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.