10/21/2026
10-21-26 WEDNESDAY 1 Kings 14-15
Chapter 14. “Chronicles” is primarily a record of the Davidic kings of the southern kingdom of Judah. “Kings” is a record of the Kings of both Judah and Israel.
The Bible is clear that a person is a human being, created in the image of God, from the moment of conception. At that moment of conception, God endows each person with an eternal spirit for ‘God is Spirit [John 4.24 and John 1.9]”.
Plants have a body. Animals have a body and a soul. But Man, you and I, made in God’s image are body, soul, and spirit. We are SOUL [the you inside your body looking out through your eyes is soul: your mind, emotion, and will] living within a physical BODY with which we are able to navigate the physical realm. Only man is endued by God with an eternal SPIRIT with which we can perceive and navigate the spirit realm. John 1.4,9, says, “In Him (Jesus) was life; and His life is the light of men. …(He) is the True Light, Who lights EVERYONE who comes into the world.”
Several times in my life, I have been asked, “What happens to babies who die before reaching the age of accountability?” And more recently, “What happens to babies whose mothers have them killed before, or in some blue states even after, they are born?” My reply is simply that they go to heaven, where instantly they are fully-grown, mature humans just as Adam and Eve were the moment God created them. When they ask me on what I base that belief, I always refer them to the much better known passage about the death of David and Bathsheba’s first son [Bathsheba bore David five sons, including Solomon, the royal ancestor of Joseph, and Nathan, from whose line the virgin Mary would come]. When Bathsheba’s irst little baby boy lay sick and dying, David is fasting, lying in the dust, wearing sackcloth, his hair and skin smeared with tears and ashes, begging God to let the boy live, and not to punish the baby for the sin of his father.
When David sees his servants tip-toeing around and whispering, he says, “Has the baby died?” When they reluctantly and apologetically acknowledge ‘Yes,’ David gets up, bathes, goes in before the ark of God and worships. Then he came back to the palace and sat down to a big supper. Confused, one of his servants asked on behalf of all the servants, “Sire, when the baby was only sick, you fasted and prayed in sackcloth and ashes on your face before God; but when he died, you got up and washed and have set down to feast. Why?”
David explained, “I cannot bring my son back, but I will go to be with him.” David knew he was saved, not by being good, but by faith in the Messiah who would one day be born of his descendants to become sin for him and for all the men, women, boys and girls of all history, to pay our death penalty. He knew, by God’s grace, in spite of his sins, he would be in heaven one day, and he knew his baby boy would be there with him, too.
This passage in chapter 14, is, I think, similarly instructive. Jeroboam, 1st king of the northern kingdom of Israel, led his nation to worship golden calves, that he told his people was ‘yhwh, who brought you out of Egypt’. He even altered the scripture, as many do today, to fit his narrative. Before we are too hard on Jeroboam, we should remember he is not the first to represent ‘yhwh god’ as a golden calf. In Exodus 32.4-5, while Moses was walking with God up on Mt Sinai, Aaron, at the behest of the tribal leaders, took the gold earrings brought to him by the people “and made a molten calf, which he fashioned with an engraving tool. And they [tribal leaders] said, ‘This is your god, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.’ And Aaron built an altar before the golden calf; and proclaimed, ‘Tomorrow is a feast to yhwh!’
In response to his perversion of the gospel of God, the judgment of God was coming down on Jeroboam and his family, and was also coming on the northern nation of Israel; and like David 50 years earlier, Jeroboam’s baby boy had fallen sick, and the doctors could do nothing to make him better. In desperation, Jeroboam tells his wife to seek out Ahijah, the prophet, who twenty years earlier had told him he would one day be king. Jeroboam had lots of prophets [remember the old false prophet from yesterday’s reading?] but he knew they were nothing but paid stooges employed to keep the people from emigrating to Judah or from clamoring for reunification of David’s Kingdom. And at that moment of crisis Jeroboam needed a real prophet who would be able to pray for them, or at least tell them what would become of their baby. Jeroboam didn’t go himself, probably for security reasons, but also, because he may have figured after all the chances to repent God had given him, Ahijah would refuse him entry.
Think carefully through this story as you read it. Ahijah was old, near death, and blind as a bat. And though his body, his earthly tent was about to be folded up and discarded, his mind (soul: who he is) and his spirit (the image of God in him) were both vibrant and strong. Paul, toward the end of his life, said of himself, “Though the outward man is perishing, the inward man is renewed day by day!” That was Ahijah, too. God informed Ahijah that King Jeroboam’s wife had disguised herself (not that Ahijah could see it), and that she is coming to see you about their sick child. When she arrives, trying to change her voice and dressed in old clothes like a commoner, blind Ahijah calls her by her name and tells her that God has given him a heavy message to lay upon her. Not only will your baby boy die, he tells her, but God is going to see that every male of Jeroboam’s future descendants dies a violent death, till Jeroboam’s line is wiped clean from the face of the earth.
