2 Samuel Lesson 80
Solomon Chosen to Reign – 1 Kings 1
Turn to 1 Kings 1; last week we finished with 2 Samuel. For the next few weeks we will finish up
various loose ends in David’s life. There
are some chapters in Kings and some in Chronicles that are necessary to study
before we can conclude with the life of this man. The first two chapters of Kings we will study
tonight and next week, and these complete historically David’s life. In other words, by the time we finish with 1
Kings 2 we will have Solomon on the throne and the great dilemma of the book of
Samuel will be solved. Remember Samuel
ends with only the promise of God; the promise has not yet been fulfilled, and
the mystery is in the ebb and flow of politics in the royal city of
Now there is apparently only man left that is apparent to the nation,
Adonijah. He is the one who is in the
public limelight. It certainly, from the
human viewpoint, looks like Adonijah will be the man who sits on the throne;
Adonijah, the brother of Absalom, Adonijah who was as handsome as his brother
was, who has all the great leadership characteristics of Absalom, certainly
Adonijah must be the one. So in 1 Kings
1 we have the great aborted coup of Adonijah, when Adonijah attempted to seize
power and was defeated. And then to
everyone’s surprise, it wasn’t Adonijah but it was a young boy by the name of
Solomon.
Because you were so familiar with the Scripture you tend to…oh well, I
already know what’s going to happen. And
so therefore that being your attitude you misread 2 Kings and you misread the 1st
and 2nd chapters of 1 Kings.
You have to forget what you know about Solomon to appreciate this
narrative. Put everything out of your
mind that you know about Solomon; all you know is that there’s a baby in the
royal palace called Solomon, that he’s grown up to adolescence and he’s there,
but that’s all anyone knows, it’s just Solomon.
There are many other sons of David, he’s just one of many. He’s playing, he’s not the handsome man that
Adonijah was, he’s not the handsome man that Absalom was. From the human point
of view he’s a nobody and he’s a dark horse, he’s way in the back, no one
notices.
Now that’s the historic situation when we begin 1 Kings 1. “Now David was old and stricken in years; and
they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat, [could not get warm].” That’s the King James for a circulatory
impairment. David was seventy years old
at this time. This is an unusual thing;
we can deduce his age from 2 Samuel 5:3 which tells us his age when he began to
reign, and 1 Kings 2:11 which tells us how long he reigned. So if you combine 2 Samuel 5:3 and 1 Kings
2:11 you obtain the age of David at seventy.
The interesting thing about this verse 1 and the diagnosis shows us
something about David’s body. David, having
an impaired circulation throughout his body shows the effect of God’s
discipline in his life.
Turn to Psalm 32; there were three Psalms that David wrote that
particularly describe his long period of carnality. In Psalm 32:3 he describes the fact that
because his conscience had been violated, and a violated conscience lets itself
be manifest first through the mind and when we put our conscience out of our
mind over and over and over, then the conscience begins to act on our emotions,
and when this doesn’t get our attention then our conscience begins to work on
our body through psychosomatic failure.
And sure enough, in Psalm 32:3 when David was in a period of extended
carnality he says: “When I kept silence,” that is when he failed to acknowledge
the conviction of the Holy Spirit in his conscience, “my bones waxed old
through my screaming [roaring] all the day long,” in other words, David was in
constant pain, twenty-four hours a day he was in constant pain and he could
have gone and gotten the best tranquilizer available and it still wouldn’t
solve his problem. Just like many
Christians today are getting drugs and psychotherapy and going and paying
hundreds and hundreds of dollars in doctors bills when there’s nothing wrong
with them physically at all; what’s wrong with them is they’re in defiance
against the authority of God’s Word, and if they would straighten up their life
and bring it into conformity with God’s Word they would save hundreds of
dollars; that’s just the economic benefits.
Verse 4, “For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me; my moisture is
turned to the drought of summer,” in other words, he experienced during this
time tremendous dehydration of his body.
Now apparently the long time affliction of this coupled with later sin
in his life led to a collapse as an older man of the circulatory system. And so in 1 Kings 1:1 he has a tremendous
illness. It’s a tragic picture, a
picture that compares graphically and very sadly with David as a young
man. Remember when we dealt with David
as the young boy, that young, red-headed smart, intelligent, skilled soldier,
with the Goliath episode in 1 Samuel 16-17, he was the picture of masculinity,
the picture of handsomeness, the picture of physical strength. And from that
glorious picture as the king, as the type of Christ, now in 1 Kings 1 we find
him dying as a decrepit old man.
The first four verses of this chapter are deliberately designed to show
us a no-holds barred picture of David’s physical deterioration. These first four verses are an introduction
to the attempted coup by Adonijah. They
are put in here to explain what is going to happen beginning in verse 5, so
take these verses as introductory material which must be covered in order to understand
why the coup was attempted. So he had a
circulatory impairment.
Verse 2, “Wherefore, his servants said unto him, Let there be sought for
my lord, the king, a young virgin; and let her stand before the king, and let
her cherish him, and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord, the king, may get
warm.” I notice everyone is paying
attention to Scripture tonight. But the
Word of God covers every area and every detail of life and unfortunately for
those of you who have a little prissiness, this is one of those times, so
you’ll have to either tune out or go on.
