Biblical Framework

Charles Clough

Lesson 77

 

A correction for the notes, on page 20, should be “The Revolt of the Ten Tribes,” Benjamin stayed with Judah so we do not have eleven that departed.  We’re going to go one step further into this divided kingdom.  Last time we covered the rejection of the Davidic dynasty, how that dynasty was basically rejected by the ten tribes, for good reason. God was behind that rejection.  But that marks a very critical chapter in Old Testament history.  Israel has never been the same since.  That was a disruption, a revolt, and an utter rejection of the Davidic line.  We showed geographically what that meant.  If you have maps in the back of your Bible’s you’ll see it there. It’s important when you study the Bible of any book written after 930 BC, in other words, any book of the Bible that talks about any period of history after Solomon will use the word “Israel” in a technical way.  “Israel” can be a man’s name, an alternate name of Jacob, it can refer to the whole nation, or it can refer to the northern kingdom.  So you have to look at the context and not just assume you know what the word means.  It doesn’t come out that easily.  So “Israel” is a term that has multiple meanings from this point on.

 

We want to study a second step that happened.  First we had this political division where a second kingdom of Jews was established.  Now we want to study what happened after the second kingdom was established, the foundation of this second kingdom and the northern area of ten tribes.  Turn to 1 Kings 11, the chapter we studied last time, but this is a continuation of that chapter.  This period, this event of history, represents a marvelous and easy to understand picture of sovereignty and human responsibility.  Sometimes we get hung up on this and we emphasize one or the other; the church has historically gone off one way or the other.  But here you’ve got a critical Biblical example of God prophesying this would take place; when it did take place He directed it.  On the north side He was the One who said Jeroboam, I will give the ten tribes to you. So the man who took over in the north was Jeroboam. The man who stayed in the south was Rehoboam, who was the grandson of David, that split was authorized by God but the means of accomplishing that split were sinful. 

 

This is something we have to watch. God executes His perfect will over, through, around, and in spite of the sin of man.  God’s plans do not need us.  He works in and through us, but He doesn’t need us.  These kinds of things show very graphically that He is capable of bringing about His perfect will to the thirteenth decimal place, without human cooperation.  He still wins, His plan still executes.  That’s one of the illustrations you have of God’s attribute of sovereignty. 

 

In 1 Kings 11:30 we pick up where we left off and we want to watch what God tells Jeroboam.  In this northern territory we have a man by the name of Jeroboam.  Actually Jeroboam is a name that is going to come up again, so the Bible distinguishes two of these guys, so we need to keep it straight, we’ll call this guy Jeroboam I.  He’s going to rule Israel.  This man has been given dominion over the ten tribes.  We have to be careful to think what this means, because whatever God does with guy, He’s got to pull it off so it doesn’t eradicate what great covenant?  What was the covenant that God made with the south?  The Davidic Covenant.  However God plays the cards here, if He does it such that He undercuts the Davidic Covenant, we’ve got a problem with the Word of God, and we’ve got a problem with God’s immutability and God’s trustworthiness to do that which He has promised.  So we’ve got quite an historical engineering feat going on here, how God is going to work it so it all holds together. 

The means of addressing kinds was always indirect.  This is something you want to pick up in the Old Testament.  Here again is an illustration among dozens of things that we’ll see, why you have to know something about the Old Testament before you can really appreciate the New Testament.  It’s never got through to me yet, in 35-40 years as a Christian, why in our evangelical circles we start with the New Testament.  The Holy Spirit did not start with the New Testament; He started with the Old Testament.  We still have missionaries out there making their first translation of the Gospel of Mark; that’s a stupid way of doing things.  You make your first translation out of creation, because that defines who God is.  I don’t know how you could say it more clearly, but there’s a sequence to Scripture. 

 

One of those sequences is right here, because whenever a king is addressed, God never talks directly to the king, He did in David’s case, but generally speaking He doesn’t, even with David.  There’s always in between God and the king a prophet, or prophets.  The kings are always nominated by a prophet.  In the Old Testament there were king makers and there were prophets and they were the ones who announced that God had appointed this guy.  They played critical roles.  This is why when you open the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, who is the leading character at the front end of the Gospels?  It is not Jesus, it’s another guy, and he is the prophet, because even the Messiah is brought in by a prophet. This is why in the Tribulation, prior to the Second Advent, before Christ returns to the earth, His return to this planet will be heralded by a resurrection of the prophets, the prophetic line will burst forth again and you will have genuine human prophets, not some people that are laughing hyenas somewhere.  These will be the real prophets, and they will be announcing, they will be called onto the historical stage to announce the next great event in history. 

 

Here we have an illustration, and that’s why we want to look at the way God works.  We’ll continue the conversation, 1 Kings 11:31, “And he said to Jeroboam,” who’s the “he?”  It’s Ahijah, so in this case Ahijah is that prophet who now talks to Jeroboam.  God’s Word comes to the king through a prophet.  It is these prophets who we believe composed the Old Testament.  In other words, these guys made these books, and you’ll see in Kings a notice that crops up, usually after a king’s reign, and it will say if you want to know more information about the kings, are they not written in the book of the acts of king So and So.  So the prophets had access to history books and records.  The question we ask as we approach Kings or if you study Samuel or Chronicles, of all the thousands of things that went on in this period of history, how come the prophets picked these things. Obviously it’s because the prophets are doing an analysis.  These books are historical analyses of the workings of God, and the people doing these analyses are prophets.  This is why the first history writing in the world was done by believers, and the motive behind this history was to see God’s trustworthiness mapped out in space and time.  That was the motive of history.

 

We want to watch this because there are certain warnings given here that are going to be violated very shortly.  We need to back up a bit and get perspective, let’s go to the big picture of this period in history, what’s going on.  We dealt with The Disruptive Kingdom period and I called it that because it was disrupting pagan civilization.  That’s sort of summarizes that whole set of events.  This next series of events we have The Disciplinary Kingdom.  Whereas in these events we were looking at the difference between God’s plan and the world, in the next series of events we come inside the kingdom to study how God administers the household of faith, and we’re going to learn some severe lessons about sanctification.  The theme in this event is the golden era of Solomon, the division of the kingdom, and the coming events, all have to do as a cluster of how God deals with His own.  Back here it was how God separates His people from the world at large.  Now it’s going to be how God deals internally to His own kingdom. 

