CHAPTER 14

(956 B.C.)

JEROBOAM SENDS HIS WIFE TO AHIJAH THE PROPHET

¹At that time Abijah the son of Jeroboam fell sick. (Through this sickness, which will result in death, the Lord makes a final appeal to Jeroboam, just as He has made such to untold millions.)

²And Jeroboam said to his wife, Arise, I pray you, and disguise yourself, that you be not known to be the wife of Jeroboam; and get you to Shiloh: behold, there is Ahijah the Prophet, which told me that I should be king over this people. (Concerning this, Williams says, The darkness of Jeroboams heart is further seen in his asking the Queen to disguise herself lest the people should know her to be the Queen. To openly seek help from God on behalf of his son would show the people that he himself had no faith in the idol he had set up, and would affect the stability of his kingdom. His folly is further to be seen in that his wife was to try to deceive the God of Israel, although she sought unto Him for Truth!)

³And take with you ten loaves, and cracknels, and a cruse of honey, and go to him: he shall tell you what shall become of the child (his idol gods surely couldnt tell him, and, in his heart, he knew that the True God of Israel held the answer, and that He Alone held the answer).

⁴And Jeroboams wife did so, and arose, and went to Shiloh, and came to the house of Ahijah. But Ahijah could not see; for his eyes were set by reason of his age. (In Verses 1-4, one can see the depths of sin to which Jeroboam had taken Israel. He had no confidence in these golden calves, which had taken the northern kingdom of Israel to the depths. The calves were merely political expediency to keep Israel from going to Jerusalem to worship God. He knew that Jehovah controlled all. Still, he would not serve Him.)

⁵And the LORD said unto Ahijah, Behold, the wife of Jeroboam comes to ask a thing of you for her son; for he is sick: thus and thus shall you say unto her: for it shall be, when she comes in, that she shall feign herself to be another woman. (Few men have been dealt with by the Lord such as Jeroboam. It almost seems as if the Lord is pleading with him to repent.)

⁶And it was so, when Ahijah heard the sound of her feet, as she came in at the door, that he said, Come in, you wife of Jeroboam; why do you feign yourself to be another? for I am sent to you with heavy tidings. (Even the heavy tidings was the Hand of God. He would try to bring Jeroboam to his senses, as He has tried to bring multiple hundreds of millions to their senses, but, tragically, to no avail!)

THE PROPHECY AGAINST JEROBOAM

⁷Go, tell Jeroboam, Thus says the LORD God of Israel, Forasmuch as I exalted you from among the people, and made you prince over My people Israel (even though the Lord gave him this position, he executed the position totally contrary to the Will of the Lord; every Preacher should read these words very carefully),

⁸And rent the kingdom away from the house of David, and gave it you: and yet you have not been as My servant David, who kept My Commandments, and who followed Me with all his heart, to do that only which was right in My eyes (a self-righteous Church world can never understand this, especially considering Bath-sheba and Uriah; nevertheless, the answer is simple; David repented! All sin repented of, and, consequently, washed by the Blood of Jesus Christ, is not only forgiven by God, but forgotten; it is called Justification; it then stands in the Eyes of God as though it never happened);

⁹But have done evil above all that were before you: for you have gone and made you other gods, and molten images, to provoke Me to anger, and have cast Me behind your back (it would seem from this statement that Jeroboam had once known the Lord in a very real way; he had received Prophecies, and then was promised a sure house and a kingdom if he would obey; this one Passage alone, along with all the many others in the Word of God, dispute the fallacious doctrine of unconditional eternal security [Heb. 6:1-6; 10:26-31]):

¹⁰Therefore, behold, I will bring evil upon the house of Jeroboam, and will cut off from Jeroboam him who urinates against the wall (all the men of the family), and him who is shut up and left in Israel, and will take away the remnant of the house of Jeroboam, as a man takes away dung, till it be all gone (the Lord set up Jeroboam, and the Lord will take down Jeroboam).

¹¹Him who dies of Jeroboam in the city shall the dogs eat; and him who dies in the field shall the fowls of the air eat: for the LORD has spoken it. (There could be no greater disgrace to a Jew than this. As well, we see that the Prophet Ahijah did not mince words, even though he was talking with the queen. How many Prophets presently will deliver the Word of the Lord without addition or deletion? Im afraid not many!)

¹²Arise you therefore, get you to your own house: and when your feet enter into the city, the child shall die. (The word child in the Hebrew, as used here, has reference to one who could be in his late teens, or even early twenties. There are few men whom God dealt with as He dealt with Jeroboam. If the death of a son [or daughter] has no effect on a parent regarding their relationship with God, then there is very little else that God can do.)

¹³And all Israel shall mourn for him, and bury him: for he only of Jeroboam shall come to the grave, because in him there is found some good thing toward the LORD God of Israel in the house of Jeroboam. (Evidently, Abijah had some qualities in him toward God that endeared him to the whole of Israel. So, God would take the young man, as a flower would be plucked from a garbage dump.)

¹⁴Moreover the LORD shall raise Him up a king over Israel, who shall cut off the house of Jeroboam that day: but what? even now. (Even though it began at that moment, it would be some twenty years before Baasha would destroy all of Jeroboams seed. This Prophecy in no way meant that Baasha would be Godly; in fact, he was evil. It does show that God rules in the affairs of men, setting up one and pulling down another.)

