Commentary Compass

Preaching 1–2 Kings well requires more than finding an edifying lesson in the life of Solomon, Elijah, Elisha, Hezekiah, or Josiah. The books contain some of the most memorable narratives in the Old Testament, yet those stories are embedded in a carefully constructed theological history stretching from the apparent glory of Solomon’s kingdom to the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of Judah. The preacher therefore has to work simultaneously at several levels: the individual narrative must be understood on its own terms, its place within the larger argument of Kings must be respected, its connections with the preceding covenantal story must be traced, and only then should its trajectory through the rest of Scripture toward Christ and the church be developed.

That makes Kings both difficult and extraordinarily rewarding to preach. A sermon can easily become a character study about being courageous like Elijah, wise like Solomon, hospitable like the Shunammite woman, or prayerful like Hezekiah, while missing the larger theological drama in which these characters appear. At the opposite extreme, a preacher can move so quickly to Christ that the distinctive contribution of the particular passage disappears. The goal is neither moralism nor a mechanical “Jesus is the better king” ending attached to every narrative, but a movement from careful exegesis through the theological world created by Kings and into the larger canonical story in which the hopes, failures, judgments, and promises of these books find their fullest resolution.

Start by Reading Kings as a Whole Story

The first essential discipline is to stop treating 1 Kings and 2 Kings as two largely independent books or as a collection of disconnected stories about successive rulers. The division between the two books occurs in the middle of the Elijah–Elisha material and does not correspond to a major theological turning point in the narrative. The preacher will understand individual episodes much better by keeping the whole trajectory in view: Solomon and the apparent fulfilment of Israel’s royal hopes; the division of the kingdom; the intensifying confrontation between the prophetic word and royal apostasy; the fall of the northern kingdom; the temporary reprieves associated with kings such as Hezekiah and Josiah; and finally the destruction of Jerusalem and exile.

J. Gary Millar helpfully divides the narrative into four large movements: 1 Kings 1–11, centred on Solomon; 1 Kings 12–16, describing the divided kingdom and the patterns that will dominate what follows; 1 Kings 17–2 Kings 12, where Elijah and Elisha confront kings and demonstrate the sovereign effectiveness of Yahweh’s word; and 2 Kings 13–25, where the long-established trajectories of apostasy and judgment move toward the destruction of Israel and Judah. This large-scale perspective matters homiletically because the repetitive material in Kings is not accidental padding. Repeated evaluations of rulers, recurring references to Jeroboam’s sin, prophetic announcements followed by fulfilment, and the alternation between Israel and Judah create a cumulative theological pressure that the preacher should allow the congregation to feel.

The Fundamental Question Is Not “Was This King Successful?”

Kings repeatedly overturns ordinary ways of measuring political success. Omri is historically significant but receives only brief attention, whereas Elijah, who possesses neither army nor territory, can dominate the narrative because the decisive reality in Kings is the word of Yahweh. The narrative’s evaluation of a ruler is therefore theological before it is political: Does the king listen to God’s word? Does he preserve covenant fidelity? Does he reject idolatry? What does he do with the worship of Yahweh? Does he walk in the way of David, or does he perpetuate the paradigmatic rebellion associated with Jeroboam?

This gives the preacher an important safeguard against reducing Kings to generic lessons on “leadership.” There are certainly implications for leadership, power, justice, courage, responsibility, and the corruption produced by idolatry, but these arise from a more fundamental theological claim: Israel exists under the kingship of Yahweh and therefore human rulers are themselves accountable servants. The prophets can confront kings because the prophetic word represents an authority the crown cannot manufacture or control. Preaching should preserve that order rather than allowing modern concerns about management, politics, or leadership technique to become the organising centre of the sermon.

Stage One: Exegesis — Hear the Particular Narrative Before Constructing the Sermon

The first movement from text to pulpit is deliberately slow. Before asking what the passage means for Christians, determine what the narrator is doing with this particular episode. Pay attention to repetitions, prophetic announcements and their fulfilment, changes of pace, narrative irony, characterisation, geographical movement, references to earlier Scripture, evaluations of rulers, and the relationship between the passage and the material immediately surrounding it. Kings frequently communicates theology through narrative arrangement rather than through explicit theological propositions, so structure is itself part of the argument.