 

The argument is this: the argument carries forward the argument of the book of Judges.  What was the conclusion in Judges some two centuries prior to this?  The period of the judges resulted in social chaos and the analysis the prophets gave of that problem was “every man did what was right in their own eyes,” because there was no king.  In other words, the book of Judges opposes a very popular idea that you get in school that democracy is the wave of the future, that the solution to all problems is a vote.  Do you know what the refutation of that is?  The book of Judges.  They had freedom then, they didn’t have any king, they didn’t have any centralized government, and the whole thing unraveled.  What that period of history tells us is that the future is not going to be democratic.  When Jesus brings His kingdom He’s not running it by a vote.  Democracy assumes self-control on the part of the people in it, and if the self-control goes away, democracy will go away.  So the argument of that big idea…, what you want to learn as a Christian is to watch the world and the big ideas, the 50-ton tanks that are running you over, and here’s one of them.  Democracy is fragile; it is totally dependent on prior self-government.  If that goes, democracy goes, and it will always come to a dictatorship.  Look at Yugoslavia; it’s a rule of history. 

 

What this is going to argue, with Jeroboam, now we’re dealing with centralized government, and what chapter of the Bible was the most eloquent statement in all of Scripture about centralized government and its dangers?  It was given by a prophet.  1 Sam. 8 is politically an extremely important passage of the Scripture.  1 Sam. 8 refutes the other popular idea that you get in class, and that is the opposite of democracy, a socialized system of government where every decision is made for you by higher authority, or a dictatorship.  Some people believe if it’s not democracy and that doesn’t work, then surely centralized power will work. This is a refutation.  What’s happening here?  Keep your eye on the forest as we go through the trees, because we will return to this big idea again and again.  It’s a tremendous idea and it’s utterly in conflict with everything you’ve learned; totally conflicts with everything we’ve learned.

 

What we’re seeing here is total depravity in centralized government. Before we saw total deprav­ity in democracy on the part of the people; people are sinners and who else is a sinner?  The kings are sinners. So what’s the conclusion?  We’re going to see the conclusion as we progress in the Old Testament, prior to Jesus.  We’re not going to deal at all with the Gospels, not going to deal with Jesus Christ; we’re going to stay in the Old Testament.  You watch how, as the events shape up and we have a new class of prophets called the classical prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, watch what these guys are doing.  Under the hand of God history is playing out; one by one God is taking on the big popular ideas of man and showing us that they don’t work.  After we go through the Old Testament for two thousand years, then we come to appreciate Jesus Christ.  But He can’t be appreciated as to who He really is and why God presented Jesus Christ the way He did if we don’t have this prior preparation.  If we harbor ideas that people really aren’t sinners, that men of good will can get together, or all we need is a good powerful leader, as long as we harbor those ideas, we cannot appreciate Jesus Christ.  It just doesn’t fit.  That’s why now as we proceed we’re going to focus now, not so much on the sins of the people though the sins of the people are here because they go along with it.  The emphasis has a new note to it, now the emphasis is on the sin of the leadership inside God’s kingdom—sin inside the kingdom of God.

Here’s what is told, this is God’s will.  The prophet comes to Jeroboam, and remember in sanctification we have the phases of sanctification, one is our position before God, that’s what God is going to do for us, that is the things He has given us at the point of salvation, regeneration, indwelling, baptizing, sealing of the Holy Spirit, He’s given all kinds of things, dozens of things, at the point of salvation.  This is all positional truth.  But the will of God in time, as we march through our Christian life, there is a set of things that He wants, that connotes the will of God for us.  So the prophet is giving the will of God for this king, and here he outlines it.  Watch how specific the will of God is for this man.

 

1 Kings 11:31, “And he said to Jeroboam, ‘Take for yourself ten pieces;’” he tore up his coat, good audio visual illustration, “for thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, ‘Behold, I will tear the kingdom out of the hand of Solomon and give you ten tribes.  [32] (but he will have one tribe, for the sake of My servant David and for the sake of Jerusalem, the city which I have chosen from all the tribes of Israel),” just look at verse 32 for a moment.  Knowing what you already have studied, what promise, what are of truth is at stake in that first clause of verse 32? What is he referring to?  “For the sake of My servant David,” because David is such a good little boy?  Is that how we interpret this Scripture, David was a good little boy, God feels sorry for David so he pats David and his sons on the back.   Now, there was something more powerful than that, it was the Davidic Covenant.  So “for the sake of David,” now you’re got the Davidic Covenant implicit in verse 21, 2 Sam. 7 is the background for verse 32, part one. 

 

Now the next phrase, “and for the sake of Jerusalem, the city which I have chosen.”  When was Jerusalem chosen?  What did we say about David?  What did David do in his kingdom that Saul never did?  He found a place for the temple of God. David chose Jerusalem, but here’s that sovereignty and human responsibility again, I chose Jerusalem, through David I chose Jerusalem.  Jerusalem will not change, so what he’s telling this king, very critical for what’s going to follow, let’s get the map out and look at the terrain.  God is telling this guy this area of Israel is yours, but He’s telling them there’s a little place there that I have chosen that is going to be special, and it’s not going to change.  I have chosen it and it is not going to change.  Jeroboam is going to try to change it, every king in the northern kingdom is going to try to change it, the Asyrians tried to change it, the neo-Babylonians tried to change it, the Greeks tried to change it, the Romans tried to change it, all the way down to Arafat trying to change it.  Nobody is going to change it; God has chosen Jerusalem, period.  Even our President isn’t going to change it. 

 

Verse 33, “because they have forsaken Me, and have worshiped Ashtoreth, the goddess of the Sidonians, Chemosh the god of Moab, and Milcom the god of the sons of Ammon; and they have not walked in My ways, doing what is right in My sight and observing My statutes and My ordinances, as his father David did.” Again notice verse 33’s analysis of David.  Does this say that David was a perfect person? No it doesn’t, but it says that by and large David’s heart was in the right place.  When David got out of fellowship, David knew how to solve his problems.  We went through how David confessed his sin and he was restored.  This was David’s problem solving technique, right there.  So David was not a man who didn’t have problems.  Bathsheba could have gone to the press.  The point is that David had problems, but David knew how to handle his problems and he stuck to the basic heart and center of God’s will for his ministry.  It doesn’t mean he didn’t have consequences because one of the things out of this is after restoration you often still have to walk through gooey consequences of all this. 