“So, go home, and the moment you reach your doorway, your baby will die!” But in v.13 Ahijah adds, “And all Israel shall mourn for him (your baby), and bury him: for he only of Jeroboam shall come to the grave, because in him there is found some good thing by YHWH, God of Israel.” What possible good thing could there be in the baby boy of such a wicked pagan king? It is the life and light that God put in him at conception. Don’t get me wrong, we all come into this world with a fallen nature received via our parents from our forefather Adam. But, because of what God would one day do, and has now done, for them and for us in Jesus, God also put life and light in EVERY PERSON who comes into the world.
When a baby is born, he instinctively knows how to hold his breath and swim! You have probably at one time or another seen a little baby swim class on TV where newborns are blithely swimming along underwater with their eyes open looking all around and smiling. It is so cool. However, if the babies’ parents do not get them into a pool in the first six months after birth, that innate swimming reflex goes away. Then a child has to be taught to swim and to overcome his fear of water.
Spiritually, I believe it is the same. Every person is born into the world knowing there is a God who loves them. And, if that innate knowledge is reinforced with songs and stories and actions by the baby’s parents, often a child will commit his life to the Lord at a very early age. For Ruth Graham, whose parents were missionaries, it was at such a young age she could never remember not belonging to her Savior and God. I was born on Thursday and was in church that next Sunday. I gave my life to God when I was 4-years-old! John the Baptist had come to faith in Jesus by the time he was six months old…still in his mother’s womb! I don’t know at what age it is that that innate spiritual understanding, if not fostered, ebbs away, but for Jerboam’s little boy, that time had not come. God is merciful and gracious.
One other thing to note from this passage, and many others like it that we have read, and many more that we will see in our walk through God’s word, is the absolute confidence the prophets had that what they were saying would SURELY come to pass, whether it was something that was to quickly happen, like Jeroboam’s altar splitting in two and the ash poured out (chapter 13), or the 2nd Coming of Jesus predicted by Daniel and Joel and Jeremiah that thousands of years later has yet to happen. The question is, “How did they KNOW what they were saying would really happen?” The answer is, “Faith comes by hearing, hearing the word of God.” When they heard God, whether it was just in the spiritual ear of their heart of hearts, or audibly, with their physical ears, as sometimes happened, or even when an angel showed up, or via a vision or a dream, they KNEW it was God. And the word they received caused faith in their hearts. They didn’t have to work it up or hope it was true; they KNEW IT WAS TRUE, because THEY KNEW IT WAS GOD!
There is not much instruction that I can give you about how to hear from God but this, Jesus said, ‘my sheep hear my voice, and they follow me.” That means that most of the time when we hear God it is because we are following him for our good and His glory. I have heard from God many times in my 75-years, but MOST of those times have been after I decided to put God first in my life, when I prioritized time with the Lord daily in His word. And every day when I opened God’s Word, I prayed, “Father, this is your boy Brian, and I am going to read this, and I am asking you to teach it to me, and whatever you tell me to do in here, with the help of the Holy Spirit, I will do it.” Most of the time for me, I receive text messages from God...the Holy Spirit sent, according to John 14, to lead me into all truth and to bring to my memory the things God teaches me when I need them, speaks a verse or a whole passage of TEXT of scripture to my mind and my heart.
Another thing I have observed is when the devil talks to you, he imitates your voice so you think those bad thoughts are your own. But when God talks to you your spiritual ear will recognize plainly that it is God speaking [just a sure as you know who is speaking when you hear your parent’s voice or that of your spouse or your child] and faith immediately comes to your heart...and you KNOW. You won’t have to hope it is true; you will feel peace and His presence, and you will know it is true, and you WILL see miracles. We will talk more about hearing God as we progress through this study, but be assured God WANTS to talk to you. But you will seldom hear Him unless you want Him to talk to you because you are ready to follow Him and do whatever it is He tells you to do. It might be GOD telling you to walk around the city each day for seven days; or it might be to send the choir out to face the enemy; it might be to attack 135,000 Midianites with just 300 men blowing trumpets and holding up torches; it might be...whatever. God challenges us, “Ask of Me and I will answer you and show you great and mighty things thou knowest not [Jeremiah 33.3].” If you have faith that comes from clearly hearing God, you will say to the mountain, go jump into the sea and it WILL...not because of any power on your part, but because God told you to say it...and God, for whom nothing is too hard...makes it happen. Just as Elijah stepped back from that altar on Mt Carmal and lifting his eyes and hands to heaven said, “God, show them I did this because You said to.”
WHOOOOOOM!!! Immediately fire fell from heaven and consumed the ox, the wood, the stones of the altar the water in the ditch around the altar and the ground beneath the altar!!!
This is the way Jesus lived. He said, “I do only what I see My Father do, and say only what My Father tells me to say.” On the Day of Pentecost, Peter explained, “Jesus of Nazareth, a man, approved among you by signs and wonders that God did by Him.” Faith is not something you can work up by trying hard to believe. Faith ‘Comes by hearing God’s word.’ But we have to make time to sit at God’s feet and hear his word each day.
