13 AHIJAH

Jeroboam persisted in his resistance to God and godliness as recorded in chapters 12 and 13, but in chapter 14 we see how God proceeded in His controversy with him and how He will use yet another relatively unknown prophet, Ahijah. When God judges, He will overcome and sinners will either bend or break before him. Jeroboam’s child fell sick as verse 1 says, “At that time Abijah son of Jeroboam became ill,” It is probable that he was his eldest son, and heir-apparent to the crown; for at his death all the kingdom went into mourning for him. His dignity as a prince, his age as a young prince and his interest in heaven as a good person could not exempt him from this dangerous sickness or death. Let none be sure to only remain healthy, but use our healthy years to improve them if possible while they continue for the best purposes.

The “at that time,” of this verse would be At that time, when Jeroboam created an idolatrous and unholy priesthood as stated in the previous chapter, then his child got sick. Was God speaking? Quite possibly. When sickness comes into our families we should inquire whether there is some particular reason or sin hidden in our houses and to show it to us and deliver us from it. God intentionally sent the affliction.

I have a personal experience with that. Once when our second son was sick, we discovered a stone image/idol/god in our house among the artifacts we had purchased many years earlier in Guatemala. We  prayed, destroyed the image and prayed for our son’s healing and he got well.

Jeroboam sent his wife in disguise to inquire of Ahijah the prophet what should become of the child. The sickness of his child touched him in a tender part. The withering of this branch of the family would, perhaps, be even a more sore affliction to him than the withering of his arm when he commanded his servants to seize the nameless prophet from Judah at Bethel. This is the force of natural affection; our children are ourselves; precious to us. Jeroboam’s great desire, under this affliction, is to know what will become of the child, whether he will live or die. It would have been more productive if he had wanted to know what means they should use for the recovery of the child; what they should give him, and what they should do to or for him. However, it seems they had then such a foolish notion of fatality that it distracted them from the use of means for recover. If they were sure the sick boy would live, they thought means were needless. If they thought he would die, they thought healing measures would be useless. They did not consider that events are in God’s hands and that He who ordains the end also ordains the means. Many times what God is doing is a result of what we are doing.

Why should a prophet be desired to show what a little time will show? It would have been smarter if he had wanted to know why God contended with him and then request the prophet’s counsel and prayers and then cast away his idols. Then the child might have been restored to him, as his hand had been at Bethel. We have duties we must fulfill. Sadly, most people would rather be told their fortune than their faults or their duties. Jeroboam sent his wife to Ahijah the prophet, who lived obscurely and neglected in Shiloh, blind through age, yet still blessed with the visions of the Almighty. To see God’s plan Ahijah did not need physical eyes; he was rather favored to not have the use of  them, the eyes of the mind and spirit being then more intent and least diverted. Jeroboam did not send to him for advice about setting up his calves, or the consecrating of his priests, but now in his personal distress, when the gods he served could give him no relief, he needed the real God. Some have by sickness been reminded of their forgotten ministers and praying friends.

He sent to Ahijah. Verse two tells us he sent his wife to him because he was “the one who told me I would be king over this people.” Perhaps he thought, “He was once the messenger of good news; perhaps he will be again.” Jeroboam did not realize something that we all need to remember: If we allow sin to disqualify us for the blessings God gives us and yet still expect ministers, who are good people, to speak peace and comfort to us, by our unrealistic expectation we wrong ourselves and our ministers. Jeroboam sent his wife to inquire of the prophet, because she could best ask the question without naming names, or making any other description than this, “Sir, I have an ill son; will he recover or not?” The heart of her husband safely trusted in her that she would be faithful both in delivering the message and bringing him the answer.

Evidently none of his counsellors could be trusted with such a confidence. Otherwise the sick child would desperately miss his mother, his favorite nurse, and it would have been much better for her to have stayed at home to care for him than go to Shiloh to inquire what would become of him. If she go, she must be in disguise, she must change her dress, cover her face, and go by another name, not only to conceal herself from her own court and the country through which she passed, but also to conceal herself from the prophet himself, that he might only answer her question concerning her son. Perhaps she did not want to discuss the matter of her husband’s defection from the true God in initiating the worship of two golden calves.

Christian leader, be careful since some people love to control their ministers and leaders by limiting the conversation to easy matters, not wanting to receive the whole counsel of God. They want to hear good news and are afraid of true news. Jeroboam would have known better than to believe that Ahijah could and would certainly tell what would become of the child, and yet either could not or would not discover who the mother was! Did he think Ahijah could see into the future and yet not see through his wife’s disguise? Did Jeroboam think the God of Israel was like his calves, just what he, the creator of those calves wanted? Be not deceived, God is not mocked.

