Boy, that didn’t take long.

If you’ve never squandered a perfectly useful hour watching the Redbull tandem coaster challenge, you don’t know what you’re missing.

Israel is off the rails into such deep idolatry that Yahweh is already saying that He will uproot them from the land and send them into captivity. The Northern Kingdom is literally on its first king and the LORD is like, “Yup. This is a dumpster fire. Y’all are done.”

But I’m getting ahead of things…

Jeroboam’s son has fallen gravely ill and his sends his wife in disguise to the Prophet Ahijah. Funny how his golden calves and priests-for-hire couldn’t give him any real answers. Good old Ahijah can’t see anymore but his perception is 20/20. He knows who she is and what she’s up to before she even says a word. You can’t trick a real prophet of God.

Jeroboam’s time in the pages of scripture is bookended by Ahijah. We first meet Jeroboam when Ahijah hands him 10 pieces of cloth torn from his robe. Years later the elderly Ahijah closes out Jeroboam’s story with a pronouncement of judgment. God is going kill every male descendant of Jeroboam. The poor boy who is sick will be the only one who dies in peace…

“And all Israel shall mourn for him and bury him, for he only of Jeroboam shall come to the grave, because in him there is found something pleasing to the Lord, the God of Israel, in the house of Jeroboam.”
‭‭1 Kings‬ ‭14‬:‭13‬ ‭ESV‬‬

All the others will die violent deaths.

Thus endeth the reign of the first king of the Northern Kingdom (which I will henceforth refer to as “Israel” and the southern kingdom as “Judah”).

---

And speaking of Judah…

Rehoboam does not do any better. He has sanctioned every kind of wickedness and idolatry you can imagine, and probably several you can’t.

After mentioning their Asherah groves and other places of idolatrous worship, we get:

“and there were also male cult prostitutes in the land. They did according to all the abominations of the nations that the Lord drove out before the people of Israel.”
‭‭1 Kings‬ ‭14‬:‭24‬ ‭ESV‬‬

In the ancient world, most temple sex slaves were females. It’s not clear if the male “cult prostitutes” were engaging in rites with men or women or both. My guess would be both.

If you read my posts on Song of Songs, you know how sexual intimacy is a picture of something much more profound. This was twisted and eagerly embraced by the ancients. Many religions saw ritual sex as a way to join themselves to a god or goddess. It’s kind of like how Christians view the Eucharist (Holy communion). It’s a physical act that represents a spiritual reality of receiving Christ into ourselves.

Israel went from enthroning Yahweh alone in Jerusalem to worshiping a growing pantheon of middle-eastern deities thru sexual rites and perversions of every kind. And they did this in about 1.5 generations or less. They are behaving no differently than the Canaanite tribes their forefathers drove out of the land. I’m sure Joshua and Caleb were spinning in their graves.

Yahweh does not sit idly by. Whenever the Lord needs to discipline His people, it usually looks like foreign invasion. And Egypt invades Judah.

“He took away the treasures of the house of the Lord and the treasures of the king’s house. He took away everything. He also took away all the shields of gold that Solomon had made,”
‭‭1 Kings‬ ‭14‬:‭26‬ ‭ESV‬‬

I’m not sure what exactly “the treasures of the house of the Lord” were. We know it didn’t include the items taken much later in the Babylonian attack which were the 2 bronze pillars, the huge bronze “sea” and smaller items (pots and utensils) mostly of bronze but also some silver and gold.

But all the gold and silver and gems Solomon had lying around everywhere? Gone. Except the stuff buried in secret vaults with him and David. Did they take any of the golden temple furnishings like the lampstands or the tables of showbread? I don’t know. They didn’t take the ark because it gets mentioned later.

The king of Egypt seems to waltz into Jerusalem without a shot fired. Where was their army? One advantage to having lots of enemies is that your fighting skills stay sharp. The peaceful years of Solomon’s reign were probably not helpful in that regard.

We’re barely out of the gate in the history of Judah and already, the glory days are over. Permanently.

The rest of this week we are going to dig deeper into the details of this with the account in 2nd Chronicles.

If it gets too depressing, there are several hours of Redbull-sponsored craziness on YouTube to make you laugh.