This is one place where Burke O. Long’s Forms of the Old Testament Literature volumes on 1 and 2 Kings add something valuable to the preacher’s library, even though they were never designed primarily as preaching commentaries. Long concentrates on formal structure, genre, setting, intention, and the rhetorical function of individual units, while at the same time treating the received form of Kings as a substantially coherent work rather than merely dismantling it into hypothetical sources. That approach can force the preacher to ask a question that application-oriented commentaries sometimes hurry past: What kind of text is this, and what is this particular literary form accomplishing here?

Long therefore belongs near the beginning rather than the end of sermon preparation. His strength is not supplying contemporary applications or Christological conclusions, but helping the preacher avoid flattening every passage into the same sort of narrative. A prophetic confrontation, royal notice, miracle story, judgment oracle, succession account, temple dedication, and account of national catastrophe do not communicate in exactly the same fashion. Long is especially helpful when a passage feels oddly shaped or when its relationship to surrounding material is obscure, because understanding the unit’s form and rhetorical function can prevent the sermon from being built around an incidental detail.

Stage Two: Locate the Passage Inside the Theology of Kings

Once the individual unit has been understood, the preacher should ask how it participates in the larger theological argument of the book. Several themes repeatedly converge: the effective word of Yahweh, covenant fidelity and covenant curse, true and false worship, the Davidic promise, kingship, temple and divine presence, sin and judgment, repentance, prophetic ministry, remnant, exile, and continuing hope. These themes should not be mechanically imposed on every passage, but the preacher should know which of them the narrative itself activates.

This is particularly important because Kings appears to address readers for whom the catastrophe has already happened. The great question is no longer simply whether Israel and Judah will survive but how the people of God are to understand themselves after kingdom, land, temple, and Davidic monarchy have apparently collapsed. The sermon should therefore resist reading the story only from the viewpoint of the characters living before the exile. Kings also asks its later hearers to look backwards and understand why the catastrophe occurred, whether God’s promises have failed, what identity remains for his people after judgment, and where hope might still be found.

Nathan Lovell: One of the Most Useful New Additions for Whole-Book Biblical Theology

Nathan Lovell’s The Book of Kings and Exilic Identity: 1 and 2 Kings as a Work of Political Historiography is not a conventional verse-by-verse commentary, but it considerably strengthens the middle stage between exegesis and preaching. Lovell asks what Kings is doing for a community that has lost the principal institutions through which it previously understood its identity. His four major categories—covenant, nationhood, land, and rule—provide an unusually productive framework for thinking about the theological significance of exile without reducing the book merely to the explanation that Israel sinned and therefore was punished.

Lovell’s proposal that Kings contains interrelated “Inner” and “Outer” narratives is also worth serious consideration. The inner story gives particular prominence to the Omrides and to the prophetic word announced through Elijah and brought to fulfilment through the subsequent history involving Elisha, Jehu, and Hazael, while the encompassing story follows the kingdoms against the background of Yahweh’s promise to David. Whether or not every detail of this structural proposal convinces, it encourages the preacher to see how apparently separate narrative sequences interpret one another and how promise-and-fulfilment patterns provide theological architecture across very large stretches of the book.

Lovell becomes especially useful in preaching the later chapters of 2 Kings. Instead of allowing sermons on Samaria’s fall, Manasseh, Josiah, Jerusalem’s destruction, or Jehoiachin to become a succession of historical disasters, he helps the preacher ask what covenant, peoplehood, land, divine presence, and rule mean when their familiar institutional expressions have collapsed. His attention to remnant is particularly suggestive: judgment is real and devastating, yet the people who survive judgment are not simply disconnected remnants of a failed national experiment. Kings is also participating in the theological reconstruction of Israel’s identity and future, which provides a much richer route into biblical theology and eventually into the New Testament people of God.