Verse 2 was a standard treatment in the ancient world for circulatory
impairment. It sounds odd, but this was
used and you can refer to it in the physician’s book, Gallen, he along with
Hippocrates, were one of the two most outstanding physicians of the ancient
world. And in Gallen’s work you have an
exposition of this method; it’s not at all strange when you know ancient
medicine. Their thinking was very
simple, if you can’t get circulation started, have a little sex, and that’s the
whole treatment pure and bluntly.
Verse 2 is simply to get one of the best girls in all of Israel to
seduce David and that way you’ll improve his circulation. Now that sounds funny and it is from our
point of view, but the point was that… this does work incidentally, you can’t
become sexually aroused without your circulation going, you heart starts going,
and so obviously you’re going to have an improvement in circulation. So this was the way they used it. Now let’s see what they did.
In verse 2, “Let there be sought for my lord, the king, a young virgin,”
and she was to be picked out, they had a beauty contest, a sort of Miss Israel
contest and any girl could enter from Dan to Beer-sheba, and she had to
minister to him; the ministry included many things. In verse 2, the last part, “let her lie in
thy bosom” includes sexual intercourse, that was one of her jobs, that was
understood, and you entered this particular beauty contest you didn’t get a
scholarship, you got a pass to the king’s harem, that was the prize, and most
young girls liked it, not that she was so thrilled about David at age 70 and
she probably being 20, but rather the idea was that by this she attained access
to the royal court, and there were a lot of very healthy bachelor prospects in
the royal court at this time; in fact, Adonijah takes very interesting note of
this particular girl who wins the beauty context.
But she’s to do more than just have sex; she’s also to “cherish him,”
the word means to constantly minister to him, that means as his personal maid,
take care of him. David is bedridden at this point. From this point forward in Scripture in the
chronology of David’s life, he dies as just a bedridden victim, a very tragic
ending to a man who had so much promise.
So she is t take care of him and be his personal nurse and his
mistress. It is total medical care.
Verse 3, so they run the beauty contest, “So they sought for a fair
damsel throughout all the borders of Israel, and [they] found Abishag, a
Shunammite, and brought her to the king.
[4] And the damsel was very fair,” except the Hebrew reads, “she was
beautiful—(dash) very much so,” she in other words was the outstanding young
female of all the Hebrew girls, Abishag, she was the winner, and so “she
cherished the king and ministered to him;” and then in verse 4, people who have
misinterpreted Scripture argue and say see, there’s nothing bad intended
here. They miss the whole point of this
passage. The last part of verse 4 should
not be a “but,” it should be an “and,”
“and the king knew her not,” in other words, in other words, David is
impotent, that’s the point of the passage, and that is why the first four
verses are put in here.
And this is what leads to the attempted coup. In the ancient world two things signaled the
collapse of a regime; one was famine, if you study the Ugaritic literature, the
king Keret, in the myth of Keret, has a famine and the famine shows that the
king has collapsed in his ability to provide prosperity for the people, and a
king that is impotent cannot carry a dynasty.
And so the image of a famine and impotence is very, very important. Now we’ve already seen how David dealt with
the problem of famine, and this, because it was a famine, also was an argument
the Ancient Near Eastern religions around about Israel. For them famine was doom, for David famine
could be reversed. But in verse 4
impotency is not reversed. And here we
have the result of a –R learned behavior pattern; David and Solomon and the men
in his family were born with tremendous libido; they had libido’s that wouldn’t
quit. Solomon had a thousand women, it
wasn’t just politics; Solomon had one of the greatest harems of the ancient
world. David obviously is picture in
passage after passage of Scripture with a great libido. Now here’s the irony, because David would not
sanctify himself in this area God took it away, and this is what happened. Now David, at age 70, is a man who cannot be
aroused by the most beautiful female girl in all of Israel. [tape turns]
The most beautiful woman, dedicated to sexually arouse this man, and
David cannot be aroused; this is the sexual death of David and that sexual
death of David is a mirror of his spiritual life. He is still a saved man, he hasn’t lost his
salvation but deep damage has been done to his physical body by his behavior
pattern. And this is how God works, we
see it in Romans 1, we see it in all areas, when particularly in the area of
sex people do not conform to God’s standards, they either wind up losing
everything or going into abhorrent behavior patterns. And David dies impotent. It is a most marvelous and complete contrast
with David in 1 Samuel 17. When all the
Jewish girls would come out and they would sing hymns as David marched with the
army, “Saul has killed his thousands, David his ten thousands,” every girl in
Israel would have a photograph of David back in 1 Samuel 17, but not now, this
is just the way of [can’t understand word] by the Holy Spirit in
Scripture.
Now beginning in verse 5 you have the immediate reaction. The king has become impotent; this was a
matter of public knowledge at that time.
It would be voiced abroad; first the people in the court would know
about it, then it would leak to the outside, and finally it would circulate
through all the royal house and royal family.
