1 Kings 21:24 – “…Anyone belonging to Ahab who dies in the city the dogs shall eat, and anyone of his who dies in the open country the birds of the heavens shall eat.”
Finally, we get to the point where God had simply had enough with Ahab and Jezebel, this couple and the demons working in and through them, and their day of death and judgment is sealed. Furthermore, unlike most kings and queens who are honored in death, this royal couple of crooks will have wild unclean stray dogs licking up their blood on the land where they shed Naboth’s blood. God’s prophecies through Elijah were later fulfilled exactly as promised as 1 Kings 21 foreshadows their ultimate demise.
When they went to bury Jezebel’s dead body, we read in 2 Kings 9:35–37, “But when they went to bury her, they found no more of her than the skull and the feet and the palms of her hands. When they came back and told him, he said, ‘This is the word of the Lord, which he spoke by his servant Elijah the Tishbite: “In the territory of Jezreel the dogs shall eat the flesh of Jezebel, and the corpse of Jezebel shall be as dung on the face of the field in the territory of Jezreel, so that no one can say, This is Jezebel.”’”
When Ahab died, his line did as well. 2 Kings 10:10-11,17 reports, “‘Know then that there shall fall to the earth nothing of the word of the Lord, which the Lord spoke concerning the house of Ahab, for the Lord has done what he said by his servant Elijah.’ So Jehu struck down all who remained of the house of Ahab in Jezreel, all his great men and his close friends and his priests, until he left him none remaining…And when he came to Samaria, he struck down all who remained to Ahab in Samaria, till he had wiped them out, according to the word of the Lord that he spoke to Elijah.”
The Jezebel spirit was and is a murderous spirit and is guilty for the taking of many godly lives from the days of Elijah (including the prophets of God she slaughtered to the innocent Naboth) to our own day. When confronted by Elijah for the evil done for him by Jezebel, Ahab demonstrates for the first time what the Bible calls “worldly sorrow”.
This counterfeit of real repentance does not grieve the sin, or the offense against God and others, but instead the consequences the sinner must pay for their sin. In this way, people with “worldly sorrow” falsely appear to have a heart change, but their heart remains selfish and unrepentant. They don’t regret who they are, or what they have done, but instead merely mourn the price they pay for who they are and what they do. 2 Corinthians 7:10 (NLT) says, “For the kind of sorrow God wants us to experience leads us away from sin and results in salvation. There’s no regret for that kind of sorrow. But worldly sorrow, which lacks repentance, results in spiritual death.”
Make no mistake, though outwardly Ahab, “tore his clothes and put sackcloth on his flesh and fasted and lay in sackcloth and went about dejectedly” (1 Kings 21:27), inwardly it was worldly sorrow and not godly repentance. God then kindly permitted Ahab to live a little longer before sending him to Hell and bringing “disaster upon his house” (1 Kings 21:29).
Does this story give you hope that God ultimately wins in the end?
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