The Word of Yahweh: A Major Highway from Kings into Biblical Theology

One of the clearest biblical-theological trajectories in Kings is the effectiveness of God’s word. Prophets repeatedly announce events that seem politically improbable, and the narrative subsequently records their fulfilment. Kings may control armies, build fortifications, form alliances, assassinate rivals, or manipulate worship, but none of them can finally prevent the word of Yahweh from accomplishing what it declares. The apparently powerless prophet may therefore possess more genuine authority within the theological world of Kings than the ruler who commands the state.

This trajectory permits a natural Christian movement without turning every prophet into a direct type of Christ. The God who governs history by his word ultimately reveals himself in the Word made flesh, and the prophetic pattern contributes to the canonical expectation of definitive divine speech. The preacher can therefore move from the local confrontation between prophet and king to the authority, trustworthiness, judgment, and saving power of God’s revelation, eventually arriving at Christ without bypassing the narrative’s original theological concern.

Paul Hedley Jones and the Problem of Preaching 1 Kings 13

Paul Hedley Jones’s Anonymous Prophets and Archetypal Kings: Reading 1 Kings 13 is a specialist monograph rather than a commentary on Kings as a whole, but for 1 Kings 13 it may change the way a preacher approaches one of the strangest narratives in Scripture. The familiar homiletical temptation is to turn the man of God from Judah into a straightforward warning that one must obey God precisely or suffer severe consequences. Obedience is certainly present, but that interpretation alone struggles to explain why this bizarre narrative has been placed immediately after the division of the kingdom and why its prophecy reaches forward to Josiah in 2 Kings 23.

Jones works extensively with Karl Barth’s proposal that the two prophets can function as a narrative analogy for Judah and Israel, placing the episode within the theological drama of the divided kingdoms. He explores its literary shape, its relation to what precedes and follows, its canonical location, and the possibility that the story functions programmatically rather than merely as an isolated moral tale. Even a preacher who remains cautious about the full symbolic interpretation will benefit from the methodological lesson: before extracting “the moral of the story,” ask why the narrator placed this strange story here, what its unnamed prophets may represent within Kings, and how its delayed fulfilment under Josiah contributes to the book’s insistence that Yahweh’s word governs history.

For preaching, Jones should therefore restrain rather than encourage imaginative allegory. His work shows how a richer theological interpretation emerges from attending more carefully to literary context, not from inventing correspondences detached from the text. A sermon on 1 Kings 13 can still speak powerfully about obedience to God’s word, but it can do so within the wider tragedy of a divided covenant people and the certainty that the prophetic word will finally be fulfilled. That is a much more substantial biblical-theological bridge than treating the lion simply as an unforgettable illustration of what happens when someone breaks a rule.

Kingship and the Davidic Promise: Do Not Jump to Jesus Too Quickly, but Do Not Stop Before Him

Kings creates a persistent tension between the promise to David and the actual performance of David’s descendants. Solomon appears initially to embody extraordinary promise: wisdom, peace, international recognition, temple building, and prosperity all suggest that Israel’s royal hopes are reaching maturity. Yet the narrative deliberately allows the splendour to deteriorate. Solomon accumulates precisely the things Deuteronomy warns the king against accumulating, turns toward other gods, and leaves a kingdom that fractures almost immediately after his death.

The remainder of Kings deepens rather than solves the problem. Some rulers are much worse than others, and Hezekiah and Josiah receive remarkable commendation, yet no king reverses the fundamental trajectory permanently. The preacher should therefore allow the congregation to experience the book’s accumulating royal disappointment before announcing Christ as the answer. “Jesus is the better king” is true, but it becomes far more powerful when the sermon has first shown exactly what kind of king Israel needed and why even the greatest historical candidates could not finally supply him.

The understated ending of 2 Kings is important in this respect. Jerusalem has fallen, the temple has been burned, and the Davidic monarchy appears finished, yet the book closes with Jehoiachin still alive and unexpectedly elevated from prison. The text does not provide a fully developed messianic sermon at that point, but neither does it allow the Davidic line simply to vanish. Christian preaching can respect that restraint while placing it within the subsequent canonical story, where the promises made to David find their resolution in the Son of David whose kingdom does not repeat the cycle of apostasy and collapse.