David was a man who was able to walk through the consequences of his own sin and still keep his eyes on the Lord.  That’s difficult to do, because you can get very discouraged, the evil one can whisper in your eat that the reason you’re having to walk through all this goo is because God really didn’t forgive you, when it has nothing to do with the forgiveness of God, nothing whatsoever.   It has to do with certain pedagogical lesson learning things; but it is not due to the fact that David wasn’t forgiven.  This is how David solved his problems; we studied Psalm 57 to show you a snapshot of this king’s great problem-solving method before God.  That’s what’s going to plague this guy.  We’re talking about a different man in the next generation. 

 

He’s been given the northern tribe and he’s warned what went wrong, verse 33 is God’s word to him, here’s what went wrong with the northern kingdom, “because they have forsaken Me,” the first and great commandment, who shall they “love with all thy heart, with all thy mind, with all thy soul”?  The Lord. And who did they love? They had an ecumenical movement in that day, let’s all get together, have religious discussions, we’re all equal, let’s keep neutrality going. 

 

Verse 34, he says I’m not going to do this right away; I’m going to wait till Solomon’s son, which is Rehoboam… [“Nevertheless I will not take the whole kingdom out of his hand, but I will make him ruler all the days of his life, for the sake of My servant David whom I chose, who observed My commandments and My statutes; [35] But I will take the kingdom from his son’s hand and give it to you, even ten tribes. [36] But to his son I will give one tribe, that My servant David may have a lamp always before Me in Jerusalem, the city where I have chosen for Myself to put My name.”]  He says in verse 37, here’s where we get into the nitty gritty, 37, 38 and 39, “And I will take you, and you shall reign over whatever you desire, and you shall be king over Israel.”  Talk about a blank check, that’s a wonderful promise to Jeroboam. 

 

Verse 38, “Then it will be, that if you listen to all that I command you and walk in My ways, and do what is right in My sight by observing My statutes and My commandments, as My servant David did,” remember we encountered that.  What was the Messianic model of leadership?  David.  “…as My servant David did, then I will be with you and build you an enduring house as I built for David, and I will give Israel to you.” What a promise!  This is all the potential in this guy’s political career.  Look carefully at what he’s saying here.  Where in the first clause do you notice God directing Jeroboam to a certain target?  “…if you listen to all that I command you and walk in My ways,” how is he going to do that? Where is he going to find the statutes and the command­ments? Back to the Torah, back to the Old Testament.  This book hasn’t been written yet, so forget anything we’ve got in Kings, all he’s got that we talk about in Kings is just this verbal word that came out of Ahijah, but in his Bible he doesn’t have this book.  What does he have in his Bible?  We know at least five books, that’s where the statutes are, that was the law.  So he was supposed to go back there. 

 

He says in verse 39, “Thus I will afflict the descendants of David for this, but not always.” That’s the election, David’s security is forever.  There are some people in the Christian church that deny eternal security.  Here’s a case, God is saying here’s a dynasty, verse 33, that’s totally apostate, but I have chosen them and I will work this through historically and that dynasty is eternally secure.  It doesn’t mean every king was a believer, but the dynasty was eternally secure. 

 

Now we’re going to go back to the statutes and commandments in verse 38; we’re going to go back to two particular statutes.  We’re going through it this way because this is the easiest way I’ve found to connect with how I disobey the Lord.  We all are artists at doing it; we just have different brushes and different canvases.  What we’re going to do tonight is show how to disobey the Lord.  It’s not unfamiliar territory for most of us.  Let’s watch how this happens, we can learn about ourselves.  In Deut. 17:18, we covered this back when the law was given, “It shall come about when he [the king] sits on the throne of his kingdom,” what shall he do first? Notice some details here because they are going to come up.  There’s just a little small detail here but look very carefully at verse 18, “he shall write for himself a copy of this law on a scroll in the presence of the Levitical priests.”  Who were the custodians of the Word of God?  The Levitical priesthood, the authorized priesthood, that was one of their jobs to teach the Bible so the population of Israel.  The priests were the Bible teachers of their time. They were the guys that had the copies of the Torah and they were the ones who made the copies of it and distributed the copies of it, and taught people how to read it. 

 

Verse 19, “And it shall be with him, and he shall read it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the LORD his God, by carefully observing all the words of this law and these statutes.”  [20] that his heart may not be lifted up above his countrymen and that he may not turn aside from the commandment, to the right or to the left; in order that he and his sons may continue long in his kingdom in the midst of Israel.”  It’s quite clear who the ultimate King is?  Jehovah is ultimate king, these are the “under kings” so to speak, the under lords with the over Lord, and the over Lord commands the under lords to follow His policies.  These are kingdom policies.  Right here you have a central issue, you don’t have to go and read 1500 books on how to be king in Israel, or “Seven Secrets of Kingship.”  What you have to do is go back to the Scriptures, and go through it all the days of your life; quite simple.  And the method was to go to the authorized Bible teachers who were the Levitical priests; keep that in mind.  What in particular command­ments figured in this guy’s career?  I want to go to two more parts of Deuteronomy, this is just the introduction, this is the technique.  Now we are going to look at two areas of the will of God for Jeroboam. 

 

Turn back to Deut. 16:16, here we have one of the policies of the great king, King Yahweh, or King Jehovah, the Lord wants His nation, whether it’s in two pieces, ten pieces or one piece, He wants the following thing to take place.  How many times a year is the entire national population called together?  Notice, he’s describing these feasts, it shall be “Three times a year all your males shall appear before the LORD your God in the place which He chooses, [at the Feast of Unleavened Bread and at the Feast of Weeks and at the Feast of Booths, and they shall not appear before the LORD empty-handed.]” That was back when the law was written, “the place He chooses.”  What new information had Ahijah just got through telling Jeroboam?  We said look at the fine print. What did he say?  The place was the city of Jerusalem. 

 

Now we add in, because now we have more information in verse 16 because we’ve had centuries go by since verse 16 was written, the place which the Lord has chosen is Jerusalem. So there should be no ambiguity about what’s going on here.  It doesn’t matter how many pieces the kingdom is in, that’s not the issue.  The issue is there is to be one and one place alone that is the place where we meet God, and that’s the temple.  There may be two kingdoms, one temple; two kingdoms with two different kings but one faith.  There’s no word here about two places that God is going to choose, one place God is going to choose.  

Let’s go back to Deut. 12:5ff to pick up some more information that Jeroboam ought to have in his little policy briefing brochure.  “But you shall seek the LORD at the place which the LORD your God shall choose from all your tribes,” Jerusalem, “to establish His name there for His dwelling, and there you shall come.  [6] And you shall bring your burnt offerings, your sacrifices, [your tithes, the contribution of your hand, your votive offerings, your freewill offerings, and the first-born of your herd and of your flock,” and we go on and on, verse 7, “There also you and your households shall eat before the LORD your God, and rejoice in all your undertakings in which the LORD your God has blessed you.” Verse 10, When you cross the Jordan and live in the land which the LORD your God is giving you to inherit, and He gives you rest from all your enemies abound you so that you live in security.  [11] then it shall come about that in the place in which the LORD your God shall choose for His name to dwell….”

