there is a break in the drama. An unnamed prophet breaks in on the scene with a message from God directed to Jeroboam.

 

There are three key characters in chapter thirteen: Jeroboam the 1st; the unnamed prophet called the man of God; the old prophet. They key doctrine that is emphasised here is the importance of the Word of God and maintaining the integrity of the message of God. When that integrity is lost then the nation is going to crumble and the leadership is going to crumble.

 

1 Kings 13:1 NASB “Now behold, there came a man of God from Judah to Bethel by the word of the LORD, while Jeroboam was standing by the altar to burn incense.” As Jeroboam is establishing the altar there suddenly this unnamed man of God bursts on the scene and he screams out so that all can hear. [2] “He cried against the altar by the word of the LORD, and said, “O altar, altar, thus says the LORD, ‘Behold, a son shall be born to the house of David, Josiah by name; and on you he shall sacrifice the priests of the high places who burn incense on you, and human bones shall be burned on you.’ [3] Then he gave a sign the same day, saying, “This is the sign which the LORD has spoken, ‘Behold, the altar shall be split apart and the ashes which are on it shall be poured out.’” This sign is given to authenticate the previous message. The previous message will not be fulfilled for almost 300 years so how do they know it is valid? There is going to be a near fulfilment to authenticate and validate the prophet’s message.

 

Background: Jeroboam came to the throne (the nation had split to the north and the south) in 931 BC. He will be on the throne for 21 years. In 722, approximately 210 years after the split, Assyria will invade from the north and conquer the northern kingdom, and the northern kingdom will go out under the fifth cycle of discipline. Many of the people heeded the warnings of Isaiah and other prophets and fled to the south and the others in the north, the ones who were apostate, were taken into captivity and resettled throughout the Assyrian empire. So the life of the northern kingdom was approximately 210 years. Approximately 100 years after that the king of Judah. Ammon the son of Manasseh is assassinated when Josiah is eight years old. Josiah is installed on the throne of Judah as the 17th king of Judah when he is eight years of age. At that time Assyria had become quite weakened even though it still exercises a general suzerainty over Judah. Josiah is positive toward doctrine and positive to the Lord and he turned to the Lord—2 Chronicles 34:32—and led the southern kingdom back to the Lord. When he was twelve he began to purge the land and for the next twenty years he is purging the land, destroying the altars to Baal, cleaning out the temple, and running the priests of Baal out of the southern kingdom. In 622 BC when they are cleaning out the store rooms of the temple they discovered a scroll that was the book of the Law. None of them had read the Law and they had completely lost any knowledge of doctrine among the priests. Josiah began to read the book of the Law and discover what his responsibilities were as the king before God. This motivated him to further spiritual reform and stimulated a greater desire for political freedom from Assyria. It was Bible doctrine that gave him the capacity for freedom and liberty and to lead the southern kingdom away from their political enslavement to Assyria. In 609 he was killed at the Battle of Carchemish. At this time they had become so negative that God was not going to restore them to their former glory, it was already determined that they would go out under the fifth cycle of discipline.

It was in this context that there was the fulfilment of this prophecy. What we must understand is that prophecy in the Scripture has certain guidelines. There were certain tests that were established in the Law so that the people would know whether a prophet was really speaking from God. These tests are found in Deuteronomy 13 and 18. The one that relates to this is found in Deuteronomy 18:20-22 NASB “But the prophet who speaks a word presumptuously in My name which I have not commanded him to speak, or which he speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die.’ You may say in your heart, ‘How will we know the word which the LORD has not spoken? When a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the thing does not come about or come true, that is the thing which the LORD has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him.’” In other words, if one was going to tamper with the Word of God, change its meaning, then he would die. The integrity of the message of God’s Word must be preserved. The test of the prophet is 100% accuracy, not 98% accuracy. When the prophets gave a prophecy that may not be fulfilled for 200 or 300 years or 2000 years they would also frequently give another prophecy that would have a near fulfilment to validate their message, that it was from God. This is what we have taking place in 1 Kings 13. There would be a far sign, the child Josiah, 200 years from now who would sacrifice the priests of the high places on this altar, and the near fulfilment would be the splitting apart of this altar. 

