The Book of Kings: The Rise and Fall of Jeroboam

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The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.

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When you read those books of the Bible that contain the history of Israel, the lessons come at you one after the other. There’s a man named Jeroboam, for example, who several really important lessons swirl around him. He was a good man, an able man. And King Solomon promoted him and placed him over all the affairs of the house of Joseph. That made him the head man in the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh in the north. Those two tribes’ father was Joseph. The scripture tells us that the man Jeroboam was a mighty man of valor. Now, what that means in biblical speak is he was a fighting man. He was an officer probably at our level of things today. He would have been perhaps a colonel. But he had been a fighter and was very good at it, very strong. Well, Solomon seeing the young man and he was industrious, he made him ruler over all the charge of the house of Joseph. It’s sort of like Tommy Frank’s being made commander-in-chief of central command. He gave him a command, gave him an area, and put him in charge of it. But he had a higher endorsement than that of Solomon, believe it or not. God was, by this time, thoroughly disappointed with Solomon. Everything had gone wrong in the later years of this man as he began to marry wives from all the countries round about him. You know, when you have his kind of power and ability, you can attract all the women you want from wherever you want. And he did. He married 700 of them and kept 300 of them as concubines. Problem was, those women introduced him to their gods, and women being the influential creatures that they are, he went out and built temples to these gods of these women and corrupted himself and corrupted the people. Well, one day when Jeroboam was on his way out of Jerusalem, the prophet Ahijah found him along the road. He had clad himself with a new garment, and they too were alone in the field. And Ahijah caught the new garment that was upon him and tore it in twelve pieces. And he said to Jeroboam, Here, you take ten pieces, for thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel. I’m going to tear the kingdom out of the hand of Solomon, and I’m going to give ten tribes to you. Now, like I said, this is a higher endorsement than anything Solomon could have done for him, which suggests we have us a really good man here. He went on to say that Solomon will keep one tribe for David, my servant’s sake. Now, why were we doing this? Well, the prophet answered it. He said, because they have forsaken me. They’ve worshipped Ashtoreth, the god of the Zidonians, whom some people say is the originator of Easter. Chemosh, the god of the Moabites, Milcom, the god of the children of Ammon, and I have not walked in my ways to do what’s right in my eyes to keep my statutes and my judgments, as did David their father. They’ve gone chasing after all these other gods. Now, this verse often stops serious readers who realize what a bounder David had been at times in his lifetime. But there is a serious difference between Solomon and David. When David sinned, he repented. And most important, perhaps, he never, ever served another God. And it was that faithfulness to God that made his repentance possible. That is a lesson worth remembering. You may sin. You may screw up. You may go a long way down the wrong road. But if you never allow yourself to forget who your God is, the road back is still open. You may suffer a lot. It may be a hard road. It may be a painful road. But it’s open. He goes on to say, I’m not going to take the whole kingdom away from Solomon. I’ll make him prince all the days of his life for David’s, my servant’s, sake, whom I chose because he kept my commandments and my statutes, which, of course, David didn’t. But when David repented, God wiped all that out and considered him a righteous man again. It’s amazing when you think about it. But I’m going to take the kingdom out of Solomon’s son’s hand, and I’ll give it to you, ten tribes.” To his son I will give one tribe, that David my servant may have a light always before me in Jerusalem, the city I have chosen to put my name there. And I’ll take you, and you will reign according to all that your soul desires. You shall be king over Israel. Now, that is some promotion for a guy who up to this time has been a colonel, maybe brigadier general, who knows, in Solomon’s army. But all of a sudden, he’s going all the way to the top position over the largest part of this tribe of Israel. He says, it shall be that if you will listen to all that I command you, If you will walk in my ways, if you’ll do what’s right in my sight and keep my statutes, keep my commandments, in other words, we’re going to live in this northern kingdom. Our constitution, our laws, our statutes are