 

Verse 12, shows you that the Hebrew idea of worship was a lot more relaxed than our concept of worship.  Sometimes we Christians get all spooky about this, cathedrals and organs, etc.  Look at what they did in verse 12 look at what they did, “And you shall rejoice before the LORD your God, you and your sons and daughters, your male and female servants, and the Levite who is within your gates, since he has no portion or inheritance with you. [13] Be careful that you do not offer your burnt offerings in every cultic place you see, [14] but in the place which the LORD chooses in one of your tribes,” and it was almost like a party, within limits.  People enjoyed it; this was to be an opportunity of enjoying the Lord.

 

Let’s come back and see what happened in 1 Kings 11.  The prophet summarizes, Solomon tried to kill him because he realized this was going to happen, we’ve already studied that.  Verse 41 is one of those notices I mentioned, you’ll see that again and again, “Now the rest of the acts of Solomon and whatever he did, and his wisdom, are they not written in the Book of the Acts of Solomon?”  There are the lost books of the Bible. We don’t know where those books went.  They were available at one time, but the prophets kept this and this only out, because they had a point they wanted to make for us. 

 

We went through 12 last time, the stupid thing that Rehoboam did, he caused the rupture of the kingdom.  Now come down toward the end of that chapter and we come down to verse 25.  Let’s go to the map and we want to start looking at places.  Verse 25, “Then Jeroboam built Shechem,” now the kingdom is rupture, he “built Shechem in the hill country of Ephraim, and lived there.”  So the king is ruling from where I have the pen on the map, that’s where the northern kingdom palace is.  Where is the southern kingdom’s palace?  Right here, a bicycle ride away.  They’re not that far apart in miles.  This is going to cause a problem shortly. 

 

Verse 26, “And Jeroboam said in his heart,” look at this, the first act as king.  What has he just been told? Who is going to give him the kingdom?  The Lord is going to give him his kingdom.  Does this sound familiar?  It does to me. “‘Now the kingdom will return to the house of David.’” He’s worried, so here’s his first problem; he’s worrying that he’s going to lose it.  He’s worried that there’s going to be defection from his domain, when he has just been told God is going to protect him.  God offered him a kingdom like David, and what did God say?  What was the one thing God asked Jeroboam to do?  Just follow My policies, that’s all you’ve got to do, I’ve already written them out, just follow what I told you to do.  So here’s what he sets out to do.  “… the kingdom will return to the house of David. [27] If this people go up to offer sacrifices in the house of the LORD at Jerusalem, then the heart of this people will return to their lord, even to Rehoboam king of Judah; and they will kill me and return to Rehoboam king of Judah.” That’s cute! 

 

He has a problem, watch the way these guys try to solve their problems and learn from this.  It’s not the problem solving of David.  It’s the problem solving of the flesh, because here he is, and what is he worried about.  What does the Torah require of every male?  Three times a year they have to go to Jerusalem; but whose palace is at Jerusalem, besides God’s temple?  Rehoboam’s. Where is this guy’s palace?  His palace can’t be in Jerusalem because Jerusalem is in the southern kingdom; it’s got to be in the north.  So he’s worried that as these people go down there they’re going to mix, they’re going to intermingle, they’re going to say gee, Jerusalem is a great place, look at the temple, look at all the gold, this is where we rejoice in the Lord, we just don’t like living up in the north any more.  He’s worried about defection due to people enjoying the Lord. 

 

We have a conflict between this guy’s sin of considering his own personal security and people worshiping the Lord.  So he’s going to deal with this, he has a plan, here’s how he’s going to solve his problems, he thinks. Verse 28, “So the king consulted,” there are always consultants, he had his own beltway, in the Dept. of Defense we always refer to the beltway bandits, these are the contractors inside the beltway that sell all kinds of gismos to the government, some work and some don’t, but they all cost money.  So he consulted, “and made two golden calves, and he said to them, ‘It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem; behold your gods, O Israel, that brought you up from the land of Egypt.”  What a brilliant solution—this guy is really cooking, he must have had some professional consultants, he probably paid these guys a hundred bucks an hour to come up with this problem. 

 

Does verse 28 ring a bell about somebody else in Jewish history, who at a certain place only days after the Ten Commandments were given were partying down at the bottom of Mount Sinai; a certain priest rose up by the name of Aaron and said exactly the same thing. Cross reference Exodus 32:2-4, we studied that, I showed the picture with the little mound of dirt, there’s God’s mountain and here’s this little mound of dirt.  He repeats Aaron’s error.  We can’t get into this guy’s head, but obviously, as a Jew he remembers parts of their tradition.  Where did Jeroboam go for years after Solomon had tried to assassinate him? He took off between the time Solomon found him out and considered him a political danger until Solomon died, and he came back from Egypt. 

 

I don’t know what it is about Egypt and scholars have not figured this out, there’s a big argument in scholarly circles about what they call zoomorphic imagery, or these calves.  I was going to bring one I found in Israel, it’s a small little bull, it’s a little model, and these people had them in their houses; Jewish people had these things in their houses.  They weren’t golden calves, they were golden bulls actually; they’re not little cattle, they’re big cattle, the idea being power and fertility.  The bull was necessary for breeding stock to do what for their farms? What was the economic benefit?  There are all kinds of economic power, reproduction kind of things involved in zoomorphic imagery, but what does the second commandment say?  You shall not make any graven image like Me.  So they conjure up this image of God. 

 

The claim in verse 28 is that this is the god that brought them out of Israel.  Notice most translations translate it “gods,” plural, “O Israel.”  The reason they do that is because in the Hebrew text it’s the Hebrew plural, Elohim, and there’s a debate here whether that word, Elohim, is used for the proper name of God or whether it’s used as just gods.  This is the way it looks,  אֱלֹהִים   and this  ים “im is the Jewish plural.  So God, usually the convention of translations is when you see that in your text, G-o-d, that’s the translation into English of this word אֱלֹהִים  Elohim.  Lord is a translation of something else, but that’s generally the translator’s rule to do that consistently.  So we have him saying that these bulls, this image, is Elohim, who saved you.  He’s following Aaronic tradition. 

