Leadership
Character Qualities. 1 Kings 12
The question: Should religion
be divorced from politics? We can address that question from two perspectives.
One is from the perspective of the voter and the second would be from the perspective
of government. From the perspective of the voter you cannot divorce religion
from politics. If someone has a religious conviction, whatever that religion
may be, if they don’t allow that to address that the every-day issues and decisions of life, then it has no value to them, it is just
a façade. So from the perspective of the individual every value judgment,
whenever we say something is right or something is wrong, that brings to the
table an ethical system, a moral system, and we have some basis for saying why
something is right or why something is wrong. Is that informed by a view of the
divine institutions coming out of the Scripture? Is it personal preference, or
is it just motivated by one’s desire to avoid a recession, depression, or difficult
times economically because you really don’t want to lose everything you have
invested?
So what is the value system?
There is always a value system and that value system either comes out of the
Scripture (which is what makes it biblical—the foundation comes out of the
Scriptures and then you build on that; it is not because it seems to be
compatible with Christianity), God and His revelation, or out of human reason,
human experience, pragmatism, empiricism, etc. It comes down to what one’s
ultimate authority is. There really is no neutrality in human thought. All
human thought that involves any sort of value judgment, any sort of ethical
decision, always brings to the table some sort of view of ultimate reality—is
it personal, is it impersonal? If it is personal does that ultimate reality
communicate with man or is that ultimate personality
non-communicative—something like a deistic view of God that was popular in the
early stage of the Enlightenment.
When we think of it in these
terms we realise that for a Christian to come to a decision about who to vote
for in an election means that we have to analyse the particular leaders in a
lot of different ways. None of them are going to be perfect. We stop and look
at the various things that God has laid out. We think of it in terms of the
divine institutions, for example—individual responsibility, marriage, family,
nationalism. What God shows throughout the Old Testament history is that human
government will always fail; it is not the solution. The political solution is
no solution and cursed is the man who trusts in man. What God is showing, and
specifically when we get into the theocratic
As Solomon during the latter
years continued trying to impress people with the grandeur of his building
projects he was conscripting more and more labourers from the tribes. So he is
virtually taking away their means of production by bringing the men into
As we analyse the political
process which is part of the whole social structure of mankind we have to
realise that at the heart of the political process is people, and people are
all totally depraved, as Scripture says, and if it is not for the truth of
Bible doctrine which emphasises personal responsibility the tendency for human
beings is to always shift responsibility to someone else. In governmental
settings today in the modern world that fits within a model known as
socialism—the idea that government controls the means of production and
controls and redistributes the wealth. This destroys initiative, the desire to
accumulate wealth and to produce and go forward, and many other things. But at
the heart of this whole thing is the people and the leaders a nation gets comes
out of the same cultural morass as everybody else. So we tend to get the
leaders that we deserve because they come out of the same pot that the rest of
us are in.
In 1 Kings chapter
twelve we see an emphasis on the character of the leader, and how important the
character of the leader is. We can see a contrast between Solomon’s son
Rehoboam, who will succeed him on the throne, and Solomon. In 1 Kings 10 we saw
the grandeur of Solomon’s empire because of God’s blessing. It was not through
taxation; he didn’t build this kingdom on the backs of the people. God blessed
him and the nation was prosperous because his heart was totally devoted to the
Lord. But when his heart turned away from God and he began to do evil in the
sight of the Lord—defined in context as open idolatry, which is treason against
God—God brought him under discipline. Now to maintain the façade of affluence and
in order to keep that veneer up he is going to maintain his affluence on the
backs of the people. So he is increasing the load that he is putting on the
people in terms of financial taxation as well as the demand for more and more
labourers. He had to keep up the façade that God is still blessing them when in
fact God is no longer blessing them and has announced the judgment on the
nation through His own revelation and then the prophet Ahijah
to Jeroboam who is one of the key leaders in labour force in the tribes from
the north.
