Insurgents (Part A)

It was a people-run church, and it made the Lord nauseous. It was not a God-run church.

He himself has appointed some to be, and he goes down the list of leaders. And that church in Laodicea did not care about the messenger of the church leading the church. They led the church, and yet still Christ addresses the messenger to the messenger of the church at Laodicea, which would be, of course, the pastor. This is Cross-Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher, Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through the Book of First Kings.

Please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross-Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. And now here's Pastor Rick with his message called Insurgence in First Kings chapter 2. First Kings chapter 2, we will begin at verse 13.

Insurgence, that's the title of consideration. Looking back at verse 12, where we left off, then Solomon sat on the throne of his father David and his kingdom was firmly established. Those words, of course, tell us God is with Solomon, but the agenda has been handed to him by his father, at least an agenda. And as we read last session, Solomon was to get rid of Shemaiah and Joab and show kindness to Brasilei, but there was no further mention of Adonijah, who will set in motion everything Solomon needs to do or conditions for him to purge his kingdom of these insurgents. He was very patient in his favor, and James chapter 1, verse 4, let patience have its perfect work that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.

And we see that implemented. So looking at verse 13, and one other thing to add, we may not have Solomon's resources in dealing with those who would do us harm and overthrow our faith, but we have the same God, and that means everything. Verse 13, now Adonijah, the son of Hagith, came to Bathsheba, the mother of Solomon. So she said, do you come peaceably?

And he said, peaceably. Well, she's not happy to see him because of what he tried to do, but there was probably a family history going on. These were wives-in-law, Hagith and Bathsheba, and I don't say that in a way that applauds or compliments that practice. In fact, it's meant to expose it, but the sleazy keep us uneasy, and he is sleazy, and she is uneasy about him showing up wanting a conversation because, again, his plot, his ambitions, which he is going to stand by, they threatened to kill her and her son Solomon had they succeeded.

Verse 14, moreover, he said, I have something to say to you. She said, say it. She could have said, I don't want anything you have to say to me, but she doesn't. She's very ladylike in this, or maybe she's saying, well, you know, whatever you say to me in her head, I'm going to tell to my son. So maybe, I don't know. Well, we'll see because there are some enigmas in this.

It's a little perplexing, her role in all of this. Verse 15, then he said, you know that the kingdom was mine, and all Israel had set their expectations on me, that I should reign. However, the kingdom has been turned over and has become my brothers, or it was his from Yahweh. Well, the three E's applied to him, egotistical, in this section what he's saying, it's egotistical, he's embellishing it, and it's an exaggeration, an embellished exaggeration. That's really what's going on here. But if we contrast, he makes this statement, you know the kingdom was mine, and all Israel set their expectations on me.

There is the embellishment, it is an exaggeration, and it is egotistical. And when we contrast the two celebrations that we did last session, verse 41 of chapter 1 in 1 Kings, now Adonijah and all the guests who were with him heard it, that is the noise of Solomon's celebration, as they finished eating. When Joab heard the sound of the horn, he said, why is the city in such a noisy uproar?

Well, because you're coronating Adonijah's uproar, by contrast, it's rather dull. And you read verses 38 to 40, and you see that what was happening with Solomon being made king, he's riding on the king's mule through the city, the people see this, the priest is there, he takes the horn out of oil and anoints him, and there's the cheering, verse 40, and all the people went up after him, and the people played the flutes, rejoiced with great joy, so that the earth seemed to split with their sound. So Adonijah says, well, all the people had their expectation on me. Well, it doesn't look that way. Solomon, Adonijah, he had an open air meal for his guests, and that was pretty much it.

Solomon, it was an open air festival, part one, with no need to feed the attendees, incidentally. He says that I should reign. He refuses to let this go. He's dismissed his own words about God wanting David.

He'll just sidestep that. But he's saying, I got cheated out of the election. Well, elect people do cheat in elections, but sometimes they don't, and Solomon did not.

At least they don't get away with it all the time. And his statement, this very statement in itself is treasonous. He's saying Solomon shouldn't be king, I should be king, and he's telling Solomon's mother.

