March 29, 2020: Day 57 – I Kings 21

Somehow Ahab gets away with…, well…, murder.  We find ourselves with King Ahab who sees a vineyard near his palace and thinks it would make a great private garden for himself.  He approaches the owner of the vineyard and asks if he would sell it or if he could give him another vineyard so that he could have the land for himself.  The man says no.  Ahab is sad, he seems actually like a child.  His wife, Jezebel, comes in and sees him upset and says: wait a minute, I thought you were the king of Israel.  As king you have absolute and total power and no one can tell you what they can and cannot do.  You, as the king, tell people what they are able to do.

Consistently we see that Ahab’s wife, Jezebel, is the driving force behind the bad decisions that Ahab makes.  It is Jezebel who threatens the life of Elijah in the earlier chapters.  It is Jezebel who tells Ahab to kill the person who would not sell the field and take it from them.  This story reminds me of King David who sinned against Bathsheba and sent her husband, Uriah, into a hopeless battle so that he would be killed.  It seems like a similar scenario.

After Ahab gets the land Elijah pays him a visit and tells him that he, his wife, his family will  die in the same way that the man who owned the vineyard died.  The Scripture tells us that there was no one as evil as Ahab in the history of Israel.  You would think that his future is before him, and not a positive future at that.  But instead that is not what happens.

Somehow Ahab  has a change of heart and his posture of confidence and defiance before the Lord changes to one of humility and sorrow.  He  puts  on sackcloth and God speaks to Elijah and says: give him a break.  All those bad things that I said would happen to him, well, let’s just push it off a generation.  That will happen to his children and not to him.  The chapter ends there.