In an age like ours, simple beats complex. The money goes to the company that can simplify their sales and marketing messages and catch consumers’ attention. The votes go to the candidate who can simplify the issues in a catchy one-liner. Products are designed to simplify our lives and eradicate complexity. We want things to get easier and simpler. We want to go from pushing three buttons to just one. We live in age of simplification.
While this may be helpful in a number of areas of our lives we need to be careful that this lust for simplification does not impoverish our faith. We have faith in a simple Gospel. God Himself is elegant in His “divine simplicity”. It is not that we have a complicated faith. But in our desire to simplify we can be tempted to making God after our own liking by emphasizing certain truths about Him at the expense of others.
For example, many people emphasize God’s love and neglect His other attributes like wrath or justice. Conversely, others see God as an angry and wrathful being with no compassion or love. It is not that God is an incredibly complex paradox. Instead, His love, justice, compassion, grace, mercy, wrath, and judgment are beautifully and completely integrated in His character.
This is a great mystery and an expression of God’s transcendence beyond our ability to understand Him perfectly. But the fact that we cannot understand God exhaustively does not mean He is not who He reveals Himself to be.
True to His Word
I’ve been studying in 1 Kings recently during my morning devotions and I’ve been struck by God’s faithfulness to His word: both of steadfast love and of judgment.
On one hand, God remains faithful to His covenant with David. He upholds His promises despite the unfaithfulness of David’s descendants. In 2 Samuel 7, God makes a covenant with David, promising him that He will raise up David’s son and that this son of David will “build a house for my name” and that God Himself will “establish the throne of his kingdom forever” (2 Sam. 7:13). This promise imminently points to Solomon, although it points beyond Solomon to Christ Himself, the Son of David who rules eternally.
However, Solomon does not remain faithful to God. He turns aside and disobeys God’s commands. God had commanded the children of Israel, before they entered the promised land, that their future kings ought to refrain from importing horses from Egypt, amassing gold and silver, and marrying many wives (Deut. 17:16-17). The writer of 1 Kings makes it very explicit that Solomon disobeys all these commands. He amassed gold (1 Kings 10:14) and silver (1 Kings 10:27), imported horses from Egypt (1 Kings 10:28), and married many foreign wives who turned his heart away from God (1 Kings 11:1-2). This was clear disobedience on the part of Solomon.
This disobedience was not without consequence. God promises to tear the kingdom away from Solomon and give it to another. However, even Solomon’s unfaithfulness would not overturn God’s faithfulness to His covenant with David. Throughout the rest of chapter 11, God swears to uphold His covenant with David (now deceased) five times (1 Kings 11:12-13, 32, 34, 36). Therefore, God hands over the kingdom of Israel to Jeroboam, Solomon’s servant, but the kingdom of Judah remains with Solomon’s son Rehoboam, in fulfillment of God’s covenant faithfulness to David. This covenant faithfulness to David is mentioned again in 1 Kings 15:4. Despite Abijam’s sin, God remained faithful to the Davidic dynasty.
This development of the Davidic covenant in 1 Kings shows God’s faithfulness to His word. It expresses His “steadfast love and faithfulness”. His lovingkindness and mercy are unfailing. Even in the face of human sin, God upholds His word. Because God’s fulfillment of His word does not depend on human faithfulness. Paul writes, “if we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself.” (2 Timothy 2:13)
This is glorious good news for human beings who follow God imperfectly and who often stumble and sin. God’s love for us is not based on our faithfulness! He cannot deny Himself and it is this deep essence of His character that makes His word and covenant secure. He swore to Abram in Genesis 15, bearing the covenant sanctions by Himself. God’s promise to Abram was not dependent on Abram’s obedience. It was a unilateral covenanted commitment made by God. How great is the kindness of our God!
