1 Kings 12:1-24 - A House Divided

Well, welcome to another episode of Bible Babbles.

I'm your host, Bryon Self.

This is Carlos.

It's great to be back with you, and we're going to jump right into our episode for today. We're going over 1 Kings chapter 12, verses 1 through 24. And in the last episode, at the very, very end of it, Solomon dies.

We detailed some of his rise, his power, his wisdom, and then his eventual downfall, and some of the enemies that we looked at last week that God raised up against him for his idolatry and how he had wandered away from God.

And we also saw one of those men in particular, named Jeroboam, that Solomon had put in charge of the whole house of Joseph, so that'd be the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh.

He put him in charge over those tribes, and then God anointed him as the next king of Israel. Solomon heard about it, got mad, Jeroboam leaves and flees to Egypt. And now in chapter 12, we are immediately after Solomon dies.

The people of Israel are coming together to Jerusalem, and they come to Rehoboam. Now Jeroboam hears that Solomon's dead. He knows, okay, my life's not necessarily as in danger as it was.

And so he comes up to Jerusalem as well. I'm sure there was probably still some fear. You know, you think of David and Saul and all of that kind of stuff.

Where even after Saul died, David still had six or seven years before he was actually king over all Israel because of the Civil War and everything that was going on there. So what happens then in the passage is Jeroboam comes.

He joins up with the people of Israel and they come to Rehoboam and they come to him with a request that I think pretty much everyone would think of their government.

They might make this same request, which is basically, would you take it easy on us?

Solomon for all of his wisdom, all his power, his riches, all of that, we read over and over again in the chapters previous of all the people that he put to work of the different nations and the Aites and all of those people that that he's put to

work. And so now the people of Israel are coming in and saying, hey, your father put a super heavy yoke on us. Would you take it easy on us? And what was, what was Rehoboam's response to that, Carlos?

So in verse 6, it says, And King Rehoboam consulted with the old man that stood before Solomon his father while he yet lived.

He said, how do ye advise that I may answer this people?

Verse number 7 says, and they spake unto him, saying, if thou wilt be a servant unto this people this day, and will serve them and answer them, and speak good words to them, then they will be thy servants forever.

So we see that Rehoboam wisely asked the council of these older experienced men, people that have had some experience in life, someone that might be wiser than him.

They seemed to advise Solomon well, so it was fitting that Rehoboam asked for their advice. The elders knew that Rehoboam was not Solomon and could not expect the same from the people that Solomon did.

So Rehoboam had to relate to the people based on who he was. You know, he couldn't try to copy, you know, what his father was. If he showed kindness and servanse heart to the people, they would love and serve him forever.

And that was pretty good advice. And to Rehoboam, probably, you will find out that he really wasn't caring for their advice. So we see in the next part of this passage, in 8-11, it says that he forsook their council.

And before Rehoboam ever consulted with the younger men, which he goes to some younger men, people that grew up with him, that were closer to his age, and asked him what they should do, what he should do.

But he rejected the older men's advice way before he even went to talk to the younger guys.

These men were much more likely to tell Rehoboam what he already thought by turning to those likely to think that just as he did, it shows Rehoboam only asked for advice for the sake of appearance.

You know, I asked multiple people for advice, so it's not like I just made a rash decision. So the younger men offered the opposite advice to the elders.

They suggested an adversarial approach, one that would make Rehoboam more feared than Solomon was. A lot of people served with Solomon because they caught his vision and his heart for Israel. But Rehoboam just wants people to obey him out of fear.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I like what you mentioned there that it says he rejected the older men's advice before he even heard any advice from the younger men.

And yeah, it can definitely be a danger to only listen to ourselves and our thoughts because all of us are flawed. The Bible says the heart's desperately wicked and deceitful above all things.

So we shouldn't really trust ourselves to make every decision or to be right in every instance. I was just reading the other day in Proverbs. It says in the multitude of counselors, there's safety.

