Jeraboam

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0:00 Okay, so we're like chapter 14 gets us right after Solomon's reign. And remember we got God has decided with Abraham generations ago that he's going to build a nation of people on earth for whom they can be his people. Instead of dealing with everybody in mass, he's going to deal with one group of people and over the generations he starts to cultivate and keep stumbling down on this promise.

0:34 I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this. And after 200 years of slavery in Egypt, he miraculously delivers them from the Pharaoh, arguably the strongest military power of the day. And he like takes them, wipes out their army and he says, now I'm going to be with you directly. And he does something in the desert that he hasn't done for humanity since the garden, since the very beginning. He says that the God, the unbounded infinite God will be able to dwell with people right

1:06 in their midst. And so he designs the tabernacle and he's like, I'm going to be directly with you. The God of the universe with the nation of people. There's one thing that's just a side note that's been stuck in my head that is worth reminding you that's really interesting. He's building this nation of Israel. He gives them the tabernacle and then we talked about last week how Solomon finally builds the temple and sets it up in Jerusalem, the city that's up on the hill, strategically

1:38 located. But I was thinking the other day, it's interesting that God is building a nation that everyone can look to and see what life is like with God. He gives them the 10 words, the 10 commandments that will describe their life. He creates a relationship so they can be humanity, but he doesn't make them like the Phoenicians. They're not the merchants. They're not traveling out two by two. They're not the Assyrians trying to conquer all the known world.

2:10 Right? They're certainly not Rome when Rome comes on the scene. But when Israel, the dream for Israel, the great dream for Israel is not world domination. It's us living in a land with our God. That's a side note. But they bring God that has in mind that he's going to be able to run the country with them and they like see all these other places and they're like, we know that you want to make

2:41 it special and we have this direct relationship with you, but we see all these other people have kings and we'd really like to have a king and he's like, you don't want a king and they're like, we want a king and he's like, you don't want a king out. I'll just keep communicating directly to the judges and the judges will work with you and you guys can decide we're going to have this flat system and they're like, no, we want a king. He's like, you don't want a king and they finally like, you said, fine, they just have a king and they give them Saul and Saul's a bad king. And then David and David is a great king, though unlikely. I talked about that on Christmas Eve, unlikely king, but a good king.

3:16 Made mistakes, but is a good king. And then Solomon asks for wisdom and lives in peace and builds a lot of stuff, but all of his stuff ends up distracting him and he becomes a problem. So much so that before Solomon dies, God pulls this move that he did with Saul where he sends a prophet Aha'ijah to this dude, Jeroboam, and says, hey, dude, you're going

3:51 to be the next king. You're going to have a 10 of the tribes. I'm going to leave two with David's family and Jerusalem will go with David's family because I promised David he'd always have someone and that'll be a thing. And so David's family will have the two southern, but you'll have the northern kingdoms. He tells us to Jeroboam. And of course, Solomon hears about it and gets pissed. So Jeroboam runs and hides in Egypt until Solomon dies and then he comes back.

4:30 And so then they have this thing. He comes back and the people talk to Rea-Bom, Solomon's son and they're like, we'll follow you if you promise to not be such a jerk like your dad. And Rea-Bom is like, you thought my dad was a jerk. I'm going to be twice as bad as him. And they're like, okay, never mind then. So Rea-Bom gets his family tribes like kind of a part of Benjamin and my Brian Judah.

5:00 Thank you. Yeah, part of Benjamin and Judah. And the rest of the 10 tribes align behind Jeroboam. Jeroboam was from Ephraim, a place in the north. And he was like actually like very like when you read Jeroboam's story, he rose to prominence because Solomon was rebuilding a section of the wall. And Jeroboam was a great manager of people. His folks were efficient. People liked following him. So he's very pragmatic and could get things done, was well organized and people wanted

5:31 to follow him. And so when Rea-Bom makes clear he's going to be a jerk, everybody's like, we'd rather go with Jeroboam and God anointed Jeroboam already, right? And so let's just go with him. And the problem comes in for Jeroboam. I mean maybe before this, what the problem I want to focus on is when he starts like setting up his system, he's going to run. Now he's king, but he doesn't have Jerusalem. That's with Rea-Bom.

