CRITICAL AND EXPLANATORY NOTES.—
1 Kings 12:26. Now shall the kingdom return to the house of David—Recognizing the immediate peril of Israel’s visits to the temple, he sought to alienate their hearts from Jehovah’s worship.
1 Kings 12:28. It is too much for you—A specious plea that it would save them the costs and toils of a long journey. Two calves of gold—Egyptian figures, Apis and Mnevis. These winged bulls, by their slight resemblance to the cherubim, might captivate their imagination and soothe their scruples.
1 Kings 12:30. The people went to Dan—“Bethel was at the southern extremity of the kingdom, and within sight of Jerusalem; but the people preferred to turn from all associations with the city of Judah, and went to “Dan,” on the far northern fronter.
1 Kings 12:30. Priests of the lowest of the people—Rather, of all classes. For the Levitea would not assist in his idolatry, and, moreover, Jeroboam wished to destroy all the sacred associations of Israel’s former life.
1 Kings 12:32. Ordained a feast in the eighth month—Most probably to divert the memories of the tribes from the Feast of Tabernacles, which fell on the 15th day of the seventh month, in order further to eradicate sacred memories. He had a plausible pretext for this change, in that the harvest ripened later in the northern districts.
1 Kings 12:33. He offered upon the altars—Thus assuming to himself the functions of the high priest. Two reasons may have led to this act of usurpation: he had observed that the Egyptian king united in his person both the royal and sacerdotal offices; and he may have distrusted the prudence of vesting in a subject, at so critical an hour in Israel’s career, the power which a high priest possessed over a people so controllable by religious impulses.—W. H. J.
HOMILETICS OF 1 Kings 12:25-33
A MAN-MADE RELIGION
THE genius of Jeroboam was equal to every emergency. He was in his element when fomenting rebellion. He was equally at home as ruler of the newly-formed state, and adopted prompt and vigorous measures for the establishment of his kingdom. He soon saw that his authority would be weakened if provision was not made for the religious instincts of his people. And here we get a glimpse at the bold, reckless daring of the man’s nature. He quails not before the demand made upon him, but at once constructs a religion which was intended to serve his own crafty purposes, rather than to promote the piety of the people and the glory of God. In the system of worship thus established we have the leading characteristics of a man-made religion.
I. It is regarded as a necessary element in state-craft (1 Kings 12:25; 1 Kings 12:27). It may be that Jeroboam neither wished nor designed to introduce heathenish idolatry into his kingdom; the revolt by which he had reached the throne was brought about as the result of, and as a protest against, the abominations of such idolatry. He was apprehensive that if all his people went up to Jerusalem to worship, their hearts would be weaned from him and won over to the government of Rehoboam. He therefore instituted a new system of worship, not, perhaps, with the intention of countenancing idolatry, although in reality caring little about the result, but as a modification of the true worship of God demanded by the changed circumstances of the kingdom. His religious reform was dictated by a shrewd state-policy, not by the Word of God. There is a class of politicians who regard religion as an erratic and troublesome superstition, but a necessary part of state organization; and who maintain that the religion of a people is determined by the condition of their national life. Now this is inverting the order of things, as if a pyramid was intended to rest upon its apex rather than its base, or a tree to produce fruit by stretching its branches underground and its roots in the upper air. The fact is, religion is the mightiest force in a nation, and that which determines the conditions and development of national life. The government that trifles with the religion of a people cannot be permanent.
II. It is the suggestion of an unbelieving and wicked heart. The king took counsel (1 Kings 12:28), not with God, but with his own wicked heart (1 Kings 12:33), and with those whom he knew would support and carry out his views. Had Jeroboam believed in God, and been obedient to His commandments, his kingdom would have been established as David’s (chap. 1 Kings 11:38). But when God is ignored, the unbeliever is left to his own devices; and there is no possible folly and wickedness to which he may not have recourse. The infamy that Jeroboam heaped upon his name is a terrible example to all who would set up a religion irrespective of the Divine word and sanction. What is religion without faith, and what scope is there for faith in a religion in which the originator himself has no faith? Vain, empty, sinful man is in too sore need of supernatural help and grace to find either comfort or elevation in a religion that springs only from himself!
III. It is essentially idolatrous (1 Kings 12:28-30).
1. It is thus a violation of a specific Divine commandment (Exodus 20:4). The breaking of one commandment leads the way to the breaking of others. It is like the letting out of waters: the wider the breach, the more impetuous and overwhelming the deluge. A single fault in the foundation imperils the whole structure. Whatever is based on wrong-doing is unstable and perishable.
