2026-10-04
Where Rapids Roar Sir Alfred East (English, 1849–1913)
1 Kings 12:8 But he abandoned the counsel that the old men gave him and took counsel with the young men who had grown up with him and stood before him.
When we were resuming school for our fifth year after the long break, and found out that we would start with Paediatrics, for most of my friends and I, the thought of Paediatrics being our first rotation was such an uneasy and worrying one. Yet unexpectedly, it turned out great because, counterintuitively, of how strict the Paediatric department normally is with matters such as attendance for instance, and how invested in us most of the lecturers were. We like being left to do our own business, as it seemed our ObsGyn colleagues were, but at the end of the rotation most of them liked it less precisely because of that; no one had followed up on them as strictly, and seeing there often hadn’t been any attendance sheets, it had been so easy not to show up on such a simple basis as not feeling like it.
Towards the end of our rotation, during a debrief with Dr. Mungai, a paediatric endocrinologist and one of our ward consultants in ward 3B, after we had just finished a simulation session that hadn’t gone so well, and she was giving us counsel of what it takes to be an exemplary and good medical student and later, a good doctor, she at some point looked at us disappointedly and said, “The problem is that when I tell you what to do as I am doing now, you look at me with such solemn and serious faces, as though you will act on my counsel, but then you never do.”
In spite of all its seriousness, and what was at stake, there’s this comical episode in Scripture when the Israelites sought God’s counsel through Jeremiah on whether or not they should go to Egypt. They swore that “Whether it is good or bad, we will obey the voice of the Lord our God to whom we are sending you, that it may be well with us when we obey the voice of the Lord our God.” (Jeremiah 42:6). Surprisingly and interestingly, when Jeremiah returned to them from consulting God, with the warning that God had given that “If you set your faces to enter Egypt and go to live there, then the sword that you fear shall overtake you there in the land of Egypt, and the famine of which you are afraid shall follow close after you to Egypt, and there you shall die. All the men who set their faces to go to Egypt to live there shall die by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence. They shall have no remnant or survivor from the disaster that I will bring upon them.” (Jeremiah 42:16-17), yet after such an unequivocal instruction from God, the people answered Jeremiah this way: “You are telling a lie. The Lord our God did not send you to say, ‘Do not go to Egypt to live there,’ but Baruch the son of Neriah has set you against us, to deliver us into the hand of the Chaldeans, that they may kill us or take us into exile in Babylon.” (Jeremiah 43:2-3)
It’s quite easy to surmise that these men, even before asking for God’s counsel, had pretty made up minds already of going to Egypt, and hoped only that the Lord’s command would agree with and encourage this intention. They didn’t want to hear God in order to obey him no matter what he would have said to them, they longed that he would confirm them in their intentions. Arthur Pink puts it very succinctly in Attributes of God, “Too often we first determine secretly for ourselves, and then ask counsel of God.” Ahab made the prophet Micaiah sweat to tell him the truth, “How many times shall I make you swear that you speak to me nothing but the truth in the name of the Lord?” (1 Kings 22:16) but when Micaiah told him nothing but the truth and prophesied to him saying, “I saw all Israel scattered on the mountains, as sheep that have no shepherd. And the Lord said, ‘These have no master; let each return to his home in peace.’” (1 Kings 22:17), King Ahab was wroth, and cried out to Jehoshaphat, “Did I not tell you that he would not prophesy good concerning me, but evil?” (1 Kings 22:18). King Ahab, sadly like many of us, though he insisted to be told nothing but the truth, yet the truth was the last thing that he really wanted to hear; he in fact wanted to be confirmed that he was right in attacking Ramoth-Gilead in battle.
This returns us to Paul’s warning to Timothy about how in the last days, men having become loves of themselves rather than lovers of God, and not enduring sound doctrine but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions (2 Timothy 4:3). We perhaps do not ask it as directly as Isaiah puts it, but many of us number among they “who say to the seers, “Do not see,” and to the prophets, “Do not prophesy to us what is right; speak to us smooth things, prophesy illusions (Isaiah 30:10).
God has not left us in this world without counsel; there’s the Holy Scriptures, able to make us wise unto salvation, there’s the testimony of our consciences through the Holy Spirit’s promptings, and there’s the abundance of godly counsel from our mentors, our pastors, our consultants, and other men with grey hair. But after we hear them, will we jettison their counsel for a more favourable response? Will we forsake their sagacity for the ingratiating counsel of our friends who we have grown up with and who only seek to please us and would never dare point out our ills and blind-spots? Do we merely read the Bible because it is one of the spiritual disciplines but are never so keen to obey it? On this score we are warned that it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God but the doers of the law who will be justified (Romans 2:13), and as Christ told his disciples, “If you love me you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15), and in 1 John 5:2-3 the beloved apostle writes, “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome.”
Brothers, let us not act foolishly as Rehoboam did, forsaking the wise counsel of the old men. Otherwise, we risk forfeiting the throne, as Rehoboam did. Nor let us put our lives in danger by not heeding the prophet’s warning, just as King Ahab did not and got himself killed. Let us not repeat Rehoboam’s folly.
Prayer:
Merciful Father and Good Lord, we are men of treacherous hearts, and often we pretend to want to do your will when in fact we mean to accomplish things our way. Forgive us this grave sin of disobedience, presumptuousness, and impertinence. Thank you for your commandments, for by them your servant is warned, and in doing them is a great reward. We have fallen to Rehoboam’s folly often in times past, but now help us in your mercy and grace to not do so again. In Jesus Name. Amen.