Jeroboam, like most tyrants, became immediately angry and he has to shut down anyone who is speaking in opposition. 1 Kings 13:4 NASB “Now when the king heard the saying of the man of God, which he cried against the altar in Bethel, Jeroboam stretched out his hand from the altar, saying, ‘Seize him.’ But his hand which he stretched out against him dried up, so that he could not draw it back to himself.” At the same time the near fulfilment occurs and the altar splits apart and the ashes on the altar are poured out on the ground indicating that the altar has now been desecrated and showing that God has completely rejected Jeroboam’s religion, sacrifice and altar. It is a sign from God the Jeroboam is completely outside of God’s will and does not have any authorisation for this. The king is only concerned about his arm and immediately begins to beg the prophet to heal his arm. 1 Kings 13:6 NASB “The king said to the man of God, ‘Please entreat the LORD your God, and pray for me, that my hand may be restored to me.’ So the man of God entreated the LORD, and the king’s hand was restored to him, and it became as it was before.” This is typical human viewpoint. People want to use God for their own personal pleasure and agenda but they don’t want to submit their will to God at all. In grace we see God heal him. God’s grace always operates within judgment.

1 Kings 13:7 NASB “Then the king said to the man of God, ‘Come home with me and refresh yourself, and I will give you a reward.’” God had told the prophet not to eat, not to stop, to go there and come back because He didn’t want him to a) be distracted from his mission, and b) He didn’t want there to be any suggestion that he was beholden to or in debt to the king for any reason at all. So the man of God says: [8] “If you were to give me half your house I would not go with you, nor would I eat bread or drink water in this place. [9] For so it was commanded me by the word of the LORD, saying, ‘You shall eat no bread, nor drink water, nor return by the way which you came.’” He understands the integrity of the message. Up to this point the prophet shows integrity.

The fulfilment of this: 2 Kings 23. This is one of the five most incredible prophecies in all of the Old Testament. If ever we are teaching that the Bible is evidence of the Word of God this is one of those passages to indicate that. This chapter describes all of the things that Josiah was doing in order to purify and reform the apostasy that had occurred in the southern kingdom and to remove all of the influence of all of the idols and false worship centres. Then in verse 15 we read: NASB “Furthermore, the altar that {was} at Bethel {and} the high place which Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel sin, had made, even that altar and the high place he broke down. Then he demolished its stones, ground them to dust, and burned the Asherah. [16] Now when Josiah turned, he saw the graves that {were} there on the mountain, and he sent and took the bones from the graves and burned {them} on the altar and defiled it according to the word of the LORD which the man of God proclaimed, who proclaimed these things. [17] Then he said, ‘What is this monument that I see?’ And the men of the city told him, ‘It is the grave of the man of God who came from Judah and proclaimed these things which you have done against the altar of Bethel.’”  

What happens in the rest of the story shows what happens when we fail to maintain the integrity of God’s Word, when we are not consistent in interpreting it and applying it. We now have an old prophet, confused, mixed-up, apostate, mystical; there is a lot that we don’t know about this old prophet. All we are told is that he lived there in Bethel. 1 Kings 13:11 NASB “Now an old prophet was living in Bethel; and his sons came and told him all the deeds which the man of God had done that day in Bethel; the words which he had spoken to the king, these also they related to their father.” Apparently he was so old that he just didn’t want to get out and join in all of the festivities and go to the altar.

1 Kings 13:12 NASB “Their father said to them, ‘Which way did he go?’ Now his sons had seen the way which the man of God who came from Judah had gone. [13] Then he said to his sons, “Saddle the donkey for me.” So they saddled the donkey for him and he rode away on it. [14] So he went after the man of God and found him sitting under an oak; and he said to him, ‘Are you the man of God who came from Judah?’ And he said, ‘I am.’ [15] Then he said to him, ‘Come home with me and eat bread.’” Remember what God said? Don’t eat, don’t turn to the left or the right, go one way and come back another way. And again he is sticking with what the Word of God said. [16] “He said, ‘I cannot return with you, nor go with you, nor will I eat bread or drink water with you in this place. [17] For a command {came} to me by the word of the LORD, ‘You shall eat no bread, nor drink water there; do not return by going the way which you came.’”

Now the old prophet is speaking in verse 18 NASB “He said to him, ‘I also am a prophet like you, and an angel spoke to me by the word of the LORD, saying, ‘Bring him back with you to your house, that he may eat bread and drink water.’ {But} he lied to him.” This is a test to see if the unnamed prophet will maintain the integrity of God’s Word as a prophet. He failed and so he is going to die. He will be mauled and killed by a lion because he fails to maintain the integrity of the Word. Rather than say, “God told me to do this” and refuse to change his mind no matter what kind of experience the old prophet has, no matter what kind of visions he saw, no matter what miracles he may claim to validate his message from God, he says “I know that God told me not to eat or drink with anyone but to go straight home, so whatever you say is wrong.” But rather than letting doctrine determine his thinking and evaluating the situation he succumbs to this lie on the basis of experience.