And by appearance here, oh, well, actually in the Book of Proverbs, that was written from Solomon to Rehoboam. He tells him that.

So Rehoboam here does have a multitude of counselors, but he's already made up his mind, so he doesn't listen to the people that have been around the block, that saw Solomon's wisdom and his downfall.

Instead, he was just consulting with the young men. And it's always better to lead from a place of service and kindness and love, rather than this approach of, if you don't, then I'm going to, or if you don't, then God's going to.

Just as Paul mentions in the Book of 2 Corinthians, like we serve out of a heart of love. We serve out of a heart that's constrained, that's pulled, that's tugged by what Christ has done for us. And that has to be our motivation.

Simply doing stuff out of duty or out of fear is never the response that we should have. If we are serving in that way, we're going to burn out really fast, we're going to be hurt.

So the best thing to do is to serve people, to lead people through love.

Yeah, if you're following along in this passage, it just gets worse. In verse 13, the verse part says, And the king answered the people roughly.

And verse 14 says, And speak to them after the council of the young men, saying, My father made your yoke heavy, and I will add to your yoke. My father also chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.

So he's basically just saying, You thought it was bad, now it's going to get worse.

Yeah, that is not the speech you want to give people at your inauguration.

No. And then it says that he didn't even listen to the people even though that shouldn't drive his decision. They probably know it's best for them more than he did, so he didn't even acknowledge what they wanted.

And so he was being a very bad leader.

Yeah. And I see it mentions there in verse number 15. He didn't listen to the people and that cause, like why he didn't listen to them, what the people were asking was from the Lord.

And so in that, you have God fulfilling his word to Solomon that because of your sin, because you, even though you had built this giant temple, even though you were so wise, you decided to worship other gods and you led Israel to worship other gods

too. And so now this is God's way of both punishing Solomon. We can see he's punishing Rehoboam a little bit too, and we'll see even more of that next week and the week following.

But here you have God working, and so he's leading the people to separate now from Rehoboam. And particularly, they're going from Rehoboam to Jeroboam, the son of Nebat. And so Israel sees, hey, Rehoboam's not going to have any part of this.

He's just going to make our lives harder than they already were under a very harsh king. And so then they decide, okay, they basically tell Rehoboam, hey, why do we have to follow the House of David?

We're going to worry about us, and you worry about the House of David. So they all leave, Rehoboam gets furious. And so he tries to send basically the tax collector Adoniram after them.

And he was in charge kind of of the forced labor, of the taxes, all that stuff. He was over. So he was over all of the stuff that Rehoboam wanted to really bring the hammer down on Israel.

So he sends Adoniram, and it says that all Israel stoned him with stones. It's definitely a rough way to go. It was a very disgraceful way to go.

It was one thing, like if you get killed in battle, there's a little bit of honor in that. You're like, man, that guy died, but he died fighting.

If you're stoned, that means, like, there was a large group of people that disapproved of you and thought you weren't even worth, you know, a fighting chance in your death. Like, you were just, you were just a criminal.

We can see that a couple of times in the New Testament with Stephen, with Paul, some of that, but it was a very ignoble death. That would not be how I want to go out.

No.

If you had to choose how you die, how would you die?

I haven't thought about this.

I haven't either.

Well, we're talking about a martyred.

No, not necessarily martyred. Like it could be, like some people would be like, oh, I want to go on my sleep, or I want to go skydiving. I feel like that wouldn't be my favorite.

I'm gonna pass.

I want to go out in a cool way.

I don't want to be like, oh, he got old and fat and died.

I don't want to say playing fruit ninja in real life.

That is a way. Yeah, I don't want to be like Eli from First Samuel, who was so fat when he heard the news about the Ark of the Covenant being taken, he falls over backwards and breaks his neck because he was so fat.

I like, I like and don't like how the Bible mentions specifically some people that were just enormously fat. You have Eglon, King of Moab, you have Eli. If your name starts with E in the Bible, there's a chance you might die from fatness.

