1 ST KINGS Week 1, Intro Having spent nearly two years in the Book of Samuel (1 st and 2 nd Samuel combined), it’s time for us to step back and review what we’ve learned and at the same time set the stage for a study of the Book […]

1 ST KINGS Week 2, chapter 1 We’ve all spent time in school some days forcing ourselves to stay awake through classes where what we were taught was tedious and seemingly irrelevant information about the past. Our history courses were usually presented as a dry series of names of dead…

1 ST KINGS Week 3, chapter 1 continued As we continue in 1 st Kings Chapter 1 let’s review. David is quite elderly; his physical health is failing and his spiritual health is nearly as sickly. He has been reluctant to name a successor to the throne and this fact…

1 st KINGS Week 4, chapter 2 Solomon is King of Israel. David is still alive but is weak and bedridden. It has taken a somewhat contrived and self-serving meeting arranged by Nathan but between Bathsheba and David to get Solomon officially crowned as king because apparently David had decided…

1 ST KINGS Week 5, chapter 2 continued At this point in 1 st Kings 2, David is now “sleeping with his ancestors” and so young King Solomon was ruling without the benefit of his father’s sage and street-wise advice and council. A youthful 20 years old (approximately) Solomon must…

1 ST KINGS Week 6, chapter 3 The last words of 1 st Kings Chapter 2 are that the kingdom was established in Solomon’s hands. The elimination of potential rivals and rebels gave him a firm foundation from which to run his government. The previous chapter tells us what Solomon…

1 ST KINGS Week 7, chapters 3 and 4 We concluded last week as Solomon was in Gibeon, having laid himself down to sleep after a most awesome and satisfying day, when he dreamed a dream that turned out to be a vision visited by God. The leaders of Israel…

1 ST KINGS Week 8, chapters 4 and 5 We’ll finish up chapter 4 and get into chapter 5 of 1 st Kings today. We’re in a section of the Bible that deals with history more than establishing new God-principles. Thus in many cases the raw history is told without…

1 ST KINGS Week 9, chapters 5 and 6 We left off at verse 6 of 1 st Kings 5 last time, the mention of an exorbitant number of horses belonging to King Solomon’s monarchy being the subject. In the preceding passages we read of an equally exorbitant amount of…

1 ST KINGS Week 10, chapter 6 continued This chapter and the next one are all about building God’s Temple and so we’re going to take considerable time with it because so many principles and challenging issues pop out of the woodwork as we examine this important section of Holy…

1 st KINGS Week 11, chapters 6 and 7 We are in the middle of examining 1 st Kings Chapter 6 concerning the building of the 1 st Temple. This chapter and the next one are full of details especially about the interior of the Temple and we’ll certainly look…

1 ST KINGS Week 12, chapter 7 We are most of the way through the description of the 1st Temple and its ornate and varied furnishings. We’ll finish that discussion today and then before we study the all-important consecration of Solomon’s Temple that appears in 1 st Kings Chapter 8,…

1 ST KINGS Week 13, chapter 8 We continue today by first completing our saga of the 1 st Temple (and this means the Temple in whatever form it existed and evolved up until the time of its destruction by the Babylonians). Then afterwards we’ll begin the long and profound…

1 ST KINGS Week 14, chapter 8 continued As we opened 1 st Kings 8 last time, we witnessed a turning of a cosmic page in redemption history, and thus in Israel’s history; and this is because Israel is the context through which God chose to bring about redemption on…

1 ST KINGS Week 15, chapter 8 continued 2 We’ll spend today with yet another section of 1 st Kings Chapter 8 that revolves around the Temple dedication ceremony and features King Solomon’s magnificent and profound prayer that illuminates a number of God-principles. But we’ll need yet another lesson to…

1 ST KINGS Week 16, chapter 8 and 9 We will finally finish 1 st Kings Chapter 8 today and we’ll get started in chapter 9; however in some ways we are exiting it sooner than I would prefer to. Like a few other places in the Bible, this is…

1 ST KINGS Week 17, chapters 9 and 10 We moved into 1 st Kings Chapter 9 last week, and the chapter begins sometime after the halfway point of Solomon’s 40 year reign. The Temple is built and in operation, Solomon’s extravagant Palace is completed. King Shlomo’s many building projects…

