Even though the Lord, the God of Israel, had appeared to Solomon twice and had commanded him not to worship foreign gods, Solomon did not obey the Lord but turned away from him. So the Lord was angry with Solomon…
We are accountable for what we have heard, seen and received (Luc 19:12-26).
So the Lord… said to him, “Because you have deliberately broken your covenant with me and disobeyed my commands, I promise that I will take the kingdom away from you and give it to one of your officials. However, for the sake of your father David I will not do this in your lifetime, but during the reign of your son. And I will not take the whole kingdom away from him; instead, I will leave him one tribe for the sake of my servant David and for the sake of Jerusalem, the city I have made my own.”
How I would like to be a source of blessing for others, Lord, and even a point of reference (2 Kings 22:1-2).
Long before this, when David had conquered Edom, Joab the commander of his army had gone there to bury the dead. He and his men remained in Edom six months, and during that time they killed every male in Edom…
Ouch. Barbaric.
So the Lord caused Hadad, of the royal family of Edom, to turn against Solomon. …Hadad and some of his father’s Edomite servants… escaped to Egypt. (At that time Hadad was just a child.) …they traveled to Egypt and went to the king, who gave Hadad some land and a house and provided him with food. Hadad won the friendship of the king, and the king gave his sister-in-law, the sister of Queen Tahpenes, to Hadad in marriage. She bore him a son, Genubath, who was raised by the queen in the palace, where he lived with the king’s sons.
This reminds me a bit of Moses (Exodus 2:5-10; Hebrews 11:24-26).
Jeroboam was an able young man, and when Solomon noticed how hard he worked, he put him in charge of all the forced labor in the territory of the tribes of Manasseh and Ephraim. One day, as Jeroboam was traveling from Jerusalem, the prophet Ahijah from Shiloh met him alone on the road in the open country. Ahijah… said to Jeroboam, “…the God of Israel… says to you, ‘I am going to take the kingdom away from Solomon, and I will give you ten tribes.
And so Solomon tried to kill Jeroboam…
Futile. We look to eliminate the threat but don’t address the source of the problem (1 Kings 11:9-14).