Was this really brought about by the Lord?

A little over a year ago, my wife and I went to a Phil Wickham show with some friends. One of the songs he sang had a very convicting lyric. He is talking about God’s word being like a letter written to us from God. His line in the song said, “I’ve read every word of it page by page.” It was very convicting because I have not read every word of it page by page. So ever since then I’ve been reading the Bible the whole way through from Genesis to Revelation. Now just to make sure you understand, I am not doing one of those “bible in a year” things. I’m just going through it very slowly and trying to understand it all as best as I can.

Now when someone takes on this incredible task, you begin to find things in God’s word that are very interesting. You being to find things that clash with our image of God we have in our head. The image that has been put in our head from every Christian that we’ve known in our life. When we come to the word of God, we find God in the way that He has disclosed Himself, and that it usually different from the way we want to make God look like or act.

Yesterday, I was reading 1 Kings 12:15 and I found something quite strange. I wanted to write about it here to help you see that God acts in mysterious ways. Here is the background for 1 Kings 12.

• This is after King David’s son King Solomon has died.
• The end of King Solomon’s life was kind of destructive and harsh toward Israel like Israel’s time in Egypt under Pharaoh.
• King Solomon’s son Rehoboam has become king. The Israelites now ask Rehoboam if he is going to lighten the burden. This is how he responds.

So Jeroboam and all the people came to Rehoboam the third day, as the king said, “Come to me again the third day.” And the king answered the people harshly, and forsaking the counsel that the old men had given him, he spoke to them according to the counsel of the young men, saying, “My father made your yoke heavy, but I will add to your yoke. My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions.”
(1 Kings 12:12-14 ESV)

So here we have King Rehoboam telling all the Israelites that he is not going to show them mercy and compassion. He is actually going to make it much more worse for the people he rules over, a great deal worse than King Solomon. Now the next verse is very surprising.

He spoke to them according to the counsel of the young men, saying, “My father made your yoke heavy, but I will add to your yoke. My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions.” So the king did not listen to the people, for it was a turn of affairs brought about by the LORD that he might fulfill his word, which the LORD spoke by Ahijah the Shilonite to Jeroboam the son of Nebat.
(1 Kings 12:14-15 ESV)

God speaks and then He sovereignly acts to ensure every word He spoke comes to pass. The ESV study note for verse 15 says, “Amid all the human decisions, God’s decision is being carried through, as was the case with the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart.” So something as horrible as the King not listening to his people and treating them harshly was actually brought about by the Lord for His purposes. Does this sound like your typical understanding of God?

Reading through the Bible, you run into these types of verses all the time. Now what is your first gut reaction to these verses? Do you try to explain them away to try to make God look better? Or do you just accept the fact that God’s thoughts and His way are not our thoughts and ways? (Isaiah 55:8-9)

Just something to think about.