Our Lord is stronger than the strong man (Lk 11:21-22); He can toss him with one finger (v 20)!
As with the devil at Calvary, what Jeroboam thought would be his greatest victory was his ultimate defeat. “Thus the children of Israel were subdued at that time; and the children of Judah prevailed, because they relied on the Lord God of their fathers.…So Jeroboam did not recover strength again in the days of Abijah; and the Lord struck him, and he died” (1 Chron 13:18-20). Who was Jeroboam? I can’t help but see in him a vivid picture of the arch-fiend himself! Initially he had great potential, but in spite of God’s favor upon him, he sought to set his throne above the Lord, and made it his aim to destroy God’s people. He was in an incessant battle against them until the day the Lord struck him. At the same time, he set about to fashion a false religion to steal away the hearts of the people. His false priests offered false sacrifices before false gods. The Lord uses him as the standard of such idolatrous evil, not only for the evil he did, but for the evil he caused others to commit. He is repeatedly cited as the polluted headwaters of the stream of sinfulness that issued from the kings, as with Baasha, for example, “He did evil in the sight of the Lord, and walked in the way of Jeroboam, and in his sin by which he had made Israel sin” (1 Ki 15:34). How similar this is to the hold the prince of darkness had on us before the Lord intervened: “you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others” (Eph 2:2-3). But our Lord struck the blow, and now we are “free indeed” ( Jn 8:36).