1 Kings, Chapter 16 - Kingdom in Chaos | Prophets of Israel Daily

[music] Shalom friends and welcome back to the Prophets of Israel Daily. This [music] is First Kings chapter 16. I'm Jeremy Gel here with my dear friend and Kabuta Arya Bramitz. This series is brought to you by the land of Israel Network at [music] the land of Isisrael.com. All right, friends, get ready. Chapter 16 is one of the darkest, bloodiest chapters in the entire book. And I want to prepare you for it cuz it moves fast. I mean, this is the northern kingdom of Israel just spinning into chaos. King after king, coup after coup, assassination after assassination. In a single chapter, we're going to watch multiple dynasties rise and fall in a spiral of violence. It's really a portrait of a kingdom that cut itself off from Hashem and is now devouring itself from the inside. And it begins with a word of prophecy against the reigning king Ba. Verses two and three, the prophet Yehu ben Kanani comes to Basha with God's word said, "I lifted you out of the dust and made you ruler over my people Israel. But you walked in the way of Yer of Avam and made my people sin. So I will sweep away your house exactly as I did the house of Yer of Aam, the very same doom." And so I want to explain Yerov Benavat Jerobam is the yard stick for evil to the northern kingdom of Israel. He is the one that all the other kings of Israel are compared to. But I want to explain what exactly did these other kings of Israel do that was considered evil like Yerov. So we know that Yuravam established two golden calves in northern Israel and in southern Israel in Don and Betel. And when the text says Basha walked in the way of Yer of Am and in his sin whereby he made Israel to sin, the commentators understand it as Bahasha maintained and perpetuated this same golden calf worship apparatus, changing the calendar, shifting Israel away from Jerusalem and away from the God of Israel in his times instead of dismantling it. And so the Radak, the Ralbag, the Abarbanel, they actually say that Yur of Am's cabs, they weren't exactly a rejection of the God of Israel in favor of a foreign god. And that's really key. Yurf of Am's own words were, "Here are your gods, O Israel, who brought you out of Egypt." Meaning he was in a corrupted and forbidden way still pointing at the God that took Israel out of Egypt. So the mafarium, the commentators usually read the calves as forbidden intermediaries, their representations, a way of worshiping the true god through physical forms, which the Torah absolutely prohibits. So it's not exactly importing a new deity into the kingdom of Israel. It's I mean the bottom line is it's bad enough to have the king and his dynasty wiped out. And that's really what distinguishes Yurfam's sin from Akav's sin that we're going to learn about in this chapter. Akav and Jezebel and Evel bring in the Baal Baal. And that's genuinely a foreign god. And the text makes it like a much deeper and worse betrayal. But here the words of the prophet Yahweh about Basha come true immediately. Basha's son takes the throne and watch how his reign ends. Verses 9 and 10. Zimri and Zimri came in and struck him and killed him while he was in Tza drinking himself drunk. A king is assassinated by his own officer Zim while he's drunk and Zimry seizes the throne and wipes out the entire house of Basha, every last man. Even if you're worshiping the God of Israel, but you're off just a little bit and worshiping Sheckcher, worshiping in a falsehood, in the end with falsehood and evil, your dynasty will be removed because you will lead Israel astray. That's right, Jeremy. Notice the detail that the text chooses to give us about the moment King Allah dies because the Tanakh is a master of the meaningful detail. And at least in [clears throat] my mind, this one is definitely a meaningful detail. We're told that Allah is killed Shiko while drinking himself drunk. Right in the house of one of his officials in the middle of the day while his kingdom is at war and his army is out in the field besieging an enemy. At a time like that, the king of Israel is getting drunk. That's a portrait of what happened there. And the single image, that image tells you everything about why this dynasty fails, why this dynasty falls. Here is a king who should be leading his people. And instead, he's checked out, numbing himself, indulging himself, indulging himself, oblivious, while an assassin walks right in. And here's a real warning, I think, for all of us, my friends, and not just for kings. Because the deepest danger in life is rarely the enemy at the gate. It's the drunkenness within. It's the moment we stop paying attention, stop being present, and just numb ourselves with whatever our drink of choice may be. And believe me, my friends, I've got mine, too. The real danger is