Divine Judgment: External and Internal
Enemies. 1 Kings
This section is dealing
with God’s discipline on Solomon and on
And even though we do not
live in a nation that has a direct contract with God as
With each of the divine
institutions there is an authority, especially with the first three. In
individual responsibility every individual is responsible to God. This was
established at the beginning of creation when God placed Adam in the garden and
said that he could eat anything in the garden except for the fruit of the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil, and if he ate from that tree (disobedience
to God) there would be consequences (spiritual death). So we have individual
responsibility. That is the most fundamental issue in dealing with any kind of
social relationship. Man is responsible for the decisions he makes, responsible
for taking care of himself, providing for himself, and as part of this we have
the development of the concept of private ownership of property, private
responsibility for what one earns and makes. When there is an attempt to spread
that responsibility out and get into various forms of collectivism this
violates individual responsibility.
The second divine
institution is marriage. Marriage defined in Scripture and defined by God is in
terms of the marriage of one man and one woman. This excludes polygamy, any
kind of marriage between members of the same sex, and it does away with any
other situations where there is an attempt to do away with the core element on
one man and one woman with the man in the leadership role. The man is the one
who is responsible to God. It is the marriage itself that is the training
ground for the next generation. It is the responsibility of the parents to
train the children, not the government or the church. It is the responsibility
of every parent to train the children. It is in the context of the real life
situations and circumstances that every family faces that parents have the
responsibility to communicate and to teach how the Word of God applies to every
single situation in life. This is how the truth is passed on from one generation
to another. Once there is anything else coming in to interfere with that it
ultimately leads to a breakdown. So once we get away from the divine
institution of marriage society will begin to break down.
The first three divine
institutions are different from the next two because they are establishing
principles before the fall, before there was ever any sin. There was this
embedded authority in each of those institutions. By institution is meant
something that was established by God that is necessary and that is embedded
within the race and the way He makes man as a social creature. These
institutions cannot be changed or there will be a complete breakdown of
society, a disintegration of the national institution.
Each of these has an
authority. Under individual responsibility is the authority of God. In marriage
there is the husband, and in family the authority is the collective unity of
the parents. We see a real breakdown in all of these areas. Notice that at the
core of every one of these institutions is this concept of authority which
always takes us back to the key issue in the angelic conflict, whether or not
we are going to submit to the authority of God and take Him at His Word, that things should be done in His way. That deals with
the first three divine institutions.
The next two we have
talked about were established after the flood when there was a major shift in
the way in which human history is conducted. The first has to do with the
institution of human government, which comes out of the Noahic
covenant. Human government is established and judicial authority is delegated
to man, primarily in the area of capital punishment. This is the most difficult
and extreme situation and responsibility that man has judicially, and so the
establishment of that by a fortiori
argument establishes all of the other types of judicial decision. So man is
responsible now for adjudicating his own circumstances, situations and
disagreements, as well as criminality. That comes out of the Noahic covenant, and that covenant applies to all human
beings throughout all time. At the end of the Noahic
covenant there was also a responsibility given, and that responsibility is the
responsibility to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. They were to
scatter, to spread out, but man rejected that mandate from God and instead of
obeying man unified in rebellion against God at the
Is that fourth the last of
the divine institutions? There seems to be something else. What we have in
common in the divine institutions is that they have been established by God as
integral societal working principles that are true for everyone, whether they
are a believer or an unbeliever. That is important to understand because even
unbelievers or societies that aren’t built on the truth of God’s Word or just
have a minimal witness from the Scriptures or from the Old testament, if they
have an understanding of individual responsibility, an understanding of
marriage and family and government, and these things are working together, and
they understand that God has established nations and national boundaries, then
they can have a measure of stability and security because they recognise those
things. So when we come to trying to identify a further divine institution in
terms of the church or something distinctly Christian, something related to
grace, and that somehow this has to be true for everyone, this has to come out
of the Abrahamic covenant, because God said: “And I will bless those who bless
you, And the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of
the earth will be blessed.” So God instituted this distinction of Israel in the
Old Testament and that it would be through Israel that God would communicate His
Word to all mankind. So there is an
establishment there of Israel as a unique and distinct people of God, and they
are to be held distinct, and how the rest of humanity treats them is going to
have an effect on how those nations survive, and whether they are stable or
not. This fits the criteria that this applies to every nation, every people
group, throughout all of history, that God is going to deal with them and their
social stability and survival as a nation by how they relate to Israel, and by
extension we could say how they relate to God’s Word; because Israel, as we can
see in the New Testament, is the custodian of God’s Word and revelation.
This helps us to
understand what is happening in 1 Kings 11, that Solomon has rejected God as
the King of the nation, and by intermarrying with the daughters of the royal
families and aristocracy in the surrounding nations he has opted for reliance
upon man and human conventions for security. God is going to punish him because
God is the head of the nation
Divine discipline operates
within two different spheres. One sphere is what we might identify as a sort of
natural cause and effect relationship in terms of bad decisions—the reap what
you sow principle. The consequences of the bad decisions we make are
destructive and harmful. In discipline God can choose out of His grace to
completely remove the punishment, or God decides to limit or minimize the
discipline so that it is not as harsh as it could have been. We can see this
with Solomon and with his father David. David committed at least two capital
crimes where he, under the Mosaic Law, should have been given the death penalty.
God commuted that sentence but in its place there was a fourfold discipline
that came into David’s life. Solomon also, introduced the worship of Moloch, which is specifically stated in Deuteronomy to be a
capital crime, nevertheless God doesn’t have him
executed and minimizes the punishment out of grace and out of His care for David.
This is spelled out in 1 Kings 11:12, 13. Twice he emphasises that the
relationship with David is the reason that Solomon is not going to experience
the division of the kingdom in his lifetime. The other sphere or category would
be divine intervention such as the plagues of
This divine discipline of
What we see is that all of
these three individuals all have some historic problems with the house of David—the
way that David defeated
1 Kings 11:15 NASB
“For it came about, when David was in Edom, and Joab the
commander of the army had gone up to bury the slain, and had struck down every
male in Edom
Joab was an extremely blood-thirsty general and there were
many times when he went outside of the law and killed when he should not have
killed. Due to Joab’s sinfulness and
blood-thirstiness he creates this scenario that is eventually going to be used
by God to bring discipline on
2 Samuel 8:3 NASB “Then
David defeated Hadadezer, the son of Rehob king of Zobah, as he went to
restore his rule at the River … [13, 14] So David made
a name {for himself} when he returned from killing 18,000 Arameans*
in the
This antagonism had gone
on from a least the time of Saul. When Saul took the kingdom over he fought
against all these enemies on every side, against
1 Kings 11:18, 19 NASB
“They arose from Midian and came to Paran; and they took men with them from Paran
and came to Egypt, to Pharaoh king of Egypt, who gave him a house and assigned
him food and gave him land.