A character comparison from
what we know of Solomon and Rehoboam. First of all, Rehoboam is much older when
he comes to the throne than Solomon was. Solomon was probably somewhere near
the age of 20; he’s young. That is something to notice because youthfulness and
the naivety of inexperience of the young is a theme within this particular
chapter. Rehoboam is 41 when he comes to the throne, not far from the age that
Solomon was at when Solomon began to get away from the Lord. Rehoboam is older
and should be wiser and should have more experience. But he doesn’t. He is
arrogant; he is self-centred; he makes, as a result, foolish decisions. That
comes because he is not oriented to God. His heart is not for the Lord at this
point.
The second thing in
comparison that we see is that Solomon listened to the counsel of his fathers.
Cf. 1 Kings 2. He is teachable, he has humility, he recognises his own
limitations, and he has objectivity. By the time we get to 1 Kings 3:7 we see
that he is humble toward God. NASB “Now, O LORD my God,
You have made Your servant king in place of my father
David, yet I am but a little child; I do not know how to go out or come in.” He
asked God for wisdom and skill in leading his people. So we see that there is a
heart for leadership there and he understands that his leadership is servanthood. That is a key element because Rehoboam is
going to reject that. Solomon understood that at the heart of leadership is
that a king is serving God and serving his people.
Solomon’s priorities show
that he is focusing on God. He wanted to build the temple for God in
What makes the difference
between Solomon as a great king and Rehoboam as a poor king is the spiritual
factor. 1 Kings chapter twelve shows us the issues related to leadership and
the individuals involved. A number of important principles are pulled out of
verses 1-24 which are often thought to be the main idea here—listening to the
elders instead of the young men, and some other things. But that is not the main
point that the writer of 1 Kings is trying to make. He is trying to show as
part of his broad argument through 1 & 2 Kings that as based on the Mosaic
Law God blesses the nation that is in obedience to Him and is keeping the
contracts, the covenant that God made with them, and that God will bring
judgment on the nation that disobeys Him, and the most egregious form of disobedience
is idolatry. All of this goes back to our understanding of Deuteronomy and the
Mosaic Law. The fundamental lesson through all of this is related to God’s
discipline of
One of the key contrasts
between Solomon and Rehoboam has to do with wisdom. Solomon is wise; Rehoboam
is foolish. Proverbs 1:7 NASB “The fear of the LORD is the
beginning of knowledge; Fools despise wisdom and instruction.” The starting point
is this fear, this respect for God as the sovereign ruler of His creation. That
is what the fear of the Lord really means. It is a
fearfulness but it is also a respect. It is that recognition that if I
disobey God He will lower the boom. Once there is that respect for God’s
authority that is when we really begin to learn and that is the basis for
wisdom. In contrast, fools despise wisdom and instruction. We see that with
Rehoboam, he despises the wisdom and instruction that comes from the elders.
Another key passage to look
at would be Psalm 11:10 NASB “The fear of the LORD is the
beginning of wisdom; A good understanding have all those who do {His commandments;} His praise endures forever.” That is the idea
that James has of practicing what we learn from the Word of God. Those who hear
should be doers, implementers of what they learn.
Proverbs
Proverbs
Psalm 19:7-10 is a tremendous
meditation on the value of God’s Word. NASB “The law of the LORD is perfect,
restoring the soul; The testimony of the LORD is sure,
making wise the simple.
The contrast is in Psalm 14:1
NASB “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God’.” This is
not talking about some overt atheist; this is talking about the person who in terms of their inner thought life, how they approach life,
are functional atheists. It could be said that perhaps ninety per cent
of people who go to a Christian church on a Sunday morning are functional atheists,
because they don’t live as if God has actually spoken to every area of their
life. They lives as if there is no God. But there is a
God, so they are foolish because they don’t have the fear of the Lord. So the
fool is not the unbeliever, the fool is the person who is living in terms of
his inner thought life, his inner view of reality, his human viewpoint thinking
which is based on non-biblical assumption.
Proverbs
Proverbs
Proverbs 15:5 NASB
“A fool rejects his father’s discipline, But he who regards reproof is
sensible.” Solomon had guided Rehoboam as a young man but now he rejects the teaching
of his father in his early years and he rejects the guidance of his father’s
counsel. In contrast, the wise person is the one who regards reproof.
Romans