 

Verse 29 says he also set up two places, so let’s look at the map and find where these two places are.  [blank spot]  “and he set one in Bethel, and the other he put in Dan.”  Any idea why he picked those two?  What does it look like he’s done?  What did the beltway bandit consultants suggest this for?  He’s bracketing his kingdom, because anybody moving toward the northern and southern border is going to penetrate the area where he’s going to have his religious worship.  So basically what he’s done, he thinks, is he’s captured the people.  They can’t head south, there’s no excuse to head south because this side of the border we’ve got our sanctuary, you don’t go across the border to the other one, you go to mine; and similarly heading north.  He probably felt guilty because he deliberately had to do Bethel, Bethel was close and it prevented people from crossing the border, and then he had all these people living up here and they had to go to some place, so he had to have another one up there.  So he made these two places. 

 

As you can imagine, this violates a few Scriptures.  What did we just see in Deuteronomy?  First of all, he was supposed to consult who every day of his life?  The beltway bandits or the Word of God?  Right away he consulted, but in verse 28 he’s not consulting the Word of God, he’s consulting the word of men.  There’s number one.  Watch how sin operates, that’s the whole lesson of this, to study our own sin and see how insidious it works.  It starts out by preferring the word of man over the Word of God.  Then it says, after he consults, he’s going to re-imagine who and what God is.  Isn’t that what sin always does.  It recreates a picture of God in our heads, in our hearts, that replaces the picture of God that we get from Scriptures.  Then the next thing that happens is that we start acting this out and putting these policies into place.

 

Verse 30 is the prophetic analysis of the results. “Now this thing became a sin, for the people went to worship before the one as far as Dan. [31] And he made houses on high places, and made priests from among all the people who were not of the sons of Levi.”  Look what else he did, notice what is wrong in verse 31, what’s he done here?  Who did we say was supposed to be the authorized teachers of the Word of God?  The Levites.  Who is it he’s putting out of business?  The Levites.  Why do you suppose he’s putting them out of business?  What would they be teaching with regard to where people worshiped?  Ah-ha, you’ve got to knock off the Bible teaching, got to replace it with gimmicks, because if you allow too much of the Word of God to be taught, people are going to get right with the Lord and this is threatening, this undermines security, you can’t have that. 

 

Verse 32 is the next step, now what is he doing?  “And Jeroboam instituted a feast in the eighth month on the fifteenth day of the month, like the feast which is in Judah, and he went up to the altar; thus he did in Bethel, sacrificing to the calves which he had made.  And he stationed in Bethel the priests of the high places which he had made. [33] Then he went up to the altar which he had made to Bethel on the fifteenth day of the eighth month, even in the month which he had devised in his own heart,” look at that clause, just look at that clause!  See how the prophetic writings analyze this guy, they cut right through, “the Word of God is living and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword,” and it cuts right to our hearts.  What does he say?  “He devised it in his own heart.”  Autonomy, the autonomous spirit, I am the criteria of right and wrong, the know­ledge of good and evil.  “…and he instituted a feast for the sons of Israel, and went up to the altar to burn incense.”  Who was supposed to go to the altar under the Mosaic Code?  The high priest.

 

Let’s enumerate what’s happened; here’s sin outplaying.  Verse 28, he departs from the Word of God.  Verse 28, he recreates the whole nature of God, redefines the attributes of God, redefines God.  The next thing he does is incarnate this belief system into a physical worship service, into a religious organization.  He creates a counterfeit religion.  In verse 32 he rewrites the Israelite calendar.  In verse 33 he pretends he’s David I guess, and he goes in and tries to assume the role of a king-priest Messianic king.  This guy really got some consulting done here.  This was a plan! 

 

Turn to page 24 on the notes, there’s a series of reference there; go to the first reference,1 Kings 14:16, I want you to see this, this is a refrain.  Look how many times this same refrain is repeated in the Old Testament.  “And He will give up Israel on account of the sons of Jeroboam, which he committed and with which he made Israel to sin.”  Just so you’ll see this, turn to 1 Kings 15:30, “and because of the sins of Jeroboam which he sinned, and which he made Israel sin, because of his provocation with which he provoked the LORD, God of Israel, to anger.”  You can go through all those verses; it’s the same thing over and over, the sins of Jeroboam, the sins of Jeroboam, the sins of Jeroboam.  Why do the prophets keep on attacking this centuries later?  Because the fallout was that serious. The entire northern kingdom came up with a doctrine and here’s the ultimate doctrine.  God’s doctrine was two kingdoms and one faith, and Jeroboam turned it into two kingdoms and two faiths, with two gods, two sets of laws, and two places to worship. 

 

Let’s bring this up closer to the 20th century.  Can anybody observe something that we’ve done here tonight?  Imagine yourself living back in those days.  Think in terms of the ideas in our world today.  Are we so very far from the government regulating religion?  Think about that one.  Does the government have the right to regulate religion?  Is that what our forefathers believed when they left Europe?  What was the problem in Europe?  Governments were regulating religion.  In a hierarchy of power, and we want to study this and we’ve got to think about it and pray about it because I believe this is going to be the crux in the next five years that we as Christians are going to face, this is the hot issue, and the issue is going to be do we follow the Word of God, even if it addresses homosexuality in a certain way, verses civil law. What we studied tonight is an example of the exultation of civil law over and above the Word of God.  And it is clearly identified with Scripture as a sin, and as a sin so serious because it’s structurally warped society.  It structurally warped society and its consequences endure for generation after generation after generation. 

 

We have to beware of what Samuel said.  I said 1 Samuel 8 is a key political passage of Scripture. Now you’re starting to see it play out.  In 1 Samuel 8 Samuel got up and said that you’re going to be sorry the day you ever had centralized government because it’s going to go rotten, and when it goes rotten, because man is the head of it, man is depraved, you have men with enormous power and they are depraved men with enormous power, and they’re insecure men with enormous power.  Because somebody is powerful doesn’t mean they feel secure.  Jeroboam had all the assets going for him but he didn’t feel secure.  So he sought a human gimmick solution to his perceived insecurity.  Did he make the northern kingdom secure? Was the effect of these policies enhanced security?  No, because in 721 BC they’re going to be erased from history, gone. The northern kingdom never comes back; they’re the ten lost tribes, still known as the ten lost tribes.  So he didn’t solve his security problem by his own gimmicks.