Covenant, Sin, Judgment, and Repentance

Kings is saturated with Deuteronomic theology. The destruction of Samaria and Jerusalem is not presented as evidence that Assyria or Babylon has defeated Yahweh, but as the terrible outworking of covenant infidelity under the sovereignty of Yahweh himself. This radically changes the theological meaning of exile. What appears from one perspective to be geopolitical defeat is interpreted within the narrative as covenant judgment, repeatedly anticipated by prophetic warning and finally realised after extraordinary divine patience.

Yet judgment must not be preached without the corresponding theology of repentance and grace. Solomon’s prayer in 1 Kings 8 already imagines Israel sinning, suffering covenant judgment, being carried into another land, turning back toward God, and pleading for forgiveness. That prayer becomes increasingly significant as the narrative approaches the very exile Solomon anticipates. A preacher who understands this can present Kings neither as a gloomy catalogue of failures nor as a simplistic demonstration that bad behaviour produces bad consequences, but as a profound account of sin, divine patience, righteous judgment, the need for heart-level return to God, and the continuing possibility of mercy.

The biblical-theological movement toward Christ is therefore deeper than saying that Christians should imitate good kings and avoid bad ones. Kings exposes a covenant people repeatedly unable to sustain covenant faithfulness and a succession of rulers incapable of transforming that condition. The New Testament answer involves not merely improved leadership but the faithful Son, the bearing of covenant curse, the gift of forgiveness, and the transformation of the heart through the new covenant. That larger movement allows ethical application to arise from grace rather than degenerating into legalism.

Temple, Presence, and the Movement of Biblical Theology

Solomon’s temple should also be preached within its proper theological trajectory. First Kings 8 simultaneously celebrates the extraordinary privilege of God dwelling among his people and insists that the God of heaven cannot be contained by a building. The temple is therefore neither incidental architecture nor a simple Old Testament equivalent of a church building. It belongs to a developing biblical theology of divine presence, holiness, sacrifice, prayer, name, forgiveness, and the gathering of people before God.

The destruction of the temple in 2 Kings 25 is consequently theological catastrophe as well as military disaster. Yet the canonical story does not end with the rebuilding of a structure as the final answer to humanity’s need for God’s presence. Christian preaching can move through the incarnation of Christ, his identification of his body with the temple, the Spirit’s indwelling of God’s people, and the final vision of God dwelling with humanity in the new creation. The preacher should make that journey because the canon makes it, not because every reference to Solomon’s temple is a secret prediction of Jesus.

Elijah and Elisha: More Than Heroic Prophets

The Elijah and Elisha narratives are among the easiest passages in Kings to preach badly because their dramatic stories practically invite detached character lessons. Elijah can become an example of courage, the widow an example of faith, Naaman a lesson in humility, and Gehazi an example of greed. Those applications may contain truth, but the larger narrative is concerned with Yahweh’s identity, the authority of his word, his contest with false worship, his sovereignty over life and death, his compassion for the powerless, and the surprising reach of his grace beyond Israel.

The canonical connections are correspondingly rich. Jesus explicitly invokes Elijah’s ministry to the Sidonian widow and Elisha’s cleansing of Naaman in Luke 4, placing these stories within the scandalously expansive reach of divine grace. Elijah also becomes part of the New Testament’s prophetic expectations and appears at the transfiguration, while the repeated life-from-death motifs in the prophetic narratives contribute to the biblical vocabulary by which the resurrection can later be understood. The preacher should let these connections emerge from the theological substance of the narratives rather than forcing each miracle into an allegorical correspondence with some aspect of Christ’s work.

J. Gary Millar — The Best Single Guide to the Whole Exegesis-to-Pulpit Journey

J. Gary Millar’s contribution on 1–2 Kings in the ESV Expository Commentary remains one of the most directly useful resources for this particular task because he explicitly thinks as a preacher about biblical theology. He identifies the dominant trajectories of the word of Yahweh, covenant, sin and judgment, repentance, and kingship, and then asks how these trajectories legitimately move forward into Christ. Particularly helpful is his insistence that the movement to Christ need not take exactly the same form in every sermon. Fulfilment, escalation, problem and solution, theological categories, divine attributes, longing, and continuity can all provide different routes through the canonical story.

