Day 102 - 1 Kings 12-14

ONE-YEAR JOURNEY OF THE BIBLE
Day 102 - 1 Kings 12-14 (When the Death of a Child is Good)
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"Arise therefore, go to your own house. When your feet enter the city, the child shall die.  And all Israel shall mourn for him and bury him, for he is the only one of Jeroboam who shall come to the grave, because in him there is found something good toward the LORD God of Israel in the house of Jeroboam." (1 Kings 14:12-13)

It is only natural for a parent who loses a child to death to question God's fairness in the situation.  I lost our first child who was stillborn.  By God's grace, I did not question God's fairness when Amber and I were grieving the loss of our baby Sarah but I know that many do not have the same faith in God and in His sovereignty as we did at that time.  The reason why we did not doubt God's wisdom was because we understood that He had a wonderful reason for allowing our child to die just as He did for the child of king Jeroboam in our text above.
Jeroboam was chosen by God to become king of Israel minus Judah and Levi because of the sins of Solomon.  God promised Jereboam that "if you heed all that I command you, walk in My ways, and do what is right in My sight, to keep My statutes and My commandments, as My servant David did, then I will be with you and build for you an enduring house, as I built for David, and will give Israel to you."  (1 Kings 11:38)  But instead of learning from the sins of Solomon from whom God tore Israel and gave it to him, Jeroboam did more evil than both Solomon and his son Rehoboam and as a result, God said of Jeroboam that He will raise another king over Israel who will cut off his house forever (1 Kings 14:14).

Today, I would like to highlight God's reason for allowing Jeroboam's son to die from our text above.  God, speaking through the prophet Abijah, said that He let the child die because He found in the lad something good.  Wow; God says that the death of a person even as young as a child is not a bad thing but is actually a very good thing.  

I can't help to keep my mind from wondering about a number of possible reasons why God would take the life of a child because He has found something good in him.  Perhaps, God was just sparing the child from becoming affected with the evil around him.  We have already learned how the child's father, king Jeroboam became an evil person and in all likelihood, his household and even the entire palace had become such an evil environment that there was no way that the child could grow up without becoming evil too.

Have you lost a child to death?  If so, I hope that you will be encouraged by our message from God's Word today that your child is in the arms of his heavenly Father and that it was actually a blessing for the child not to have known evil as an adult would have known it by the time he died.   And God forbid you lose a child close to you, know that God may be sparing the kid from evil because he has found something good in the youth.