1 Kings 13

Discussion Questions

1. Religion on our own terms… Has your religion become more about you than about the God of the Bible? What are some examples of  “creating your own religion” in today’s world?
2. Do you prioritize convenience or obedience? Why is obedience so important to God?
3. One prophet of the Lord was led astray by another prophet of the Lord. How do we protect ourselves from those that would lead us astray, even misguided fellow believers?
4. How are you still learning and growing in your allegiance to the word of the Lord? Would those who know you say that humility is a part of your Christian walk?
5. “…we will not be able to discern the word of the Lord if we have already decided what we want Him to say.” Then how DO we discern the word of the Lord?

Transcript

We study through books of the Bible here at The Village Chapel. We have some extra copies, if you didn’t bring one with you and you’d like a paper copy of the Scriptures, raise your hand up real high. Somebody’s coming up and down the aisle. They’ll drop one off at your aisle or your row. There’s a QR code up on the screen. If you would like to put your phone’s camera onto that, you can access the notes and the quotes as we go along. Our study of 1st and 2nd Kings is called “The King of Redemption History.” So, we are looking at that. There is one king that all of these kings point forward to in one way or another. Some of them are a really bad example of what it means to be a king and, therefore, they’re saying to us we need a better king. So, they point us forward. As we read our Old Testament and our New Testaments together, we start to figure out there must be a better king than what we’ve read about here.

Some of them are godly, just a small handful of them, or have moments of godliness we should probably say, and we can learn much from them as well. So, chapter 13 is one of the most strange chapters that we’ll study together here in The Village Chapel. I don’t know how that always falls to me. I’m not sure what’s going on here, but actually, I’m very, very excited about studying this together, and I don’t consider it bad at all. Let me pray, though, before we open the Scriptures in reading: It was You, Lord, who protected us while we slept last night. It was You, Lord, who provided for our every need. It was You, Lord, who gave us strength for the battles in our past. It is You, Lord, who can make a way for us now and in the future.

As we end one week and begin another, we pray that You would have mercy on us, especially those among us or joining us online who are in need, who are weak, exhausted, vulnerable in some way, confused in some way, those who suffer injustice. Lord, have mercy. Something inside of us is longing for more of You, Lord Christ. May our souls find peace in Your presence. May our sorrows fall exhausted at the feet of Your joy. Help us remember to rest in Your sovereignty and Your faithfulness. Help us to honor Your name even as we read Your Word and study it. Help us to walk in Your ways and to praise You with all our being. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Amen. Amen.

So, when we finished up last week, Pastor Tommy led us through chapter 12, and we saw this one Jeroboam who is king in the north. The north is typically called Israel. The south is typically, from here on forward, called Judah. That doesn’t mean there won’t be occasions where it changes up a little bit, but it’s good for us to keep that in mind. Israel is the Northern Kingdom, 10 tribes, and the Southern Kingdom is typically called Judah. Jeroboam is not really a good guy at all, okay? The aforementioned bad kings, he’s one of those guys. He really wanted religion on his own terms. I say that knowing that so many of us in our day and time also want religion on our own terms.

We even want God Himself on our own terms, and some of us want that but don’t know that that’s what we want. We’ve just subtly been trained and formed to think that way. As that kind of thinking overshadows us, we start to think we are our own creator and that we are the center of the universe in some way and that everybody should, and if they don’t, they’re the ones that are being wrong. If they don’t honor us, affirm us, respect us, listen to our story, all that sort of thing, it gets us in trouble. It’s what happens instead of the humility of Christ, who came and called His disciples to deny the self, take up a cross and follow Him.

It’s a radical message that Jesus brought into a world full of people who are just naturally inclined to want it to be all about me. Jeroboam was one of these narcissists, and he wanted his own religion on his own terms. He had alternative places and alternative priests. He had alternative gods and alternative feasts. He moved stuff away from Jerusalem, didn’t want his people, and by the way, he thought of them as his people, didn’t want them going to Jerusalem where God had said, “I will put my presence there in the temple and that’s where you’ll worship me.” Jeroboam didn’t want that, and he wanted his own priests, and so he appointed pretty much everybody who wanted to be one. I remember growing up in the back of the comic books, there were these $5, “Become a reverend,” type offers. You become a preacher for $5 and never pay taxes again. I thought that was a good investment.