 

I asked you last time to look ahead and try to fathom what is going on in this strange set of events in 1 Kings 13.  We won’t read the whole thing, but I’ll just point to certain details for those of you who read this and are wondering why is this strange thing going on, what is going on with this prophet and the other prophet, etc.  The first prophet comes, in verses 1-2 to the northern kingdom.  He comes up out of the south with a message.  Remember we said observe the convention, how does the Word of God come to the king?  Two ways, it comes through the Torah as taught by the priests and it comes through the prophets.  See the three offices working together, prophet, priest and king; the prophets and the priests are to input policy to the king. 

 

So here comes a policy statement and in verses 3-4 the old man from the south brings this message from God, and he says your kingdom is done, you are finished, you have violated the fundamental policies of Scripture, and the Great King has just fired you, you’re done, your career is over, your kingdom is over.  Naturally, he gets angry about that, in verses 4-5 he tries to attack the guy and the Lord protects the prophet.  The prophet has been given this commission not to abide in that northern kingdom, he was to do his mission, penetrate the area, drop his bomb and return; he was not supposed to take a vacation up there. 

 

Now comes this second guy, verse 18.  Who is this guy?  The second guy in the story is also a prophet.  Here’s an interesting key to the story; what has the second prophet been doing all the time Jeroboam has been doing his thing?  Obviously he wasn’t involved in the consulting, so whatever this second guy was, he wasn’t a very active prophet.  He pretends in verse 18, he lies and says “’I also am a prophet like you, and an angel spoke to me by the word of the LORD, saying, Bring him back with you to  your house, that he may eat bread and drink water.’ But he lied to him.”  Verse 18 shows you another example of religious deception.  You will have people say this, God spoke to me and God did this and God did that, and I saw lights, I stood on my head, I cried, I had this feeling, they’ll come up with this garbage that doesn’t fit Scripture.  Yet Christians fall head over heels for this kind of stuff, all the time it goes on.  All you have to do in any evangelical group is say “God spoke to me,” and everybody listens.  Well, he listened.  It was in direct conflict with the known Word of God.  You can say an angel spoke to you or anything else, it doesn’t make any difference.  What does Paul say in Galatians?  If even I tell you anything other than this gospel, let me be damned. 

 

So he gives a false message, you know what happens, he stays for supper and he gets killed because he, the prophet from the south, disobeyed.  The prophet on the north feels sorry; by this time he realizes there are some problems here.  He also, if you read the story carefully, he himself gets signs of the authentication of this man’s sentence of doom against the northern kingdom.

Then in verse 31-32 the tragic ending to this story, “And it came about after he had buried him, that he spoke to his sons, saying, ‘When I die, bury me in the grave in which the man of God is buried; lay my bones beside his bones.’”  Verse 32 is a profound announcement, “For the thing shall surely come to pass which he cried by the word of the LORD against the altar in Bethel and against all the houses of the high places which are in the cities of Samaria.”  Then it says Jeroboam didn’t pay any attention to it.

The point is, by verse 32 the prophets that are left in the northern kingdom, of which the second man is representative, who were silent in the days when sin was going on.  They did not speak out to challenge it, they did not impact Jeroboam with the Word of God, they did not appeal to the people who followed this idiot, they didn’t make the message clear.  The result was that they had to be shocked by somebody outside of their own camp to come in and tell them this is the message and you should have been delivering this message and you didn’t.  Now your country is gone, you’ve had it.  So the whole thing falls apart, and verse 33-34 is a prophetic conclusion to the story, it’s the analysis of what’s going to happen from a prophetic standpoint. “After this event Jeroboam did not return from his evil way, but again he made priests of the high places from among all the people; any who would, he ordained, to be priests of the high places.” What is that a slam on?  It’s attacking the whole Levitical institution.  Oh, this guy is a great democrat, he’s going to appoint anybody that wants to be, applications down at Bethel, go north and you can sign up.  Verse 34, “And this event became sin to the house of Jeroboam,” that means the dynasty, “even to blot it out and destroy it from off the face of the earth.”

 

A sad, sad story, but tonight we’ve seen the second step in this progress of sin.  The first step was they rejected the Davidic dynasty.  Now they’ve gone one step further; now they’ve got to the point where they’re going to overthrow the entire temple apparatus, the Levitical priesthood that goes with it, and the Word of God that goes with that.  In place, and always notice this, sin when it erases the truth can’t stand the vacuum.  Why is that?  Because we’re made in God’s image and our heart demands something to fill it.  So if we kick out God, something else will reside in His place, it always will, it always has, it always shall be.  It’s always, when there’s a defection from Scripture there won’t be no religion, there will be a false religion rapidly coming in to fill the gap. 

 

That’s the tension, sin creates religion.   You may not have thought of that, but sin creates its own religion.  And at the heart of sin’s false religion is man devising it in his own heart and creating God after his image. 

 

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Question asked: Clough replies:  That’s the scary part of these stories and Christians react to it, historically Christians react to these kinds of stories by saying you can lose your salvation.  We had the same discussion with Saul.  I think that’s because we have this “happy image,” we’ve grown up to think that every story must have a happy ending, and we kind of get upset when we go to a movie and it doesn’t end with a happy ending, and the lovers never get back together again or something happens, and you just feel sad, you feel something’s wrong with that story if it doesn’t conclude right.  That’s probably because in one sense the universal history, under God and the universe, does end right, and we’re born to anticipate that ending; that’s why we get dissatisfied when stories don’t end right. 

 

But on a smaller scale individually stories don’t end right, and I think the message we’re getting out of the Old Testament is every believer doesn’t cruse into heaven with lots of rewards and everything else, every believer is saved, I’m not saying.  You can have severe loss of rewards, Paul says that, that we can be “saved yet so as by fire.”  We find in the Corinthian church believers killed by God, physically, because they were messing around, so the exit from this life by Christians is not always a happy story.  Christians leave debris in history, a lot of debris in history.  That’s our flesh, and that’s a sad, ugly story, of what we’re made out of apart from the grace of God.  So this is the sobering side, and this is why the Old Testament… Because it’s not taught enough Christians tend to be very idealistic in the New Testament. 

 

I’m not trying to tear down wanting the best, that’s not my point.  My point is that the reality of history is we don’t always get our best.  There are some awful ugly tragedies associated with believers.  The sad thing about what we saw tonight is this is the kingdom of God.  God knows what’s going on in Tyre and Sidon.  We’ll see more of that next week when we get into Ahab, this guy is a real ripper.  If you thought Jeroboam was bad, wait till we get to this next clown in the series.  This guy just marries right into the pagans, and officially installs paganism for the official religion.  My point tonight was Jeroboam at least called these gods Elohim; that’s not going to happen next week, we get even worse.  This is God’s kingdom, this is His house, this is His nation that He called to be separate from the world. And this is what goes on inside. 

