Day 174: Shemaiah, the Man of God (1 Kings 12:22)

A Spurgeon Snapshot

The word of God came to Shemaiah, the man of God.

1 Kings 12:22

Through the Bible: 1 Kings 12-14

There are 3,237 characters in the Bible. Two thousand six hundred seventy in the Old Testament, and five hundred eighty in the New Testament.

Many of those names are mentioned hundreds of times. Just for fun, here are the top ten most used proper names in the Bible (not including God):

• 10. Abraham (235)
• 9. Paul (239)
• 8. Joseph (248)
• 7. Solomon (272)
• 6. Saul (326)
• 5. Aaron (342)
• 4. Jacob (363)
• 3. Moses (803)
• 2. David (974)
• 1. Jesus (1,310)

On the other side of the spectrum, there are 186 characters whose names are mentioned only once.

Today, we come across one of these. Shemaiah. Granted, there are other Shaemaiahs in the Bible. But this is the only mention of the prophet who was active during the reign of Rehoboam.

Shemaiah’s name means “heard by God.” And we truly know nothing about him apart from this event. Yet, this one-off character changed the course of Israel’s history. Here is what happened:

After the death of Solomon, his son Rehoboam took the throne and immediately made a stupid decision which divided the kingdom. He decided he would make his snaps by becoming an even more ruthless taskmaster than his father Solomon had been. As a result, all but the tribe of Judah seceded from the union (see 1 Kings 12:20). Rehoboam mustered an army of 180,000 Judahites and Benjaminites to fight against the other tribes in order to bring them back into the kingdom.

But then, Shemaiah stepped up and told the men not to march, because this situation was from the Lord. The people listened, and the army did not march.

Here’s what Charles Spurgeon had to say about how God used Shemaiah:

He appears once in this history and then vanishes. But it would be a grand thing to preach only one sermon and to be as successful as Shemaiah was. It would be far better than to preach ten thousand and to accomplish nothing by them at all. Let us therefore earnestly pray to God that we may preach ‘as a dying man to dying men’ and to deliver each discourse as if that one message was enough to serve for our whole life work. We need not wish to preach another sermon provided we are enabled to so deliver that one that the purpose of God will be accomplished by us and the power of his Word will be seen in our hearers.

* Spurgeon was quoting a 17th century British theologian named Richard Baxter, who said “Preach as though you will never preach again; a dying man to dying men.”

What a testimony! One man, never mentioned again, turned an army of 186,000.

Beloved, the world is not likely to ever know your name once you leave this earth. But as Shemaiah reminds us, the world doesn’t need to. God knows your name, and that is enough.

One of my favorite study Bibles is The Spurgeon Study Bible, available from Lifeway, Christianbook.com, and Amazon. All of the study notes are quotes from Charles Spurgeon’s sermons and writing. For more on Charles Spurgeon, click here.