Every blessing is a burden. When God gives you something, you are responsible to use it for His glory.
How often women and children have borne the brunt of foolish men’s wickedness. Such is the sad tale in 1 Kings 14. There was no question that God had supernaturally intervened to give Jeroboam the 10-tribed kingdom of Israel. The Lord declared: “I exalted you from among the people, and made you ruler over My people Israel, and tore the kingdom away from the house of David, and gave it to you” (vv 7-8). But it is the divine assessment that “you have done more evil than all who were before you” (v 9)—and that’s saying something! The Lord knows this contagion of godlessness can spread rapidly. In an earlier day, it gripped the whole human race, except Noah’s family. So Jeroboam’s household must be uprooted. The Lord anticipated this day: “so that there may not be among you man or woman or family or tribe, whose heart turns away…from the Lord our God, to go and serve the gods of these nations, and that there may not be among you a root bearing bitterness or wormwood…The Lord would not spare him…and the Lord would blot out his name from under heaven” (Deut 29:18-20). Thus it was that Jeroboam’s only son, Abijah, took ill. The king instructed his wife to disguise herself and visit the prophet Ahijah at Shiloh for a prognosis. The disguise was both unnecessary and ineffective—unnecessary because Ahijah was almost blind, ineffective because the Lord saw right through it. Ahijah had bad news for her: “When your feet enter the city, the child shall die” (1 Ki 14:12). The lineage of Jeroboam must be plucked up by the root, “a root bearing bitterness.” He “made Israel sin” (v 16), a phrase linked with him 20 times in the ensuing years—proving no one’s absolutely useless; you can always be a bad example.