Millar is also unusually practical about preaching the length of Kings. He argues that many passages need to be handled in larger narrative blocks rather than atomised into paragraph-sized sermons, because repetition, acceleration, contrast, and accumulation are themselves part of the rhetoric of the book. His warning against preaching the same sermon repeatedly is equally important: if every message concludes simply that Israel had a bad king but Christians have King Jesus, the conclusion may be true while the preaching becomes reductive. Millar helps the preacher preserve both the unity of biblical theology and the variety of the individual narratives, which is why I would begin with him when designing an entire series.

August Konkel — The Most Deliberate Bridge from Original Meaning to Contemporary Significance

August Konkel’s NIV Application Commentary on 1–2 Kings is almost tailor-made for the problem represented in the title of this post. Its recurring movement from Original Meaning through Bridging Contexts to Contemporary Significance forces the interpreter to distinguish three tasks that are often collapsed into one another. Instead of leaping directly from an ancient king or prophet to a modern Christian application, Konkel asks what the passage communicated within Israel’s story, which theological principles genuinely travel across the historical and covenantal distance, and how those principles address contemporary hearers.

Konkel is particularly valuable when a preacher has completed the exegetical work but cannot yet see how to make the sermon contemporary without trivialising the text. The applications do not all need to be adopted, and some readers will occasionally draw the canonical or Christological connections differently, but the discipline of the method is exceptionally useful. In a book where monarchy, temple, warfare, prophetic office, land, and covenant sanctions can all tempt the preacher into direct one-to-one transfer, Konkel continually reminds us that responsible application requires a bridge rather than a jump.

Philip Graham Ryken — A Strong Model of Redemptive-Historical Exposition

Philip Graham Ryken’s Reformed Expository Commentary volumes on 1 Kings and 2 Kings show what the material can sound like after it has passed through the study and reached an actual congregation. Ryken works with a consciously redemptive-historical and Christ-centred framework, but his sermons generally spend substantial time developing the Old Testament narrative before moving canonically forward. He is especially good at identifying the theological problem exposed by a passage and showing how that problem participates in the larger biblical story rather than simply extracting a principle for improved behaviour.

Ryken is therefore most useful late in sermon preparation rather than as the sole exegetical resource. Read him after working with a detailed commentary and after identifying the passage’s place within Kings; then observe how he converts theological conclusions into clear homiletical movement, memorable language, pastoral appeal, illustration, and explicit gospel proclamation. At his best he demonstrates that Christ-centred preaching need not erase the Old Testament story, although preachers should still make their own exegetical judgments rather than simply importing Ryken’s sermonic connections wholesale.

Dale Ralph Davis — Learning How to Make Narrative Theology Preachable

Dale Ralph Davis’s volumes on 1 Kings and 2 Kings remain among the most enjoyable resources for learning how Old Testament narrative can be preached with theological seriousness and rhetorical energy. Davis notices irony, repetition, surprise, narrative tension, and the small details that make a story memorable, and he writes in a way that frequently suggests how those observations can become the structure or language of a sermon. His work is particularly helpful to preachers whose technically correct exposition tends to sound like a commentary read aloud.

Davis should nevertheless be used as an expositor rather than as the final authority on difficult historical or philological questions. His great strength is the ability to feel the narrative and communicate its theological force, not to survey every scholarly alternative. Pairing him with a more detailed exegetical commentary produces a particularly fruitful combination: the technical work prevents overconfident interpretation, while Davis helps ensure that careful exegesis eventually becomes proclamation rather than remaining a collection of notes.

Lissa Wray Beal — A Strong Exegetical and Theological Anchor

Lissa Wray Beal’s Apollos Old Testament Commentary on 1–2 Kings is one of the stronger resources for the exegetical stage because it brings literary, historical, textual, and theological concerns into sustained conversation. Her attention to the narrative’s Deuteronomic standards for kingship and worship helps the preacher understand why apparently impressive rulers can receive negative evaluations and why particular sins recur as theological benchmarks throughout the book. She is especially valuable when the preacher needs more substance than an exposition-oriented commentary can provide without disappearing into a purely technical discussion.