From the division of the nation after the death of Solomon in c.930BC, Rehoboam reigned 17 years and died at age 58 or 59, and his son Abijam reigned over Judah in his stead; but Jeroboam, King of Israel, reigned five years longer, before he died, and his son, Nadab, took his throne.
Rehoboam, King of Judah was almost as wicked and back-slidden as Jeroboam, and according to verse 24, at least part of the corruption of Judah was due to the LGBTQ lobby, who, to justify their sins, perverted the word of God. V.25: Because of Rehoboam’s apostasy and idolatry, just as we saw in Chronicles, the Egyptians invaded and looted all the vast store of wealth Solomon had amassed in all his sad life long.
Our founding fathers heeded this warning in Scripture, and they knew if they did not fund public education to teach children to read the Bible, the same apostasy that happened in Judah and Israel would happen in America. President Thomas Jefferson, in calling for an end to slavery, said [engraved on his Memorial in DC], “The God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis: a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God; and they are not to be violated but with His wrath?” That’s why it was unconstitutional until the 20th Century to allow public tax money to be given to any school or college that did not teach the Bible. It was considered a matter of National Security!
But by the 60’s the Marxist left had so infiltrated our government and public schools and higher education that they succeeded, not in taking religion out of our schools, but in replacing Christianity and capitalism, upon which our nation was founded and prospered, with the religion of our enemies, with secular humanism and socialism both based on the mythical foundational doctrine of Darwinian evolution and they used your tax dollars to do it. Abraham Lincoln said, “The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” Today the godless globalist, socialist, leftists have not only infiltrated, but have taken over the Democrat party, and they are working day and night to destroy the three-Cs: Christianity, the Constitution, and Capitalism…on their way to establishing a One World governmental dystopian disaster we will see revealed in the Book of Revelation.
Chapter 15. Rehoboam’s son, Abijam, was as bad or worse than his dad, and he reigned only three years before he died (it appears it may have been from wounds he sustained in battle against Jeroboam, King of Israel).
When Abijam died, his son, Asa, followed him to Judah’s throne. But in his faith and his reign Asa followed in the footsteps of his great-great-grandfather, David. And one of the first things he did to restore the nation was to restore the home, and he did so by rejecting the LGBTQ agenda and by enacting Judah’s Marriage Amendment (v.12). He tore down all the idols and pagan worship centers his dad, and granddad had set up, and even banished his mother forever from his palace because she refused to leave her idolatry.
This is a place where Chronicles gives us the most information. You will remember from our study of Chronicles that Asa came to the throne of a nation that had been looted and brutalized. And he made Judah GREAT AGAIN. Asa determined to follow YHWH, and to return his nation to God’s law and order, and justice for all, and a free market, and there was an amazingly quick economic turnaround! This passage shows, if you put the right people in office, safety and prosperity can quickly recover.
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Asa rebuilt Judah’s military, and led her in revival, till he felt strong enough to stop paying tribute to Egypt. Then Pharaoh came up with an army of a million, yet because his way pleased YHWH, Asa won a miraculous victory and all Judah, especially Asa, was greatly enriched by the spoils.
But chapter 16 skips that great story and jumps to Asa’s latter days, 36 years into his 41-year reign, when Baasha, king of Israel was fortifying Israel’s southern border [he was erecting an iron curtain to keep the people of Israel to move south to Judah because of how much better life was in ‘One nation under God’ down in Judah. Baasha was also using his fortifications as a staging area for attacks on and into Judah.
Instead of seeking YHWH...not good...Asa, now wealthy and experienced, took money out of his own account and out of the temple treasury to bribe the King of Syria to attack Israel’s northern border. When Baasha, down on his southern border attacking Judah, heard he was under attack on his northern border, he was forced to abandon his fortifications and to lead his army north to fend off Syria. So, Asa was easily able to mop up any resistance on his northern border, and he used all the stones and timbers Baasha had amassed to build fortified cities for himself. He returned to Jerusalem to great fanfare and accolades, and all the media outlets were praising his wisdom and power.
But, we saw in Chronicles, God sent the prophet, Hanani (2 Chronicles 16), to tell Asa how foolish he had been. For if he had only asked YHWH for help, he would not only have conquered Israel and unified the nation, but he would have also been able to defeat Syria and extend his empire all the way to the Euphrates River!!!!!!! When the Bible says, “God, Himself, will wipe away all tears from our eyes,” I think in part those tears will be because we will see clearly the life we could have lived, had we not leaned so often upon our own understanding. If we had only in all our ways acknowledged Him, He would have directed our paths, and would have lavished us with all the blessings Jesus died to make available to us, exceedingly abundantly above all that we could ask or think!
V.23 reports that foot cancer killed him, but in Chronicles we are told this disease was from God, because instead of REPENT at the words of Hanani, he had God’s prophet locked up. And he arrested any who would speak a word in Hanani’s defense. So God diseased him in his feet, but in his pride, Asa stubbornly refused to repent because he had all the money he needed to bring in the world’s best physicians who treated him with the latest in scientific technology… till he died! A sad, sorry, end to a once great king!