going to be mine. If you do that, as David my servant did, I’ll be with you. I will build you a sure house as I built for David, and I will give Israel to you. Now, just how much assurance do you need? of God’s promises. How good an arrangement do you want? God had just made him king. God would allow him to reign according to all his heart’s desires. All he expected of him was that he would reign according to God’s law. He would have that as his statutes, as his constitution, as that which directed the affairs of state in his kingdom. That’s all God required of him. It didn’t mean he had to be perfect, not to follow in the steps of David, only that he not follow other gods, that he remain faithful to David’s God. Now, how hard is this? He went on to say, I will for this afflict the seed of David, but not forever. Solomon, after this, when he learned, you know, word gets around, sought to kill Jeroboam. So Jeroboam arose and fled into Egypt. And he was there until the death of Solomon. And we’re still reading in 1 Kings 11. The rest of the acts of Solomon, all he did and all his wisdom, they are written in the book of the acts of Solomon. And the time that Solomon reigned in Jerusalem over all Israel was 40 years. That’s a long reign as kings go. And consequently, he had a profound influence. And Solomon slept with his fathers and was buried in the city of David his father. And Rehoboam reigned in his stead. Now we enter into really one of the most pivotal times in the history of the Bible, where two men whose names you could easily confuse, Jeroboam and Rehoboam, are the two major players on the stage. Now, Rehoboam was unlucky in his choice of a father, I guess, but he also had his own ego to deal with. Rehoboam, and this is in 1 Kings 12, went to Shechem, for all Israel were come to Shechem to make him king. And it came to pass when Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, who was in Egypt, heard of it. Now, you might as well get used to this expression, Jeroboam, the son of Nebat. It’s mentioned again and again in the history of the northern tribes of Israel. When Jeroboam the son of Nebat was in Egypt, heard of it, because he had fled from the presence of King Solomon, and he stayed in Egypt. They sent and called him, and Jeroboam and all the congregation of Israel came and spoke to Rehoboam, saying, Now, this is a very interesting section. I don’t know where Jeroboam’s heart was on this day. But he became a spokesman for the assembly to the king. They had a request to make which was altogether reasonable, given the reign of Solomon, which had just ended. They wanted a tax cut. They said, this is verse 4, Your father made our yoke grievous. Now therefore make you the grievous servants of your father, and his heavy yoke he put upon us lighter, and we will serve you. It’s all they asked for. All they wanted. I mean, Solomon had all these high taxes year after year after year after year. He’d built the kingdom. He’d built the infrastructure. It was all there. I mean, how much more do we have to have here? It’s what the people wanted to know. You make this yoke lighter and we will serve you. Now, you would think Rehoboam hearing this would begin to consider the implications of not making their yoke lighter. When you go back and you read the incredible expenditure of Solomon’s work, you have to know it was a terrible burden upon the people. They would take it from Solomon, but they felt that enough was enough. Now Rehoboam heard all this, and he said to them, Okay, give me three days to think this over and come back. So the people departed. And King Rehoboam consulted with the old men that had stood before Solomon. Now, these old men, for probably for a very long time, had known that this thing was getting out of hand, that taxes were too high, they were depressing the economy, they were making life difficult for the people, and they probably had been in favor of making this yoke lighter for a long time. He asked them, how do you advise me that I should answer this people? And they said, well, if you will be a servant to these people this day, if right now you will become their servant, if you’ll take care of them, you’ll answer them, speak good words to them, they will be your servants forever. There is this pivotal point where if he had just been willing to humble himself, to lay his ego aside, and to go along with the people and make their burden lighter, who knows where his kingdom could have gone. It’s sage advice. The king is, after all, a servant of the people. All you have to do is listen to them, consider their needs, consider their requests, and do what’s good for the people, and they will go to hell and back for you. Rehoboam could have been looking at a new golden age of enlightened rulership. What did he do? Well, grab a pencil and a piece of paper. I want to give you a phone number. And when I come back, we’ll talk about the alternative that was presented to Rehoboam.