 

I guess what you can see, as I hinted at earlier, this is why you want to watch how the Old Testament answers this. There is an Old Testament answer, it’s like a musical piece and what you’ve got now is the orchestra and the strings and the brass going away, then suddenly in the music you begin to hear a throbbing base, and this rising crescendo from the bottom. That’s going to happen starting with Isaiah.  That’s a setup for those prophetic books.  But you can’t appreciate that setup until you go through this mishmash of crud that we have to go through in these chapters.  It will all come out, God has an answer to all this, but what we want to notice is that these are written for our edification and we see guys with good backgrounds, if you looked on his resume you’d never guess this was going to happen. It’s not that God made a mistake because God is omniscient; He knows what’s going to happen.  Why did He do this? Well why did He construct history the way He constructed it, I don’t know.  I don’t know why He picked Jeroboam.  He could have picked somebody else, but there’s a malaise that’s coming over the whole nation here. 

 

So while we focus in on Jeroboam, notice what’s happening.  That’s why that king story that’s so queer in chapter 13, what that’s a revelation of is the silence of the men who should have been prophesying.  Why did they wait? Why did they sit back and do nothing.  Today some kids went down for the Woe vs. Wade thing.  That’s great, because at least they can’t say fifty years from now, well the United States in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s was on a critical path and they made these bad decisions, they demeaned the baby in the womb.  Now they’re killing the baby out of the womb. I just heard tonight some MIT guy is now saying infanticide is not necessarily bad.  He’s arguing that the girl that had the baby at the prom and dumped her in the toilet bowl and went back to dancing, that we shouldn’t be too upset because in our evolutionary development infanticide played a role in the survival of the human species.  When you go back into history you see women did practice infanticide, they killed the unwanted babies, got rid of them, it saved a lot of trouble, and they went on.  So once you start with life not valuable in the womb, then obviously life outside of the womb isn’t going to be respected.  So in this case, this is the malaise that sets over the whole country.  The kids that went down there today are part of the church that’s speaking out.  Nobody can say that nobody spoke out, we may not have been listened to, but the church wasn’t silent.  That’s great. That’s all we can do, we can voice our opposition, we do it in a dignified way, we do it in a forceful and clear way, and if the world goes to hell in a hand basket, then it goes to hell in a hand basket, but at least it’s not going to hell in a hand basket because we didn’t open our mouths.  So it’s great that people do that.

Question asked: Clough replies:  The question concerns chapter 13 of why the guy that gets creamed is the guy that started out godly.  The Old Testament approaches these things in a startling way, in that these men were called to depict by the activities in their lives certain divine truths.  You have weird things like Ezekiel going around naked; you have this idea of cutting up suits and going to sackcloths; Jeremiah in his prison life.  God calls these guys to be living audio visual aids to what He’s trying to teach, and if you notice in the Hebrew it’s very forceful, God said I want you to go north, and I don’t want you to stop for anything!  It’s a little fine detail in there, but it was quite clear that his commission was to move into enemy territory, do his mission and come home, period.  All the while he was in there he was on enemy ground, from the standpoint of his mission. 

 

I agree with you, the guy probably was very personally sensitive, these people weren’t auto­matons, they had their own human emotions.  Many of the men who have studied that chapter point out that even though that second guy lied and deceived, he maybe deceived in the sense that he wanted so bad to be near this man, this prophet, he wanted him to come because there was a cry in his heart, the second guy’s heart, to be like the first one, because the second guy was a fellow who obviously had compromised.  Here you have this prophet, he’s by himself, the kingdom has gone apostate, and he’s just kind of crawling out of the woodwork because this other guy came into his life.  So the death of the first man is sort of a shock to the second guy, it’s part of that sign, there was a sign given to So and So. 

 

That’s what’s so hard in these stories because the poor people on whom some of these signs come, it looks like God has almost has dual standards and He really creams guys, and for crying out loud, what did You do that to him for?  That incites that reaction in our hearts to some of the things.  You’re going to see, we won’t go through the passage but there’s the passage every unbeliever picks in the Old Testament where Elisha curses the kids, they come out and they say “baldy baldy” or something like that, they’re making fun of them so he calls a bear or a wild animal out after them.  They say see, that’s the evil God of the Old Testament, that’s the kind of God you Christians worship, and this sort of thing comes out.  But you’ve got to take these stories and realize that whoever put Kings together from the human point of view, these were the prophetic school that operates in the background, we’d like to get our hands on who was it that put this book together; they picked that story out because it’s an action in chapter, action in chapter 12, action in chapter 14, why stick this thing in chapter 13?  So you have to give credit.  The liberals never give credit to this, when you study higher criticism they always say this came from another source, you know, it’s like somebody is making a dress and they ran out of material and they just pick up from the scrap heap and sow little pieces together.  That’s the way they think the Old Testament happened, if you listen to any liberal person. 

 

We have to give credit that there’s a coherence to these books, and if when we’re reading from chapter 11 to chapter 12, and then chapter 14 looks like it keeps on going, but chapter 13 looks like it’s something totally out of it, in the middle, we’ve got to go back and say whoa, the guy who wrote this and assembled this book, must have thought that there was a continuity here, so I’ve got to sit here and give respect due to the overall argument of the book, and say Lord, I don’t understand, but chapter 13 has to have something to do with preparing us for chapter 14.  And by that little prophetic announcement at the end of that chapter you see what he’s telling us.  Whoever wrote that in there is telling us a message; it was one of the ways that the Word of God was authenticated in the north.  And it was very interesting that the Word of God was authenticated through a prophet from the south, and then the prophet in the north who had compromised, finally in his last days realized that he had compromised, and that the kingdom was going down.  So now you get “by the mouth of two witnesses,” the first prophet and the second prophet confirm the doom on the northern kingdom. 

 

Now you’ll observe something different happening.  Two guys that form very famous stories arise, the Elijah/Elisha duo.  They will rise up and they’re going to start doing certain things, but what they’re going to do is not what Isaiah, Jeremiah, these prophets all have different places on the team.  What we want to study next time is Ahab and the interaction between Ahab, Jezebel on the one hand, and Elijah.  Elijah has a peculiar ministry and the way to understand his ministry is not like these guys.  The guys that we looked at in chapter 13 were announcers of doom.  What Elijah is doing is he’s confronting the north in an assault, a massive assault on the false religion of the north. 

