Wicked king, wicked king, wicked king—could anything be worse? Oh yes, a wicked king with a wicked wife!
In our saga today we come to something even worse than division among God’s people—Omri’s wicked son, Ahab, unifies with the Baal worshipers of Sidon! You can see the deterioration of the nation step by step. “Solomon did evil in the sight of the Lord, and did not fully follow the Lord, as did his father David” (1 Ki 11:6). “Omri did evil in the eyes of the Lord, and did worse than all who were before him” (16:25). “Now Ahab the son of Omri did evil in the sight of the Lord, more than all who were before him” (v 30). And what was Ahab’s shocking sin? He got married! He turned the most sacred human alliance, with God as witness, into an opportunity to defy Him to His face! “As though it had been a trivial thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat,…he took as wife Jezebel the daughter of Ethbaal, king of the Sidonians; and he went and served Baal and worshiped him. Then he set up an altar for Baal in the temple of Baal, which he had built in Samaria. And Ahab made a wooden image. Ahab did more to provoke the Lord God of Israel to anger than all the kings of Israel who were before him” (vv 31-33). It wasn’t that Baal hadn’t been skulking around in the shadows for centuries. But now he was moved to center stage, the pet demonic deity of the king. Ahab’s father-in-law was the king-priest of Baal worship in Phoenicia, and Ahab took Ethbaal’s wicked daughter Jezebel to wife. Imagine your father-in-law having a name meaning “with Baal”! Baal now replaced Jehovah as the official god in Israel. And Jehovah’s response? Would He abandon them? He appeared to do that—as He sometimes does with us. But in shutting them up to their own resources, in amazing grace He was showing them how much they needed Him.