Presented to Swift Current Corps of The Salvation Army , 25 Nov. 2012
By Captain Michael Ramsay
Harvey told a joke at the Army this week:
There is a fellow who is big game hunting somewhere in Africa along with his wife and her parents. One afternoon, his mother-in-law is missing so, of course, they all franticly search for her. The wife spies her mother and grabs her husband. She points to a clearing where they see her mother who is face to face with a lion. “Do something!” she exclaims to her husband.
“No” he replies, “the lion got himself into this mess, he can very well get himself out of it.” (I imagine that the point of this story is simply pointing out the superior big game hunting skills of his wife’s mother)
The pericope that we are looking at today contains a lion and a person but the person who comes face-to-face with the lion doesn’t fare quite as well as the fellow’s mother-in-law in our opening anecdote presumably does. This scriptural episode with the lion is just one aspect of the story that we read today and this passage has so many fascinating parts to it.
We read in 1 Kings 13 how the LORD uses one of His prophets to give this powerful message to King Jeroboam of Israel. As recorded in 1 Kings 13:2-3, the prophet relays the message from the LORD that the LORD will punish the king for his sins: for the golden calves and high places that the king had set up (cf. 1 Kings 12:2-5-33). When King Jeroboam responds to this news by stretching out his hand to command the prophet’s capture, his hand is shriveled up and he cannot withdraw it. So the king pleads with the prophet to intercede with the LORD on his behalf so that his hand may be restored. The prophet intercedes: the hand is restored by God. The king then invites the prophet to have dinner with him reportedly in order to present him with a gift of some kind: probably a thank you gift.[1] Declining, the prophet declares in Verses 8 and 9 that “even if you were to give me half of your possessions, I would not go with you, nor would I eat bread or drink water here. For I was commanded by the Word of the LORD: ‘You must not eat bread or drink water or return by the way you came.’ So he took a different route home.”
If the story ended here it would be interesting enough. At the beginning of the episode, we have two characters going head to head here: the prophet [He is named ‘Yadon’ by Josephus (Antiquites viii.9.1; cf. Iddo, 2 Chr. 13:2)] – and the king, Yadon and King Jeroboam.[2] The roles seem to be pretty well defined here too. The prophet is a ‘man of God’. He is the good guy and the king in this scene is the bad guy.[3] If this was an old west film, Yadon would be wearing the white hat and Jeroboam, the black hat. If this was a classic western movie, when Jeroboam reached out his hand he would have had a six shooter in it but Yadon would be quicker, paralyzing Jeroboam as he shoots the gun from his hand. You can almost picture this dramatic scene.
In our scriptures today it is this dramatic of a scene but, of course, this actually takes place a long time before western movies existed and it seems as if all that is in the king’s hand is his full royal authority, which of course is more powerful than any six-shooter possibly could be. It is this authority with which the king is reaching out in order to order the prophet’s arrest. The prophet Yadon by condemning the king’s idolatry has just challenged the king’s authority to set up independent places and modes of worship in his own country. The king takes this sort of challenge seriously and he responds as the powerful often do when challenged, even in our world today. The prophet however (as do we all) has access to the power and the mercy of God. The power of God is manifest through this prophet in that when the king stretches out his hand to command the arrest of the prophet, the Lord arrests his hand. God then shows His power and His mercy through the prophet by restoring the king’s hand and then Yadon further shows his strength of conviction and his character by obeying the Lord in refusing to delay returning home by refusing to dine with the king.
Now there is even more to this apparent strength of conviction and character of Yadon the prophet. Some background information: King Jeroboam, the bad guy, in the first part of our story today is the king of the newly created Kingdom of Israel. God has just torn Israel (with the exception of the tribe of Judah) away from Solomon’s son Rehoboam and God has given it to King Jeroboam (1 Kings 11-12). King Rehoboam of Judah, in the previous chapter of the book of Kings here, sent his officer in charge of forced labour to go get Israel back but God and King Jeroboam’s Israel didn’t take so kindly to this and the Israelites stoned him (1 Kings 12:18). King Rehoboam of Judah then sent an army against Israel, which God, through the prophet Shemaiah, turned back and now God sends this young prophet from Judah to condemn Israel’s King Jeroboam (1 Kings 12:21-24). You can see why Israel and King Jeroboam might not trust this prophet from Judah and you can see why this young prophet from Judah might doubt his assignment from God but he doesn’t; on the contrary he displays this apparent strength of conviction and character in his obedience to the LORD.
