Historical Revisionism and Political Justification. 1 Kings 12:25-30

Today we have a lot of politicians talking about change but people don’t look at what kind of change they mean. Just because somebody wants change and can identify that there is a problem, and that something might be broken, doesn’t mean that their solution is the right solution. Increasingly our education system has been dominated by a human viewpoint view of history that is built on a Darwinistic worldview that everything that has happened in history is just random chance. The American people have been short-changed in many ways because they have been led down a wrong path. There is a tremendous failure of leadership in almost every arena of American life and thought. Part of this, I think, is God allowing us to reap the consequences of our negative volition following that pattern we have studied so many times in Romans chapter one.

We see this pattern working itself out in the history of Israel in the division that occurs between the northern and the southern kingdom because this is part of divine discipline on the nation. Not only does Solomon lead them into idolatry but they were led into idolatry, they were willing to follow his leadership into idolatry. Because of that God is going to fulfil those disciplinary warnings that He has promised in Leviticus 26 and in Deuteronomy in bringing the nation into discipline, and part of that included fragmenting the nation now between the northern kingdom and a southern kingdom. We have seen that that breech occurred as a result of this tax revolt. It is interesting to see the contrast in the north with Israel and what is happening in our country because they understood that increased taxes limited their options. The less money you have the less you can choose to do. The more money you have the more you can choose to do, and when the government has its hand in both of your pockets and is taking out 50, 60 per cent of what you worked hard to make and thinks that what you make is really theirs and they have a right to it, then you lose freedom, you lose options. That is what God warned about in 1 Samuel chapter eight—the problem of big government. Big government seeks to establish itself.

Israel has their tax revolt and as a result of that they are going to have to re-establish their basic cities and institutions in the north and redo all of their basic systems—economic, government and military, as well as their spiritual base. This is where we begin in 1 Kings 12:25. Jeroboam has to establish both the physical and the spiritual foundations of the northern kingdom. He begins first with the physical side but then in vv. 26, 27 we see that in his thinking he realise that you can’t just change what is going on on the outside, externally, you have to change people on the inside spiritually. Once you are able to shift their focus spiritually then you can transform the culture. This is exactly what has happened in American history over the past 200 years, beginning in the 19^th century, as Americans began to imbibe the consequences of extreme Enlightenment thinking and rationalism that destroyed true education in Europe. And by the mid-nineteenth century as the revolt against God in Europe is being transplanted to America and we began to see the rise of the influence of Darwin and other thinkers in the area of labour, a rise in the influence of other thinkers in terms of education. So by the beginning of the 20^th century there were many influential people coming out of transformed educational systems, mostly in the north-east, the old ivy league schools had all been transformed. Many of them were founded to train pastors to know the Bible, to teach the gospel. What happened then was that Americans then began, as a result of change in their spiritual orientation away from the Word of God, to be affected by how their social institutions functioned and operated.

There was the rise of progressivism, progressive thought, which is just a nice word for early forms of socialism and political liberalism. Then there was a shift in education and moves to take any kind of absolutes out of the schools. All of this culminated by the 1960s in a number of legislative decisions.

So we see the same patterns in our history that Jeroboam understood. He was a brilliant man apparently, he realised that if he didn’t change the spiritual orientation of the people in the north he would lose them to the south. He is going to take special moves to do that.

1 Kings 12:25 ^NASB “Then Jeroboam built Shechem in the hill country of Ephraim, and lived there. And he went out from there and built Penuel.” Shechem was already there. What this means was not that he built it, it is not a new city, but he refortified it. He is going to establish Shechem temporarily as his capital and so he needs to fortify that city on the west side of the Jordan. Then as we go through this passage we read of his development of the new golden calf worship and he is going to set up two sites for the worship of the golden calf to make it easy and convenient for people to worship God. They didn’t have to go down to Jerusalem because that would have created a political conflict. If they went to Jerusalem they would be orienting to the tribe of David and they might hear the truth, and Jeroboam needs to try to unify the people in the north and give them their own religion. So he is going to argue for taking them back to the early form of their religion, that which Aaron was trying to develop at the foot of Mt. Sinai with the golden calf.

He is going to establish two worship centres in violation of the Mosaic Law which called for one central sanctuary which would be the temple in Jerusalem, one on Bethel on the border of Benjamin Ephraim, and one in Dan. One was in the south and one in the north so that they are convenient for everyone to go to.

1 Kings 12:26 ^NASB “Jeroboam said in his heart, “Now the kingdom will return to the house of David.” The issue in Israel’s history is the kingdom and the kingdom God promised, and when the prophets start showing up as they do the role of prophecy in the Old Testament isn’t about satisfying people’s curiosity about the future, it is not some incidental facts about what is going to happen, the prophets aren’t someone you go to like the local astrologer or palm reader to find out what is going to happen next. What we have with the prophets is that they are outlining God’s plan in the development and establishment of His kingdom in Israel. Because the Israelites disobeyed God many times what the prophets are doing is challenging Israel with the fact that they have violated the Law, they are coming as a prosecutor indicating the indictment against Israel and the punishment according to the Law. This terminology is embedded in their thinking even though Jeroboam’s thinking is pagan.

We hear the same thing in America. How many times do we hear the politicians pander to people about their Christianity? On the one hand this time, we have one contender for the presidency who has managed to sit under a pastor who preached Marxist rhetoric, black liberation theology, for twenty years and he didn’t have a clue that is what he was doing. How could anybody vote for a president who was so dense that he didn’t recognise Marxism when he heard it? We have a president in the White House today who because of the fact that he comes out of a liberal Methodist background doesn’t understand that the essence of Islam isn’t peace; it is only peace if you submit to Islam. One reason religion is important is because if people have a pseudo-religious framework then they are going to make bad decisions based on faulty information. That is pretty much what this president has done, although he has done some things to try to defend the nation against Islamic terrorism, but he consistently in many others wants to make this division that is not true if you understand what the Bible says is true and you understand what Islam actually teaches.