And this is why in verse 5 it says “Then
Adonijah, the son of Haggith, exalted himself,” this means he is now going to
claim the throne for himself. Now to
show you that he is out of line with the Word of God, turn back to 2 Samuel
12:25. I want to prove from these
Scriptures that of all the sons of David, Solomon had been picked out by God
from the very beginning. Now this wasn’t
obvious; it is to you because you know how the story ends, so the drama of the
story is hard to keep because all of us know how the story winds up. But as I’ve said before, forget how the story
winds up for a moment; pretend you don’t know how it winds up. All you know is that you see the sequence of men,
who from the human point of view look like the
right man to succeed David.
In 2 Samuel 12:25 you have the only mention of Solomon in all of Samuel,
just one little verse, but that verse tells us a lot indeed. “And he send word by the hand of Nathan, the
prophet;” that’s God sending by the hand of Nathan the prophet, “and he called
his name Jedidiah, because of the LORD.”
That is God’s name to Solomon; Solomon is a name apparently David gave
him, it comes from Shalom, peace, but this is the name that he was given by
God. Kings were given many names, the
word for this, there’s a titulary, every king had a titulary or a set of
titles; this is what Isaiah 9 is, in Handel’s Messiah, “thou shalt call Him
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace and so on;
that is Christ’s titulary, and every king had one of these. Every king had one of these; this is the
first name on Solomon’s titulary, and it means “beloved of God.” So the fact that first the baby is named by a
prophet should clue us there’s something special about this child. Secondly, the kind of name given to the
child, that he is particularly beloved of the Lord.
Now in 1 Chronicles 22 we have another notice that it was Solomon, not
Adonijah, that was in line for the throne.
This is David and this is a passage we will study in a few Sundays,
David setting up the temple worship. In
verse 6 it says, “Then he [David] called for Solomon,” now all his other sons,
apart from Amnon and Absalom, the other sons were living at this point. Adonijah was certainly alive, but it’s only
Solomon that he calls. “Then he called
for Solomon, his son, and charged him to build an house for the LORD God of Israel.
[7] And David said to Solomon, My son, as for me, it was in my mind to build an
house unto the name of the LORD my God. [8] But the word of the LORD came to
me, saying, Thou hast shed blood abundantly, and hast made great wars; thou
shalt not build an house unto My name, because thou hast shed much blood upon
the earth in My sight. [9] Behold, a son shall be born to thee, who shall be a
man of rest; and I will give him rest from all his enemies round about; for his
name shall be Solomon, and I will give him peace and quietness unto Israel in
his days.” By the way, that shows the
name Solomon apparently came through David but it was also given by God. [10, “He shall build an house for My name;
and he shall be My son, and I will be his father, and I will establish the
throne of his kingdom over Israel forever.”]
Verse 11, “Now, my son, the LORD be with thee; and prosper thou, and
build the house of the LORD thy God,” so it was obvious for years that Solomon,
not Adonijah was the man.
Now turn to 1 Kings 1:5, you are witnessing an attempted coup d’etat, an attempted overthrow of
the government, and this overthrow is directly contrary to the stated Word of
God. So “Adonijah, the son of Haggith,
exalted himself, saying, I will be king; and he prepared chariots and horsemen,
and fifty men to run before him.” Sound
familiar? That’s exactly what his brother did, Absalom. Verse 6, “And his father had not displeased
him,” this means that David apparently did not know it, again verse 6 shows you
the tremendous danger the throne was in.
This is to dramatize how close God’s promise came to not being
fulfilled. It’s just hanging here by a
thread. Don’t get to so hyper Calvinist
on sovereignty that you think that here’s God’s sovereign decree and it just
kind of goes on like a tank. God’s
sovereignty is so great in history, and is so inter [can’t understand word]
with volition that it just jumps from point to point to point to point, from
one crisis to the next. The point is, it
gets down there to the promised event, but until it does it often looks like
God’s promise is never going to come to pass, never. And this is one of those things.
In verse 6, his father not only has circulatory impairment, not only is
impotent, but his father at this point has essentially abdicated from holding
that kingdom together. He’s obviously
absented himself from the political process, he’s totally in the dark what’s
going on in this country. He’s confined
to the bed, and his whole G2 system broke down here. And verse 7 tells us another little
development in this coup; “And he conferred with Joab,” now alas, you find
these men, men that we have looked up to through this whole book, finally at
the end, they too go into carnality.
“Joab, the son of Zeruiah, and with Abiathar, the priest,” Abiathar was
David’s G2, remember the man that he left in the temple to spy on Absalom when
Absalom took over Jerusalem; that was Abiathar.