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Now, here is a lesson that I wish somehow I could find a way to get through to young men. So far, I haven’t had a whole lot of success, but let’s talk about it. Here was a fellow, a young guy, who had received advice from all the old men who had been friends, acquaintances, who had served his father. And they told him, you need to give these people the tax cut they want. You need to make their burden lighter. If you will just go back out there and speak kindly to them and be their servant, they will serve you forever, and you will have a solid kingdom that will go on and on. But he said, I want to hear another side of this. So he went and he asked the young men that had grown up with him. Now, why ask these kids? I mean, after all, you grew up with them. You know what’s in their mind. They think the same way you do. If you’re going to ask them, you might as well just make up your own mind what you want to do. There’s hardly any point in asking the people you really want to hear from. are the old men, people who’ve been around a long time, who have had the bark knocked off of them several times, who’ve had to heal up for some bad things that have happened in their life, and who have an accumulation of experience. To choose the advice of the young brats you grew up with over that of old, experienced men is stupid. But Rehoboam did exactly that. The young man had grown up with him, spoke to him, saying, You go out and you speak to this people that spoke to you, saying, Your father made our yoke heavy. You make it lighter. You say this to them, My little finger shall be thicker than my father’s loins. And now, whereas my father did lowly you with a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke. My father has chastised you with whips. I’ll chastise you with scorpions. Get out there and really exercise some authority with these people. Put some fear into them. You know, I don’t know what they were thinking. Probably they weren’t thinking at all. And, in fact, God had determined to divide the kingdom anyhow. So the people came on the third day to Jerod, to Rehoboam, and the king stood before them and answered the people roughly. He forsook the old men’s counsel that they gave him and spoke to them after the counsel of the young men. Now visualize all these people standing around, a lot of them old enough to be Rehoboam’s grandfather. And they’ve come to him and they’ve said, quite reasonably, your father put an awful heavy burden on us all of his life with all the projects that he went through. We have been taxed almost out of existence. Give us a little relief from this, please. He comes out to these old men, this young whippersnapper, and gives them that speech that the young men recommended. You think my father was tough? I’m going to be tougher than my father. He chastised you with whips, I’ll chastise you with scorpions. So he wouldn’t listen to the people, because the cause was from the Lord that he might perform his saying that he spoke by Ahijah to Jeroboam, the son of Nebat. And I figure the old man who had been Solomon’s counselors up to this time rolled their eyes to heaven and probably headed back off to home saying, I don’t think I want to be around anything having to do with this government. So when all Israel saw the king wouldn’t listen, they answered the king and said, what portion do we have in David? Neither do we have an inheritance in the son of Jesse. This is none of our affair down here. To your tents, O Israel. Now see to your own house, David. So Israel departed into their tents. Going back to your tents is an idiom for going home. They said, we’ve had it. We’re just going to go home. We’re not going to have any more to do with that. But as for the children of Israel that dwelt in the cities of Judah, Rehoboam reigned over them. And I guess he had to get all the taxes out of them that he got out of everybody before. He tried to get some taxes out of the other people. He sent Adoram, who was over the tax system and the head of the IRS, and all of Israel stoned him with stones that he died. Therefore, King Rehoboam made speed to get back up in his chariot and flee to Jerusalem. Now, this is really brilliant. Rehoboam seems to think he is still king over the whole country. They all said, no, we are seceding from the union. And so he sent his tax collectors out there to get the money. His tax collector, the head of the IRS, gets stoned to death. And Rehoboam has to flee for his life with his shirt tail probably barely hitting his back as he ran. Seems to me you ought to try to do something good for the people before you send out a tax collector. Well, this was not a brilliant young man. So Israel rebelled against the house of David to this day. It came to pass when all Israel heard that Jeroboam had come again, they sent and called him unto the congregation and made him king over all Israel. And there was no one left of the house of David but the tribe of Judah only. Historically, Benjamin tended to stay with Judah, as did Levi, because their responsibility was the temple. When Rehoboam came to Jerusalem, he assembled all the house of Judah together with the tribe of Benjamin, 104,000 chosen men, who were warriors, 180,000 army. They’re going to go up and fight the house of Israel to bring the kingdom back. We’re headed for the civil war, just like we had it in this country. It’s brilliant. We can’t collect taxes from this people, so let’s go to war against them. But then, in all the history of the Bible, something very unusual happens. The word of the Lord came to Shemaiah, the man of God, saying, Go speak to Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, king of Judah, and to all the house of Judah and Benjamin, to the remnant of the people, to what’s left, saying, Thus saith the Lord, You shall not go up, you shall not fight against your brothers, the children of Israel. Go home, all of you. This thing is from me. Now I said something very unusual happened. They listened to God. They hearkened to the word of the Lord and returned to depart according to what he commanded them to do. This hasn’t happened very often in Israel’s history, so you might want to make a note of it. A king actually listened to a man of God. Last time that happened, it was King David, I think. So, Jeroboam built Shechem in Mount Ephraim and dwelt there and went out from thence and built Penuel. Now, I said Jeroboam would be the focus of some important lessons, and here comes one. Mind you, this man had been told by God that the kingdom would be his. He told him, you’ll have the kingdom. Not only you’ll have the kingdom, you’ll have ten tribes. He didn’t have to fight for it. It was almost dropped in his lap. Rehoboam, in an act of supreme vanity, handed him his kingdom on a silver platter. So what does Jeroboam do? Trust God to secure his kingdom. See to the security of the people from vandals and predators. Just do what kings do. Ensure that the crops that were planted and harvested, that the people will be safe in their houses. Is that what he did? No. Since the death of Solomon, we have been standing on the cusp of history. Things could have progressed at this point in any number of directions. But what happens now casts the die and leads to the eventual demise of the house of Israel. And it all arises from a simple act born out of fear. I’ll tell you what that was. But first, be sure you have a pencil and a paper because we have a special offer for you.