Putting the Israel of our pericope today in its proper historical context: Israel is in the process of seceding from its union with Judah. There has been talk this week about some of the American states in the south seceding from their union; how would they feel if someone from the north then came down to the south to tell them what is wrong with their lives and the way they worship God? They might not like that too much. Closer to home Quebec just this year elected a separatist government again. If Quebec finally does separate from Canada, how would we here react to a Québécois prophet coming to Saskatchewan to tell our premier that we are worshipping God in the wrong way? This is what it is like for King Jeroboam and this is what is like for Yadon, the man of God.[4]
Can you imagine if you were a prophet from the west here, after a separation, and you were sent to tell the Québécois how to worship God? How bold would you be? That would be what it must have been like for the prophet Yadon but he stands strong. He never wavers. He obeys God: he gives the king God’s message, he restores the king’s arm, and he heads straight for home refusing to tarry with the king. This prophet seems like he is doing great, right? Wouldn't we all like to be as bold as he is? Now this is where the story gets interesting...
An old prophet seeks out this man of God as he is travelling home. He invites him home for dinner. The young prophet originally declines: God told him to go straight home. Our bold man of God who has just faced off against the king of a hostile country, he is bold and he is determined and at first he is not deterred even when he is invited to stop and have dinner with a colleague, a senior colleague. That would be like if I was returning from a mission to Regina or Ottawa and a Major or a Colonel asked me to stop by on the way home. The old prophet asks the young man of God to stop and, 1 Kings 13:16b-17: The man of God says like he did earlier to the king, “I cannot turn back and go with you, nor can I eat bread or drink water with you in this place. I have been told by the word of the Lord: ‘You must not eat bread or drink water there or return by the way you came.’” So far so good…
Now in our story then, this old prophet, this senior prophet, ‘Colonel Old Prophet’, he then lies to the man of God, saying that an angel of the Lord has asked him to invite the young prophet to his home to eat and drink with him. Verses 18-19: “The old prophet answered, ‘I too am a prophet, as you are. And an angel said to me by the word of the Lord: ‘Bring him back with you to your house so that he may eat bread and drink water.’ (But he was lying to him.) So the man of God returned with him and ate and drank in his house.”
This is were the tragedy unfolds: the young man of God accepts this invitation that the older prophet of God tells him comes from God and a then lion sent from God kills the young man of God for disobedience to God. Put yourself in the place of Yadon, the young prophet. What is he supposed to do? Well, we know that he was supposed to go home without stopping but how could he know that ‘Colonel Old Prophet’ was lying to him? This is a young prophet heading home is probably completely drained. You know the feeling when you have just been used by God in an amazing way or have just finished some very important task, how drained you are. One is drained after the Lord uses us for big events like this. I imagine that the young prophet Yadon feels like this. This young prophet is coming home from a successful encounter with the king where the Lord has just spoken through him and he has seen the king’s hand arrested and then he has seen it healed. He is going straight home just like God told him but then another prophet of the Lord comes up to this man; an older, presumably more experienced prophet tells him that the Lord has told him that the young prophet should stop for dinner and so he stops for dinner and is then later killed by a lion for disobedience to the Lord.
There is more here too. Imagine with me now that you are this young prophet who has just been used by God to do so much and imagine with me now that you have had this invitation from a senior prophet that you only accepted because the prophet told you that it was a message from God. Imagine that you have just sat down to dinner. Imagine that you have been recounting the events of your day to the senior prophet. Imagine that you are maybe even listening to some of his stories from the old days. Imagine that you then sit down to dinner. Imagine that somebody is about to ask the blessing, say grace, and then, Verses 20-22: “While they were sitting at the table, the word of the Lord came to the old prophet who had brought him back. He cried out to the man of God who had come from Judah, ‘This is what the Lord says: ‘You have defied the word of the Lord and have not kept the command the Lord your God gave you. You came back and ate bread and drank water in the place where he told you not to eat or drink. Therefore your body will not be buried in the tomb of your ancestors.’”
How would you feel? You have just been used mightily for God’s purposes. You were bold in standing up to the declared bad guy, the king of Israel; you refuse to be distracted from your God-given task but then someone who is supposedly on your side tells you that he has a message from the Lord telling you to stop, so you stop: why would you think he would be lying to you? And then as you are about to eat supper with him he does ironically deliver a message to you that is actually from the Lord, that of your impending death and burial away from your ancestral home for disobeying God by obeying the one speaking to you. How would you feel?
And then it comes to pass, Verse 23 and 24: “When the man of God had finished eating and drinking, the prophet who had brought him back saddled his donkey for him. As he went on his way, a lion met him on the road and killed him, and his body was left lying on the road, with both the donkey and the lion standing beside it.” So, the lion was obliviously from God: he didn’t eat the prophet and he didn’t touch the donkey. He just killed the prophet and stood there beside the donkey watching over the prophet’s body. This is no hungry lion that just happened along by coincidence.[5]
So I have a lot of questions here: Why did the old prophet lie? Why -after the old prophet did lie- did the LORD still use the old prophet to prophecy to the young prophet? Why does the young prophet pay for his sin with his life? But why then is there no punishment recorded here for the elder prophet? Why, more importantly, why is this story even in the Bible? What is God relaying in this scene and this episode to anyone who reads the book of 1 Kings? What is the very important message that we need to learn here today so that we don’t wind up deserving the same fate as Yadon, the young prophet?