losing awareness of what's really happening around us because we're too scared to face it. Allah wasn't defeated in battle by some mighty foe. He was killed because he was lost. Fleeing from his responsibilities into his own self-indulgence. The Tanakh is showing us that a leader, a person who loses loses vigilance, who trades responsibility for self-indul self-indulgence has already fallen before the assassin. Whatever that assassin is, even uh before the assassin enters the room, the game is over. I think part of the message here is that especially during these volatile times as we approach redemption, we need to stay awake. We need to stay present and we need to resist the urge to flee into our phones or our food or or whatever we may be using to distract ourselves from the reality Hashem is calling on us to face. That is such a powerful read because it speaks so powerfully to me. I'm constantly kind of distracting myself instead of just being present. Anyway, here's where the chapter becomes almost dizzying because Zimry who just murdered the king and seized the throne. How long do you think he lasts as king? Verse 15. He reigned 7 days in tier. Seven days. The moment the army out in the field hears that Zimry has killed the king, they immediately proclaim their own commander Omri as king instead. They march to the capital and when Zimre sees the city is taken and it's over for him in verse 18 he goes into the palace sets it on fire around himself and dies in the flames. It's like a king for 7 days for one week and then he ends up burning down his own house on top of himself. And so we're watching the kingdom of Israel slip into spiritual idolatry and total political chaos. >> Right. And Jeremy, here's where the pace of everything really starts to pick up. Just count what we've witnessed in a handful of verses. A prophecy of doom. A king assassinated while drunk. An entire dynasty exterminated. A usurper who lasts seven days. A suicide by fire. And a civil war between rival claimments. It's chaos piled upon chaos. Blood on blood. Throne after throne collapsing almost faster than the text can even record it. And I really don't think that that um that pace the the the the speed that that's sort of thrown at us as an accident. In some ways, maybe it's the whole point of what we can learn here. And I think that Tanakh is showing us what a society looks like when it has severed itself from God. There's no stability. There's no continuity. There's no trust, no legitimacy. There's nothing to hold it together. Every strong man grabs power by murder and is murdered in turn by the next strong man. It's the law of the jungle wearing a crown. And contrast that with the house of David in the south. Down in Judah, one dynasty rules for 400 years. I I'm talking about the entire house of Judah, father to son, generation to generation, because it was anchored in a covenant with God. But in the north, cut off from that covenant, dynasties last a matter of years, sometimes days. And that's a profound teaching about what actually holds a society together. It was never the strength of the strong man. Power seized by force is inherently unstable. The same violence that puts you on the throne is waiting to pull you off of it. Real lasting stability only ever comes from something higher than raw power from from covenant. It comes from legitimacy, from being anchored in God. And you cut that anchor off and no matter how strong your grip is, you're just the next one waiting to be overthrown. You know, I think that's actually the exact contrast the text is drawing. It's like out of all this chaos, one strong man finally emerges who's able to hold power, Omari. He wins the civil war. He consolidates the kingdom. He does something that will matter for centuries. Verse 24, he buys a hill from a man named Shemire. And he builds on it a new capital city and names it after the hill's owner, Shamron, Samaria. It becomes the capital of the northern kingdom. From this point on, Omri is by worldly measures a successful and powerful king. But listen to how the Tanakh measures him. This is verse 25. But Omri did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and did worse than all who were before him. It's like worse than all who were before him. So, it's not exactly clear what he did, but it seems like he took the worship of the golden calves, the separate calendar that divided the house of Israel from Judah, and really entrenched that behavior more than any other king. While other kings may have used that calendar and idols for political reasons, Omri seems to really like delve deep into the idolatry. And in that way, he set up his son Akav for total betrayal by worshiping the Bal for the first time in the land of Israel. >> Right. Well, I don't know if it was the first time the battle was worshiped