1 ST KINGS Week 18, chapters 10 and 11 We concluded our last lesson by being introduced to the famous Queen of Sheba whose name, it turns out, is actually the Queen of the Saba. And more correctly, what we have is her title and not her name (and we…

1 ST KINGS Week 19, chapter 11 We’ll continue in 1 st Kings Chapter 11 by re-reading the entire chapter in sections. Last time we just go started into this chapter that could reasonably be titled: “The Reasons for the Division of the Kingdom of Israel” because we are given…

1 ST KINGS Week 20, chapter 11 continued To close out the last lesson, we talked about a concept that on the surface seems like something only social scientists ought to care about, however it is anything but that. The concept is that throughout all of mankind’s history there have…

1 ST KINGS Week 21, Chapters 11 and 12 After our detour last week to take a good look at the 3 societal platforms that form the basis for virtually every known culture, and with the revelation that the shame-honor culture is the one that we see most prevalent in…

1 ST KINGS Week 22, chapter 12 There are events in the Bible that are so history-changing that it is hard to put into words; and yet, most of the time these events are given but brief mention or spoken of rather dispassionately. This is one of the many aspects…

1 ST KINGS Week 23, chapter 13 We concluded our last lesson as the deluded Jeroboam was proudly standing at the altar of the golden calf that he had erected in Beit-El. Acting somewhat like the Pope, one can imagine the eyes of the thousands of his people who were…

1 ST KINGS Week 24, chapter 14 We folded our tents and went home last week after reading about King Jeroboam of Israel utterly abandoning Yehoveh God of Israel by means of creating and worshipping golden calf gods and telling his subjects that “these are your gods who brought you…

1 ST KINGS Week 25, chapter 15 The event that ended our lesson last time was the death of Rehoboam, King of Judah, who was Solomon’s son that succeeded him to the throne. He had ruled for 17 years from Shlomo’s death until about 911 B.C. We’re going to […]

1 ST KINGS Week 26, chapter 15 and 16 In our last lesson in 1 st Kings we ended by focusing on the meaning of the word “whole- hearted” ( lebab shalem ) as used in chapter 15 verse 3. There the Scriptural complaint is that the newest king over…

1 ST KINGS Week 27, Chapter 16 When last we met we had just begun 1 st Kings Chapter 16 that opens with the story of Ba’sha’s inglorious and shameful end. We’ll re-read the entire chapter but first I want to set the stage for today’s lesson with […]

1 st KINGS Week 28, Chapter 17 As we continue in our study of 1 st Kings, the northern kingdom of Israel has just hit the bottom of a spiritual death spiral. The 10 tribes have a new king whose first prominent action was to renounce Yehoveh God of […]

1 ST KINGS Week 29, Chapter 18 We’re in that section of the Bible that tells of a man who is perhaps the greatest prophet of God in the Bible: Elijah. And last time we witnessed how Yehoveh used this great man to perform the first bodily resurrection recorded in…

1 ST KINGS Week 30, Chapters 18 and 19 The story of Elijah is about his mission as a prophet of God NOT to all Israel, per se, but primarily to the northern kingdom of Israel; the kingdom that by now is beginning to be known by the name Ephraim,…

1 ST KINGS Week 31, chapter 19 For the moment, Jezebel seems to have won. She could easily replace those 450 prophets of Ba’al that were killed on Mt. Carmel at the order of Elijah, so just because of their deaths she wasn’t at all deterred from her commitment to…

1 ST KINGS Week 32, chapter 20 Last week we encountered some wonderful spiritual and practical truths as we witnessed the great Elijah pull himself off of the mission field and essentially resign his calling as a prophet of Yehoveh to the people of Israel. The Lord tried to teach…

1 ST KINGS Week 33, chapters 20 and 21 The king of Aram, Ben-Hadad, had been determined to attack the northern kingdom of Israel; his motives were mostly geo-political in nature as he sought to secure his southern border and to extract wealth from Israel to bolster his kingdom. But…

1 ST KINGS Week 34, chapters 21, 22 We stopped in 1 st Kings 21 with the unjust execution of Navo t, the owner of a piece of land that the wicked and self-serving King of Israel wanted for his own enjoyment. This land was adjacent to Achav’s […]

1 ST KINGS Week 35, chapter 22 END of 1 st Kings This week we conclude our extensive journey through the book of 1 st Kings and when we meet next time we will start the book of 2 nd Kings. Remember when we do, however, that […]