Alternative gods: Jeroboam, as we saw last week, built these, not one but two golden calves. Shaped like golden calves, they had eyes but couldn’t see, feet but couldn’t walk, mouths but couldn’t speak, statues made of gold, but statues nonetheless, lifeless, incapable of helping anybody or guiding anybody or serving anybody in any kind of way. Alternative places, priests, gods and feasts. He also changed the date in the calendar year of where the feast should be. We pick up right here in Chapter 13. I think all of that about Jeroboam really leads us to what we read just as the first couple of verses of Chapter 13 explode off the page. You’ll see he’s now practicing his religion. He’s not losing his religion; he’s making his own religion.

“And behold, there came a man of God from Judah to Bethel.” See, Bethel was one of the two places the golden calves were placed, one at Bethel, one in the area that belonged to the tribe of Dan up in the north. Some of us have been to that site. It’s been uncovered, and we’ve visited there where Jeroboam and many of his priests sacrificed to the idol of the golden calf there. But Bethel is not too far from Judah, actually, just a few miles. This man of God, he’s called a man of God throughout the chapter, interesting distinction between this character and another one we’re going to read about in a second. “Behold, a man of God came from Judah to Bethel by the Word of the Lord.” Interesting that a man of God didn’t come from the northern tribes here. This is God sending somebody from the south up to the north. Why didn’t He just send somebody from the north to the site of this worship service? Must not have been able to find one is my guess. So, this man of God from Judah came to Bethel by the Word of the Lord.

Circle that or underline that phrase as it occurs nine times in this passage. That’s why we’ll call the study “The Word of the Lord,” okay? “While Jeroboam was standing by the altar to burn incense…” So here he is practicing his self-created religion. He’s burning incense by the altar. “…he cried against the altar,” this man of God did, “…by the Word of the Lord,” there it is again, and he said this, “O, altar, altar!” He’s talking to the altar. He’s not talking to Jeroboam. He’s not talking to the people of Jeroboam. He’s looking at the pulpit and saying, “O, pulpit, pulpit!” “O, altar, altar!” He says. It’s interesting to me. There’s so many questions in this chapter. I’m going to throw them out and, hopefully, some of you will tell me the answers later. Okay? “Oh, altar, altar! Thus says the Lord, ‘Behold a son shall be born to the house of David, Josiah by name, and on you he shall sacrifice the priests of the high places who burn incense on you, and human bones shall be burned on you.'” This is really interesting.

Now, for those of us that live on this side of history all the way to where we are, we recognize that name, Josiah. That’s a familiar name to us as one who would come and do this kind of thing. Yet, the Josiah this guy’s talking about doesn’t come around for 300 years from this time. Isn’t that amazing? You wouldn’t know that. The guy isn’t stopping down and saying it’s going to be 300 years, but he’ll be stopping by, and he’ll be destroying this altar, and he will also burn human bones on it and all that stuff. If you want to read the rest of the story, we read that in our preaching prep meeting. We read 2 Kings; I think it’s around Verses 15-23. It’s remarkable how close it is to what is said right here that King Josiah shows up, King Josiah does all of this. Then this man of God who’s standing there in front of the king in public.

As the king is practicing his religion, this man of God who’s speaking boldly in front of this eastern despot and crying out against this altar and saying that someone’s going to come and literally tear it apart. “And he gave a sign the same day,” this man of God did, “This is the sign which the Lord has spoke, Behold, the altar shall be split apart and the ashes which are on it will be poured out.” Well, you could just imagine the people parted and wanted to see what in the world is Jeroboam going to do because this guy is ruthless. This guy, he doesn’t mind killing people at all. “When the king heard the saying of the man of God, which cried out against the alter in Bethel. Jeroboam stretched out his hand from the altar saying, seize him,” like this, “but his hand, which he stretched out, dried up so that he could not draw it back to himself.