6:02 So he's got to build a new kind of capital, which he does at Shechem. But then he's got a problem because he's like the key thing about us with Israel here is that we've got this relationship with the God of creation and life, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And everybody knows, remember we talked about it last week, that God is at the temple. Remember Solomon's prayer dedication? You're going to be here. You promise to be here. You're here so much that whenever anybody comes here from anywhere in the world to pray

6:35 for anything, you will hear them here. So unique, we can come here to the temple for fertility, for crops, for military protection, for financial provision. We can come to the temple for anything and all the things. Not only that, any nation could come here and you'll hear them. Then Solomon goes further. Not only that, but anybody who faces the direction of the temple and prays with intent for the

7:08 God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. So it's all about God is there. And when Solomon prays that, the cloud of God's presence comes down and hovers over the temple. And we know it's not only not in the temple broadly, but in the temple very specifically, right? Inside the first court outside area. Then you go inside another court inside area. And you go inside another court and right in there in that holiest little place is the

7:39 ark of the covenant. And then there's in the box is the tablets of the Ten Commandments, Moses' staff that budded and the manna that fell from heaven. And then there's these gold angels on top of it and their angels stretch out towards the middle. And right there where their angels wings meet is called the mercy seat. That's where God is. Everybody knows that.

8:10 Jeroboam has a problem because he's like, our people are going to want to worship and I'm going to have to send them down to Rayanboam's place. He's got control of the temple. So he's like, what have we got? We got ten and a half maybe of the tribes. You should have something and he's got this place called Bethel or Bethel at this mountain Mount Gerizim.

8:40 Everything good happens going up in the story of Scripture, Mount Gerizim. And if we were to go back and look at it, you could. It would be in Genesis chapter 12, 28 and 35. It pops into the story. And chapter 12 is actually the first place in the promised land that Abraham stops when he's coming out of Huron. And God reminds him, I'm going to give you all this land. Abraham's like, that is great. I'll build the altar here so that I always remember.

9:10 This is where you said that. You remember, I remember we'll come back, there'll be rocks here and I can remind you that you told me you'd give me all this place. So Abraham, it was significant to Abraham. And then two times for Jacob. This is where Jacob put his head on a rock and saw the ladder, the angels coming up and down, Mount Gerizim, Bethel. Is a significant place. Some people think that there are significant physical locations where the angels have more access and that Jacob saw one of these.

9:42 Like angels going up and down from one paradigm or one space or one to another and that Jacob saw this ladder where angels were actually doing this in that place. And so, Jeroboam is a good practical, pragmatic leader. He's like, we got our own country now. We have the same God, but we got our own places. So we'll just, I'll just, I'm not sending you guys down to Rea Boam's place. We all know that guy's a jerk. We're not going down there to worship.

10:13 We got our own Mount Gerizim and he did a little bit of research. He did some consultation. And a normal thing is that a God would be on top of a cow or a calf. Oh, maybe that rings some bells. So Jeroboam builds two very large golden calves. And he tells Israel, behold Israel, the Lord your God who brought you up out of Egypt is here. We don't have to deal with Rea Boam.

10:43 But worship him right here. I mean, it gets him in a lot of trouble. I mean, basically by the end of Jeroboam's reign, this kicks off a whole series of events where God's like, Jeroboam, you have done more evil towards Israel than anybody before you. God picked him.

11:14 I went back to look at the story again and I read in this one as well as in this one. Both. That really, okay? Yeah. And it's true. God picked him. God picked Jeroboam. Jeroboam was like minding his own business and through a prophet, Ahaija, he comes to Jeroboam and tells him, I want you to do this. But then I noticed a thing because Jeroboam goes off to Egypt because he's afraid of

11:49 Solomon and a lot of people will compare that to Moses being gone in the wilderness or even Egypt going down or Israel going down into Egypt to be protected from famine or then later Jesus going down into Egypt to await well-hearads killing all the young boys. This is a theme for Israel. We go into Egypt for protection, but there's a balance, right? Because sometimes God says go down to Egypt like he did with Jesus and other times out

12:23 of fear and a lack of faith, Israel retreats to Egypt as though Egypt can protect them. Through all the kings, they make alliances with Egypt when they should have trusted God. And when you read the story carefully, Jeroboam goes down to Egypt, but nobody told him to do that. So here's the first kicker for me. Jeroboam, minding his own business, able to get stuff done, people follow him, the prophet

12:56 comes to him and says on behalf of God, you're going to be the next king of Israel. And he does this object lesson where he tears his cloak into 12 pieces and gives him 10. And it's like you're going to have 10. I'm leaving two with David, but you're going to have 10 tribes. Now this is just a dude from Ephraim. He's not supposed to be a king. He gets to be a king. And then he knows Solomon's afraid. And what does he do immediately? Solves the problem, I'm trying to say. He's not going to go away, but God did not tell him to go to Egypt.

