Category: 1 Chronicles-1

I suppose this is out of chronological order, but I do kind of want to deal with this before I get to Solomon’s story.

It’s the story of the Reubenites, Gadites, and the half-tribe of Manasseh. These were the people who stayed on the opposite side of the Jordan, apart from the rest of the Israelites.

As you may recall, they found the land there pleasant, and so they asked permission from Moses to stay there.

Moses told them that as long as they helped the rest of their brothers in their fight against the Canaanites, they could do so.

And so after the rest of the Israelites had taken possession of their land, these three tribes went back across the Jordan and settled there.

They started out well. When they were under attack from their enemies, they cried out to God, and it says,

He answered their prayers, because they trusted in him. (1 Chronicles 5:20)

But like their brothers across the Jordan, they soon forgot about God and what he had done for them.

Instead of continuing to follow God, they turned to the false gods of the land.

And though they had brave, famous leaders among them—or perhaps because they had brave, famous leaders among them—they stopped trusting in the one true God.

They started trusting other gods and trusting themselves.

The result? They were taken into captivity.

What can we learn from this? Sometimes we face times of trouble, and because we can see no way out of our problem, we turn to God and ask for his help.

God in his mercy delivers us as we put our trust in him, and our life turns around.

But after the problem is dealt with, it can become so easy to forget God and pursue other things.

We pursue our career, money, things, romance, or other things.

In themselves, they are not necessarily bad.

But when we make them the most important things in our lives, they can cause us to forget the one who should be first in our lives.

We then start making bad decisions, and we find ourselves in a worse state than the one we were in before God saved us.

Where are you in your life? Are you feeling comfortable? Are you starting to make other things more important than God?

Be sure to keep God at the center of your life above all things.

Remember to trust him and not lean on your own wisdom, understanding, and strength.

And as you do, you’ll not only find blessing but avoid the trap that these Israelite tribes fell into.

Before I go on to the life of Solomon, I’d like to touch on two more stories found in the early part of 1 Chronicles.

Here we find the life of a man named Jabez.

We hardly know anything about him. We don’t know his occupation. We know nothing about who he married, or if he had children, or how long he lived.

What we do have are two things.

First, he was an honorable man.

Second, he was left with a name that probably left him open to ridicule and shame.

Apparently, while his mother was giving birth to Jabez, she suffered great pain. And so she named him Jabez, which sounds like the Hebrew word for pain.

Can you imagine growing up with that name? I can imagine the boys he grew up around saying to him, “You’re such a pain! Get lost.”

Growing up, I wonder how loved he felt by his mother.

“Does she really love me? Does she only see me as a person who brought pain into her life?”

And perhaps it was in the midst of his hurt and feelings of rejection by his mother and the people around him that he cried out to God,

Oh, that you would bless me and enlarge my territory!

Let your hand be with me, and keep me from harm so that I will be free from pain. (1 Chronicles 4:10)

And it says at the end of the verse that God granted his request.

How about you? Are you suffering from the hurts of the past?

Perhaps you grew up feeling rejected by your father or mother. Perhaps you grew up isolated from the people you went to school with.

You don’t need to continue to live in the hurts of the past and let it affect your present and future.

Give your hurts to God. Give your life to him and ask for his presence and blessing in your life.

And if you do, you’ll find all the love and acceptance you missed when you were growing up.

But don’t let it stop there either.

Instead, take the love and acceptance you’ve received from God and pass it on to the people around you who, like you, have suffered from the hurts of the past.

As Paul wrote,

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.

For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. (2 Corinthians 1:3–5)

Just a footnote to the footnote on David’s life. 🙂

I won’t be touching most of 1 Chronicles 1–9. It’s mostly just a list of names.

I will touch on a few stories from there, and I’ve already pointed out some things from chapter 9 in talking about the gatekeepers’ duties.

Aside from that, please read the passages on your own, and if you find anything else of interest, please feel free to write a comment on it.

On to the footnote of David’s life.

It’s found in 1 Chronicles 3:4, and it does show that it’s good to pay a little attention to these lists.

It says here that there were four sons born to David and Bathsheba. One of them was named Nathan.

This is really amazing to me.

Nathan was the prophet who confronted David with his sin concerning Bathsheba and her husband Uriah. He was the one who pronounced judgment from God.

And yet years later, when David and Bathsheba had a son, they named him Nathan.

I think it speaks to the character of David. That though Nathan scorchingly chastised him for his sin, David not only accepted it and repented, but continued to consider Nathan a friend, to the point that he would name his son after Nathan.

I think it also speaks to the character of Nathan.

I think if I had a friend who had done what David had done, I would probably have distanced myself from him afterward, particularly since David was still with Bathsheba.

And yet, because he saw true repentance in David, and he saw that God had extended grace and mercy to David, Nathan extended that same grace and mercy to David.

And as has been noted before, it was actually Nathan who later warned David and Bathsheba when Adonijah tried to seize the throne from Solomon.

I think there are two key things to learn from this.

First, when God extends his grace and mercy to a repentant Christian, do we offer that same mercy and grace?

It’s so easy to judge that person. It’s so easy to hold that sin against them, especially if it was extremely bad, as was the case with David.

I think of a Christian man who left his wife for another woman. At that time, he also seemed to have a problem with truth as well.

From some accounts I’ve heard, he has since repented, although he eventually married another woman (not the one he left his wife for).

But to be honest, I’ve kept my distance from him even so.

I’m starting to think now that I’m wrong. If he has truly repented, then God has forgiven him and shown him grace. And I need to do the same.

But the second thing is this: how open are we to the rebuke of our friends when we are wrong?

Do we embrace that rebuke and let it change us? Or do we reject it… and our friends?

Solomon wrote,

Better is open rebuke than hidden love. Wounds from a friend can be trusted… (Proverbs 27:5–6)

I like another version that puts it,

Faithful are the wounds of a friend. (KJV)

Love doesn’t always mean telling a person what they want to hear. Love means telling them what they need to hear. And sometimes it hurts.

But if we are willing to accept it, God can use that rebuke to make us more like him.

How about you? Are you open to wounds from a friend?

And when your friend is wrong, do you openly rebuke them in love?

Or do you just keep silent because you “love” them too much to hurt them?

May we be faithful friends to the people around us.