“The altar also was split apart and the ashes were poured out from the altar according to the sign which the man of God had given,” here it is again, by the Word of the Lord. “The king said to the man of God,” and look how his tune changes, he went from, “Seize him,” to, “Please entreat the Lord your God and pray for me that my hand may be restored to me. So the man of God entreated the Lord, and the king’s hand was restored to him, and it became as it was before.” Again, sorry, but I’m baffled. My mind is blown. This guy, Jeroboam, is in complete rebellion, belligerently against all of God’s ways and will and God’s Word as revealed in some of the Old Testament scriptures that have certainly been handed down. He’s literally, on his own, turned away from Yahweh to create these two golden calves that everybody should worship.

He’s using all of his power and authority to manipulate all of the 10 tribes, the northern 10 tribes to follow him into this idolatry. God is going to be gracious to him in this moment and heal him from this, “Seize him!” He’s so angry and yet God still… I’m even impressed that the man of God would stop and pray for him. I’d be praying, “Lord shrivel up the rest of him too before he does anything worse.” So the king as this happens and Jeroboam is healed, let’s see, Verse 7, the king said to the man of God, “Come home with me and refresh yourself, and I will give you a reward.” What a change of heart and attitude in mind. “Let’s go to my house and let’s have some tea, and I’ll also give you some stuff. Okay?”

But the man of God said to the king, “If you were to give me half your house, I would not go with you, nor would I eat bread or drink water in this place,” this is so important, “For so it was commanded me by the Word of the Lord saying, you shall eat no bread nor drink water, nor return by the way which you came.” In other words, you got to go home another way. We heard something similar when we just came through the Advent season and the magi were told to go home another way, a different way. I think when you’re walking in obedience of the Lord, you often end up finding yourself… You have to dynamically listen to what He says, and you have to dynamically be ready to obey Him if He says go a different way. So, this prophet tells Jeroboam, “That’s what God has told me to do.” So this prophet went another way and did not return, by the way, which he came to Bethel.

Now, third primary character, “…an old prophet was living in Bethel, and his sons came and told him all the deeds which the man of God had done that day in Bethel.” Evidently, the old prophet was not at that worship service that Jeroboam was just having and that the man of God from the south just interrupted. So, his sons come, and they tell them what happened. “The words which he had spoken to the king, they also related to their father. Their father said to them, ‘Which way did he go?’ Now, the sons had seen the way which the man of God who came from Judah had gone.” In other words, he went by way of Hillsborough Village. He went that way. He went down Hillsborough Road and he went south. It’s that clear to these sons, and they convey that to the father. “The father says,” in Verse 13, “’Saddle up my saddle up the donkey for me.’” all you Steven Curtis Chapman friends, okay, saddle up your donkeys. “’Saddle up the donkey for me,’ so they saddled the donkey for him and he rode away on it.”

“He went after the man of God and found him sitting under an oak, and he said to him, ‘Are you the man of God who came from Judah?’ He said, ‘I am.’ Then he said to him, ‘Come home with me and eat bread.’ But he said, ‘I cannot return with you nor go with you, nor will I eat bread or drink water with you in this place, for a command came to me by the Word of the Lord.’” Here, again, he’s going to convey what the Word of the Lord to him was. “’You shall eat no bread nor drink water there. Do not return by going the way which you came.’ He said to him, [this is the old man from Bethel said to the man of God from Judah] ‘I also am a prophet like you, and an angel spoke to me by the Word of the Lord saying, “Bring him back with you to your house that he may eat bread and drink water.”’ Then the narrator says this to us, five words, “but he lied to him.”

That’s really important. You should underline that. That’s an important pivot right there. That’s really important that he lied to him. The man was pretending to be a prophet, pretending that an angel appeared to him and spoke to him. Did an angel actually appear to him and say this to him? I don’t know, but if he did, I’m going to say it’s an angel of darkness, not an angel of light, but he’s saying that happened, and the other guy is going to be swayed by it, you’ll see. So, he went back with him and ate bread in his house and drank water. This is a very sad thing. There’s no pushback, there’s no, “Let’s explore this together. What do you mean by an angel spoke to you and said this?” There’s no, “Yeah, but I got to follow what the Lord has spoken to me. He’s got my phone number too.” I don’t know if that’s ever happened to you. It happens quite often to those of us that are vocational in ministry. A lot of people come to us and tell us what the Lord told them to tell us.