For sermon preparation, Beal often performs the work immediately before the biblical-theological bridge. She clarifies what is happening in the passage and how the unit contributes to Kings as a whole, giving the preacher enough control of the text to resist premature application. She is less interested than Konkel in constructing detailed contemporary applications and less sermonic than Davis or Ryken, which is precisely why she complements them well. A preacher who uses Beal for exegetical control and then turns to Millar, Konkel, Davis, or Ryken for different stages of the journey will usually have a stronger sermon than one who expects a single commentary to do everything.

Iain Provan — Compact Theological Exegesis That Keeps the Big Story Visible

Iain Provan’s commentary on 1–2 Kings remains valuable because it is relatively concise without becoming superficial. He pays careful attention to the narrative logic and theological convictions of Kings and is particularly alert to the danger of allowing speculative reconstructions of sources or history to dominate interpretation of the received text. For a preacher who needs to see the argument of a passage clearly without reading an enormous technical discussion, Provan frequently offers an excellent first orientation.

His compactness also means that he pairs naturally with more specialised works. Provan can establish the contours of the passage, Beal or a more technical commentator can resolve detailed questions, Lovell can illuminate the whole-book theological and exilic horizon, and Millar or Konkel can help carry the result toward the pulpit. Even after newer commentaries have appeared, Provan remains useful because clarity about the theological story is often more valuable for preaching than sheer volume of information.

Burke O. Long — Newly Added, but Best Used Early in Preparation

The newly added Burke O. Long FOTL volumes should not displace Millar, Konkel, Davis, or Ryken as preaching resources, because that is not what Long was attempting to produce. Their contribution comes earlier in the process. Long’s sustained attention to form, structure, genre, setting, and rhetorical intention helps the preacher respect the literary individuality of passages that can otherwise become merely another episode in the long succession of kings and prophets.

Long also provides a useful bridge between older form criticism and later literary readings because he is interested in literary history without making reconstruction the sole goal of interpretation. He treats Kings as a work whose received form has coherence and rhetorical force, while remaining explicit about the interpretive assumptions involved. That makes the volumes especially useful for difficult units where the preacher senses that the passage’s shape matters but cannot yet explain why. Their homiletical payoff is indirect but real: better recognition of literary form produces better identification of theological emphasis, and better identification of theological emphasis makes the eventual application less arbitrary.

Nathan Lovell — Newly Added and Highly Valuable for the Biblical-Theological Middle

Lovell belongs at almost the opposite point in the workflow from Long. Whereas Long helps with the form and function of individual units, Lovell is strongest when the preacher steps back and asks what the entire history means after exile. His categories of covenant, nationhood, land, and rule prevent biblical theology from shrinking to a single line about the failure of Israel’s kings. They show how exile threatens the whole complex of Israel’s identity and how Kings works through the question of continuity after those institutions have been shattered.

This makes Lovell particularly valuable for sermons that need to move from historical catastrophe to Christian biblical theology without simply spiritualising Israel’s experience. The preacher can ask how the canonical story subsequently develops the identity of God’s people, the promise of land and presence, Davidic kingship, covenant faithfulness, remnant, and the relation of Israel to the nations. Lovell does not write the Christian sermon for the preacher, and that is an advantage: he thickens the Old Testament theology sufficiently that the move to Christ can become genuinely canonical rather than a shortcut.

Paul Hedley Jones — Newly Added and Essential for One Difficult Text

Jones is obviously much narrower than the other resources because his entire study concentrates on 1 Kings 13, but the very narrowness is what makes the book worthwhile. The narrative of the man of God from Judah and the old prophet of Bethel has generated radically different interpretations because it is genuinely difficult to understand why the story unfolds as it does and why the narrator gives it such prominence. Jones surveys that interpretive history while developing a literary-theological account that takes seriously its placement after the division of the kingdom and its later fulfilment in Josiah’s actions.

