GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
2 CHRONICLES 13:4-9
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4 Then Abijah stood on Mount Zemaraim, in the hill country of Ephraim, and said, “Hear me, Jeroboam and all Israel! 5 Don’t you know that the LORD, the God of Israel, gave the kingship of Israel to David and his descendants forever by a covenant of salt? 6 Yet Jeroboam son of Nebat, a servant of Solomon son of David, rose up and rebelled against his master. 7 Certain worthless, wicked men gathered around him and opposed Rehoboam son of Solomon when he was young and indecisive and not strong enough to resist them. 8 And now you plan to resist the kingdom of the LORD, which is in the hands of David’s son? You are indeed a vast army and you have the golden calves with you that Jeroboam made to be your gods. 9 But didn’t you drive out the priests of the LORD, the sons of Aaron, as well as the Levites? You made your own priests like the people of other lands. Whoever comes to consecrate himself with a young bull and seven rams can ordain himself as a priest– but to things that are not gods!
Mount Zemaraim might be Khirbet El-Mazari‘a, a tall peak near Bethel, but the identification does not affect our understanding of the text. Rehoboam (outnumbered two to one) climbed up and took a position where he could be seen and heard. He called out to the army of northerners. At first, he included Jeroboam as one of the ones listening, but he puts Jeroboam’s name in the third person as his speech continued (see verses 6 and 8), separating the upstart king from the people of Israel. Some of Rehoboam’s points are valid, some less so, but let’s take a look at everything he said:
I, Jeroboam rebelled against his master. No one could dispute this, although the throne had been offered to Jeroboam by God on the condition that he remain faithful to God– a condition that Jeroboam never met (see Point IV below).
II, The kingship really belonged to the sons of David, not this servant of Solomon (there is a dig at whether Jeroboam was legitimate, but see Point I above). Rehoboam mentions a “covenant of salt.” Salt was required with every sacrifice and every covenant oath (Leviticus 2:13). The term “covenant of salt” is also a reference to the permanence of such a covenant (Numbers 18:19).
III, The present division could be laid at the feet of the “certain worthless, wicked men.” But were these men of Judah, or men of Israel? In the context of verse 7, the worthless men gathered around Jeroboam to oppose Rehoboam. But in the account we have of the incident, the young men who grew up with Rehoboam gave the king of Judah bad advice (2 Chronicles 10:8). Is there something we don’t know about? Perhaps Jeroboam also had some bad advice, such as while he was away in Egypt (1 Kings 11:40).
IV, Jeroboam had turned his nation away from the worship of the Lord to worshipping golden calves and goat-idols (2 Chronicles 11:15). So the worship of the north was idolatrous and worthless, too.
V, Not only was the worship false, but the priesthood was false as well. The priesthood had been transferred through Moses from the firstborn of each family to the tribe of Levi (Exodus 32:29; Numbers 1:47-53). But in the north, Jeroboam had sent all the Levites and the priests packing, and now what Rehoboam described was correct: Anyone could become a priest if he liked, by supplying the required offering of a bull and seven rams (notice that Jeroboam overcharged them; God required only one bull and two rams for an ordination, Leviticus 8:2).
VI, Rehoboam returns his focus on the gods of the north, which were not gods at all. Had all of the people become pagans in the last seventeen or eighteen years? The King of Judah was inviting this army to repent and to return to the fold of the united kingdom. It is not stated directly, but it is certain that any soldier, his family, or any civilian and his family, could come south and be welcomed into Judah once again. Rehoboam would not close his borders to them.
What does it mean to have a false god? It doesn’t matter one bit what a person’s opinion is of God, his law, or his gospel, with regard to whether or not the true God is actually God. He is. A child can close his eyes so tightly that they hurt and pretend that the sky is purple and green, but that doesn’t change the fact that the sky is blue in the daytime and black at night. So it is with God above. He is God. So if someone tries to imagine a different god, that doesn’t change that man’s sinful status. He is damned and surely as the devil is damned if he doesn’t look to the true God and his holy Son Jesus Christ for his forgiveness. In Christ, Luther explains, “you have the true honor and the true worship which please God and which he commands under penalty of eternal wrath, namely, that the heart should know no other consolation or confidence than that in him, nor let it be torn from him” (Large Catechism I:16).
Idolatry does not really amount to setting up a statue and praying to it. Idolatry is mostly there in the heart. Idolatry turns away from Christ and says either, “I will get comfort from somewhere else,” or, “I don’t think Christ is enough. I will get comfort from Christ and also something else– I will include the saints, or Mary, or my own works, or my own suffering, or my own obedience, or my own human reason, or my own seemingly divine opinion, and that will truly be my god above God.”
When I was a boy and I worked in the family business as a house painter, I learned the great rule about using oil and latex paints. If the first coat that goes onto bare wood is oil-based, then down the road you can put anything over it, whether oil or latex, and it will hardly ever, if ever at all, peel. It may fade and need touching up, but that’s all. But if the first coat is latex, it will crack and peel with time. You won’t ever be able to paint oil over latex, and even latex over latex will give you trouble down the road. So it is with faith that looks to Christ. When we begin with the truth, that Christ has atoned for all of our sins, each and every sin completely covered by Christ (for this is what the Scriptures teach us, Hebrews 10:10; 2 Corinthians 5:21), then that foundation of faith will last a person’s lifetime. But if a person has been lied to, if they are first instructed that Christ somehow isn’t enough, then that old false faith will need to be scraped and sanded away, as if down to the bare wood, or it will always make any other teaching crack and peel. Begin with the truth, and build on the truth. “By setting forth the truth plainly we commend ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God” (2 Corinthians 4:2).
“We are to trust in God alone and turn to him, expecting from him only good things; for it is he who gives us body, life, food, drink, nourishment, health, protection, peace, and all temporal and eternal blessings. It is he who protects us from evil, he who saves and delivers us when any evil befalls. It is God alone from whom we receive all that is good and by whom we are delivered from all evil.”
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
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Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota
God’s Word for You – 2 Chronicles 13:4-9 Idolatry in the North