You know what? I’ll say this, we have to remain open, always have to remain open. But often, it ends up being a thing where it’s just somebody’s preference, and we have to just be honest and say, “I appreciate that. We’ll take that under advisement. We’ll pray about that,” whatever it is, and we consult among ourselves, and we go, “That’s not the Lord. He’s not really leading us to do that. It seems good to us and to the Holy Spirit to do it this way.” So, we do that kind of thing all the time, but we do always want to remain open. This guy, though, just there’s no pushback at all. He went right to his house, went back with him, ate his bread and drank his water. It came about as they were sitting down at the table that the Word of the Lord, there it is again, came to the prophet who had brought him back.

So now the lying prophet who’s got the title but he’s not really a man of God, by the way, you can have the title but not be a man of God, yeah, I agree. I heard somebody say, “Hmm?” Yeah, and some of us are thinking about all the people that had the title that were a priest or a pastor or any number of things, maybe a world religion leader, but did not have the heart of a man of God. Titles mean nothing to me, I got to be honest. Just call me Jim, don’t call me Rev. If I get a piece of mail, it says Reverend Jim Thomas, I know they don’t know me. I know it’s junk mail. It goes right in the trash, but I just think that’s really important for us to know. So, this guy doesn’t push back at all. He goes right on with it, and this guy who lied to him, we’re told that very clearly here, he swayed him.

As they were sitting down to have bread, the Word of Lord actually came to him, this lying prophet, this lying older guy, “Thus says the Lord,” that beautiful formula that so many of the Old Testament prophets would use as they were about to speak on behalf of the Lord, “because you have disobeyed the command of the Lord,” here, they’re sitting at the table that he lured him back to, “because you have disobeyed the command of the Lord and have not observed the commandment which the Lord your God commanded you but have returned and eaten bread and drunk water in the place of which he said to you, eat no bread and drink no water, your body shall not come to the grave of your fathers.” Not going to be buried with your family in the family cemetery, okay? “It came about that after he had eaten bread and after he had drunk that he saddled the donkey for him,” for the prophet whom he had brought back.

Now the man of God is now called a prophet by that guy here in the narration, Verse 23 there. Verse 24, “Now when he had gone,” this man of God from Judah, “…when he had gone a lion met him on the way and killed him and his body was thrown on the road with the donkey standing beside it. The lion also was standing beside the body.” This is so weird. “And behold, men passed by and saw the body thrown on the road, and the lion standing beside the body. So, they came and told it in the city where the old prophet lived.” Now remember what’s being said here is that the lion killed him. First of all, I had to recover from that. That’s harsh. Did you get it? Come on, be honest people. You thought that was harsh too, didn’t you? Yeah.

Yeah, and then, what’s with the lion? When they kill, they eat, don’t they? No, he’s just sitting watch over this man that he killed. He’s just sitting there. Add to that, there’s a Big Mac named donkey right there. There’s a huge Big Mac with extra sauce right there, and he’s not going to eat that either. The lion just sits there. The donkey doesn’t run away; he just sits there. The man of God has died and he’s not going to be buried with his fathers. “Behold, men passed by. They saw all this. They went back to the city, told everybody about it.” How weird it must have looked. “When the prophet who brought him back from the way heard it, he said, ‘It is the man of God who disobeyed the command of the Lord, therefore, the Lord has given him to the lion, which has torn him and killed him according to the Word of the Lord, which he spoke to him.’”

He spoke to his sons saying, ‘Saddle the donkey for me.'” Okay, one more time, boys, get the car ready, pull it around front. “They saddled it. He went and found his body thrown in the street with the donkey and lion standing beside it. The lion had not eaten the body nor torn the donkey. The prophet took up the body of the man,” and boy, it was Tommy or somebody who said now that had to be bold and brave for that guy to come like, “Nice kitty, nice kitty, nice kitty,” and drag that dead carcass away from the lion who might’ve been holding onto that for a little later, like dinner tonight, maybe. Instead, he pulls out the body and puts it up on his own donkey. He’s going to honor this thing, this body, and he’s going to take it and bury it.

