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A brief bit of encouragement for your day from God’s Word
Well, a good Monday morning to you and a happy Valentine's Day. I hope you're planning to spend some time with your Valentine today. The Lord has blessed you with one and I don't know, you're gonna go out on a date.
You're just gonna have a restful quiet time alone. Whatever you do, have a good time with your Valentine today. Well in our Bible reading today, we came across a statement that that can actually be a little disconcerting to a believer if you think about it.
Maybe you don't have to think about it too much for it to be disconcerting. A little background. Again, we're in 2 Chronicles and the background to this particular passage is that Solomon had been the king, assumed the throne from David, had a glorious 40 years of reign as king over Israel, but during his reign he had, shall we say, expensive tastes and that caused, as is often the case in government officials that have expensive tastes, that caused rather high taxation and that caused a little bit of distress for some of the people, but it didn't show up.
I mean everybody kind of appreciated what they had under Solomon and kind of bit the bullet when it came to the taxes, I guess. But when Solomon died and his son Rehoboam became the king, a representative from the ten tribes of Israel, the northern tribes of Israel, came to Solomon's son Rehoboam, led by Jeroboam, and Jeroboam said, listen, the tax burden is just too great for us.
Would you please lower the tax rate, lower the tax burden? And so Rehoboam said, give me a few days, come back in three days, and I'll give you an answer. So they took off and Rehoboam sought counsel and he asked from the advisors that also served his father Solomon and those advisors said, look, you want to have these people loyal to you, submissive to you as their leader, as their king, then pay heed to them.
Give them a tax break, give them a tax break. And by the way, it seems that politicians kind of get that when it comes to election year. They figure out ways to pretend like the tax burden is going to be lower.
Well, anyway, that was the advice of the older advisors.
The.
Contemporaries of Rehoboam, those who grew up with Rehoboam, they had a little bit different idea. They said, listen, you need to establish yourself as the authority, as one to be reckoned with. Show them who's boss.
Let them know you're tough. Don't give in to this or they'll be coming back and wanting you to give in to all kinds of demands. So you tell them this, you tell them, you think my father's burdens were heavy?
You ain't seen nothing yet. So, what's he gonna do? Jeroboam and his contingency come back a few days later, come in before Rehoboam and what's your decision? What's it gonna be? Gonna ease our burdens for us, oh king?
And Rehoboam says, listen, if you think my dad was tough, you ain't seen nothing yet. You think the burden, you think the tax burden was heavy under him? I'm gonna raise your taxes 20%. Well, I don't know what the percentage was, but he just let him know that things were not going to get easier.
They were going to get even harder under his rule. So Jeroboam said, all right, have it your way. We're out of here. And so Jeroboam led the ten tribes of Israel to separate from the nation and become their own kingdom with Jeroboam as the king.
Well, this is nothing less than treason. This can't stand. We kind of understand that. You remember the American Civil War, the Confederate States said, we're out of here. We're gonna form our own nation.
And the Union States said, no, you're not. And hence we had a civil war. Well, that's what's coming here. Jeroboam realizes that he's under threat. So he gets back to Jerusalem. And this is where we pick up the story in 2 Chronicles 11.
It says, now when Jeroboam came to Jerusalem, he assembled from the house of Judah and Benjamin, 180 ,000 chosen men who were warriors. And their plan? To fight against Israel, that he, Jeroboam, might restore the kingdom to Jeroboam.
OK, sounds like a reasonable response. We can't let them get away with this kind of rebellion. But the word of the Lord came to Shemaiah, the man of God, saying, speak to Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, king of Judah, to all Israel and Judah and Benjamin, saying, thus says the Lord, you shall not go up or fight against your brethren.
Now, if it just stopped there, it would sound like, look, we're not going to have an inter-family squabble here. You're not going to go fight your brothers. You know, this is flesh and blood. You don't go fight against your own blood.
The Lord goes on to say, though, let every man return to his house. And here's the statement that can throw us. Because God says, for this thing is from me. This thing is from me. So you get the import of what the Lord is telling Rehoboam, right?
That this catastrophe, this disaster, this division of the nation that is going to end up leading to a bunch of idolatry. Jeroboam is going to establish his own gods. He's going to establish his own priesthood.
There is going to be, from here on out, a permanent separation between the ten tribes of the north and Judah in the south. And never the twain shall meet again until after both of those kingdoms, the northern kingdom and the southern, go into captivity.
And then finally they're released from captivity in respective places and times. And then the distinction is no longer there. But this is going to be hundreds of years before that ever comes. And God says, this is from me.
This is from me. Now it's one thing to read that statement regarding this division of the nation of Israel in the Old Testament, you know, 2 ,800, 3 ,000, 2 ,900, almost 3 ,000 years ago. It's one thing to read it about that.
It's another thing to realize what God is saying here. Beneath that statement, God is revealing to us his sovereignty, his authority, his control. That even the negative things, the things that we don't like, the things that we don't think should happen, the Lord says, this is from me.
Now, we don't always know why that is. Sometimes it can be pretty obvious. In this case, it is fairly obvious. Solomon had led the nation into really the seeds of idolatry. And he'd been unfaithful in some ways.
I mean, he had all these wives, and with the wives from foreign countries, he brought in foreign gods and so on. And so this was a way of punishing the nation of Israel for their departure from the Lord.
So sometimes this thing is from me because God wants to punish or chasten his people. Sometimes this thing is from me as a form of testing. What will we do through this trial, through this difficulty, through this challenge?
Will we impugn God? Will we consider him not to be good? Will we question his love and his loyalty, his faithfulness to his people? Sometimes this thing is from me because God wants to rebuke us for a course of action we're taking or a decision or whatever.
Sometimes this thing is from me because he wants to correct the path in which we're going. Sometimes this thing is from me to bring us to conviction. We can't always say, why this thing is from me? But I think the point that we want to come to in our understanding of God is that he is not taken by surprise when these things happen.
That somehow these things fit into the plan that he has for our lives, for our family, for our nation. They may be things that are difficult to accept. They may be things that are hard to endure. They may be very painful.
They may seem like there's no end to it. But may we have the grace and the understanding of our sovereign God to come to the place where we humble ourselves before him. Even if we have to say, oh my God, I don't understand what you're doing or why you're doing it, but I'm trusting you in it, in this thing that is from you.
That you have allowed to come into my life or you have brought into my life. I trust you in it. Give me grace to endure. Maybe that's the kind of prayer that you and I need to pray today. So Father, I pray, give us the humility to accept your sovereign work in our lives.
Even when that work is hard to accept, hard to understand. We pray in Jesus' name.
Amen.
All right, well have a good Valentine's Day. Enjoy the day and may God bless you in it.