For preaching, the most valuable result is methodological. Jones demonstrates why a strange Old Testament story should not be domesticated too quickly into a neat moral principle. Literary placement, canonical echoes, the relationship of Judah and Israel, the efficacy of the prophetic word, and the long delay before fulfilment all contribute to what the narrative is doing. Even if a preacher ultimately adopts a more restrained version of Jones’s proposal, the resulting sermon should be considerably richer and less moralistic than one that begins and ends with the assertion that disobedience has consequences.

A Practical Commentary Workflow

For a difficult passage, I would not expect one commentary to perform every stage of preparation. Begin with Provan or Beal to establish the narrative and exegetical contours, consulting Long when literary form or structure is especially important. Use more technical resources where textual, historical, chronological, or linguistic questions genuinely affect interpretation rather than accumulating technical information simply because it is available.

Then move outward. Lovell is particularly useful for locating the passage within the theological problem created by exile and the identity of God’s people, while Millar is especially strong at tracing the dominant themes of Kings into biblical theology. Konkel helps discipline the movement from ancient meaning to contemporary significance, and Davis and Ryken show two different ways in which the results can become vivid Christian proclamation. For 1 Kings 13, insert Jones into the process before constructing the sermon, because that passage rewards much more specialised attention.

Do Not Make Every Sermon a Character Study

Kings contains extraordinary personalities, and the narrator certainly expects readers to evaluate their actions. Nevertheless, sermons should not routinely take the form “be like Elijah,” “do not be like Ahab,” “have faith like the widow,” or “ask for wisdom like Solomon.” Such applications can be legitimate as secondary implications, but if they become the centre of the sermon the theological narrative has been reduced to religious biography. Elijah matters because Yahweh’s word confronts Baalised royal power; Solomon matters because his extraordinary promise and eventual failure expose the insufficiency of even Israel’s wisest king; Hezekiah and Josiah matter because genuine reform can be celebrated while still proving unable to reverse completely the accumulated covenant crisis.

A better question is therefore not merely, “What should I copy or avoid in this character?” but, “What does this episode reveal about Yahweh, his word, his covenant, his kingdom, human sin, divine grace, and the hope the narrative is creating?” Ethical exhortation can then follow from those theological realities. The result is not less practical preaching but more deeply Christian practice because obedience is located inside the story of God’s action rather than being detached from it.

Do Not Turn Every Passage into the Same Christological Formula

Christian preaching should not stop before Christ, but neither should Christ become a predictable final paragraph disconnected from the route by which the passage reaches him. Different passages travel along different canonical roads. A royal narrative may move through the Davidic promise; a temple text through divine presence; an Elijah narrative through prophetic word, covenant conflict, or resurrection motifs; an exile passage through covenant curse and restoration; Naaman through grace extending beyond Israel; and a story of repeated royal failure through the longing for a ruler who can actually produce the righteousness his kingdom requires.

This variety is important both theologically and homiletically. It respects the diverse ways Scripture prepares for the gospel while preventing a long sermon series from sounding as though the preacher has learned only one biblical-theological manoeuvre. The question is not simply, “Where can I insert Jesus?” but, “Which theological trajectory generated by this passage actually continues through the canon and reaches its decisive development in Christ?”

Do Not Rush the Judgment Texts

Kings contains disturbing violence, severe prophetic judgments, dynastic extermination, warfare, famine, and finally national destruction. The preacher should neither apologise them away nor imitate their rhetoric carelessly in contemporary application. These texts belong inside the covenantal and redemptive-historical framework of Israel’s life under Yahweh and often depict judgment after sustained rebellion and repeated prophetic warning. Their theological seriousness should be allowed to stand before any movement to application.

At the canonical level they contribute to Scripture’s insistence that evil matters and that divine patience must not be mistaken for indifference. Christian proclamation eventually reaches the cross, where judgment and salvation meet in an entirely decisive way, and the New Testament’s own teaching about final judgment means that Kings cannot simply be relegated to a supposedly primitive theology that Christianity has outgrown. Yet the church is not the monarchy of ancient Israel, and the preacher must not transfer Israel’s national warfare or royal sanctions directly into the mission of the Christian community.