You’ll see this in just a second. So, the kids saddled the donkey, he goes, he finds the body. “The prophet took the body of the man of God and laid it on the donkey and brought it back. He came to the city of the old prophet to mourn and bury him. He laid his body in his own grave.” That’s an interesting image, isn’t it? “They mourned over him saying, ‘Alas, my brother!’” It’s interesting to me to watch this prophet from Bethel, the older one who, under the reign of Jeroboam, may have found himself completely decommissioned, didn’t go to that worship service perhaps for a reason. Maybe he didn’t think it was right, and yet, he’s still a liar, and he goes and lies to this prophet and tries to get him to come back to his house.

But you see him undulate, he’s going back and forth, back and forth between good thinking, wise thinking and bad thinking, and it’s just like us. It’s just like me too, yeah. So “He took the body of the man of God and laid in the donkey, brought it back, and he mourned it, and he was going to bury it. He laid it in his own grave. They mourned over him saying, ‘Alas, my brother!’ After he had buried him, he spoke to his son saying, ‘When I die, bury me in the grave in which the man of God is buried, lay my bones beside his bones’  [so much symbolic here] ‘for the things shall surely come to pass, which he cried by the Word of the Lord against the altar in Bethel and against all the houses of the high places which are in the cities of Samaria.’

“After this event, Jeroboam did not return from his evil way.” That’s the saddest thing right there. But again, “He made priests of the high places from among all the people, any who would be ordained, he ordained to be priests of the high places. This event became sin to the house of Jeroboam, even to blot out and destroy it from off the face of the earth.” Fade to black. Aren’t you glad you came to church today? I’m glad you came to church today, and I’m glad I came to church today, and I’m really glad we’re studying this, I got to be honest. Because it pushes me one more time to ask myself the question, “How do I respond to the Word of the Lord?”

Since that phrase repeats nine times in what we call chapter 13, remember these chapter markings are pretty recent compared to back in the time of the kings, today we have these chapter breaks. I think this really goes with those last few verses of Chapter 12 a bit better. But how in the world are we to pull something out of this that applies for us today? I think there’s plenty here, and I was actually encouraged by this chapter the more I dwelt on it, meditated and thought about it. Especially after seeing how many folks mentioned, “Look at that repeating phrase.” It’s “the Word of the Lord,” and I think 1 Kings 13 is as much a part of the divine dossier of redemption history as any chapter is. This is really beautiful to me; however, one of my favorite commentators is this guy Robert Alter. He says, “The entire story remains bizarre to the end.” Somebody say amen. Amen.

Yeah, but I’m glad the Lord keeps it in here. I’m glad every now and then we are pushed to drink one more cup of coffee, sit up straight and try to figure something out here. Listen, when we do Bible study here at The Village Chapel for our preaching team, we typically have these four questions that we came up with a long time ago. We ask it of every passage: What does God reveal about Himself in this passage? What do we learn about God here? What vulnerabilities and sinful tendencies of humanity are exposed? There’s plenty here, everybody here, all of the humans in this particular scenario here, we’ve got stuff we can learn from them that show vulnerabilities and sinful tendencies. How is the Gospel reflected in a passage like this? It’s a great question. Then what faith response does this passage call for? I want to hear from the Lord. You want to hear from the Lord too, don’t you?

We have a longing for a sure word, a certain word in an age, in a world, that worships at the altar of ambiguity. In their time, Jeroboam is the one that didn’t just abandon Yahweh and abandon Judaism, he created his own thing and then demanded that everybody else follow him into that thing. He’s a great example, actually. Some of you maybe that are teetering on the edge of faith a little bit. If you decide, “I’m going to chuck Christianity for…” you’re not just leaving something, you’re going to something. You always are believing something. You always are worshiping something. The question is, is it God that you’re worshiping? Or like Jeroboam, are you just creating your own religion? If your god likes what you like, if your god does not like what you do not like, including the people that you do not like, you are probably not worshiping the real God who is there.