in the land of Israel, but worshiped on a governmental level like codified because listen to the way the chapter introduces Akav. It's really noteworthy because the text keeps using this escalating phrase and with a it hits its peak. Listen to the pattern. Yuram sinned. Then Bashot did evil. Then Omri did worse than all who were before him. And now verse 30 about a did evil in the sight of Hashem more than all who were before him. Right? The kingdom isn't just wicked. It's getting progressively worse generation by generation. Each king outdoing the last in evil. It's just this downward spiral. It's like a moral avalanche gaining speed. And Akav is about to become the very bottom of that pile or at least what we hope will be the very bottom of the pile. Who knows? It could always get lower, I guess. But why is Akav worse than everyone? The text tells us tells us precisely. And it's a turning point in the entire history of Israel. I think verse 31. It wasn't enough for Akav to walk in the sins of Yurovam. He married Eve, Jezebel, the daughter of the king of Sidon, a foreign princess and a fanatical devote of the god Baal. And under her influence, Akav didn't just tolerate idolatry. He established it. He fortified it. He built an entire temple to Baal right in Samaria in Shamron in the capital. And he built an altar to Baal. and he himself served it and worshiped on it. I mean, you have to understand the shift here. Yuram's golden calves, like you said before, Jeremy, were a corruption of the worship of the God of Israel. It was twisted, but still aimed in a confused way at the God who took them out of Egypt. And I'm quite sure we took a deeper dive into the past fellowships. We talked about exactly how that is a distortion of real worship of Hashem. Either way, it isn't for here. But Akav and Jezebel import a completely foreign god which is even more disgusting. They import Baal and make it the official religion of the state. I mean this is a whole new depth of betrayal. And it sets the stage for the great confrontation that's coming. Because a kingdom this far gone, a darkness this complete and pervasive is exactly the moment God raises up his prophet of fire. You know, Akav and Jezebel are about to meet Elijah. Eliao Hanavi. And like that is the cliffhanger that the chapter leaves us holding on to. It set the stage for one of the most epic showdowns in all of scripture. And there's just one last noteworthy detail in the chapter. It's verse 34. In Akab's days, a man named rebuilds the city of Jericho. And it costs him his firstborn son and his youngest son. Exactly. Fulfilling the curse Joshua pronounced over Jericho 500 years earlier. So even now in the depths of this darkness, Hashem's word from centuries before comes true to the letter. The kings forget God, but Hashem's word never returns unfulfilled. And we're going to meet a little bit later when Ela has his showdown with the prophets of Baal. We'll talk about that in a couple of chapters from now. But that's it, friends. That's what King 16 teaches us. And I just for our first in our own lives, it's a chapter about what happens when there's nothing at the center. There's no anchor. There's no covenant. There's no accountability to anything higher than themselves. It's just kingdom after kingdom, dynasty after dynasty. You know, it plays out and fast forward so we can see the whole pattern clearly. A king numbed by being drunk and destroyed for his own blindness. Usurpers who grab power by the force and they lose it to force. And this spiral where each generation does worse than the last. And the lesson is that a life or a nation that's built only on strength, ambition, and self-interest with no higher purpose, it's just not going to be stable. It's self-destructive. So stay awake. Stay anchored in the Torah. Stay rooted in the Torah. Stay stay rooted in something greater than your own power and your own appetite. Because wherever we build on force, force will eventually come and tear it down. And so only what we build on the foundation of Netzah, on the foundation of eternity, on truth, on Torah really endures. And so may we choose the path of the kingdom of Judea, not of Israel. And so that is the path of covenant. That's the path that endures forever. Soak my friends. And of course, I would love to invite you to be a part of the engine that makes Prophets of Israel Daily happen every day. Please dedicate a chapter, a book, send a blessing, an honor, or in memory of someone, someone that you love, and [music] have their name intertwined with the eternal words of the prophets being learned by people all around the world to sponsor or dedicate. Just click on the link below or head to the [music] land of Isisrael.com. We would be honored to partner with you. And so, Besashem, we'll see you tomorrow for chapter 17.