¹⁵For the LORD shall smite Israel, as a reed is shaken in the water, and he shall root up Israel out of this good land, which he gave to their fathers, and shall scatter them beyond the river, because they have made their groves, provoking the LORD to anger. (This refers to the River Euphrates, when Israel would be taken captive by the Assyrians. It happened about 250 years after the Prophecy was given.)

¹⁶And He shall give Israel up because of the sins of Jeroboam, who did sin, and who made Israel to sin. (The very fact that Jeroboam sent his wife to the Prophet Ahijah shows that the Lord was dealing with him. So why did he not repent then? As we shall see, the Prophecy given to him by his wife, as it had been given to her by the Prophet, even with the death of his son, had no effect. He continued on in his evil ways, and would not repent. It is remarkable as to the stubbornness of the human heart when it comes to God. Men do not repent quickly or easily!)

THE DEATH OF JEROBOAMS SON

¹⁷And Jeroboams wife arose, and departed, and came to Tirzah: and when she came to the threshold of the door, the child died (exactly as the Prophet said would happen [Vs. 12]);

¹⁸And they buried him; and all Israel mourned for him, according to the Word of the LORD, which He spoke by the hand of His servant Ahijah the Prophet. (If the Word of the Lord is ignored, the end result will not be happy!)

THE DEATH OF JEROBOAM

¹⁹And the rest of the acts of Jeroboam, how he warred, and how he reigned, behold, they are written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel.

²⁰And the days which Jeroboam reigned were two and twenty years: and he slept with his fathers, and Nadab his son reigned in his stead. (The exploits of this long reign find no mention in Scripture; the historian dwells exclusively on the sin, the consequences of which were of so much greater moment.)

THE REIGN OF REHOBOAM; THE SINS OF JUDAH

²¹And Rehoboam the son of Solomon reigned in Judah. Rehoboam was forty and one years old when he began to reign, and he reigned seventeen years in Jerusalem, the city which the LORD did choose out of all the Tribes of Israel, to put His Name there. And his mothers name was Naamah an Ammonitess. (The writer of I Kings reminds us that Jerusalem was by Gods appointment the spiritual center of the land; that Bethel and Dan were no sanctuaries of His choosing; and that, however much the realm of Rehoboam was restricted, he still reigned in the capital of Gods choice Spence.)

²²And Judah did evil in the sight of the LORD, and they provoked Him to jealousy with their sins which they had committed, above all that their fathers had done. (For the first three years the nation remained steadfast in the faith [II Chron. 12:1]. The defection commenced when Rehoboam began to feel himself secure [II Chron. 11:17; 12:1]. Idolatry was unfaithfulness to God, and provoked the Lord to jealousy.)

²³For they also built them high places, and images, and groves, on every high hill, and under every green tree. (The word images actually refers to pillars or statues. This was probably the Asherah, which was the male reproductive member. Its system of worship incorporated all types of immoral rites. In other words, it was the most abominable of the abominable.)

²⁴And there were also sodomites in the land: and they did according to all the abominations of the nations which the LORD cast out before the Children of Israel. (Sodomites are homosexuals [Gen., Chpt. 17]. Here it refers to male prostitutes dedicated to idolatry involving this sin [II Ki. 23:7]. Such was forbidden by the Law of God [Deut. 23:17-18]. The Lord refers to this sin as an abomination. A nation begins to lose its way when three sins become prominent: pedophilia, homosexuality, and murder.)

SHISHAK OF EGYPT SPOILS JERUSALEM

²⁵And it came to pass in the fifth year of king Rehoboam, that Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem (Shishak was founder of the 22nd Egyptian Dynasty):

²⁶And he took away the treasures of the House of the LORD, and the treasures of the kings house; he even took away all: and he took away all the shields of gold which Solomon had made.

²⁷And king Rehoboam made in their stead brasen (copper) shields, and committed them unto the hands of the chief of the guard, which kept the door of the kings house.

²⁸And it was so, when the king went into the House of the LORD, that the guard bore them, and brought them back into the guard chamber. (The shields of gold, in some way, represented Gods Blessings upon Israel. The shields of copper, in some way, represented the sorry state in which Israel now found herself. Just a short time before, she was the most powerful nation on the face of the Earth. And now, because of her transgression against God, the Lord allows the king of Egypt to do damage to Israel. The gold was a Type of Deity, referring to the fact that God ruled in Judah. Brass, or copper, was a type of humanity, which states that men are now guiding Judah instead of God, hence the disruption and declension.)

REHOBOAM DIES

²⁹Now the rest of the acts of Rehoboam, and all that he did, are they not written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah?

³⁰And there was war between Rehoboam and Jeroboam all their days.

³¹And Rehoboam slept with his fathers, and was buried with his fathers in the city of David (Jerusalem). And his mothers name was Naamah an Ammonitess. And Abijam his son reigned in his stead. (Twice the Holy Spirit refers to the mother of Rehoboam as the Ammonitess. It can hardly be doubted that she was one of the Ammonitesses who turned away Solomons heart. In fact, she was the one who brought the worship of Moloch to Jerusalem, and was, as well, influential, no doubt, in the spiritual declension of her son, and, thereby, the wreckage of Judah.)