If your god fits neatly into your particular political persuasions, I assure you that is not the God of the Bible, or your cultural sociological persuasions. We get a lot of stuff wrong. It’s really important for us to know that, and we need the Lord. I think this chapter is really good at this. We need to hear from the Lord. I posted this before, Lily Tomlin, that great philosopher and theologian: “Why is it that when we talk to God, we’re said to be praying, but when God talks to us, we’re schizophrenic?” Some people think it’s weird that you might want to hear the Word of the Lord, but that’s one of the reasons why I’m so glad that we study through Books of the Bible here at The Village Chapel. It’s God’s Word, unique in its source, timeless in its truth, broad in its reach, transforming in its power – all four of those things. It’s not riddled and filled with Jim’s ambitions, nor is it riddled and filled with Jim’s anxieties.

See, because all of us, if we try to go off and build our own religion, it’s pretty much going to look like your ambitions and your anxieties do. Your fears are going to become evident. What you choose to worship is you trying to make up the difference for the God who is there, which you can never make up the difference for the God who is there. Only the God who is there can be the God who is there. So, King Jeroboam, the man of God from Bethel, all of the people here in this particular passage teach us something. Each one of them heard the Word of the Lord. Each one of them failed to trust and obey the Word of the Lord. Each one of them illustrate our need for a radical transformation of the disposition of our hearts and minds toward the Word of the Lord. Each one of them reminds us to turn from worshiping at the altar of autonomy, the altar of advantage.

“What will be for my advantage here? How do I get ahead? How do I become the center of attention? How do I take down that person or innovation I don’t like?” I put that in there too because I think Jeroboam is a good example of a bad direction, a bad kind of innovation. He wanted to innovate. He wanted to create his own religion. See, any god that you create, or Jeroboam creates, or I create, by definition, will be less than we are. Something greater cannot come from something less, and so we want to worship the God who is there, not the god that you imagine God to be, as is so popularly said in our own day and time. Jeroboam rejected and ignored the Word of the Lord. This is important for us to note. How do people respond to the Word of the Lord? Really, really important for us. He ignored it. He rejected it. He made four big mistakes processed inwardly and outwardly, but not upwardly. “What do I want?”

As Pastor Tommy led us last week, we saw how he did a little polling. He polled the old guys first and then he polled the young bucks, and he went with the young bucks. That’s not always wrong. I’m not saying it’s just ’cause old or young, it’s not about that at all. It’s about the Word of the Lord. It’s about being in pursuit of the Word of the Lord. So, Jeroboam’s big mistakes, to me, were inwardly and outwardly, but not upwardly. He preferred convenience to obedience. Do you ever do that? Let me just do what’s convenient here ’cause obedience costs something. Obedience costs me my time. When the Lord says, “Hey, there’s somebody sitting by themself in church, go over there and sit with them or at least say hi to them.” That’s a very trivial example of something the Lord might want us to do. There’s so many other categories, but do you prefer convenience to obedience in worship as well as in serving? “My schedule’s too full. I can’t really go do that. I can’t really be a part of that thing.”

He indulged in idolatry and led others to do the same, this is Jeroboam, and he cheapened and weakened the infrastructure of ministry. How’d he do that? He appointed his own priests according to anybody that filled out the form. That’s all it takes. It’s not about having godly character, it’s not about any hunger for the Lord. Listen, I’m not saying you got to have seminary. Listen, none of the 12 disciples went to seminary, okay? None of them wore a tie. None of them ever heard of a pipe organ. See, we take all of our traditions and elevate them to the highest level of all kinds of things, but Jesus took a band of uneducated fishermen, and there was one guy that knew how to count, Levi, who became Matthew. He was there. I’m glad he was there, but a couple of these guys were total knuckleheads and some of them you would never have expected they would be together in the same collection of people. Yet, because of Jesus they can find a way to work together and it’s by keeping Jesus first, by keeping Him first. That’s so, so very important.