So the man who was so loyal that he risked his life for David, he too
has gone over; the same with Joab. Now
how do we know these men are carnal; didn’t they just make an innocent
mistake. Not at all; the passage I
showed you from 1 Chronicles 22 was a passage that deals with temple worship;
anyone who was interested in worshipping God would have clearly known who was
entrusted to the temple. Now you have to
see the combination of religion and politics to understand what’s happening
here. Anyone who was interested in the
religion of Israel at that time would have been temple-centered in their
viewpoint. Anyone who was
temple-centered in their viewpoint would have known that Solomon was the
man. So when you see Joab and you see
Abiathar, you see two men who could care less for the worship of Israel, and
therefore worship of Jehovah. So that
tells us these men were spiritually out of it, they are carnal at this
point. They have completely followed the
political, totally divorced it from the area of religion and you never can do
this. There is no such thing as absolute
separation of church and state.
Verse 8, “But Zadok, the priest, and Beniah,the son of Jehoiada, and
Nathan, the prophet, and Shimei,” that’s not the clod that we met a few
chapters ago, it’s someone elsle, “and Rei, and the mighty men who belonged to
David, were not with Adonijah.” Now the
notice in verse 8 is given by the Holy Spirit to show us something; what must
you have to have an authentic king, functioning under the Mosaic Law? You have to have first a prophet who is a
king-maker, and apparently from this episode the priesthood also has a role. It just dawned on me, time and time again
I’ve taught that the king can’t be a king until a prophet anoints him; fine,
that’s where we get the word “Christ,” this is why the four Gospels in the New
Testament don’t begin with Jesus. The
four Gospels begin with another man, John.
Why? John is the prophet who
anoints Christ. So the four Gospels
begin with a prophetic king-maker. But
there’s something else that just dawned on me about John. Do you know what his tribe is? Levi.
John the Baptist was also a priest along with being a prophet. Now observe the ceremony because in chapter 1
you see how a king was installed and this is a prophetic view of the Lord Jesus
Christ when He comes.
“Bt Zadok, the priest,” so you have a representative of the priesthood,
“and Nathan the prophet,” so you have a representative of the prophets. Notice lacking in verse 7 is a prophet; you
have a priest there but you do not have any prophet. So the association of
Nathan the prophet in verse 8 on the side of Solomon decides the issue; it is
Nathan who will shift the scales in his favor.
Now before we leave verse 8 there’s one word we want to look at
carefully to appreciate history. And
this is one of those fine points of Scripture you can pass over it if you’re
too hasty, but I like to stop on some of these points because in my thinking
these are the fine points that prove the inerrancy of Scripture. One of the fine points about history that
proves the inerrancy of Scripture is that of all the tribes of Israel there was
only one who was singled out for a role in the millennium, a specific role, and
that was the Levites.
Now after 70 AD when Vespasian and Titus finished off the city of
Jerusalem and after the revolt of Bar Kokhba and the Jewish culture collapsed,
all during this time you lost all the genealogical records, thus if you talk to
a Jewish person today he doesn’t know his lineage, except one kind of Jew, a
Jew by the name of Levi, or Cohen, any person like that, they are of the tribe
of Levi. Now isn’t it interesting, it
just happened by chance do you suppose that over 20 centuries of time,
persecution in Russia, persecution in France, Spain, England, Germany, the
Jews, of all the different kinds of Jews and all the tribes, there’s been one
that has been preserved in their identity: the Levites. And we would explain that historical
empirical fact by the fact that of course that’s there because the Scripture
said Levites must be preserved for their identity in the millennium.
Now we’re going to carry that one step further. Out of Levi comes a family of Abiathar, and a
family of Zadok. The family of Zadok is
the one who is prophesied to be in the future temple. Turn to Ezekiel 44:15, because Zadok obeyed
the Word of God in his generation he was rewarded so that his seed will be
those Levites, now how they’re going to identify they’re of Zadok I don’t know,
but the Levites who are sons and great, great, great, great, great, grandsons
are the men we are studying, at this point they’re the ones that are going to
be picked up in Ezekiel 44:14, “But the priests, the Levites, the sons of
Zadok, who kept the charge of My sanctuary when the children of Israel went
astray from Me,” that’s referring to the passage we’re studying now, “they
shall come near to Me to minister unto Me,” in other words, when Jesus Christ
sets up the millennial temple there will be certain Jewish families picked up;
these Jewish families will be believers in the Lord Jesus Christ spiritually
and physically they will have the genes of Zadok, all because of the effect of
this one man. But that’s not all, not
only does the line of Zadok reach into the millennial kingdom, but we have
contemporary historical records back in Biblical days that shows that from this
point forward, which we can just date about 980 BC, from this point forward the
line of Zadok took over the temple.
We have various evidences of this; three evidences. The first evidence is the direct statement
that the high priests were all sons of Zadok until 171 BC when Antiochus
Epiphanies destroyed the priesthood in Jerusalem and put his own puppet on the
throne. But all up until that time, for
800 years the sons of Zadok reigned in direct fulfillment of this passage of
Scripture. Then we have another evidence
besides the obvious lineage of the high priests in Jerusalem, we have a little
place in Egypt, a Jewish ghetto, called Leon Topolis, and Leon Topolis lasted
until they were wiped out in they were wiped out in 70 AD, and all during the
time of this Jewish ghetto, they built themselves a little temple there, kind
of a little version of Jerusalem, and all the time that you have this
functioning Jewish community outside of the land, inside Egypt, you have the
sons of Zadok ministering in the temple.
