We are out of 2 Samuel :( Now David is an old old man. He has a maidservant named Abishag to take care of him. He also has another couple of sons that want to be king. Absalom's brother, Adonijah, put himself forward and said, "I will be king." It says that David "had never interfered with him by asking, 'Why do you behave as you do?'". Adonijah snagged Joab and Abithar the priest and offered sacrifices. He invited pretty much everybody of importance - except the ones still loyal to David. Bathsheba and Nathan the prophet had a talk, and Bathsheba went to David and said, "You yourself swore to me your servant by the LORD your God, 'Solomon your son shall be king after me, and he will sit on my throne.' But now Adonijah has become king, and you, my lord the king, do not know about it." So David took an oath: "As surely as the LORD lives, who has delivered me out of every trouble, I will surely carry out today what I swore to you by the LORD." So he sent the loyal ones, Zadok the priest, Nathan, Benaiah the special guard, the Kerethites and the Pelethites to put Solomon on David's mule and anoint him with oil. They blew trumpets and yelled, "Long live King Solomon!" When Adonijah and his party heard, they got scared and dispersed. But it says, "Adonijah, in fear of Solomon, went and took hold of the horns of the altar." I don't know exactly what that's about, but it sounds like a last ditch attempt to hold on to the Lord's favor, and safety. He wouldn't let go and said, "Let King Solomon swear to me today that he will not put his servant to death with the sword." Solomon I think was already pretty wise! He said, "If he shows himself to be a worthy man, not a hair of his head will fall to the ground; but if evil is found in him, he will die."
Pretty soon David called Soloman and told him "his will". He told his son to walk in laws of the LORD and keep his decrees. He told him not to let Joab's head go to the grave in peace for all those murders he had commited. He told him to kill Shimei of Gera for throwing dirt and calling down curses, because he had sworn that he wouldn't do it. Then David, the awesomest guy in the whole Bible besides Jesus, died. Waaaaa!
Solomon moved fast to do what he had to do. Turns out that evil was found in Adonijah when he asked for his father's maidservant. I'm not sure why that was an act of audacity, but apparently it was, because he was killed for it. Joab ran to the tent of the LORD and grabbed the horns of the altar, just like Adonijah had done. But it helped nothing, cuz Solomon told Benaiah to kill him anyway. Shimei was commanded never to cross the Kidron Valley, but he did, and therefore was killed. But this is the most interesting part. Abithar the priest had helped Adonijah, and Solomon said, "'you deserve to die, but I will not put you to death now, because you carried the ark of the Sovereign LORD before my father David and shared all my father's hardships.' So Solomon removed Abithar from the priesthood of the LORD, fulfilling the word the LORD had spoken at Shiloh about the house of Eli." WHOA!!!! Let's go back to 1 Samuel 2!!!
It says:
Now a man of God came to Eli and said to him, "The LORD, the God of Israel, declares: 'I promised that your house and your father;s house would minister before me forever.' But now the LORD declared: 'Far be it from me! Those who honor me I will honor, but those who despise me will be disdained. The time is coming when I will cut short your strength and the strength of your father's house, so that there will not be an old man in your family line and you will see distress in my dwelling. Although good will be done in Israel, in your family line there will never be an old man. Every one of you that I do not cut off from my altar will be spared only to blind your eyes with tears and to grieve your heart, and all your descendants will die in the prime of life."
And Solomon was fulfilling it years later! Wow. God doesn't just forget things huh? And maybe Solomon didn't even know that he had fulfilled it! Wow.
There is never a promise God made that he didn't make good. And there never will be one.
1 comment:
It's great that you are now noticing stuff that you had not before. It will help others (like me) who read it and can cause us to stop and say, "whoa, that's pretty amazin' stuff"
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