Here with Jeroboam, it’s just a matter of are you his buddy. “Do you want to be on my priestly team? I’d love to have you if you want to do it.” The man of God from Judah obeyed at first but then strayed from and disobeyed the Word of the Lord. That’s true. I have lots of questions. As I said, when I read the passage, I struggled with the fact that the Lord let the lion kill him. I struggle with that. When I think about the things that I’ve done and measure them up against what this guy’s done, man, on the way home, I should meet a lion. But I’m not God, and I can’t pretend to know God’s ways. His ways are higher than my ways, and the Word of the Lord is so important to the Lord. Without it, we are rudderless, meaningless, purposeless creatures careening through a huge universe without any sense of mission, but with it, man, everything changes when the Word of the Lord is respected. The old man from Bethel misrepresented and also misappropriated, I would say, the Word of the Lord.

So, what are we doing with the Word of the Lord and how should we respond to the Word of the Lord? 1 Kings 13 shows us how these three people responded. Again, if I was being nice, I’d just say Jeroboam ignored it. I’d say he rejected it. I would say he resisted it and rejected it. He’s a belligerent unbeliever, a willful unbeliever. There are people that you might know, and maybe there’s even somebody in the room or watching online right now that’s in that state with God where they’re just mad at God, angry at God for some outcome or for something that has not happened or whatever it might be. The man of God who was from Judah strayed from the Word of God, maybe people like that here as well are watching online today. He obeyed, he left Judah, he traveled up there. In that collection of people around that altar where it was public. And the King Jeroboam was there, and he’s known to be a violent man, and all those other people are there. He interrupted the whole thing and spoke the Word of the Lord.

Pretty courageous, really? Are we that bold? I’m not. Often, I’m not that bold. But at the same time, he resists the first temptation with the king. “Come to my house. Don’t you want to hang out at the palace? Don’t you want to? I got really some great venison. We can do some wine. We can do the whole thing.” Then comes the next offer and he caves to it, don’t know why. We’re not told, don’t know his motives. I wish I had more. We’ll have coffee with him when we all get home and try to figure it out a little bit. The old prophet misrepresented, and I think misappropriated, the Word of God for his own purposes. How am I like him sometimes? How am I like all three of these people sometimes, and how are you like all three of these people sometimes?

I think it’s important for us to ask ourselves the question when we see what are really good examples of a way not to be. Do we learn from the good examples of what not to be when we read the Scriptures? We do that with history all the time. We learn the lessons of history by studying history. Sometimes the lessons are, “Oh, yeah, we should be more like that.” Sometimes, though, the lessons are, “That’s not the way to go,” and I think it’s important for us to be able to do that. I thank God preserving a word like this for us that we might learn from it. If we divide it rightly, I think there’s just a great opportunity for us to move forward in the way that we might respond to the Word of God. Listen, we believe here at The Village Chapel in a God who speaks, but we will not be able to discern the Word of the Lord if we’ve already made up our minds about what we want Him to say. Amen.

Do you see this? There’s a lot of people out there that have already made up their mind about what they want the Lord to say. It could be, as we’re in election year. Some people think they know what it is that God wants to say. If you’re thinking of anybody other than you, you just made a mistake ’cause it could be the ones you are thinking of as well just as easily. So, we need to find ourselves in that place of humility before the Word of the Lord, to know that it’s God who has the right and the power and the authority to speak. He’s the only one, actually, that has the authority to speak with that kind of authority. We sang a song that this man wrote earlier, and I love that song, a Mighty Fortress is Our God. He also said, “My conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand.” He’s not just saying, “I’m a stubborn old guy. I’m a stubborn old coot.” No, he says, “I stand on the Word of the Lord,” and that’s where we’ll stand as well here at The Village Chapel.

That’s why we study through books of the Bible, and that’s why that will be a part of the fabric and DNA of this church for 100 years to come. Okay? It’s really, really important for all of us to know that. Tozer: “If you would follow on to know the Lord, come at once to the open Bible expecting it to speak to you. Do not come with the notion that it is a thing which you may push around at your convenience. It is more than a thing; it is a voice, a word, the very Word of the living God.” We should treat it with that respect and come before it. Not wanting to be an authority over it like Jeroboam, creating our own religion, but to place ourselves under its authority and therefore, under its freedom and grace and its goodness and its richness and its beauty and all that it provides for us in the way of hope for our future.