The man is out of his mind. He is a serious threat to the throne, and he is not to be trusted. However, the kingdom, he says here in verse 15, has been turned over and has become my brothers, for it was his from the Lord. So this is laced with resentment towards God and everybody else. He admits that God is against him being king, yet he insists that he should be king because the people liked him. Incidentally, the church at Laodicea, the word Laodicea means of the people. It was a people-run church, and it made the Lord nauseous. It was not a God-run church. He himself has appointed some to be, and he goes down the list of leaders. And that church in Laodicea did not care about the messenger of the church leading the church.

They led the church, and yet still Christ addresses the messenger to the messenger of the church at Laodicea, which would be, of course, the pastor. So here, he doesn't care what God's view is. Self-exaltation.

It produced arrogance, and that arrogance produced madness. He's delusional. Just looking at his words here in verse 15, you know, he contradicts himself, or at least he says right out, I believe in God.

I believe God made his will known. I don't like it. I'm going to go against it. Something's wrong with somebody like that. It's a special kind of fool. He doesn't even care that he's scoffing at the woman's son. Your son should not be on the throne.

I should be there. To her face. Self-superiority has no shame, because it has no conscience. Verse 16, now I ask one petition of you, do not deny me. And she said to him, say it. Again, she's either patient, or she's going to say whatever you want.

I'm telling my boy, and you're going to get it. There might be some of that. I think it takes a twist, though. Early stages, she might have been like, you're going to get it.

But I think there's a change coming. She doesn't see this request. Verse 16, when he says, I ask one petition of you.

She doesn't know what that is, of course. And he says, do not deny me. That's not a good way to ask somebody to do something for you. But his lower self, feeling cheated, he has become his lower self. There's no fight any longer.

And humans that are out for themselves make life difficult for everybody else around them. Verse 17, then he said, please speak to King Solomon, for he will not refuse you, that he may give me Abishag the Shulamite, Shunammite here, as wife. In other words, all of you are too ignorant and or too weak to see what I'm up to. I mean, this is a bodacious request. Almost anybody else in the kingdom could have made such a request, and it would not have been what is coming from this man. This is not the first time a woman has been used to approach or win over a man.

I'll give you three, one of them good, too bad. Of course, Satan approached Eve to get to Adam. He knew better not to go right to Adam. Samson's wife, the Philistines went through her. Samson said, if you had not plowed my heifer, you would not have solved my riddle. And then there was the woman of Tekoa, that Joab sent to David to overturn David's harshness towards Absalom.

So this is not uncommon to this day, but here it is. He's going to the mom. He's not going right to Solomon, because he knew that would jeopardize his life.

He'd see right through it. And he's so, again, delusional, he actually thinks that Solomon's going to say, sure, mom, whatever you want, even if it burns down the kingdom. The kings who succeed to the throne, they have control and possession over the previous king's wives and harem. Even the Lord mentions this to David in 2 Samuel 12. I gave you your masters in part of the judgment coming through Nathan. So they control the destiny of these women.

Like it or not, this is the way it was. And since Adonijah, again, once attempted to seize the throne, his request represents a serious threat to the throne. And she should see this. At least I think she does.

I don't want to get ahead of myself, because there's much to say about her. True, David never consummated the marriage to Abishag, but that's an irrelevant technicality. There are other factors. And still, the king, Solomon, in this case, would have retained control. Just one of the factors is Abishag was privy to kingdom business. And confidentiality would have been a concern, especially with someone who wants to overthrow the throne.

Even today, corporate secretaries, big corporations, they have confidentiality agreements. They can't quit and just go to the competitor and start sharing, well, let me tell you what I was sitting in the meeting and this happened. He says that he may give me Abishag the Shulamite as wife, the gall of this man. So he pretends to want Abishag, it seems, as some compensation to not getting the throne.

Of course, that's not what's going on. He's blinded by his arrogance. And that arrogance gave birth to maddening pride. It's the same situation that we find with Satan. Pride ruined Saul, pride ruined Nebuchadnezzar, pride ruined Satan. All of these, the arrogance, this level of arrogance, it makes people stupid and destructive. At the same time, it's a real thing. We face it in life and we just blow it off.

