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As this blog focuses on church growth, creativity, leadership, and casting vision, one key thing that is sure to mess up your ability to move forward in these areas is a distant relationship with God.
How do you know if you are drifting away from the Lord? These four steps down the broad road are being taken by many people:
1. Break a commandment of God. (1 Kings 16:31)
1 Kings 16:31 says, He not only considered it trivial to commit the sins of Jeroboam son of Nebat, but he also married Jezebel daughter of Ethbaal king of the Sidonians, and began to serve Baal and worship him.
You can study more about this in Deuteronomy 7:3. When God’s people entered into the promised land, they were commanded to never marry people who worshiped idols.
It is important to understand what the issue was in this situation. The issue was not interracial marriage. We know this because Ruth, in the Old Testament, was a Moabitess. She married Boaz after she took refuge “under the wings of the Lord.” She was included in the line that led to Christ. We know, for sure, that God smiles upon the marriage of a man or a woman of different races when they marry in the Lord.
God speaks very clearly to His own people, with regard to entering a marriage with someone who does not submit to Him. Here you are and you submit to God and you are with someone who doesn’t submit to the Lord. That is what the Bible calls being “unequally yoked.”
Ahab pays absolutely no attention to that. What did he care about the Word of God in old books like Deuteronomy, written hundreds of years ago, at that time. He would have said he was dealing with political reality.
The political reality of the day was that Assyria (to the north) was growing exponentially in power. Ahab was presiding as king over these ten tribes in the northern part of Israel, in Samaria. He worked it out, and it doesn’t take a genius to grasp this.
He knew he needed a strong ally to bolster his defense against his threat from the north. It seemed, to Ahab, that the Sidonians were just the answer. What better way to cement an alliance with the Sidonians than for him to marry the crown princess, the daughter of Ethbal, whose name was Jezebel. So, they married approximately 60 years after Solomon’s death.
He was the seventh king in line after the awful schism in which the kingdom ruptured with the ten tribes in the north, separating themselves from the line of David that continued the Davidic king’s ruling in the south.
It is interesting, in this passage, that after seven kings and 60 years, Ahab wasn’t phased by walking in the sins of Jeroboam. Vast changes had happened over just half a century, since the death of Solomon. Sins that would have seemed shocking to one generation, now, within 60 years, seemed trivial to another.
Older folks, who could look back 60 years to Solomon’s reign, must have looked back and thought, “What has happened to our nation?” Have you ever asked that question about America? Have you ever felt that what seemed shocking a half century ago seemed lite and trivial today?
You begin to say, “How could a culture have moved so far and so fast after sixty years?” That’s the situation in America today and in 1 Kings 16.
2. Subvert the worship of God. (1 Kings 16:32)
1 Kings 16:32 says, He set up an altar for Baal in the temple of Baal that he built in Samaria.
What a change this is. It is only 100 years since David planned for the temple of God, and 60 years since Solomon built it. Now, here we are, these years down the line, and Ahab is on the throne.
The ten tribes from the north were separated from Jerusalem,
