Divine VP;
Politics and Leadership. 1 Kings 12
When we get into the study of
Kings we note that at the beginning, or more often at the end, of each of the
sections where we deal with a king there is a divine editorial or comment
evaluating the ruler. That gives us insight into how God looks at the
leadership, the politics of that ruler and what went on during his reign. This
is going to be true of each one of the kings now as we get into the second part
of 1 Kings. We will be going back and forth between 1 Kings and 2 Chronicles. 1
Kings focuses on both the kings of
We want to look at a
framework for understanding God’s evaluation of leaders. We have to be careful
with this because God’s expectations of a leader in
Any religious system, if it
has any depth or complexity to it, is going to address the basic issues of
life. Politics is a key issue in life. It has to do with how people as a social
group are going to organise and govern themselves.
From that we see that there
will always flow some explanation of origin. Why do we think creation is such a
battlefield, and has become such a battlefield, in education? It is because if
we reject God we have to come up with some alternate explanation (myth) in
order to explain how people got here, how the earth got here. In that there is
something that exists we have to explain how it came into existence. There is a
view of origins in any significant religious system.
How we think about origins
will then impact how we think about human society and its institutions. We look
at the social institutions that we have, and if we are coming from a random
chance orientation, then we are going to come up against different conventions
that were chosen in order to make life work and make societies function in that
particular world, so they tend to treat them as all having equal value. They
look at what we call institutions as merely conventions, things that were
generated and created by man in a very pragmatic way in order to make society
function and work. So that government itself as an outgrowth of these social conventions
has its ultimate authority located within the people themselves—this is just
something that was developed by man in order to have some kind of order, though
sometimes in order to exercise power and control to dominate other people. Another
way to look at this is from a Christian viewpoint, and that is that these institutions
are a part of God’s original creation. He has established man and created him
as a social creature and therefore has embedded within man’s being certain ways
of doing things so that these become virtually social laws that cannot be
manipulated or changed without doing harm to society. So
different religious systems are all going to have different ideas about
marriage and family and government. And government is as integral to
Islamic theology as praying five times a day. That is why Islam is not simply
from the western vantage point a religion, it is a total way of life that
includes sharia
law and the type of government that it has—it is all one package. Whatever the
religious framework is going to be it is going to influence how we think about
society and social institutions.
The Judeo-Christian
Scripture, the Old Testament and the New Testament, provide a specific view of
human society as part of God’s creation. So that within these Scriptures, primarily
the Old Testament, we are told that God established and embedded certain
institutions within human society. They are not conventions, they didn’t
originate from the bottom up, but were established by a creator God from the
top down in order to give order and stability to man’s social relationships. When
these are honoured, whether it is by Christian or non-Christian, the society
will have a measure of stability and preservation and prosperity. When these
are violated the society will have instability and will self-destruct. For example,
there is no example of a matriarchal or polygamous society that ever existed
above a very primitive level. Internationalism flies in the face of what the
Bible teaches and we have to maintain national sovereignty, national identity.
There is tremendous pressure today from many of the elites in the world, from
government, to give up our national sovereignty to world courts, to UN courts,
to all of these kinds of things which run completely counter to what the Bible
teaches. Man will always try to find some sort of international body to do things
and it always has a religious background.
All of this goes back to the
We can derive two conclusions
about this. The first is, it is only reasonable for us to believe that the God
who created all things, created mankind to be male and female—this isn’t
accidental, he designed that a specific way, and this can’t be manipulated—and designed
the entire social concept because he made us to be relational creatures after
His image, and that would include marriage, family and government. Those three
things are all part of man’s being a social creature. So we can infer that he
would also address in Scripture principles related to each of these. Since he
is the one who designed and created marriage and family He is going to teach us
about marriage and family in His Word. It is the same with government. The
second conclusion is that as part of this it is also reasonable that if we
believe that God is the creator and that He created all things, that God
addresses principles of marriage for both believer and unbeliever and for
family for believer and unbeliever, that we should also have Him address principles
of government as well. And that goes back to our basic question: Can we divorce
politics from religion?
God is the foundation for all
thought, and if we are Christians and serious about the Word, and if we believe
that the Word of God addresses everything, then we have to be consistent with
that and not leave the Bible outside of the political science classroom. It is
part and parcel of our thinking about government but it also tells us how we
should handle this is relationship to people who are not believers, who are not
involved, who do not share the same beliefs that we do. We respect the fact
that they have other beliefs, we don’t impose Christianity on other people;
there is not a legislation of Christianity on other people.
The Old Testament gives us
several key passages that help to frame our understanding of the role of
government. The first is in Genesis chapter nine in the Noahic
covenant. It establishes the basic foundation for human government. God tells
Noah that now, if man sheds man’s blood, the person who commits murder should
have his blood shed also. He delegates the responsibility for capital
punishment to mankind. That is a very abbreviated statement,
but in order to fulfil that man had to figure out a way to do that in a just
manner. There had to be a system of laws developed for witnesses, to establish
the fact that a murder had taken place, laws for a just execution, etc. What
the Noahic covenant does is simply establish the
principle, so in order to carry out those principles there had to be the
development of a judicial system and government. But that doesn’t necessarily
entail a nation. There can be all kinds of groups of people that are self-governing
that are not nations. The idea of national distinctiveness comes along after
the
The next key passage we see
is found in Deuteronomy 17:14-20, and part of this becomes the Mosaic Law basis
for indicting Solomon. NASB “When
you enter the land which the LORD your God gives you, and you possess it and live in
it, and you say, ‘I will set a king over me like all the nations who are around
me, you shall surely set a king over you whom the LORD your God
chooses, {one} from among your countrymen you shall set as king over
yourselves; you may not put a foreigner over yourselves who is not your
countryman.
The king had to have an
attitude of humility toward the people. The people do not exist in order to
bring prosperity to the ruler. He is not to prosper himself at the expense of
the people. But this is what God warns them will happen. The king is not to use
his position to develop his own wealth and power. There is an embedded view in
Scripture that a genuine leader is a man that has a genuine humility and a
desire to serve the people. These verses are telling us that when the king
comes to the throne he is under the authority of God and He wants to remind him
of that, so the king has to consistently write out copies for himself so that
he will understand who the nation Israel is, what God’s purpose for them is, and
then he will understand his role. He is to do it with witnesses involved and be
observed by the Levitical priests who represent God. He is to “fear the Lord
his God,” and that is an important phrase. It is repeated many times in
Scriptures but we learn, for example, in Proverbs that the fear of the Lord is
the beginning of knowledge. It is that authority orientation and respect for
God and His Word that is the starting point for all knowledge. So the king is
to read the Word and study it daily so that he will fear the Lord and begin to
have wisdom. Then there is a second purpose stated in v. 20.
We have seen that Solomon
failed in all of this. He gets lifted up by pride and arrogance to that he
rejects God in the latter part of his reign, and so God is going to bring this
discipline upon him. The irony is that Solomon is the one who when he began his
reign was truly humble and manifested what the biblical kind of leader should
be like. But pride enters into it and he fails. In a broader sense what God is
going to demonstrate to
Leadership is related to
wisdom, the fear of the Lord, and to foolishness.
1 Samuel 8:10-16 NASB
“So Samuel spoke all the words of the LORD to the people who had asked of him a king.
This is what Solomon did
though the people were warned. 1 Samuel