Wed 23rd Feb 2022 - Daily Reading:
1 Kings 13
Authority
We read yesterday how Jeroboam threw away the blessings that could have been his because he would not submit to, or trust, the Lord. Instead of enjoying a prosperous reign where God had promised to be with him just as he had been with David, Jeroboam chose to reject the Lord and lead the whole nation into idolatry.
Jeroboam has attempted to ignore the authority of the Lord, and this cannot go on. The prophet from Judah who meets Jeroboam at the altar is not only there to prophesy future events, but also to remind Jeroboam that the Lord is in authority.
There are three separate parts to this reminder:
- The prophet explains that the Lord will appoint a king of the line of David – Josiah – a powerful reminder to Jeroboam that it is the Lord who appoints kings, and the Lord who removes them.
- Jeroboam raises his hand in a symbol of his kingly authority, but the Lord shrivels that hand. The Lord’s authority is greater than Jeroboam’s.
- The altar that Jeroboam was serving at (against the Law of the Lord) was destroyed and the ashes poured out. God had rejected not only Jeroboam’s ruling authority but also his religious authority.
Yet despite all of this, Jeroboam continues to utterly reject the Lord. When he asks the prophet to pray for his shrivelled hand, he says, “Intercede with the Lord your God,” not the Lord our God, or the Lord my God. He has wholly turned his back on the Lord.
It is a foolish thing to forget the authority of the Lord, and even worse to reject it. We may look back at Jeroboam and wonder how he could have acted that way, and yet thinking we know better than God has been humanity’s problem since the very beginning, and we are certainly not immune to it today.
Worship, and time spent in the Word can protect us against the temptation to imagine that we could ever know better or do better than the Lord. “For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.” (Colossians 1:16).