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What was Jeroboam afraid of? Here was a man whose God had given him his kingdom, handed it to him, was going to preserve it for him. Well, he said in his heart, I know what’s going to happen. This kingdom will eventually go back to the house of David. If these people go up to do sacrifice in the house of the Lord at Jerusalem, then their heart will turn again to their Lord, even to Rehoboam, the king of Judah, and they’ll kill me, and they’ll go back again to Rehoboam. Now, why would that happen? Well, the strongest unifying force in Israel in those days was the temple and its rites. There were three holy days when people were commanded to go to Jerusalem. It were the pilgrimage festivals of Passover, Pentecost, and the Feast of Tabernacles. Jeroboam was afraid, with some justification, that the unifying power of the temple might lead to his own demise. I say with some justification, but only justification. If a man forgot how he came to his kingdom, and who was the guarantor of his kingdom and his security. So he took some advice, and he made two calves of gold and said to them, It’s too much for you to go up to Jerusalem. Behold your gods, O Israel, that brought you up out of the land of Egypt. Now here we go again. We had Aaron doing that back in the book of Exodus, where he went out and made golden calf to them and said, this is your God that brought you out of the land of Egypt. How in the world that comes about is kind of hard to see. Well, he said one of these calves in Bethel and the other one in Dan. If you don’t know your biblical geography, Dan is in the far north and Bethel in the far south of the northern tribes. You had to go right by Bethel on your way to Jerusalem out of the north. And the whole idea was, well, you don’t have to go all the way to Jerusalem. Hey, you can stop here at Bethel, and you’re in your place. You don’t have to put up with all those crowds down there. This is a whole lot better for you. And, of course, if you live in the north, way up in the north, it’s a whole lot closer to go over to Dan. So the thing became a sin, for the people went to worship before the one, primarily even unto Dan. And he made a house of high places, and made priests of the lowest of the people, who were not of the sons of Levi. Now, this is a strange thing for him to do. I mean, why go to the bottom of the barrel? You know, you’d think you could stop somewhere in between. But he made his priests of the lowest of the people. And he ordained a feast in the eighth month on the fifteenth day of the month, just like the feast in Judah. And he made offerings upon his altar. Now, the Hebrew calendar is a lunar calendar. And naturally, the fifteenth day, then, of every month, since the first day of the month is the new moon, the fifteenth is the full moon. So he did this in Bethel. He sacrificed to the calves that he had made. He placed in Bethel the priests of the high places which he had made. So he offered upon the altar he had made in Bethel on the fifteenth day of the eighth month, even in the month he had devised out of his own heart. and ordained a feast to the children of Israel and offered upon the altar and burnt incense. Out of his own heart, without any authority to do so, he cut loose from the appointed times of God. These times that down through all history were the moments when God met with his people, the time when God took action in history for his people. He moved away from them and set things up by his own authority. God had given him a kingdom, not a new priestly authority, not the authority to change the faith. This whole story is a series of bad decisions by people who had every reason to know better. And one lesson is, whatever you feel, you really feel that God has told you something, it’s a good idea to trust him enough to do as you’re told. There are some of us, of course, who operate in our lives on a different rule. The rule is, when all else fails, then do as you are told. But first, we seem to have to find out for ourselves, sometimes at great cost. There came a man of God out of Judah by the word of the Lord to Bethel. We’re now in 1 Kings 13. Jeroboam is standing by the altar to burn incense. Now, mind you, this man is a king, not a priest. He has absolutely no business doing this. And this man of God that came from Judah cried against the altar in the word of the Lord and said, O altar, altar, thus saith the Lord, behold, a child shall be born to the house of David, Josiah by name, and upon you he shall offer the priests of the high places that burn incense to you, and men’s bones shall be burnt upon you. Nothing more horrible could have been contemplated And he gave a sign the same day, saying, This is the sign which the Lord has spoken. Behold, the altar shall be torn, the ashes that are upon it shall be poured out. And it came to pass that as soon as Jeroboam heard the saying of the man of God who had cried against the altar, He put forth his hand, saying, Lay hold on him. And as soon as he got his arm out there, it dried up, and he couldn’t pull it back. The altar also was torn, and the ashes poured out from the altar according to the sign given to him by the man of God.

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