I need that. So many people need that. They want to do the salad bar spirituality thing of just going down the line and picking and choosing what they like from the Bible. Man, 1 Kings 13 has got some great lessons for us. Let’s not skip 1 Kings 13 or any other chapter for that matter. Let’s spend our time studying the Word together. Packer so beautifully summarized this. “At no time since the Reformation have Christians as a body been so unsure, tentative and confused as to what they should believe and do. The outside observer sees us as staggering from gimmick to gimmick, stunt to stunt like a drunk in the fog. Preaching is hazy, heads are muddled, hearts fret. Why is this?” J.I. Packer asks. “We blame the external pressures of our world, but this is like Eve blaming the serpent. The real trouble is that for two generations or more our churches have suffered from a famine of hearing the Word of the Lord.” Amen.

He said that decades ago. That’s spot on as far as I’m concerned, spot on. I’ll close with this quote by John Stott, one of my favorite Bible teachers of all time, “The greatest single secret of spiritual development lies in personal, humble, believing, obedient response to the Word of God. It is as God speaks to us through His Word that His warnings can bring us to conviction of sin, His promises to assurance of forgiveness, His commands to amendment of life. We live and grow by His Word.” Amen? Amen.

So still, you find yourself with questions, as do I. Let us continue in the Word of the Lord. Let us lean in to the Word of the Lord. Let’s listen. Let’s not just listen, but heed the Word of the Lord, and let’s move on the Word of the Lord. If He says, “Go back home a different way,” we should go back home a different way. If He says, “Don’t eat or drink that,” then don’t eat or drink that. In other words, are we bowing before Him intellectually? Are we bowing before Him volitionally in terms of our will? Are we bowing before Him in terms of our affections? Are we bowing before Him in terms of the things that we value in this world? All of that is a little disturbing for me to think about for myself.

So, I hope I’m disturbing you as well, not just to disturb you, but to perhaps catalyze us all, to move us from just reading a One Year Bible to actually meditating on a One Year Bible and allowing the Word of God to sink deeply into our hearts as well as our minds and our ears so that, like Psalm tells us, we might not sin against Him. It might actually be the kind of thing that shows us, “Hey, these are the guardrails right here.” This is our standard of belief and behavior. We can believe this is actually true. The value of my understanding of who I am is not based on a career or cash or a condo or a car. The value of who I am is based on the fact that Christ died for me. Amen. Amen?

Christ chose me and made me His own and He’s done that. He’s calling to you as well. How will you respond to, not just the written Word of God, but the living Word of God, who is Jesus who came for you and who came from me? He’s the greater than King David, the greater than King Solomon and yeah, the greater even than Josiah from 2 Kings 23, who fulfills what this prophet in 1 Kings 13 prophesied, Jesus is greater than Josiah as well. Some of what Jesus did is foreshadowed in 1 Kings 13. He, too, died and was buried in another man’s grave. The great news is, He didn’t stay in that grave. Because He got up from that grave, He can speak Words of life to you and to me and Words of hope to you and to me, especially those of us who are sitting watching as some move on and pass between the thin veil between this life and the next.

If you aren’t there, we will all be there someday, 100% of us, until the Lord Himself returns to set all things right. Let’s look to Him: Thank You, living Word of God, Jesus. Thank You for coming. You didn’t have to, but You did. Along the way, we see foreshadowings of Your approach as we look at 1 Kings 13 and learn that You are a God who speaks. You are a God who actually offers grace. Even in the middle of prophesying against King Jeroboam, You healed his hand. That blew my mind that You would be gracious even then. There was still time for Jeroboam. Lord, there’s still time for me. There’s still time for my friends who are listening to this study as well. Help us, Holy Spirit, remove the scales from our eyes that we might see the Word as we read it and hear it in our hearts. Give us, then, the faith, grant us the faith to respond in belief and trusting it, and obey the Word of the Lord. I pray this in Jesus’ name for His glory. Amen and amen.