He who presupposes a negative outcome habitually, can never get started.

It is not the outcome which finally does him in, it is the non-starting which whittles away his progress.

Every time one says No to an Idea, a proposal or a task, it brings about a sense of false power, as if one had a choice to accept and do, yet one out of his God given Liberty refused doing it.

Such habitual negation of opportunities are nothing but rungs on which the bread of idleness are baked!

A habitual No-sayer has a great responsibility to convince himself that he had said NO, based on some real reasoning. Therefore he starts hunting for a reason to convince himself and bring himself to that belief. The greatness of the human mind is that it is a storehouse from which one can pull out anything that he wishes to. It is a larder of archetypal dots which could be connected with one’s wishes and presented as a drawing. Having been endowed with a mind, the No-sayer clutches at negative possibilities and weaves a fabric of probabilities where he could have fallen. That fabric is nothing but a self-woven shroud to his own growth. He feels secure in the warmth of the shroud for a few years and in the ensuing inactivity of the mind and body, incapacitated from taking risks, pulls the shroud over his head and fades into the sunset horizon with no trace of him having lived a Life at all. A cow among the cattle; a sheep among the herd, having spent his time eating grass and letting others milk benefits out of his life with no footprints to show- not even to one’s own generation, leave alone the next.

Among this huge mass of dead cattle and sheep, some names have stood as beacons inspiring succeeding generations for millennia – Moses, Gideon, David, among those should also be counted Abijah, who though not popular, because of the shortness of his reign and also because of lack of preservation of the Chronicles relating to him.

Abijah did what his Grandfather and Father failed to do.

Can one imagine Solomon, a man who had been stamped the wisest man unable to rein in a Jeroboam? Do we recall that Solomon married a daughter of Pharaoh? Do we recall that Jeroboam took refuge in Egypt? So why couldn’t Solomon, being the exalted son in law of the Pharaoh, not able to rein in Jeroboam?

To speculate, Jeroboam must have been a force even in Egypt that the Pharaoh didn’t want to antagonise! So the Pharaoh just let him be.

This Jeroboam gets back to Israel and wangled out ten of the tribes including the tribes of Ephraim, Manasseh and Simeon out of a third generation King of Israel – not a mean achievement.

Rehoboam meekly submitted to the so called prophecy of a minor prophet, whose name is not only difficult to recall, but goes down in history as a prophet who palliated a King with his prophecy in the name of God’s purpose as a punishment for the deeds of his father Solomon. Pity, that he was not a prophet or a seer with the relentlessness of Jacob to wrestle with God and call to memory the ‘covenant of salt’ made by God with Rehoboam’s grandfather David!

Rehoboam is overwhelmed by his father’s enemy at his door having walked away with ten portions of his twelve assets- despite his big talk of the girth of his little finger being thicker than his father Solomon’s ‘waist’ – Thanks be to God, that Rehoboam compared his little finger to that of his father’s waist- at least it is so reported!!

It is this Jeroboam, who was Solomon’s nemesis and the stealer of a chunk of the Kingdom from Rehoboam that Abijah is confronted with.

How many prophets and seers would have told Abijah that it was reported by that Prophet during his father’s time that it was God’s Will to sever the kingdom, and not to go to war with Jeroboam? Many – i suppose. How many commanders would have told him that with half the strength of the army of Jeroboam, Abijah stood no chance? Most, i suppose.

But Abijah did not deter from his path despite these circumstances – both the prophetic history as well as contemporaneous military advice.

Abijah delivered a harangue from the mount and mentally berates Jeroboam as a SERVANT, of his grandfather. A word Jeroboam wouldn’t have heard in the last twenty years. Abijah reminds Jeroboam of his past. Not a gentle reminder, but a hard hitting slap in front of his own army. Abijah had mentally overcome the rut in which Solomon and Rehoboam had grovelled, before the ability and efficiency of an Ephraimite.

What happened thereafter is not clear – the smart Jeroboam surrounds the army of Abijah yet Abijah not only wins the war but decimated five portions of the eight portions of Jeroboam’s army and reduces the forces to 75% capacity of that of Judah. I am yet to find a King within the Bible who did so much for his succeeding generations, with such a depressing legacy. To boot, Abijah gets into Bethel and cuts through the Northern kingdom. Where are the Chronicles of Prophet/Seer Iddo, which probably described this battle?

One person i would like to meet and talk to, deo volente, would be this Prophet Iddo. He must have accurately brought out how Abijah won the battle; and not merely the battle, but how Abijah broke the backbone of Jeroboam by decimating his army and reducing it to below twenty five percent capacity of Abijah’s own army; and took back the lands of Bethel and other parts of Ephraim/Manasseh.

God, helped Abijah, but longevity was denied and the man achieved in three years what Solomon and Rehoboam couldn’t achieve in 30 years.

I am of an inveterate opinion that the histories of Abijah must have been suppressed after Ahab and Jezebel took over; and with their villainy ensured that their daughter was married into the family of the King of Judah and got rid of the History of the Seer Iddo, which was the history of Judah and Abijah, and a damning one for Samaria!

If Jehu, had only seen through that, he might have secured the history and preserved it for me and you the reader. Asa, the son of Abijah who came to power had an untrammelled run as the King only because of the body blow delivered by Abijah.

I am all for these types who had not only the indomitable spirit but took the God given Liberty in their hands and DID attempt something, and God sanctified those efforts.

God loves a man who says YES. Yes to righteous action