1 Kings 14:15,16 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

For the Lord shall smite Israel For consenting to that idolatrous worship which Jeroboam set up. As a reed is shaken in the water Hither and thither, with every wind. So shall the kingdom and people of Israel be always in an unquiet and unsettled state, tossed to and fro by foreign invasions and civil wars; by opposite kings and factions, and by the dissensions of the people. The emblem expresses very forcibly the ease with which God could punish the Israelites and overturn their state, notwithstanding all their greatness, even as easily as a reed is shaken with the wind. He shall root up Israel out of this good land Which God began to do first by Tiglath-Pileser, king of Assyria, 2 Kings 15:29; and then finished it by Shalmaneser, 2 Kings 17:5-6, &c. And shall scatter them beyond the river That is, Euphrates, so called by way of eminence, they being carried, as the forenamed places tell us, into the country of the Medes. Because they have made their groves For the worship of their idols. God having before condemned the making and worshipping of the calves, by which they pretended to worship the true God; he now takes notice that they were not contented with the calves, but (as it is in the nature of idolatry, and all sin, to proceed from evil to worse) were many of them fallen into a worse kind of idolatry, even their worship of the heathenish Baals, which they commonly exercised in groves. Who made Israel to sin By his invention, and making the occasion of their sin, the calves; by his example, encouraging those and only those that worshipped the calves; and by his authority requiring and compelling them to do it. This is mentioned as a monstrous aggravation of his wickedness, that he was not content to sin himself, but was a great author of drawing others into sin, and of corrupting and undoing the whole kingdom; which therefore God would never forgive him, but upon all occasions mentions him with this eternal brand of infamy upon him.