That person's nuts. Well, there's a spiritual story in back of those things. Again, arrogance, this self-exaltation to the extreme, it made Satan insane in the spiritual realm. Isaiah 14, I will exalt my, I will exalt my, I will exalt. And in his case, he's going to exalt over God.

Because if you can exalt to be equal with God, you are exalting over, you are challenging him. Well, it made, as I mentioned already, King Nebuchadnezzar insane in the physical realm. In Daniel chapter 4, Nebuchadnezzar is talking to himself. He says, Siloquy, this is great Babylon that I have built for a royal dwelling by my mighty power and for the honor of my majesty. And as we know why the words were coming out of his mouth, he was smitten with insanity and he drove him from men. So the Bible is telling us with these historical accounts, he's saying, watch out for this behavior. And if you find it in another, maybe you can be used to give some word in season. Verse 18, so Bathsheba said very well, I will speak to you for the king.

You ask for it, I'll do it. Now, would it be naive to think that she was ignorant of the protocols of the king's harem? Yes, she knew the protocols of a king's harem. She was in that harem and she knew, she couldn't just say, well, you know, my husband's dead.

Maybe I'll just take a stroll down the street and just marry whoever. I mean, she just, there were restrictions and she knew those restrictions. She would have counseled other women. Maybe she thought Abishag was a strange case.

Again, the marriage was really not consummated and so she's not a court lawyer. She was not her place to go this far. She should have just told her, Absalom, you go ask him.

You're not using me. So why is she doing this? She knew he's a walking time bomb. She had to have known that this could precipitate in his death if her son didn't approve. I think one possibility is she saw an opportunity to be a peacemaker through matchmaking. She, in verse 21, will refer to Adonijah as Solomon's brother. She doesn't have to say it that way.

It's recorded that way and I think these things are on purpose. And I think that maybe if she, you know, if he married Abishag, there would be this, you know, peace, this lessening of tensions between the brothers and the whole family. She should not have read into that this way.

Here's an interesting question. How did the historian get his hands on this dialogue? She doesn't have a court appointed scribe to write down the conversations that she engages in. I think she had to have told, retold this to Solomon and making it into the court records now. And the historian takes the dialogue from those records and he writes it into the first person of the dialogue. Possibly another thought is, you know, there are witnesses in the court and they could have just preserved the exchange. But at some point, her dialogue with Adonijah makes it into the story and that is how I think it happened. The historian gets it right from the court records, which is not far-fetched at all. You know, as the Bible has already told us in several places that there were men who were writing biographies and autobiographies.

So not a far-fetched thing at all. People, they weren't stupid. They were just like us.

Well, you know, if they were, then maybe they weren't. Anyway, those things intrigued me because I want to know, how did it happen? Sometimes it's spiritual. Moses had the spiritual revelations. God told Moses things that he otherwise could, no one could have known.

And then there's this blend of the oral traditions that make it from one generation to another. So none of that is disturbing to me. Verse 19, Bathsheba therefore went to King Solomon to speak to him for Adonijah. And the king rose up to meet her, verse 19, and bowed down to her and sat down on his throne and had a throne set for the king's mother. So she sat at his right hand.

What a good son. There's such respect for his mother. She comes in, he gets up off the throne, he bows to her, this gesture of deference and she's receiving his mom, and he brings a throne for her to sit right next to him. It's the seat of the highest honor. Probably there's no one else in the kingdom he'd do that for.

Barzillai could come in and he'd just bring him a chair, but he's not sitting next to me. The resurrected Lord Jesus is often described as seated at the right hand of God, and so this is just a very honorable thing. What we have when she starts talking, again, I think the historian just leaves it out of this section of the story and he's already prefaced the story with that dialogue between Adonijah and Bathsheba. So here in verse 20, then she said, and I'm going to pause there, when they don't do that, when they repeat it again and we're reading the Bible, we say, why did you make me read all this twice? You said that in verses five and six, why do I got to read it nine more times? So here he spares us that, and we should applaud it, if I am right, and I'm usually right in my world. Verse 20, then she said, I desire one small petition of you, do not refuse me. And the king said to her, did you get that from Adonijah? No, ask it my mother, for I will not refuse you.