Let Repetition Do Its Work

The repetitive royal notices can tempt the preacher either to skip large portions of Kings or to preach them as tedious biographical summaries. Yet repetition is itself theological rhetoric. Successive kings walk in the same sins, prophetic warnings recur, reform repeatedly proves incomplete, and apparently new beginnings fail to escape old patterns. Part of the narrator’s purpose is that the reader should become exhausted by the recurrence of rebellion and increasingly conscious that Israel requires something more radical than another promising ruler.

This means that some sermons should deliberately cover substantial amounts of text. A sequence of minor kings may work better as a single sermon than as six separate messages, because rapid movement allows the congregation to experience the pattern that the narrator constructed. Conversely, major episodes such as Solomon’s dedication of the temple, the Carmel confrontation, Naboth’s vineyard, Naaman, Hezekiah’s crisis, Josiah’s reform, or Jerusalem’s fall deserve enough space for their distinctive theological contribution to emerge.

A Possible Shape for a Preaching Series

A congregation does not necessarily need dozens upon dozens of sermons to encounter the theological force of Kings. A substantial series could devote several messages to Solomon and the temple in 1 Kings 1–11, move more rapidly through the division and establishment of the two kingdoms in 1 Kings 12–16, give appropriate space to Elijah and Elisha from 1 Kings 17 through 2 Kings 13, and then accelerate through the increasingly ominous royal succession toward Samaria’s fall, Hezekiah, Manasseh, Josiah, Jerusalem’s destruction, and Jehoiachin in 2 Kings 17–25. The exact number of sermons matters less than preserving the proportions and theological momentum of the narrative.

It is also worth considering whether the usual break between 1 Kings and 2 Kings is the best break for the congregation. Because Elijah’s departure and Elisha’s ministry cross the canonical division, a series arranged around the major literary movements may communicate the book’s structure more clearly. Whatever arrangement is chosen, the congregation should repeatedly be reminded where it stands in the larger story so that individual sermons accumulate rather than disappearing into a sequence of memorable but disconnected episodes.

From Exegesis to Biblical Theology to the Pulpit

The journey can finally be stated quite simply. Exegesis asks what this narrative is doing here, in this form, within the book of Kings. Biblical theology asks how its principal theological realities—word, covenant, kingship, temple, sin, judgment, repentance, grace, remnant, presence, or promise—develop through the rest of Scripture. Preaching then asks how those realities confront, comfort, correct, and nourish people who now live on the far side of Christ’s death and resurrection while still awaiting the consummation of his kingdom.

The order matters. Beginning with application usually produces moralism, while beginning with a predetermined Christological analogy can produce allegory. Beginning with the text, moving through the theological argument of Kings, and then following genuine canonical trajectories toward Christ allows the sermon to be both recognisably about the Old Testament passage and unmistakably Christian.

Final Assessment

If I were assembling a preaching desk specifically for 1–2 Kings, J. Gary Millar would be my first resource for understanding how the whole book moves from biblical theology toward preaching, while August Konkel would be the most systematic companion for working from original meaning through the hermeneutical bridge to contemporary significance. Lissa Wray Beal and Iain Provan strengthen the exegetical and theological foundation, while Dale Ralph Davis and Philip Ryken demonstrate two different forms of lively Christian exposition after the interpretive work has been done.

The recently added books strengthen the workflow at points that those preaching commentaries do not cover as fully. Burke O. Long makes the preacher attend more carefully to literary form and rhetorical function; Nathan Lovellgreatly enriches the whole-book theology of exile, covenant, identity, land, and kingship; and Paul Hedley Jonesdemonstrates on 1 Kings 13 how patient literary-theological interpretation can rescue a difficult narrative from reduction to an easy moral lesson. Used together, these resources make it possible to preach Kings neither as an antiquarian history of failed monarchs nor as a collection of inspirational stories, but as a sustained theological narrative in which the word of God judges human pretension, covenant rebellion leads inexorably toward exile, grace repeatedly interrupts deserved judgment, the Davidic promise refuses to disappear, and the failure of Israel’s kings intensifies the longing for the King who finally fulfils what the kingdom was meant to be.