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