 

Look at the notes I handed out, I quote Dr. Leah Bronner, I think she got her PhD in England, she’s obviously a Christian, one of the most brilliant dissertations that has ever been written on the book of Kings is written by this lady, a South African lady, and she’s done one of the most thorough analysis of this book and she points out certain very interesting things that I want you to look at in the quotes on the notes.  She ties everything that that prophet Elijah does with the false religion that he’s attacking.  We often think of the drama, that great drama.  I’m going to try to bring slides of Mount Carmel because I want you to see where this happened, it’s a fantastic place to see, where this happened and where this confrontation occurred between Elijah and the 400 prophets and the violence that was involved.  This man incited a mob against the government, and killed 400 civil servants of the northern kingdom’s government.  Talk about Ruby Ridge and Waco, holy mackerel, this is exactly the opposite, this is where an insurrection was begun and what we as believers have to ask the question is, wait a minute, aren’t we supposed to be law abiding?  Here it was the believing godly remnant that were the killers, they were the disrupters of society.  We have to ask what led to that confrontation.

 

Be prepared for Elijah and Elisha, as you begin to read, don’t function like these two guys.  Elijah and Elisha are not announcing the doom on the kingdom so much as they’re doing something else, and you want to understand what is this that these two guys have done.  Then they get through their ministry and then along come the giants, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, those guys, and they do something else.  So the prophets in different stages are pulling different maneuvers, although, ultimately, pointing back to the Torah.

 

Question asked: Clough replies:  Thankfully the Lord probably isn’t casting us in these particular roles and the drama that we’re going to be dead, but I think the lesson that we’ve learned tonight is a sobering one, is that once you perceive the will of God from the Scripture, you’d better stick with it, and if the Holy Spirit leads you, you have a right before God to pray that the Holy Spirit confirm whatever He’s told you through the Scripture.  Now if the Church had just followed that, half the garbage wouldn’t even be here.  But we get ourselves in all kinds of trouble because we always have this arrogance, that the Holy Spirit never taught anybody else except us. Like for 1900 years nothing’s been taught down through history and He’s got to teach us the whole thing.  That’s arrogance.  It is true, I think, that in each century God does teach the Church something new, that’s the sixth part of this series.  God is teaching a progression through the church history, and you can observe that.  But it never is something apart from Scripture, and the examples we’re seeing here are clearly contrary to the spoken text.  The spoken text has priority.

 

If you want something that will twist your ankles a little bit, look carefully at the language in Gal. 1, because this is a very powerful statement, where Paul says, and this is the answer to Catholicism, Mormonism and all the other isms that argue that you have to have living prophets continue, the church has its own living prophets.  Then they say because we have the living prophets we’ve got the extra Word of God here, we’ve got Revelation 23, you guys stopped at 22.  Well, the answer to that in Galatians is Paul says if I or an angel from heaven teach you another gospel than that which I taught you, let him be damned. [Gal. 1:8]  So what Paul was doing was drawing a curse down upon himself if he departed from his own message.  Once that message got out and canonized in Scripture, even Paul couldn’t change it. And that’s the answer to the Pope.  The Pope and the Catholic Church can’t change the Scripture once the Scripture is written.  They insist that Mother Church gave us the Bible and Mother Church will interpret the Bible. And we insist that Mother Church was the means that gave us the Scripture, but once the Scripture is given Mother Church submits to the Scripture.  That’s the difference. And that’s Mormonism.  What is Mormonism’s claim?  That they have living prophets, that’s why they can add all these doctrines. 

 

It all follows once you allow a prophetic line to exist, it really doesn’t, the prophets would add if they were godly prophets, they’d pass the test, there’s two tests in Scripture, Deut. 13 and 18, and we’ll get to that next week because Elijah is going to use those two Canon passages because those are actually instructions to courts on how to kill prophets.  Before they came to a capital decision in a courtroom proceeding, what were the laws of evidence?  It was a capital offense to be a false prophet, so you had to have rules of evidence given to the jury.  What are the rules of evidence given to the jury?  They are contained in Deut. 13 and 18.  There are two tests that the prosecutor would throw to the jury and say okay, this guy claims to be a prophet, now here’s how you test him.  We’ll go through that. 

 

It’s not subjective, that’s the thing we have to remember, the leading of the Holy Spirit.  We all have this where the Holy Spirit draws your attention to talk to someone, etc.  I’m not talking about that because that’s not a doctrinal issue.  What I’m talking about is when the Holy Spirit spoke to me and He really revealed to my heart that….  You don’t want to hear from my depraved heart; you want to hear from the Scriptures.  So we’re not talking from our depraved hearts this way.  Just watching the progress in 1 Kings 12, the first departure was from Scripture, because he consulted with who?  He was given clear mandate in Deut. 17 about consulting, it couldn’t be clearer as to who he was supposed to consult with.  And you know he had a thing against the Levites because what is he doing right at the end of the passage?  He’s firing them and hiring any goon off the street.  So he cut himself off from Scripture, he cut himself off from the teachers of the Scripture.

 

The second thing that happens is once that happens, the heart is a vacuum, and if you push God out something else comes in, and what comes in is a false image of God that you yourself have created.  That’s why it says this was something that he devised in his own heart.  So we fill our hearts with our fleshly imaginations, demonically agitated of course, and we create these idols.  There’s a quote I have in the sixth part of this series where a lady who is a student of church history pointed out to me, Charles, you missed the whole point in church history and that is if you go back to the church father’s there’s passages after passage in the church fathers that claim, this is the view of the 1st and 2nd century Christian that every idol out in the world, the statutes all over Rome, Greece, etc., that those are actually images of demons that appeared to the artist’s imagination.  That was how the Christians interpreted the art work; it was directly demonically induced in their brains.  Then from there you have the outworking.

 

So you have the departure from the authority of Scripture, you have the second step, a readjustment in who God is, and then the third step is the behavioral implications, it starts to work itself out, it may take a century, it may take a lifetime, it may take five years, ten years, one month, but sooner or later that false thing will start acting out behaviorally, and we’ve seen it act out here in policies.  That’s why I gave you all those verses that keep talking about the sins of Jeroboam, the sins of Jeroboam, the prophets won’t let us forget that, that was a critical point in Jewish history.  People ask Charles, how do you get these events, how do you pick the events?  See how I pick them, because they are the events that keep being pointed at in Scripture.  That event that we studied is an event that’s pointed out thirty times in the Old Testament, so I figured hey, the Holy Spirit pointed it out thirty times I guess I’d better include it. 

 

That’s all we have time for.