And finally, in 1946-46 when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, and these
scrolls began to be translated and so on, there was one, the fragment of Zadok,
and sure enough, the Qumran communities priests were the sons of Zadok. So there’s a strong historical argument that
this person, Zadok, is a very, very critical person in the Old Testament
priesthood.
Back to 1 Kings 1, Zadok, verse 8 was the priest; here is where history
was made, when this man chose to obey the Word and not go with the popular
political uprising in his time. Nathan
we have already been introduced to, Shimei and Rei, these are men in the
army. Verse 9, Adonijah made a big, big
mistake. By the way, this is always how
God works, He works with Satan this way.
People on negative volition have always a massive amount of stupidity
that always gets them in trouble. Satan
thought he could kill Christ and he tried it, and he did; there’s only one
problem, in killing Christ he undermined his whole kingdom, a real smart
move. And this is how Satan always is
thwarted under God’s sovereignty. God
just lets him, the classic idea is give a man enough rope and he hangs himself
and this is how God deals with His enemies.
Well, Adonijah is no exception to the rule. He does what looks like is legitimate.
“And Adonijah slew sheep and oxen and fat cattle,” this is the standard
festival of coronation, then however, he had the wrong place for his party
because this party, here’s the city of David, the temple is going to be built
up to the north, and he has his little party down where everybody in the city
of David can see the party going on. That
isn’t too smart, particularly if you’re going to exclude people. If you invite the whole congregation that’s
one thing, but if you’re going to be selective, that’s another thing, and it
can be down right rude to have a party in front of everybody and bouncers at
the door that say you aren’t invited.
This man made the big mistake in verse 10 of not inviting certain people
who were looking down from the city of David, and heard all this going on. Obviously you don’t kill oxen and fat cattle
without making a little noise. And you
don’t have a mass of people drinking and carrying on, singing and so on,
without someone overhearing. So of all
people not to invite, guess gets excluded?
Nathan. Nathan the prophet, and
the prophet is the man who stands for the Word of God. He’s excluded. But you see, he’s only
standing hundreds of yards away, that’s the point. This party is going on about two football
fields length away from the city of David, a real bright location. [“Adonijah slew sheep…and invited all his
brethren, the king’s sons, and all the men of Judah, the king’s servants.
[11]But Nathan, the prophet, and Benaiah, and the mighty men, and Solomon, his
brother, he invited not.”]
So verse 11, Nathan begins to take action, and at this point we want to
explain something about a prophet. We
had a lot of questions, about a prophet writing canon, etc. I want you to notice something about normal
spirituality in the Bible. The tendency
in our time is to really think these guys were supermen. We see the word “prophet” and we think holy
mackerel, this guy, he went into a room and had God writing on the ceiling in
neon lights, I’d love to be a prophet, every day I could get a hot word from
God; God, what do you want? This kind of
thing. That’s the image a lot of people
have of a prophet, that these guys had unlimited access to God. Now I want to show you something that in this
entire incident Nathan doesn’t get one word from God. A prophet, most of the time, 99.9% of his
life, no word from God; he applies the Word like any other believer and when he
does get a word from God then it’s in addition to the canon of Scripture.
In verse 11 Nathan acts like you and I would have to act, he uses the
faith technique. The faith technique had
a resting and a doing side. Nathan
doesn’t just rest, because if he did, Solomon isn’t going to make it to the
throne. So Nathan is going to do
something, he’s going to take specific steps with Solomon’s mother, Bathsheba,
he’s going to start working around, but it’s not just doing either. Remember the rule to think about in your own
mind, to keep this thing balanced so you don’t slide off into sanctification by
works and completely drown out grace and faith, and yet at the same time you
don’t go into passivity and sit around and do nothing, wait for God to drop it
from heaven or something. You’ve got to
keep a balance and how to keep a balance is to think; doing is necessary but
not sufficient. It was necessary for
Israel to walk around the walls of Jericho, if they didn’t God wasn’t going to
collapse the walls, so it was necessary they do something. But the act in itself was
non-meritorious. The act in itself
didn’t collapse the walls of Jericho, God collapsed the walls of Jericho. So you do what is necessary but just keep in
mind what you’re doing isn’t half the story.
What you’re doing does not produce the results that are produced. You can study, you can teach the Word and so
on, and you can do a lot but you always have to keep in balance that what you
do is not sufficient for the job at hand; it never is.
But here Nathan starts to do something, [11] “Wherefore Nathan spoke
unto Bathsheba, the mother of Solomon, saying, Have you not heard that
Adonijah, the son of Haggith, does reign, and David, our lord, knows it not? [12] Now, therefore, come, let me, I pray
thee, give thee counsel, that you may save your own life, and the life of thy
son, Solomon. [13] Go and thee in unto King David, and say unto him, Did not
thou, my lord, O king, swear unto thine handmaid, saying, Assuredly Solomon,
thy son, shall reign after me, and he shall sit upon my throne? Why, then, does Adonijah reign? [14] Behold,
wile thou yet talking there with the king, I also will come in after you and
confirm your words.” Now all this sounds
very politically kind of mundane, you know, just kind of like some of the
dealing that goes on in Washington, looks likes lobbyists, and in fact that’s
what it is. This is nothing more than
normal lobbying; there’s nothing wrong with lobbying; lobbying is a legitimate
political process and Nathan’s using it here.
