Divine VP; Politics and Leadership. 1 Kings 12
When we get into the study of Kings we note that at the beginning, or more often at the end, of each of the sections where we deal with a king there is a divine editorial or comment evaluating the ruler. That gives us insight into how God looks at the leadership, the politics of that ruler and what went on during his reign. This is going to be true of each one of the kings now as we get into the second part of 1 Kings. We will be going back and forth between 1 Kings and 2 Chronicles. 1 Kings focuses on both the kings of Judah and the kings of Israel.
We want to look at a framework for understanding God's evaluation of leaders. We have to be careful with this because God's expectations of a leader in Israel and not going to be quite the same as His expectations of a leader in a Gentile nation or a nation in the church age. The king in Israel has a special role and special relationship to God in what is called the theocratic kingdom. The term "theocratic" means just a form of theocracy and it relates to God's rule. Israel was originally set up as a theocracy where God was the King and He was the sovereign ruler over Israel, but they rejected His kingship during the period of the judges. There was no king in Israel in those days and everyone did what was right in their own eyes.
Any religious system, if it has any depth or complexity to it, is going to address the basic issues of life. Politics is a key issue in life. It has to do with how people as a social group are going to organise and govern themselves.
From that we see that there will always flow some explanation of origin. Why do we think creation is such a battlefield, and has become such a battlefield, in education? It is because if we reject God we have to come up with some alternate explanation (myth) in order to explain how people got here, how the earth got here. In that there is something that exists we have to explain how it came into existence. There is a view of origins in any significant religious system.
How we think about origins will then impact how we think about human society and its institutions. We look at the social institutions that we have, and if we are coming from a random chance orientation, then we are going to come up against different conventions that were chosen in order to make life work and make societies function in that particular world, so they tend to treat them as all having equal value. They look at what we call institutions as merely conventions, things that were generated and created by man in a very pragmatic way in order to make society function and work. So that government itself as an outgrowth of these social conventions has its ultimate authority located within the people themselves—this is just something that was developed by man in order to have some kind of order, though sometimes in order to exercise power and control to dominate other people. Another way to look at this is from a Christian viewpoint, and that is that these institutions are a part of God's original creation. He has established man and created him as a social creature and therefore has embedded within man's being certain ways of doing things so that these become virtually social laws that cannot be manipulated or changed without doing harm to society. So different religious systems are all going to have different ideas about marriage and family and government. And government is as integral to Islamic theology as praying five times a day. That is why Islam is not simply from the western vantage point a religion, it is a total way of life that includes sharia law and the type of government that it has—it is all one package. Whatever the religious framework is going to be it is going to influence how we think about society and social institutions.
The Judeo-Christian Scripture, the Old Testament and the New Testament, provide a specific view of human society as part of God's creation. So that within these Scriptures, primarily the Old Testament, we are told that God established and embedded certain institutions within human society. They are not conventions, they didn't originate from the bottom up, but were established by a creator God from the top down in order to give order and stability to man's social relationships. When these are honoured, whether it is by Christian or non-Christian, the society will have a measure of stability and preservation and prosperity. When these are violated the society will have instability and will self-destruct. For example, there is no example of a matriarchal or polygamous society that ever existed above a very primitive level. Internationalism flies in the face of what the Bible teaches and we have to maintain national sovereignty, national identity. There is tremendous pressure today from many of the elites in the world, from government, to give up our national sovereignty to world courts, to UN courts, to all of these kinds of things which run completely counter to what the Bible teaches. Man will always try to find some sort of international body to do things and it always has a religious background.
All of this goes back to the tower of Babel where mankind, rather than scattering and filling the earth as God had commanded after the flood, decided to unite against God and build this tower to heaven. We have a modern version of that at the EU headquarters which is specifically designed to imitate the tower of Babel. In light of these things that God has set forth we can begin to develop something of a political theory that is based upon the Bible. Its foundation is found in Acts 17:26 NASB "and He made from one {man} every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined {their} appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation." The foundation of Paul's argument is that God is the creator of all things, and this is seen in the previous two verses, 25 & 25 NASB "The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands;
We can derive two conclusions about this. The first is, it is only reasonable for us to believe that the God who created all things, created mankind to be male and female—this isn't accidental, he designed that a specific way, and this can't be manipulated—and designed the entire social concept because he made us to be relational creatures after His image, and that would include marriage, family and government. Those three things are all part of man's being a social creature. So we can infer that he would also address in Scripture principles related to each of these. Since he is the one who designed and created marriage and family He is going to teach us about marriage and family in His Word. It is the same with government. The second conclusion is that as part of this it is also reasonable that if we believe that God is the creator and that He created all things, that God addresses principles of marriage for both believer and unbeliever and for family for believer and unbeliever, that we should also have Him address principles of government as well. And that goes back to our basic question: Can we divorce politics from religion?