13:29 He just handles his business. Do you see? And a similar thing with setting up the golden cats. I've Beth Elle and he does another one at Dan. It's a reasonable solution to the problem. Jeroboam is looking at the thing and going, okay, I'm the king. My problem is to solve. Now if I send my people down to Rehoboam all the time, they're going to end up returning to him. I'm going to lose this kingdom. I can't do that. A practical solution. We've got Beth Elle. It's important that there's been altars there before.

14:01 Let's just handle it. Okay, done. He can't imagine that God might miraculously protect him from crazy king Solomon and have some solution he couldn't imagine to the problem of worshiping at the temple in Jerusalem. He just is like practically and pragmatically handling the problem himself.

14:33 How are your problems? I remember this is kind of a crazy story. I hadn't thought of it until just now. There was, you know, I ran these coffee shops in town and I kind of backed myself into running coffee shops. I'd never worked at a coffee shop before. I liked drinking coffee, but I was not a coffee con a sewer. I just drank a lot of it.

15:06 Another day is a story about, but I realized that running a coffee shop would give me in the direction that I wanted to go. If I could build a coffee shop that cultivated a network of people that stood for something larger, then it would drive me in the direction I wanted to go and I felt like Orlando was ready for something different. So I like, we started these coffee shops and I got a couple years into the coffee shop and I'm like pretty soon, I'm like, wait a minute. I thought I was like building a network and I am making a lot of coffee. Like it's kind of what I'm doing. I'm behind the counter all the time.

15:37 I'm like making all this coffee. I realized that I needed to make the coffee and be in behind the counter in order to make it all work. I couldn't afford to go do something else. If I had to pay somebody to do what I was doing, it wouldn't work. I had kind of built this idea from a couple of different things. I'm making coffee on a regular basis and I'd seen this model of a nonprofit that helped people build businesses and I thought I'd like to start something like that. That's the next thing Orlando needs.

16:08 It fits with this network of people and so I pitched it to a couple of folks. You guys should do this and they were like, yeah, that's a good idea. Your right Orlando does need it but you're the one who should do it, not us. And I was like, I don't see how I could do it. I'm behind the counter and I got to be behind the counter in order to make enough money to buy coffee, to pay rent, to pay mortgage. Like this is how it works. And so, but they were like, no, you can do it. We think you can do it. You should just start doing it. I tried to do like, Bo, I was like behind the counter and trying to build this nonprofit

16:42 like about like this. It felt like this. And I had a friend working for me at the time and we were trying to strategize how are we going to get this nonprofit going? This is a long example to show you pragmatism doesn't work all the time. And she said, you're never going to build this nonprofit if you're always behind the counter. I said, OK, I can see that. She's like, you just don't have enough time. I said, but if I leave behind, we don't have enough money to pay the bills if we pay somebody

17:14 else do what I'm doing behind the counter. She said, what do we care? If all we ever are doing is making coffee, that's not what we set out to do to begin with. So let's fail rather than succeed at something we don't want. Let's either succeed at what we want or fail at what we don't want. So let's just go for it. So it's in the middle of the summer, like July. And I'm like, OK, I'll just drop all my birth to shifts. And I'll focus all my energies on starting this new nonprofit.

17:48 We'll just pay somebody and see what happens. If we run out of money, we shut the place down or call an audible when we run out of money. But let's just try it. And as soon as I stepped out from behind the counter in the middle of the summer, the people walking in the coffee shop jumped up so that we were all of a sudden making enough money to pay me to start the nonprofit and pay people to do the breeza stuff in July in Orlando to buy coffee. And I started to realize that sometimes, it reminded me of a friend of mine, Eddie, that's

18:22 like, if you're never in a position where you need God, you never learn the ways in which God can provide. This is the problem Jeroboam had. He was very capable, pragmatic and smart, inspiring and leader prone. And God recognizes it and says, you're going to be the next leader. He said, great, I'll take you from here.

