Remember that our Lord will also take vengeance on His enemies in establishing His kingdom.
The section before us, 1 Kings 2:12-46, will be as summarily dealt with as were the enemies of David. First, Adonijah made another ill-advised move to take the kingdom, not this time by gathering powerful men, but by manipulating women. Using false guilt, he pressed Bathsheba to help, saying, “You know that the kingdom was mine, and all Israel had set their expectations on me, that I should reign. However…” (v 15). However what? You, Bathsheba, stole it from me. So as a consolation prize, “Please speak to King Solomon…that he may give me Abishag…as wife” (v 17). The last woman in David’s life, he would use her as his ticket to power. Solomon saw this (although his mother seemed not to) and sent Benaiah to dispatch the rebel (v 25). Enough of that! Next, Abiathar the priest was sent home to Anathoth to take up farming. His life was spared, as Solomon explained, “because you carried the ark of the Lord God before my father David, and because you were afflicted every time my father was afflicted” (v 26). But he had sided with the rebellion and so was defrocked, in part fulfilling “the word of the Lord which He spoke concerning the house of Eli at Shiloh” (v 27; see 1 Sam 2:31). When Joab heard this, he saw the handwriting on the wall. He had also been weighed and found lacking. Not having a mother’s skirts to cling to, instead he “fled to the tabernacle of the Lord, and took hold of the horns of the altar” (v 28). But the man who always did what he liked would find no protection from the Lord now, and Joab died at the altar by the sword of Benaiah. Lastly there was Shimei, the cursed one. Initially shown mercy, he scorned that, too, and paid with his life. “Thus the kingdom was established in the hand of Solomon” (v 46).