He doesn’t ask God, hey, hit David on top of the head with a bolt of
lightening and wake him up that Adonijah is having a party. Nothing spectacular like that at all, just
normal processes.
So Bathsheba goes into the king, and this is another one of those little
tragic notes in Scripture, if you wrote a book or portrayed this in drama this
would be a very interesting scene. [15]
“And Bathsheba went in unto the king into the chamber: and the king was very
old; and Abishag the Shunammite ministered” or was ministering “unto the
king.” The word “minister” here is a
participle which means the girl was in the bedroom with David, and Bathsheba
walks in. Now why do you suppose, it’s
not necessarily directly to the story to put that last part of verse 15 in
there; the story would have flowed very well to just say “Bathsheba went into
the chamber; and the king was very old.”
And then [16] “Bath-sheba bowed, and did obeisance unto the king. And
the king said, What wouldest thou?” You
could have gone on and not lost anything out of this story, or maybe the Holy
Spirit does want us to point out something.
Again you have this irony happen, because here’s Bathsheba, she’s
probably about a 50 year old woman at this point, and she walks into the
bedroom of this impotent old man, so different from the man who was her lover
many years ago, and what does she see, Abishag, the most beautiful girl in
Israel, in with her husband, and this refreshes her mind that her husband is
impotent. And all of this must have gone
on in her mind, and the Holy Spirit must want us to be conscious of it or He
wouldn’t have put this last part of verse 15 in the text, because as I said,
the story would flow very, very well without it. So when you see these extra little things
plugged into the text, that’s the way the Holy Spirit has of making us
understand these Bible characters as real people. Bathsheba must have bit her lip when she
walked in to that room, and she was pleading for her son, and she goes on. But that little notice, a little dig, all
right Bathsheba, this is the man you seduced, twenty or thirty years ago, now
look at him Bathsheba, look where he is, take a good look. It’s poetic irony, it’s the sin coming out
and finally people see the results.
Verse 17 and following shows how she asked for Solomon. [“And she said unto him, My lord, thou
swarest by the LORD thy God unto thine handmaid, saying, Assuredly Solomon thy
son shall reign after me, and he shall sit upon my throne. [18] And now,
behold, Adonijah reigneth; and now, my lord the king, thou knowest it not: [19]
And he hath slain oxen and fat cattle and sheep in abundance, and hath called
all the sons of the king, and Abiathar the priest, and Joab the captain of the
host: but Solomon thy servant hath he not called.”]
And in verse 20 we have another one of those interesting notes, it goes
with all the others we’ve seen about David and his relationship with
women. In verse 20, “And thou, my lord,
O king, the eyes of all Israel are upon thee, that thou should tell them who
shall sit on the throne of my lord the king after him. [21] Otherwise it shall
come to pass, when my lord the king shall sleep with his fathers, that I and my
son Solomon shall be counted offenders.”
See David is dying and he still hasn’t officially made Solomon king;
he’s procrastinating, he’s hesitating, apparently forgot about it. See, the man
has just lost all sense of political moxy, he lets dangerous political
movements build up in the nation, doesn’t do anything about them, doesn’t even
make clearly and officially Solomon as king.
David is obviously not in control of his senses, and obviously therefore
not in control of the kingdom. And
obviously therefore who must be in control; only the sovereign God who gave him
the Davidic Covenant.
See what the argument is here of 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, God is the
King of Israel, not David. You see David
blowing it all the time, chapter after chapter, he lets go, he doesn’t have
control over the process, and that’s to say yes, of course, David can’t have
control over the process, he’s only a finite man, what’s more, he’s a sinful
finite man and he just can’t get that control.
So she goes on, in verse 20, Bathsheba, again for the third time in
David’s life is a woman who confronts him at a very critical point.
Let’s review the three women who made great impacts on David at crises
in his life. This is the Biblical answer
to women’s lib, by the way. These
passages are arguments by the Holy Spirit to show where the woman fits in as an
’ezer, and where she is absolutely
necessary, and without her history would have become all fouled up. At three points in David’s life he is about
to blow the whole plan of God; at each of these three points, not even a
prophet of God comes on the scene, it’s a woman that comes on the scene. He goes to put blood on his hands, back in 1
Samuel 25, with a man by the name of Nabal, and this woman, Abigail comes out;
she confronted David in the most amazing passage of Scripture where it shows
this middle class wife talking to royalty, and how she turns the king around
without losing her femininity, she completely turns David around. The second time, he was involved in this
thing and finally Joab got the wise woman of Tekoa, and she came up and gave
David a parable and from that he took various actions in 2 Samuel; again, it
was a woman in the crisis hour that God used to speak to David, not a
prophet. Not a prophet, a woman! And now here again, his wife, Bathsheba. She is the only woman, apparently Nathan sees
this, but for some reason Nathan doesn’t walk in there and say hey, David
you’ve got to do this; what does Nathan do?