Well, I mean, we're learning just from that. Don't write checks with your mouth that you can't produce, your body can't keep. He should have said, well, let's hear what you have to say first. Someone who says, can you do me a favor? Maybe. It depends on what it is. I don't know what you're going to ask and what I know of you, it's going to be kooky. Anyway, some of you may be offended by that, and that would be an admission of you being kooky and you know it. So anyway, don't be offended. That's like saying, well, the ugly people in the room stand up.

I mean, nobody should stand up. Anyway, so he's thinking, I don't know, what does mom want? Does she want to throw a party? Does she want a new chariot with those dual overhead nimbats?

You know, what does she want? On one hand, since the king's harems were seriously guarded, and everybody knew it, again, I have difficulty believing that she was naive and did not know the severity of his request. On the other hand, as I mentioned, I can see her saying, well, you know, technically Abishag wasn't the wife of David, and maybe if this will bring peace, I can see her doing that also, until Solomon points it out.

It's going to be one of those, well, I didn't see that. Verse 21, so she said, let Abishag, the Shulamite, be given to Adonijah, your brother's wife. Now, going back to my thought that she is trying to bring peace through matchmaking, it wouldn't be the last time in history that people have wanted peace so much that they have become blind to reason.

It's actually quite frequent. We see it in Genesis 34 with the men of Shechem and the sons of Jacob and his daughter Dinah. They, you know, Shechem wanted to marry her after violating her. The sons said, okay, here are our terms, which essentially rendered the men defenseless, physically. And of course, Levi and Simeon went in and slaughtered them. But there Shechem, he wanted peace so badly after violating Jacob's daughter, he wanted peace so badly, willing to do anything, and the whole village went with him.

It cost them their lives. Neville Chamberlain, World War II, I've got the treaty with Hitler. You've got no reason to believe that guy.

Who wears a mustache like that? Anyway, we know what happened. And fortunately for Neville, he then backed up Churchill, so he didn't remain blind to the truth. But many Jews today, they want peace so badly that they just, you know, they support anti-Semitic politicians and you scratch your head and say, what is wrong with you people? I remember speaking with a cab driver in Jerusalem and he said, oh, this Obama's going to be great. The guy does, he's anti-Semitic.

Don't you know? Do you listen to what he says? Yeah, but he's going to bring peace.

No, he's not. Anyway, so my point is, this is not far-fetched to think that someone may just want to bring peace so badly that they become blind to the facts and to reason and they end up in a situation like this. Fortunately for her, Miss Solomon is no fool. We know that Abishag is never referred to as David's wife in scripture or said to be a concubine, but we know her role.

But then on the other side, none of the concubines were named at all. So the legal technicality, as I mentioned, but too close to home for anybody to miss what an insurrectionist could do if he could gain this in the public eye. And that's what, you know, the people wanted me anyway. So he's very conscious of his public relations.

He's got a shot at the throne. As I mentioned also, had anyone else asked, it would not have been such a great concern. What is clear is that in the eyes of the people, Abishag was not available to him, regardless of the technicalities. If the Song of Solomon is a true story or based on Abishag, then because the marriage was not consummated, she could be given to another as the Shulamite in Song of Solomon was eventually given to the beloved shepherd and not the king. So a rival, he did not have that privilege. And that's what's going on behind a lot of this verse. And if I were Solomon, I would say, I don't need any of that. I don't like the guy. He's trying to kill me. And he stepped over the line. I gave him a chance and that's it.

You guys can argue about what mom knew and what everybody else knew, but that's it. So verse 22, and King Solomon answered and said to his mother, now, why do you ask Abishag Shulamite for Adonijah? Ask for him the kingdom also, for he is my older brother. Thanks for joining us for today's teaching on Cross Reference Radio. This is the daily radio ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia.

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