God told Ahijah, Jeroboam’s wife would come and in disguise. God gave him full instructions about what to say to her which enabled him as she came in the door to call her by her name, to her great surprise and so to announce to all around him who she was, “Come in, wife of Jeroboam. Why this pretense?” He had no regard for her rank. She was a queen, but what was that to him, who had a message to deliver to her immediately from God, before whom all the children of men stand on the same level? He did not regard her gifts of bread, cakes and honey, and did not think himself obligated by that to give her any finer language than the nature of her message required. He did not regard her desire to be unknown.

It is usually polite not to take notice of those who do not want to be noticed, but the prophet was not a member of the kings court. He preferred to get right to the point of his message and let her know he had bad, not good, news for her. Those who think by their disguises to hide themselves from God will be confused and embarrassed when they find themselves disappointed on their day of discovery. Sinners now appear in the clothes of saints and are taken to be saints; but how they will blush and tremble when they find themselves stripped of their false exteriors and called by their own name. God will judge men according to what they are, not according to what they seem to be. When those that set up idols and keep them, as Jeroboam had, go to inquire of the Lord, God determines to answer them, not according to their pretensions, but according to the multitude of their idols.

So Jeroboam gets his answer, but it is not good news. The prophet anticipates the inquiry concerning the child, and foretells the ruin of Jeroboam’s house for its wickedness. No one else could have dared to carry such a message back to Jeroboam, a servant would have covered it, but his own wife cannot be suspected of ill-will; she would carry the message.

God calls Himself the Lord God of Israel. Though Israel had forsaken God, God had not cast them off. He had not given them a bill of divorce for their unfaithfulness. He is Israel’s God, and therefore will take vengeance on the one who did them the greatest wrong he could do them. Jeroboam had given Israel false idols and drew them away from God. Ahijah scolds Jeroboam with the great favor He had given him, in making him king, exalting him from among the common people, to be prince over God’s chosen Israel. God had taken the kingdom from the house of David, to give it to Jeroboam. Whether we keep an account of God’s mercies to us or not, if we are ungrateful, God still remembers, and will set them in order before us to our greater confusion. If we remain humbly grateful, He gives and does not scold.

Ahijah charges Jeroboam with his ungodliness and particularly his idolatry. Verse 9 says, “You have done more evil than all who lived before you. You have made for yourself other gods, idols made of metal; you have aroused my anger and turned your back on me.” Saul, who was rejected, never worshipped idols; Solomon did it occasionally, only in his weak old age but he never made Israel to sin. Jeroboam’s calves, though pretended to be set up in honor of the God of Israel that brought them up out of Egypt, yet here they are called other gods, or strange gods, because in them he worshipped God as the heathen worshipped their strange gods. Jeroboam had changed the truth of God into a lie and represented Him as altogether different from what He is. Many ignorant worshippers would focus their devotion on the image, and not at all regard the God of Israel. Though they were calves of gold, the richness of the metal, the best metal money could buy, was so far from making them acceptable to God that they provoked Him to anger.

Jeroboams idolatry defiantly affronted God, under the pretense of pleasing him. In doing this he had not followed David’s example before him. Verse 8 says, “I tore the kingdom away from the house of David and gave it to you, but you have not been like my servant David, who kept my commands and followed me with all his heart, doing only what was right in my eyes.” David, who, though he had his faults and some bad ones, yet never forsook the worship of God nor grew loose nor cold in the worship of God. His faithful adherence in the worship of God gained him this honorable character, that he followed God with all his heart, and herein he was set up as an example to all his successors. Leaders do not do well who do not do like David did. Jeroboam had not set God before him, but as verse 9 says, “You have done more evil than all who lived before you. You have made for yourself other gods, idols made of metal; you have aroused my anger and turned your back on me.

Ahijah foretells the utter ruin of Jeroboam’s house. He thought, by his idolatry, to establish his government, and by that he not only lost it, but brought destruction on his family, the universal destruction of all the males, whether shut up or not, married or unmarried. They will be taken away as dung, which is loathsome and which men are glad to be rid of. He worshipped dunghill-deities, and God removed his family as a great dunghill. Noble and royal families, if wicked, are no better in God’s account. Their dead bodies would be meat for the dogs in the street, or the birds of prey in the field. Evil pursues sinners and this prophesy is fulfilled in 1 Kings 15:29 which says, “As soon as he (Asa) began to reign, he killed Jeroboam’s whole family. He did not leave Jeroboam anyone that breathed, but destroyed them all, according to the word of the Lord given through his servant Ahijah the Shilonite.”