This goes right to the second test that God established for evaluating revelation in Deuteronomy chapter thirteen. This is one that applies to many things today, especially within the charismatic movement. Deuteronomy 13:1 NASB “If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder…” He says this is what God said to me, an angel appeared to me, I healed someone, this miracle occurred. Notice in this passage that Moses doesn’t say it is a false miracle or that it is deceptive. He accepts the miracle as legitimate. [2] “and the sign or the wonder comes true…” He actually predicted something, there is a healing that occurred, etc. “… concerning which he spoke to you, saying, ‘Let us go after other gods (whom you have not known) and let us serve them’ … here is a situation. Someone comes along teaching false doctrine and they are validating the miracle, inviting everyone to come forward, slapping them on the head, getting them “slain in the spirit” and getting healed. And they say, See, I’m a prophet from God. The test isn’t the miracle. But that is what confuses everybody. Some one says their mother got healed. All of these claims that made but when we look at this passage it doesn’t matter if it really happened or not because the test isn’t the alleged miracle, the test is the message and whether the message is consistent with the Word of God. The message that is being promoted by the false prophet in this example is: “Let us go after other gods,” which is a direct violation of the second commandment to have no other gods before the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. So that is the test. Are we going to let experience dictate our interpretation of the Word of God or let the Word of God dictate our interpretation of experience? We live in a world today that interprets the Word of God on the basis of experience over and over and over again, it is all about emotion, about feeling, about experience; it is not about content—and nobody has any content so they can’t evaluate whether anything is spiritually true or not.  

Deuteronomy 13:3 NASB “you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams; for the LORD your God is testing you to find out if you love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.” In other words, God is going to allow some people at some times to have real miracles to test them to see if they are really going to stick with what the Word of God says or go with experience. That is the test in 1 Kings chapter 13. The old prophet says the other can come and eat with him and he buys that instead of evaluating it on the basis of previous revelation. And, 1 Kings 13:24 NASB “Now when he had gone, a lion met him on the way and killed him, and his body was thrown on the road, with the donkey standing beside it; the lion also was standing beside the body.” This is obviously divine intervention because the lion is not eating the donkey and he is not devouring the man.

When the old prophet hears about this in verse 26 he realises what has happened and he understands it correctly. That is what is confusing about it. On the one hand he is deceptive and seemingly confused, and on the other hand he recognises that this is from the Lord. 1 Kings 13:26 NASB “Now when the prophet who brought him back from the way heard {it,} he said, ‘It is the man of God, who disobeyed the command of the LORD; therefore the LORD has given him to the lion, which has torn him and killed him, according to the word of the LORD which He spoke to him.’ [27] Then he spoke to his sons, saying, ‘Saddle the donkey for me.’ And they saddled {it.} [28] He went and found his body thrown on the road with the donkey and the lion standing beside the body; the lion had not eaten the body nor torn the donkey. [29] So the prophet took up the body of the man of God and laid it on the donkey and brought it back, and he came to the city of the old prophet to mourn and to bury him. [30] He laid his body in his own grave, and they mourned over him, {saying,} ‘Alas, my brother!’ [31] After he had buried him, he spoke to his sons, saying, ‘When I die, bury me in the grave in which the man of God is buried; lay my bones beside his bones. (That is what Josiah is referencing in 2 Kings 23) For the thing shall surely come to pass which he cried by the word of the LORD against the altar in Bethel and against all the houses of the high places which are in the cities of Samaria.’”

What is the conclusion of all of this in relationship to Jeroboam and the political situation in Israel? Miracles don’t affect people. Positive volition or negative volition affects people. God withered Jeroboam’s arm, He split the altar, and Jeroboam has all of this empirical information about God’s intervention in his life and he ignores it—because his heart is set against God; negative volition. Some people are that way. No matter how much proof there is, just like the “earth dwellers” in the book of Revelation, their heart is set against God. 1 Kings 13:33 NASB “After this event Jeroboam did not return from his evil way, but again he made priests of the high places from among all [every class of] the people; any who would, he ordained, to be priests of the high places. [34] This event became sin to the house of Jeroboam, even to blot {it} out and destroy {it} from off the face of the earth.”   

Illustrations