So we find that in their day just as in our day people have been influenced by a superficial religious system and terminology. When Obama was asked what his favourite passage of Scripture was he went to Matthew 25:31-46 and he quoted the passage on the sheep and the goat judgment. This interpretation of this passage said more about his economics than we have heard anybody say. This passage is a parable related to the judgment of the Gentile nations at the end of the Tribulation period in relationship to how the individuals in the nation treated Jews during the Tribulation period. But you will always find political liberals, Marxists and socialists taking this out of context and using this passage to say that Jesus is more concerned about the poor, and so we have to take care of the poor and we have to feed the hungry, and all of this socialist pandering that they do doesn’t help the poor at all and yet it somehow gets them a lot of votes. They stop at verse 36, but notice the next verse: Matthew 25:37 ^NASB “Then the righteous will answer Him, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry, and feed You, or thirsty, and give You {something} to drink?.” Those on the right hand are the righteous, and they are only righteous because of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness; they have trusted in Christ as their saviour, and because they have, and because they have divine viewpoint about Israel, when Israel is being persecuted by the Antichrist during the Tribulation period then those who are believers are going to take care of the Jews who are under persecution; they are not going to be anti-Semitic. The last thing this is teaching is any kind of social program or social compassion. What this is talking about is the evils of anti-Semitism and that Jesus is going to judge those nations and those peoples who do not support the Jews during the Tribulation period. Matthew 25:40 ^NASB “The King will answer and say to them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, {even} the least {of them,} you did it to Me.’” That terminology “my brethren” relates to the Jews, the saved Jews during the Tribulation period.

Some poor person living under a bridge and who doesn’t know the first thing about Jesus Christ is not the object of this parable. When there are politicians who don’t have enough sense to recognise that their pastor is preaching perverse heresy from the pulpit in terms of Christianity, then what can be expected in terms of how that politician handles the Bible or how he handles the truth? He wouldn’t know truth if it slapped him in the face. First of all, to know truth you have to start with the Word of God; that is what truth is.

Jeroboam has this religious verbiage but he doesn’t understand it correctly. 1 Kings 12:27 ^NASB “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.” His motivation is simply self-preservation, he doesn’t want to lose his position of power, his position of leadership in the northern, he wants to continue to be the king. So he has to solve this problem by changing the religious orientation of the people.

1 Kings 12:28 ^NASB “So the king 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’.” This is the same thing that Aaron said at the base of Mount Sinai after Moses was up the mountain for forty days and forty nights. The people became restless, they think that God has killed him and he’s not coming back, and they pleaded with Aaron to make them a golden calf. The idea of a golden calf came out of Egyptian religion. But this isn’t pure idolatry here and later in Kings there will be a distinction made between the golden calf religion of Jeroboam and the introduction of Baalism and the fertility cult under Ahab and Jezebel. What Jeroboam is doing here is two things. He is redefining history. He is saying it didn’t happen the way Exodus says it happened, that God did not bring them out of Egypt, it is this god, this golden calf that brought us out of Egypt. He is going to identify Yahweh with the golden calf.

Once we have politicians trying to reshape and redefine the reality of numbers then eventually what they are going to do is build the house of cards that will collapse. We can trace our present financial debacle back to the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 and then Clinton passed another form of it in 1995 which made it illegal for banks to not give loans to those who were underprivileged and really couldn’t afford to pay them back. This was because they wanted to reshape society. They were letting their accounting, which ought to be pure black and white science, be shaped by an agenda of social engineering which in reality is being shaped by a religious assumption. The religious assumption is that man is the centre of everything: we got rid of God back when Darwin came up with the origin of the species. We don’t need God, man is just a product of time plus chance; and that is a view of history. This is the same thing that Jeroboam did. He was looking at history and saying: “I can manipulate history like the proverbial clay nose on the face of the statue. They wanted to go one way and I’ll just twist it the other way.” We can shape it any way we want to and make history serve our purposes. And so we have our thinking shaped by too many liberal types of leaders in this country, both Republicans and Democrats, who thought they could reshape the laws of numbers and somehow make it possible for somebody who made $30,000 per year to qualify for a loan to buy a $200,000 house and make the payments. It just doesn’t work. But when politics and a pseudo-religious system changes your social thinking then the results are the collapse of society. We see the same thing in the idea of homosexual marriage. All of this comes out of the same kind of thinking, it is a totally fraudulent type of thing, and people are completely self-deceived about the nature of reality. So they want higher taxes, they want socialism because they think that somehow that is going to solve all of their problems.

The genius of Jeroboam 1^st was that he looked at the golden calf and said: “This is the god that brought you up out of Egypt.” But if you didn’t know the truth and you didn’t know the Bible then you were going to get duped just like so many do down through history by somebody who comes along and has a great rhetorical style but they have no content, and the little content they do bring is just plain evil. That is exactly how God will analyse Jeroboam 1^st. His idea is to come up with these two calves of gold: 1 Kings 12:28 ^NASB “So the king 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’. [29] He set one in Bethel, and the other he put in Dan.”

As God’s conclusion, and editorial on this: 1 Kings 12:30 ^NASB “Now this thing became a sin, for the people went {to worship} before the one as far as Dan.” This becomes the basis for God’s evaluation for all the kings in the north. They follow in the footsteps of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat.

Conclusion: Be wary of politicians and their attempts to rewrite and revise definitions of history and law. It doesn’t do anyone any good.

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