Ahijah also foretells the immediate death of the sick child, probably in mercy to him, lest, if he live, he be infected with the sin of his father, and so involved in the ruin, of his father’s house. Evidently the boy was the only one in the family that was righteous. Verses 12 and 13 say,“As for you, go back home. When you set foot in your city, the boy will die. 13 All Israel will mourn for him and bury him. He is the only one belonging to Jeroboam who will be buried, because he is the only one in the house of Jeroboam in whom the Lord, the God of Israel, has found anything good.” Where there is good it will be found: God, who seeks it, sees it, be it ever so little, and is pleased with it. Those who are good in bad times and places shine very brightly in the eyes of God. A good child in the house of Jeroboam is certainly a miracle of divine grace. To be there and not be corrupted like him is like being in the fiery furnace unhurt, and unsinged. Only he of all Jeroboam’s family, will die in honor, will be buried, and will be lamented as one that lived correctly.

This hopeful child dies first of all the family. Is this a hint that sometimes God takes those soonest whom He loves best. Heaven is the fittest place for them; this earth is not worthy of them. Jeroboam’s whole family would suffer. It was a sign the family would be ruined when he, a righteous son by whom the family and nation might have been reformed, was taken. The righteous are removed from evil to come in this world, and taken to a good and better world. It is a bad sign to a family when the best in it are buried out of it; when what was valuable is picked out, the rest is for the fire. It was likewise a present affliction to the family and kingdom, by which both might have been improved. Surely this distressed the poor mother knowing she would not reach home soon enough to see her son alive. She knew that when she set foot in the city, her son would die. If this happened as the prophet said, then she could be assured the rest of what he said would also happen. And, so it was “As soon as she stepped over the threshold of the house, the boy died” (17).

Ahijah also foretells the setting up of another family to rule over Israel. This was fulfilled in Baasha of Issachar, who conspired against Nadab the son of Jeroboam and in the second year of his reign murdered him and all his family. Sometimes God makes quick work with sinners; he did that with the house of Jeroboam since it was not even twenty-four years from the beginning to the end of the family’s reign. And then Ahijah went on to talk about the judgments which would come on the people of Israel for going along with the worship Jeroboam established. If the blind lead the blind, both the blind leaders and the blind followers will fall into the ditch. It is foretold here that they would never be rightly settled in their land, but continually shaken like a reed in the water.

After they left the house of David, the government of the northern ten tribes never continued long in one family, but one undermined and destroyed another which of course introduces great disorders and disturbances among the people. He even said they would, before long, be totally expelled out of their land, that good land, and given up to ruin. This was fulfilled in the captivity of the ten tribes by the king of Assyria. Families and kingdoms are ruined by sin, ruined by the wickedness of the heads of them. Verses 15 and 16 say, “And the Lord will strike Israel, so that it will be like a reed swaying in the water. He will uproot Israel from this good land that he gave to their ancestors and scatter them beyond the Euphrates River, because they aroused the Lord’s anger by making Asherah poles. 16 And he will give Israel up because of the sins Jeroboam has committed and has caused Israel to commit.”

Jeroboam’s wife has nothing to say against the word of the Lord, but she goes home with a heavy heart to their house in Tirzah, a sweet delightful place, so the name indicates, famed for its beauty as attested by Song of Solomon 6:4 which says, “You are as beautiful as Tirzah, my darling,” But death, which will stain its beauty and embitter all its delights, cannot be shut out from it. That is where she came, and there we leave her attending the funeral of her son, and expecting the fate of her family. The child died and Jeroboam himself died soon after that.

2 Chronicles 13:20 says, “Jeroboam did not regain power during the time of Abijah. And the Lord struck him down and he died.” He died miserably, when he had reigned twenty-two years. At this juncture God needed a mouthpiece and Ahijah was the man God used. He had earlier been instrumental in the appointment of Jeroboam and in this lesson was used in delivering the message of his demise.

The prophet of God is not free to imaginatively create his or her own messages. Blind Ahijah obediently gave both good news and bad news. Will you be like Ahijah, seeing with your spiritual eyes and remaining obedient and truthful?