Thoughts on 1 Kings 14

Today's reading: 1 Kings 14; 1 Timothy 1-2

I know that this is not the point of 1 Kings 14, but there is something in this chapter that I think is important context for how we think about God's judgements on people in the Old Testament.

The chapter today starts off telling us that Jeroboam's son, Abijah, fell sick, leading Jeroboam to send his wife to the prophet Ahijah to find out what would happen to him. Presumably this was not a common illness that he would be expected to recover from with time given that Jeroboam sent his wife into enemy territory to consult Ahijah about it. What's interesting about Ahijah's response though is that as he pronounced God's judgement on Jeroboam and his family for all of their sin and rebellion against God, he also told Jeroboam's wife that Abijah would die of his illness because the Lord was pleased with him.

That seems a little backwards, doesn't it? If the Lord is pleased with Abijah, shouldn't He heal him of his illness rather than letting him die from it?

This is actually a really important concept for us to understand if we are going to think well about God's judgements on people in the Old Testament.

One common issue people bring up with the God of the Bible is the killing of innocents we find in the Old Testament. There are a number of places this objection can be raised, such as the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the conquest of Canaan where God told Israel to kill everyone, leaving none alive in the cities, etc. Some places where children are killed it is not at the express command or action of God and could be written off as human folly, but there are other places where God unequivocally commands or causes it. So what are we to do with that?

God's comment about Abijah in our chapter today gives us an important clue to that answer.

From our perspective, death is the ultimate judgement as it signals the end of life, but that is far from God's perspective. This life is only the beginning, and after we die, there is still eternity to go, either lived in God's presence or cast out from it. Our experience is limited to our physical lives, and so our physical lives are what we most value, but God is in a position to recognize accurately that the short time we have in this life, whether 5 years or 100 years, isn't even a blip on the ultimate timeline of our lives. More importantly, knowing that this life is only a blip, God also knows infinitely better than we do what this life means for how we will spend eternity.

In the case of Abijah, God is going to bring bloody destruction on the household of Jeroboam, and Abijah is spared from that fate. More important than preserving him from the physical suffering he would likely end up enduring, Abijah died while he was pleasing to God. We aren't told how old Abijah was, but I assume he was young. Being raised by Jeroboam, he would be led astray to worship the false idols his father had created, meaning that whenever God's judgement came down on the household of Jeroboam, Abijah would have died, like the rest of his family, in rebellion against God and been condemned to hell for it. But by dying before he had been led down this road, while he was pleasing to God, Abijah gets to enjoy an eternity with the Lord that he likely would have lost if God had spared him from his illness.

The reality of the situation is that while people decry the loss of "innocent life" in the bible, those deaths could really have been the greatest possible mercy the "innocents" could ever have received. In a place and culture like Sodom or Gomorrah, would the kids in those cities have been raised to faith in Yahweh, or would they have gone the way of their parents and neighbors into condemnation? If God had only killed the adults in these judgments, those innocent kids would have been left alone with nobody to care and provide for them and likely would have died or been kidnapped by people from other cities. So were there innocent children swept up in the broader judgements of peoples and countries? Certainly. But we can't miss the fact that, from a Biblical perspective, that was probably the best thing that could possibly have happened to them, and likely gave them an eternity in glory they otherwise would have missed out on. 

So as backwards as it may seem to us, it actually makes complete sense for God to tell Jeroboam's wife that He is going to let Abijah die of his illness because He is pleased with him.