He sends Bathsheba in to do it for him.
I don’t know exactly what this says about David, whether there were
times when only a woman could approach him, I don’t know, but it does show
something about the role that women can have who know the Word of God, who can
submit to the authority of a man and at the same time use the Word of God to
influence that man toward godly behavior.
It is an art this is learned over many, many years. And many Christian women fall flat on their
face; either they start nagging some man in which case they drive him further
away from the Word of God, or they just go along with the man, whatever he
wants to do, regardless of the Word of God; they go one of two extremes but
these three women are examples. This is
a rare thing for Bathsheba, because she was, as women in the Bible go,
Bathsheba was kind of stupid and slow, and apparently she got to verse 20 only
because Nathan gave her a good briefing on what to say.
And then verse 22, “And, lo, while she yet talked with the king, Nathan
the prophet also came in,” he just happened
to walk in; obviously it’s a plan, it’s a clever politically produced
lobbying. [23] “And they told the king,
saying,” and Nathan goes through the same thing down to verse 28, “…Behold
Nathan the prophet. And when he was come in before the king, he bowed himself
before the king with his face to the ground. [24] And Nathan said, My lord, O
king, hast thou said, Adonijah shall reign after me, and he shall sit upon my
throne? [25] For he is gone down this day, and hath slain oxen and fat cattle
and sheep in abundance, and hath called all the king's sons, and the captains
of the host, and Abiathar the priest; and, behold, they eat and drink before
him, and say, God save king Adonijah. [26] But me, even me thy servant, and
Zadok the priest, and Benaiah the son of Jehoiada, and thy servant Solomon, hath
he not called. [27] Is this thing done by my lord the king, and thou hast not
showed it unto thy servant, who should sit on the throne of my lord the king
after him?”]
And finally in verse 28, David’s reciprocal relationship with his wife,
very interesting, Nathan has come into the bed chamber, apparently in the
course of Nathan’s entrance Bathsheba has removed herself. After David makes the decision, who does he
call into the room first? The woman to
whom he swore; so in verse 28, “Then king David answered and said, Call me
Bathsheba. And she came into the king’s presence, and stood before the
king.” And he makes a second oath to his
wife, verse 29, “And the king swore, and said, As the LORD lives, that hath redeemed
my soul out of all distress, [30] Even as I swore unto thee by the LORD God of
Israel,” that’s the past oath that he took to his wife, “saying, Assuredly
Solomon thy son shall reign after me, and he shall sit upon my throne in my
stead; even so will I certainly do this day.”
David takes action. And [31]
“Then Bathsheba bowed with her face to the earth, and did reverence to the
king, and said, Let my lord king David live for ever.”
Now the ceremony follows and we’ll just briefly look at a few points to
show you what, probably, will happen when the Lord Jesus Christ comes
again. Jesus Christ will come back to
this earth and He will be physically installed as the King of Israel. And the ceremony of installation will
undoubtedly parallel the ceremony of his great, great, great, great ancestor,
David. Let’s look at who will be
present. Let’s look at who will be
present. [32] And king David said, Call
me Zadok the priest, and Nathan the prophet, and Benaiah the son of Jehoiada.
And they came before the king. [33] The king also said unto them, Take with you
the servants of your lord, and cause Solomon my son to ride upon mine own mule,
and bring him down to Gihon.]
In verse 34, “And let Zadok the priest” so apparently there will be a
functioning priesthood at Christ’s coronation, Christ has been coronated at the
Father’s right hand but He’s also going to be coronated the King of Israel,
“and Nathan the prophet,” which shows you there will be a living prophet when
Christ returns, in this ceremony, “Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet will
anoint him there king over Israel,” and the word “anoint” is mashach, from which we get the word
Messiah. This is the word from which we
get the Greek Christos, it means let
us Christ the king, let us make him Christ, “and blow ye with the trumpet, and
say, God save king Solomon.” And this is
the shophar, the Jewish trumpet, and
they would blow it all over the land, it’s not just one trumpet, they have a
system of hills throughout the land, this is part of the defense system around
the city of Jerusalem, you have these various fortress cities on hills, and
they would blow the horn and the guards on the next hill would hear the horn
and they’d blow theirs, and finally it would just propagate all through the
land. So from this one place the horn
started blowing and then these horns would blow all over the nation, every
village would hear it within a matter of hours.
[35, “Then ye shall come up after him, that he may come and sit upon my
throne; for he shall be king in my stead: and I have appointed him to be ruler
over Israel and over Judah. [36] And Benaiah the son of Jehoiada answered the
king, and said, Amen: the LORD God of my lord the king say so too. [37] As the
LORD hath been with my lord the king, even so be he with Solomon, and make his
throne greater than the throne of my lord king David. [38] So Zadok the priest,
and Nathan the prophet, and Benaiah the son of Jehoiada, and the Cherethites,
and the Pelethites, went down, and caused Solomon to ride upon king David's
mule, and brought him to Gihon. [39] And Zadok the priest took an horn of oil
out of the tabernacle, and anointed Solomon. And they blew the trumpet; and all
the people said, God save king Solomon. [40] And all the people came up after
him, and the people piped with pipes, and rejoiced with great joy, so that the
earth rent with the sound of them.”