He Will By No Means Clear the Guilty
At the same time, we must acknowledge and appreciate the severity of God. Just as 1 Kings makes God’s covenant faithfulness clear, it also has much to say about the inevitability of judgment against idolaters. God is in fact who He revealed Himself to be to the children of Israel in the wilderness:
The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.
Exodus 34:6-7, ESV
In this Exodus passage, where God proclaims His “name” (i.e. the essence of His character) we learn that God is a God who keeps His word. If He has promised judgment on evildoers, He will execute judgment. And this is exactly what we find in 1 Kings.
The book of 1 Kings is filled with story after story of Israel’s (and Judah’s) leaders turning from God in sin and being confronted and warned by God’s prophets. God announces judgment to Solomon in 1 Kings 11:11. This judgment comes upon His son, Rehoboam, exactly as promised. When Jeroboam leads the Northern kingdom of Israel into idolatry, a “man of God” appears to pronounce judgment:
And the man cried against the altar by the word of the Lord and said, “O altar, altar, thus says the Lord: ‘Behold, a son shall be born to the house of David, Josiah by name, and he shall sacrifice on you the priests of the high places who make offerings on you, and human bones shall be burned on you.’”
1 Kings 13:2, ESV
This is fulfilled exactly as prophesied, hundreds of years later, as we read in 2 Kings 23:
Moreover, the altar at Bethel, the high place erected by Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, that altar with the high place he pulled down and burned, reducing it to dust. He also burned the Asherah. And as Josiah turned, he saw the tombs there on the mount. And he sent and took the bones out of the tombs and burned them on the altar and defiled it, according to the word of the Lord that the man of God proclaimed, who had predicted these things.
2 Kings 23:15-16, ESV
Again, an unnamed prophet pronounces judgment on King Ahab of Israel in 1 Kings 20:42 because he spared the life of Ben-hadad, an enemy that God had devoted to destruction. This prophecy of judgment is fulfilled in the very next chapter. Other examples include the destruction of Jeroboam and Baasha’s dynasties in Israel according to the word of God.
If there’s one thing we can learn (and should learn) from the later half of 1 Kings, it is that God upholds His word. When He promises judgment, judgment will come. When He promises steadfast love and faithfulness, He will surely do as He has said.
Covenant Faithfulness & Sure Judgment
How ought we to think about this as New Covenant believers?
We must understand that God is still a God of His word. He has promised judgment for those who reject His Gospel and He has promised eternal life for those who are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. We can be certain that He will indeed fulfill His word in both regards.
Paul writes, “Note then the kindness and the severity of God: severity toward those who have fallen, but God’s kindness to you, provided you continue in his kindness. Otherwise you too will be cut off.” (Romans 11:22) In the context of the passage, Paul is talking about the unbelieving Jews who are like branches that have been “broken off” while the believing Gentile believers in Rome are like branches that are “grafted into” true Israel. Paul wants his readers to understand that God is gracious and kind in His grafting them into true Israel but He doesn’t want them to miss the severity of God towards those who presume upon His kindness while rejecting Him in their hearts. This was the problem of the Pharisees in Jesus’ day.
And do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham.
Matthew 3:9, ESV
John the Baptist is the one speaking in the passage and he warns the Pharisees not to presume upon God’s grace based on their ethnic or religious heritage. These are exactly the “branches” that were broken off from true Israel “because of their unbelief” (Rom. 11:20).
From this we can discern that God is not going to fail in fulfilling His word, either in regard to salvation or judgment. He will punish the guilty and He will preserve the righteous. The question is, which camp do we fall into?
Everyone is born into the guilty camp. We are all, by nature, children of wrath (Eph. 2:3). But God, in His great mercy, has saved us by grace, through faith in Jesus Christ (Eph. 2:8). If we confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in our hearts that God raised Him from the dead, we will be saved (Rom. 10:9). Jesus promises us, “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.” (John 5:24)
Judgment is surely coming. Salvation is just as sure for those who are united by faith to Jesus Christ and have been redeemed by grace alone.