What did Yadon do wrong? He disobeyed God. Why did he disobey God? A senior prophet of God (one of the supposed good guys) told him that God wanted him to do something different than God really did want him to do. Are we ever vulnerable and apt to make this same error? Do we ever doubt what God is telling us because someone else tells us differently? How many of us have Christians pastors, preachers, prophets, officers, and others speaking into our lives? I hope most of us do. How many of us read Christian authors? How many of us watch Christian speakers on TV? How many of us listen to Christian preachers on the radio? How many of us search the Internet for Christian teaching? How many of us pass along Christian e-mail messages? These are all good things just like Yadon’s heading to Israel to talk to their king was a good thing. And these Christian preachers and teachers are presumably the good guys like the older prophet was supposed to be one of the good guys; but how many of us bother to check to make sure that these messages that we receive even from the presumed good guys are true before we forward them on or how many of us make sure that our favourite Christian speaker is correct –anyone can make a mistake – before we re-tell his story? How many of us make sure that what our favourite speakers, preachers and teachers are teaching is true before we obey it or tell our friends about it? And how can we verify these things and so avoid falling into the trap that cost the man of God his life?
One key way that we have available to us today is the Bible: when someone purports to have a message from God we should make sure that they are right and true. Doctrine 1 of The Salvation Army states that, “We believe that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments were given by inspiration of God; and that they only constitute the Divine rule of Christian faith and practice.” We need to test what people – even the good guys - say against the Scriptures. Acts 17:10-12 commends the Bereans for doing just that: they would examine the Scriptures every day to see if what even the apostle Paul himself was telling them was true. We need to pray and read our Bibles, for otherwise how can know if what we hear from the pulpit, what we hear on the radio, what we hear the TV, what we read online, or what we read in a book is true or not? For those who come to Bible study on Monday nights, you’ll remember last Monday we looked at, among other passages, 1 Thessalonians 5:20-22, where God through the Apostle Paul reminds us all: “Do not treat prophecies with contempt but test them all; hold on to what is good, reject every kind of evil.”
This is important in our world today. More and more people and more and more churches are spending less and less time in prayer and less and less time in Bible study. And this is a shame because how can we possibly tell what of all the cacophony of voices speaking into our lives is true if we don’t ask the Lord and if we don’t spend time praying and reading our Bibles. Romans 1:16 reminds us that the Gospel itself is the power for Salvation. That is how we can know what God is telling us.
Today we read about a prophet who was used greatly by God but then disobeyed God as another prophet deceived him and it cost him his life. If that happened then and there to a man of God, it can certainly happen to any of us today. So I extol each of us to protect ourselves from that which befell Yadon. I encourage each of us to fervently seek the Lord through prayer and Bible Study because that is our protection. For God promises us that when we seek Him, we will find Him and He promises us that when we find Him we will be saved (from more than just lions) and when we are saved what a day of rejoicing that will be (Matthew 6:33).
Let us pray.
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[1] Donald J. Wiseman, 1 and 2 Kings: An Introduction and Commentary. Downers Grove, IL : InterVarsity Press, 1993 (Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries 9), S. 158: If the man of God were to make an agreement or show fellowship (‘eat bread’, vv. 7, 18) with the king, that would have been tantamount to a withdrawal of judgment. The king’s motive could have been ‘to link himself in fellowship with him as a form of insurance’ (Robinson, p. 161; cf. Noth, p. 298), and so to seek for the prophet’s endorsement of his new royal position. The ban on the return route might serve to avoid further contact with a cursed place and people.
[2] R. D. Patterson and Hermann J. Austel, The Expositor's Bible Commentary, Pradis CD-ROM:1 Kings/Notes to First Kings/First Kings 13 Notes/First Kings Note 13:1, Book Version: 4.0.2: If Josephus's suggestion (Antiq. VIII, 240-41 [ix.1]) that the prophet's name was Yadon is accepted, he may perhaps be connected with the Iddo mentioned as a chronicler of the events of Abijah's day (2 Chronicles 13:22).
[3] Mark Leuchter, 'Jeroboam the Ephratite', Journal of Biblical Literature 125 no. 1 (2006): 51:"No other king is so strenuously distanced from the principles of the prophet tradition, the theological standards of Israelite covenantal theology, or the inherent grace of the Davidic house."
[4] Cf. Mark Leuchter, 'Jeroboam the Ephratite', Journal of Biblical Literature 125 no. 1 (2006): 55.
[5] Cf. Choon-Leong Seow. The First and Second Book of Kings, (NIB III: Abigdon Press, Nashville, 1999), 108.
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