And before we leave this passage I want to point out something else that
David tells the people to do; in verse 33 Solomon is not to ride horses. Notice; what does it say in verse 33, “Take
with you the servants of your lord,” you see, Adonijah has all the horsemen, he
falls in the tradition of the Ancient Near East, all the Gentile nations would
exalt their king with horses; you “cause Solomon my son to ride upon mine own
mule,” David says, David would never ride, as king, in a celebration on a
horse; he always rode on a mule. Do you
know why? He was told to do so in
Deuteronomy 17, the King of Israel was never to have horses of his own, he was
to ride a mule, and the reason is that the mule was looked down upon, and the
king had to humble himself to ride the mule; the rest of the kings would all be
riding horses; the king of Israel, he rides a mule; ha-ha everybody would say,
and the king would have to humble himself to ride this mule. And this is why in the New Testament, what
does Jesus pick to enter the city of Jerusalem; He rides a mule. The claim that Christ was making as He rode
the mule into Jerusalem was that He was the Son of God, that was a Messianic
claim, not just that Jesus said He was the Messiah, but the fact that he rode
the mule should have tipped of anyone wise in the Old Testament that Jesus
Christ was right there, claiming to be the king of the nation as he rode the
mule. And you see the nation that day
had had Herod the great, they had had several Gentile rulers, they had Pilate,
they had all the Romans, the idea of some guy riding a mule just was so totally
foreign to the concept of political power and glory that they never realized
this kind of glory is grace and glory.
So after this, this obviously leads to a problem with the attempted
coup, in verse 41, “And Adonijah and all the guests that were with him heard it
as they had made an end of eating. And when Joab heard the sound of the
trumpet, he said, Wherefore is this noise of the city being in an uproar?” The party breaks up, all of a sudden people
are around drinking and hey, what’s this noise, somebody blowing a horn. Verse 41, that’s what it says, what’s the
noise. [42] “And while he yet spoke,” he
got the word, [“behold, Jonathan the son of Abiathar the priest came: and
Adonijah said unto him, Come in; for thou art a valiant man, and bringest good
tidings. [43] And Jonathan answered and said to Adonijah, Verily our lord king
David hath made Solomon king. [44] And the king hath sent with him Zadok the
priest, and Nathan the prophet, and Benaiah the son of Jehoiada, and the
Cherethites, and the Pelethites, and they have caused him to ride upon the
king’s mule: [45] And Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet have anointed him
king in Gihon: and they are come up from thence rejoicing, so that the city
rang again. This is the noise that ye have heard. [46] And also Solomon sits on the throne of
the kingdom. [47] And moreover the king's servants came to bless our lord king
David, saying, God make the name of Solomon better than thy name, and make his
throne greater than thy throne. And the king bowed himself upon the bed. [48]
And also thus said the king, Blessed be the LORD God of Israel, which hath
given one to sit on my throne this day, mine eyes even seeing it. [49] And all
the guests that were with Adonijah were afraid, and rose up, and went every man
his way.”]
And they tell him in verse 43 and in verse 50, “And Adonijah feared
because of Solomon, and arose, and went, and caught hold on the horns of the
altar.” This was the place where he’d go
to plead mercy, to plead forgiveness of sin from judicial authority. [51] “And
it was told Solomon, saying, Behold, Adonijah fears king Solomon: for, lo, he
hath caught hold on the horns of the altar, saying, Let king Solomon swear unto
me to day that he will not slay his servant with the sword. [52] And Solomon
said, If he will shew himself a worthy man, there shall not an hair of him fall
to the earth: but if wickedness shall be found in him, he shall die.” And so by verse 53 we have Solomon installed
on the throne. [53] So king Solomon sent, and they brought him
down from the altar. And he came and bowed himself to king Solomon: and Solomon
said unto him, Go to thine house.”
Now at this point, if you can free yourself from you over familiarity
with the story of David and Solomon, and you can free yourself enough from your
familiarity to recreate in your own mind the tension that has just been solved
by this chapter, you will see a graphic picture of the sovereignty of God’s
Word. God promised a son of David would
reign of God’s own choosing. That boy
had been picked out as a child in his eighth day, when he was circumcised, he
received his name. Since Solomon was
eight days old he was named to be the king.
No one, including even his father David, apparently realized it until
this last hour, or at least until the closing hours of his life when he made
the first oath to Bathsheba. And by 1
King’s 1 God’s promise has been fulfilled.
It’s not yet secure, chapter 2 is going to deal with some further events
that Solomon has to clean house a little bit to solidify his position, but here
again we have testimony that when God makes a promise to you, that promise will
come to pass, regardless of how it looks at the moment.
Shall we bow for prayer.