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In 1 Kings 1, King David is very old. He is weak, he is in bed, and he does not have many days left. He spends one of those days keeping a promise. He calls Bathsheba in and keeps the promise he made years earlier — that her son Solomon would sit on the throne after him. When he swears it, he says: “As the Lord lives, who has redeemed my life from every distress” (v. 29). That is the reason he gives for keeping his word. David had spent his whole life watching God keep promises to him — in the fields as a shepherd, in the cave, and in the years when Saul was hunting him. God had rescued him again and again, and that taught David to keep his word too. One of the last things David did with his strength was make sure someone else received what he had promised. He did not build himself a monument. He kept his word. God is faithful to us, and He wants us to be people others can trust, too.
Two men were crowned king of Israel on the same day, and they could not have been more different. Adonijah was David’s older son. Earlier that day he had thrown a feast and “exalted himself, saying, ‘I will be king'” (1:5). He invited guests, he had chariots and runners, and he announced himself king. No priest anointed him. No prophet was there. His own father did not even know. Solomon did none of that. He never asked for the throne. He rode down to Gihon on his father’s mule because his father ordered it, with Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet beside him. Then Zadok poured oil from the tabernacle on his head. The difference between those two men was not that one was more talented or wanted it more. Adonijah wanted it far more. The difference was that one man took the throne and the other was given it. The whole Bible teaches us this: the good things we have come from God as gifts. We do not grab them. We receive them from Him with thankful hearts.
What made Solomon king in verse 39 was not a crown or an army. Zadok the priest took “a horn of oil from the tabernacle” and poured it over his head. That is how Israel made kings. The oil was not magic. But when a priest poured it out in public, using oil from the tent where God met His people, it said one thing: this man is God’s choice, not ours. A person chosen this way is called anointed. In Hebrew, “anointed one” is Messiah. In Greek it is Christos, which comes into English as Christ. So every time you say “Jesus Christ,” you are saying “Jesus the Anointed One.” Christ is not His last name. It is His title: He is the King God chose. Solomon was anointed king, and he reigned, and then he died, and Israel needed another king. Each anointed king in the Old Testament was a picture pointing ahead to a greater King. Jesus is that King. He died for us and rose again, and His reign will never end. You can trust Him as your King today.
1 Kings 1 ends in a surprising place. Adonijah has lost. His guests “were afraid, and arose, and each one went his way” (v. 49). They had never really been his friends. He is left alone, so he runs to the altar and takes hold of its horns. That was not a random hiding place. The altar was where sacrifices were made, and holding its horns was how a man in Israel begged for his life when he had no case to argue. Adonijah could not claim he was innocent, because the whole city had heard what he tried to do. He could not fight, because everyone had gone. All he had was a grip on the place where blood was shed for sin, and a request. And the king he tried to steal from spared him. Solomon did not pretend it never happened. He said plainly that it would depend on how Adonijah lived from then on. But he let him go home alive. A guilty man with nothing to offer, holding on to the altar and receiving his life from the king, is a picture of how we come to Jesus.
Adonijah is a lot like us. Nobody gave him the throne. He wanted it, so he took it — he “exalted himself, saying, ‘I will be king'” (1:5). That is what sin is at its root. It is more than breaking rules. It is taking the throne, wanting to run what belongs to God.
And Adonijah could not fix it. He could not hand the crown back and make everything right. He was still the man who reached for it. Good behavior on Tuesday does nothing about what you did on Monday. That is why the Bible says nobody can save himself — not by effort, not by religion, and not by being nicer than the next person.
At the end Adonijah is alone at the altar, holding its horns. He has no innocence to plead, no army left, and no claim of any kind. He has only a grip on the place where blood was shed, and a request. And the king he tried to rob gives him his life.
Solomon’s mercy points us to a greater King. Jesus is the Anointed One; “Christ” means exactly that. And He is the opposite of Adonijah. He did not grab at the throne He truly owned. Philippians 2 says He emptied Himself and became obedient to death, the death of a cross.
At the cross Jesus did more than offer a sacrifice. He was the sacrifice, dying in the place of people who wanted His throne. And on the third day God raised Him bodily from the dead. He is alive now, and He is Lord.
So come to Jesus the way Adonijah came to the altar. You do not need a record that will stand up, because none of us has one. Come holding on and asking. Solomon’s mercy had a condition and lasted only a short time. Jesus’ mercy rests on His finished work, and it lasts forever. The King you sinned against is the King who died to give you life.
David is swearing an oath here, and this is what he swears it on. He could have said “I promise” and stopped. Instead he pointed to what he was surest of in the whole world: God had rescued him from every trouble he had ever faced. Every distress — the lion and the bear, Goliath, the years of running from Saul, and his own worst days. Not most of them, but every one. So when this dying man wanted to say “you can count on my word,” he backed it with God’s faithfulness instead of his own. That is a good way to learn to keep a promise, and a better way to learn who God is.
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📚 The Horns of the Altar