God is the foundation for all thought, and if we are Christians and serious about the Word, and if we believe that the Word of God addresses everything, then we have to be consistent with that and not leave the Bible outside of the political science classroom. It is part and parcel of our thinking about government but it also tells us how we should handle this is relationship to people who are not believers, who are not involved, who do not share the same beliefs that we do. We respect the fact that they have other beliefs, we don't impose Christianity on other people; there is not a legislation of Christianity on other people.
The Old Testament gives us several key passages that help to frame our understanding of the role of government. The first is in Genesis chapter nine in the Noahic covenant. It establishes the basic foundation for human government. God tells Noah that now, if man sheds man's blood, the person who commits murder should have his blood shed also. He delegates the responsibility for capital punishment to mankind. That is a very abbreviated statement, but in order to fulfil that man had to figure out a way to do that in a just manner. There had to be a system of laws developed for witnesses, to establish the fact that a murder had taken place, laws for a just execution, etc. What the Noahic covenant does is simply establish the principle, so in order to carry out those principles there had to be the development of a judicial system and government. But that doesn't necessarily entail a nation. There can be all kinds of groups of people that are self-governing that are not nations. The idea of national distinctiveness comes along after the tower of Babel. The tower of Babel operates because man failed to do what he was required to do under the Noahic covenant, which was to scatter and multiply and to fill the earth. The tower of Babel episode shows that sinful man is going to pervert government, but that doesn't mean that the institution itself is wrong.
The next key passage we see is found in Deuteronomy 17:14-20, and part of this becomes the Mosaic Law basis for indicting Solomon. NASB "When you enter the land which the LORD your God gives you, and you possess it and live in it, and you say, 'I will set a king over me like all the nations who are around me, you shall surely set a king over you whom the LORD your God chooses, {one} from among your countrymen you shall set as king over yourselves; you may not put a foreigner over yourselves who is not your countryman.
The king had to have an attitude of humility toward the people. The people do not exist in order to bring prosperity to the ruler. He is not to prosper himself at the expense of the people. But this is what God warns them will happen. The king is not to use his position to develop his own wealth and power. There is an embedded view in Scripture that a genuine leader is a man that has a genuine humility and a desire to serve the people. These verses are telling us that when the king comes to the throne he is under the authority of God and He wants to remind him of that, so the king has to consistently write out copies for himself so that he will understand who the nation Israel is, what God's purpose for them is, and then he will understand his role. He is to do it with witnesses involved and be observed by the Levitical priests who represent God. He is to "fear the Lord his God," and that is an important phrase. It is repeated many times in Scriptures but we learn, for example, in Proverbs that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. It is that authority orientation and respect for God and His Word that is the starting point for all knowledge. So the king is to read the Word and study it daily so that he will fear the Lord and begin to have wisdom. Then there is a second purpose stated in v. 20.
We have seen that Solomon failed in all of this. He gets lifted up by pride and arrogance to that he rejects God in the latter part of his reign, and so God is going to bring this discipline upon him. The irony is that Solomon is the one who when he began his reign was truly humble and manifested what the biblical kind of leader should be like. But pride enters into it and he fails. In a broader sense what God is going to demonstrate to Israel is that no human being can ever be the solution to our problems. Our problems derive from a spiritual problem, not from a political, educational, or economic source. Unless there is a spiritual solution the political solution is no solution and there are no other solutions that will help.
Leadership is related to wisdom, the fear of the Lord, and to foolishness.
1 Samuel 8:10-16 NASB "So Samuel spoke all the words of the LORD to the people who had asked of him a king.
This is what Solomon did though the people were warned. 1 Samuel 8:19 NASB "Nevertheless, the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel, and they said, 'No, but there shall be a king over us.'" There mind was made up and they decided to give up their freedom. The more power the government has the less freedom that people have. It is amazing how people give up their freedoms to government thinking the government can give them security, and the government cannot give them security.
Illustrations