Some of the worst ways to die would be drowning, burning alive and buried alive.

Don't like any of those.

I'm going to pass on all this.

Maybe fire from heaven.

Oh, well, no, because that means God, God's after you. And if God's after you, you're yeah, it's not going to. We will.

We will read about some people who did get taken out with fire in in a couple chapters. That's going to be a good time. So they they kill Adoniram.

They take out the IRS, if you will, which, you know, great day for Israel. And so after this happens, it says, you know, Rehoboam was kind of in that area.

It says, he got back in his chariot, went back to Jerusalem, and he amasses this huge army of a ton of men to try and really forcefully take back Israel.

During this time, Israel themselves nominated, crowned, kinged Jeroboam as their new king, and Rehoboam has his army that he's going to fight.

But, the Lord sends a prophet to Rehoboam and says, hey, tell all of your men to go back to their homes, go back to their lands, put away your weapons, because what's happened here, all of this, you know, this breaking of the country, is from me.

And we can see there's something good that Rehoboam finally does of he doesn't fight against what the Lord tells him in that moment. He's not happy about it, hence why he amassed a giant army.

But he obeys the Lord there and and the people all go back to their lands. So here you have really kind of the end of Solomon's greatness in a lot of ways.

It's mentioned several times in Proverbs that the glory of old men is what they leave to their children. And the honor of old men is their children and their grandchildren.

And the testimony, the legacy of Solomon, yes, is the temple and the temple is great. And we'll see a couple of times over the next few weeks, some of the awesome things that happen in the temple and with the worship of God.

But really, Solomon's lasting impact was not as great as success, but multiple failures along the way that led him to amass wives, amass horses, amass wealth, amass other gods that he was worshiping.

He was so busy getting all of these things together that he didn't leave a good legacy for his son. And I think for us, it's super important that God doesn't care, like, the grandeur of our biggest victory for him.

He cares about that personal walk with him. He cares about that day to day. It doesn't matter what we do on our best days.

It matters the life that we live on the most boring days. Any thoughts on that?

No, but one thing I got a thought from this passage is, when we look at Rabeau going to people to just hear what he wants to hear.

Yeah.

A lot of us be like, oh, that's so foolish. And why would he do that? But one thing I just got challenged by is, don't be that person that just tells someone what they want to hear.

If you want to be a good friend, then tell them what they need to hear.

Yeah, definitely.

One other thought I had from that particular thing was, even though Rabeau's initial whatever was to the old men and that they had good advice and then the young men had the bad advice, it's not always that the old people will have all the best

advice or the young people will have all the worst advice. You can find someone that will have your opinion, whether old or young.

And so you should, hi, pastor, you should be looking for really views and opinions, especially when you're coming to a decision. Look for people that have a different view than you on it so that you can have a well-rounded view of what you should do.

Just like that verse again, in the multitude of counselors, there is safety. There will be people that agree with you. There will be people that disagree with you.

But you should look for some of that. That way you don't just have an echo chamber going on where all you ever hear is what you already think. Any other thoughts from this passage?

Rehoboam, Jeroboam, the kingdom, any of that?

Nope.

Okay, looking forward to next week. We're going to look at kind of Jeroboam. And he's been promised at this point by God, hey, if you follow me, I will give to you this dynasty, this lasting legacy of your family reigning on the throne of Israel.

He's promised the same thing that he has to the house of David. And we'll see what he does with that opportunity. But want to encourage you, be in God's word.

We'd also love to hear from you. We've got our Facebook page and our Instagram page. You can let us know any questions you have.

We have the option with our current podcast hosting thing to have bonus episodes.

So if you have things you'd like to hear us talk about, questions you have about the Bible, about specific passages, we would love to be a help to you in any way that we can. And thank you so much for listening. I'm Bryon.

This is Carlos.

Thanks for joining us.