18:53 The great problem of Jeroboam, I think, is probably not his ignorance, but his genius. Not his inability, but his ability. He was very good at stuff. And so he never consulted God again. God said, you can be king. He said, good, thank you. I'll take it. God had in mind a building another dynasty out of Jeroboam as he had done for Abraham and

19:24 David. And instead, Jeroboam went his own way and ends up doing more evil for Israel than anybody before him. And I think it's probably because he just made smart, pragmatic decisions rather than putting himself in a position where he needed God. I was trying to think of what might have made the difference. And I think it's in this Beth L. Thing, but before we get to it, first one, I thought, what might have made the difference for Jeroboam?

19:55 I thought of this other story about worship from Jesus' life. Maybe remember it. It's in John chapter 4 at verse 25. Jesus is talking to this woman. She's a Sumerian, which is like one of the names that Northern Kingdom ends up developing into. And so at the time of Jesus in the first century, there's still a lot of kind of friction and animosity in the remnants of Israel.

20:29 And so it's kind of conspicuous that he's talking to this woman. And it's become clear in their conversation that he's not just a normal rabbi, but she's like, he's kind of a big deal, but she's Sumerian and he's Israelite. And she asks him, let me see if I can find the exact verse. Oh, yeah, here she goes. 19. I think the verse numbers are small.

21:02 The woman said to him, sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. She said, our family's worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where we ought to worship. She's trying to figure out it's still a debate. I was hoping that they're still worshiping at Mount Gerizim. They're not. She's talking about a different spot or she's talking about Mount Gerizim. She's not talking about Bethel.

21:34 But the principle remains where they were like, in order to worship God, you've got to go get to where God is. And Israel always says he's at the temple, but our people in North say he's up on this mountain. If we want to worship God, should we like go to the temple or face the temple or should we go to the mountain or face the mountain? Where is God? How do we worship him? And Jesus says this thing. He says, woman, believe me. The hour is coming when neither on this mountain side nor in Jerusalem will you worship the

22:11 Father. You will worship what you do. You worship what you do not know. We worship what we know for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. I think like what would have solved the problem for Jeroboam is if he would have gone, all right, the key for me here is to be connected to the God that gave this to me.

22:43 And he's at the temple. Instead of saying the key is for me to maintain what I got to solve the problems how I can. I don't know what will happen if I got to go down to Jerusalem over and over again to worship God. But that's where he is. So that's where I should go. And what Jesus has changed the equation. So for you and I, here's the thing. You're not called to be the king of Israel. But you do have callings.

23:16 If we are alive in the world, there is work God is expecting us to do, right? Blue my mind when I realize that my kids were going to learn the nature of love by the way I demonstrated love to them. That is a huge responsibility. That neighbors will learn what the love of God looks like by the way their neighbors

23:47 love them. Huge responsibility. Not to mention the work that you get into where God likes things to go in order, things to be built, lives to flourish. And it happens through the work. You have significant callings. And the trouble for most of us is the same as it was for Jeroboam. We're pretty good. You are pretty good at what you are called to.

24:19 That's why you're here. This is a room of people who are good at what they do. It's a dangerous place to be. How do we not fall into the trap of believing that we don't need God? Or acting as though we don't.

24:50 It's to get into the presence of God. And we don't have to go to Jerusalem to worship God anymore. This is a thing. You are the true worshipers of God. The straightest route to fulfilling your calling in a way that is life-giving rather than evil, to leaving a legacy of more people that find their way to God instead of more people that fall away, to continue to pile one blessing on top of another instead of taking one blessing from God and living off of it for the rest of your life, to pile more

25:21 blessings on more blessings from the God is to stay in a receiving mode in a posture of worship in front of God. I started looking at the Hebrew words for worship. There's several, but they're all about acknowledging the lordship of God that's not me. Whether you're prostrating yourself, whether you're working, whether you're anointing things, all worship is your God, I'm not. Tell me what to do. You and I can cultivate significant, meaningful life-giving callings in life to the degree

25:57 that we continue as true worshipers. When we run away and handle it ourselves, it will just turn evil. Let the story of Jeroboam. You can read it in here or in here. It's both. This one's shorter. Mark will tell you. But you can read it in either one and you'll be reminded to find your way to the God. You don't have to go to Jerusalem. You can come right here in his midst where his word is, where his people are, where his worship is. Let's pray that we could be true worshipers together.

26:29 Hey Lord, thank you for the story of Jeroboam. Might it remind us of the way you have called us into good work. And by your grace, would you call us again today and let it develop in us hearts of true worship that trust you, that follow you, that submit to you, that worship you. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.