The man of God’s message did not conclude with the prediction of Josiah’s action regarding the priests of Bethel. There was to be a sign that attested to the prophecy. Behold, the altar shall be torn down, and the ashes that are on it shall be poured out.
What is a sign
? This is the ESV’s translation of the Hebrew mophet. According to the standard Hebrew lexicon, it means in this case a sign token of a future event.
1 The phrase the same day
refers to the day the man of God spoke, but it also refers to the execution of the sign, as is made clear in the following verses (see 1 Kings 13:4–5).
The people of Josiah’s day would not need this attestation. It was given for the benefit of Jeroboam and his subjects. The challenge for them was whether the sign would be met with a response of faith or of rebellion.
The execution of the sign did not take place instantaneously. Jeroboam had enough time to respond in rebellion. We are told that when he heard the words of the man of God, stretching out his hand he ordered his servants to seize the prophet.
Two things happened when he did so. First, the king’s hand was shrivelled in such a manner that he could not draw it back to his side. Second, the words of the sign were at the same time executed by the destruction of the altar and its ashes pouring out. This was exactly as the man of God had prophesied.
This raises a fine point of interpretation. Was the sign
the action of the altar splitting open, which is how most commentators describe it being torn down, or is the sign the words spoken by the prophet? Our intuition may lead us to propose the first alternative, but the language of the text seems to indicate the second when we read it carefully: The altar also was torn down, and the ashes poured out from the altar, according to the sign that the man of God had given by the word of the Lord.
The action was, according to grammar, the result of the sign and the sign was the words that the man of God spoke according to the word of the Lord.
We ought to learn from this that the word that the Lord speaks has the same authority as the power displayed in its execution. Jeroboam rebelled before the altar was destroyed but after the words were spoken, and God executed judgment upon him at that point. When God speaks, no one has the right to disbelieve, even if the word has not been instantly fulfilled.
The drama before us, as it was recorded by the writer of 1 Kings, clearly presents Jeroboam as a man of unbelief. There was no time taken for the consideration of the prophet’s words. The immediate reaction is the attempt to do away with God’s prophet. To repeat, this is an act of rebellion and unbelief.
In the comments on 1 Kings 11:1–43 we insisted that Jeroboam’s response to Ahijah was rebellious, since he began to rebel against Solomon even though the prophet told him that Solomon would retain the kingdom throughout his lifetime. Thus, Jeroboam’s actions when he becomes king are not to be understood as a faithful man becoming faithless but an unbeliever continuing in his unbelief. It is often the case that a person’s outward actions display the inner person, not the other way around. For example, a man is not a liar because he lies; he lies because he is a liar. Jeroboam was not faithless because he refused to believe the Lord's word; he refused to believe the Lord's word because he was faithless.
3 Et le même jour il donna un signe, en disant: C'est ici le signe que l'Eternel a parlé: Voici, l'autel se fendra, et la cendre qui est dessus sera répandue.