In First Kings, chapter fourteen, verse fifteen, Ahijah prophesied the captivity of Israel. The chapter begins with the prophecy against Jeroboam, the first king of Israel, the northern kingdom, after the division. He was young when his father, Nebat, died, and his widowed mother, Zeruah, raised him. Jeroboam’s son, Abijah, fell sick, and he tells his wife to disguise herself to go to the prophet Ahijah and tell him: and bring some goods, as in verse three of the same chapter. Jeroboam was the same king who stood by the altar, burning incense in First Kings thirteen, verse one: when the man of Judah cried against the altar in the Word of the Lord.
Chapters fourteen through sixteen of First Kings sets off a series of Kings in their persistence of breaking God’s covenant. Whether we keep an account of God’s mercies to us or not, He does. God will set them in order before us, if we are ungrateful, to our greater confusion. Ahijah foretells the speedy death of the child then sick, in mercy to him. He only in the house of Jeroboam had affection for the true worship of God and disliked the worship of the calves.
To show the power and sovereignty of his grace, God saves some out of the worst families, in whom there is some good thing towards the Lord God of Israel. The righteous are removed from the evil to come in this world, to the good to come in a better world. It is often a bad sign for a family when the best in it are buried out of it. Yet their death never can be a loss to themselves. It was a present affliction to the family and kingdom, by which both ought to have been instructed.
God also tells the judgments which should come upon the people of Israel for conforming to the worship Jeroboam established. After they left the house of David, the government never continued long in one family, but one undermined and destroyed another. Families and kingdoms ruined by sin. If great men do wickedly, they draw many others: both into guilt and punishment. The condemnation of those will be severest, who must answer, not only for their sins, but for sins others have been drawn into, and kept in, by them.