KINGS AND KINGDOMS
	Bible Reading: 1 Kings 15:25-31
V. 29: When Baasha became king, he struck down the entire house of Jeroboam. (HCSB)

Another Man Who Would Be King

Beginning on a tangent, I highly recommend the movie, The Man Who Would Be King (1975), directed by John Huston, starring Sean Connery, Michael Caine, and Christopher Plummer, based on a short story by Rudyard Kipling.

When you are trying to tell the stories of two kingdoms that interact frequently, but also have their own issues and challenges, there are going to be times when the writer has to backtrack to catch up with previous events in one of the kingdoms. This is true for 1 & 2 Kings, and tonight's section is definitely a case in point. Last time we left off with King Asa of Judah winning a diplomatic victory against King Baasha of Israel, but now we need to go back and look at how Baasha actually became king. Well, this is not a very pleasant story, and I trust that any children reading this will realize that this is not how things are supposed to be done, and I am hoping that parents will exercise discretion in exposing their children to these facts. Baasha simply killed the one who was king at the time and declared himself to be King.

Before we get back to Baasha and his actions I trust that you are catching the irony as well as the sarcasm in the previous paragraph. On the one hand, it appears as though the Bible contains depictions of events that normally Christian parents shield their children from, and so people have pointed out before the apparent inconsistency of parents guarding their children from explicit movies or other literature, while encouraging them to read the Bible. But this is silly. The Bible doesn't depict anything here; it simply reports it. There are a few passages that are a little bit more graphic in their descriptions, but on the whole the Bible simply says that such and such occurred, and it does not go into detailed descriptions the way that much of literature, not to mention films and television, do. Some folks reading this may remember Prof. Ed Dinsey, who taught English at Taylor University for a while. One of his standard phrases in evaluating someone's creative writing, including mine (voluntarily submitted to his criticism), was: "Don't tell it; show it!" Well, the Bible tells it; it rarely shows it, whereas the stuff that concerns Christian parents usually "shows" it.

Oops, I am stacking again. So be it. I just can't help myself,  as I am musing on the subject, to think of Bertrand Russell, who was always prepared to exercise scathing moral criticism of both the Old and New Testaments (e.g., in his "Why I am not a Christian") Yes, you read correctly. Bertrand Russell criticizised the Bible for its alleged immorality. You may not be familiar with Russell and his stellar moral code, so let me give you a quick analogy. His exercise of moral criticism is worth approximately the same value as any statements of outrage by Stalin or Hitler over genocide.

Okay, pop! Let's get back to where we were, if, that is, we happened to have been at Gibbethon, a town on the Mediterranean coast, which at the time was under the domination of the Philistines. Sure enough, the Philistines were back in the picture again, though only on the margin and not in the center. One would not expect otherwise; between the quarreling among the two Hebrew kingdoms, the invasion by Shishak, and then the skirmishes by Ben- hadad, it would have been a real shock if the Philistines had not taken advantage of the situation and sneaked back up into Israel to claim a little extra territory for themselves.

The king of the northern kingdom of Israel now was Nadab, the son of Jeroboam. You may remember the prophet Ahijah having foretold Jeroboam that his entire family would be eradicated. This did not happen during Jeroboam's reign, but the prophecy became fulfilled shortly after Nadab had assumed the throne. Nadab was no improvement over Jeroboam in terms of his devotion to the Lord. Just like his father he encouraged the worship of the golden calves and abetted idolatry wherever it occurred. And while Jeroboam had instituted these practices specifically in order to keep people who lived within the Kingdom of Israel from having to go to Jerusalem in order to fulfill their religious obligations, by now it is safe to say that the idol worship had taken on a life of its own. It was no longer a means to an end, but it was an end in itself.  

We can say this much for Nadab: he appears to have been committed to throwing the Philistines back out on their ears. For his own reasons, Baasha had decided that he was really not all that happy serving underneath this king, and that he really was far more qualified to fill that office. So, while everyone was busy focusing on the siege of Gibbethon, Baasha made his move toward glory.

As we already noted, Scripture does not give us much in the way of details, it tells us that he killed Nadab. We know, of course, that by doing so Baasha was fulfilling God's threat to Jeroboam, but there doesn't seem to be any further justification or rationalization from Baasha's. perspective other than that he thought he should be king. And thus, Jeroboam's dynasty had been replaced by a new one, the "dynasty" of Baasha. Would this be the dynasty in charge of Israel from here on out? Let me save you a bit of disappointment because I don't want anyone distraught and tell you:  "not a pedestrian's chance on the Dan Ryan."