2. Its tendency is thus to insult and supplant the One True God (1 Kings 12:28). These calves were not set up to be worshipped as idols, any more than were the ark and cherubim, and other sacred shrines at Jerusalem, but were designed to be symbols of Jehovah. And yet the inevitable tendency was to lose sight of the invisible in the visible, as the subsequent history of Israel so painfully proved. What an enormity is it to liken the glory of the invisible God to an ox that eateth grass! Man creates his own idols, and falls down and worships them. Any creature, real or imaginary, which we invest with Divine properties is an idol; or, it may be the true God falsely conceived. Idolatry is a sin against which the most faithful warnings have been uttered in all ages, and on account of which the severest judgments have been inflicted; yet it is that to which humanity is most prone.
3. It is thus the occasion of great moral corruption. “And this thing became a sin” (1 Kings 12:30). It was not without reason that the Israelitish king was branded in sacred history as “Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin.” That sin consisted in a one-sided construction and use of the facts of sacred history, and an arrogant assumption to improve the religious worship of the nation by most dangerous methods that had no proper sanction from Jehovah or His prophets. He may be regarded as a type of the Roman hierarchy, which, in its efforts to bind the people to St. Peter’s chair, has verily set up graven images in connection with its worship, and, assuming to represent the sanctities of a holy antiquity, has, in fact, reproduced the forms of heathen idolatry. Idolatry is the fruitful source of many other sins.
IV. It is not scrupulous as to the agents it employs (1 Kings 12:31). Not that the king selected priests from persons of low birth or infamous character. This would have brought his system of worship into contempt. The priesthood had hitherto been hereditary and confined to the tribe of Levi. But it is probable that the Levites opposed the unauthorised innovations, and refused to give their sanction to the new religion; indeed, they left their possessions and came to Jerusalem, where they found a more congenial sphere for their sacred functions (2 Chronicles 11:13-17). But, not to be foiled in his purpose, Jeroboam created a new priestly order, taken indiscriminately from the entire population, irrespective of rank or tribes. The wily schemer never lacks instruments to work out his designs.
V. It has all the outward seeming of a genuine institution (1 Kings 12:32-33). There was the Temple, the feast of dedication, the altar, the sacrifice, the priests. Nothing is more delusive than religious form and ceremony. There may be the most elaborate ritual, while the spirit of religion is extinct. The most gorgeous tapestry may hide a wall honey-combed with decay.
LESSONS:—
1. A Man-Made Religion is deficient in fundamental truth.
2. In spiritual life.
3. In authority.
4. In practical morality.
5. In saving efficacy.
GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES
1 Kings 12:25-33. The demoralizing influence of idolatry on national life.
1. It leads to a national enfeeblement, against which the strongest fortresses afford no protection (1 Kings 12:25).
2. It distorts the idea of God (1 Kings 12:28).
3. It loosens the bonds of morality (1 Kings 12:30).
4. It leaves the people an easy prey in the hands of a selfish and unscrupulous ruler.
5. It caricatures the solemnities of worship (1 Kings 12:31-33).
6. It issues in national extinction.
1 Kings 12:25. Shechem had been ruined and sowed with salt (Judges 9:45), it had been rebuilt (1 Kings 12:1), but now made a royal city, as being in meditullio regni, in the middle of the kingdom: as Constantinople, for its situation, is said to be a city fatally founded, to command a great part of the world.—Trapp.
—As soon as Jeroboam obtained the wish of his heart, namely, the rulership, he asked no longer about the condition under which it was promised to him, and with which it was bound up (chap. 1 Kings 11:38). How often we forget, when God has granted to us the desire of our hearts, to walk in His ways. He who obtains rulership by the path of rebellion, must always be in fear and anxiety lest he lose it again in the same way, for the populace which to-day cries, Hosanna! will on the morrow shout, Crucify! crucify! An evil conscience makes the most stout hearted and the strongest timid and anxious, so that he sees dangers where there are none, and then, to insure his own safety, devises wrong and evil instruments. One false step always requires another.—Lange.
—Humanly speaking, Jeroboam’s fear was, it must be confessed, well-founded. We cannot, therefore, be surprised that he gave way to the temptation of helping forward the plans of Providence by the crooked devices of a merely human policy. His measures for counteracting the tendency to reunion with Judah were cleverly devised, and proved him “wise in his generation.” The later history shows that they were effectual. Like all measures which involve a dereliction of principle, they brought certain evils in their train; and they drew down a Divine judgment on himself which he had not faith enough to anticipate. But they fully secured the object at which he aimed. They prevented all healing of the breach between the two kingdoms. They made the separation final. They produced the result that not only no reunion took place, but no symptoms of an inclination to re-unite ever manifested themselves during the whole period of the double kingdom.—Speaker’s Comm.
1 Kings 12:28-33. The sin of Jeroboam wherewith he caused Israel to sin. I. He erected images of God against the supreme commandment of God (Exodus 20:4). II. He set aside the prescribed order of the servants of God, and made his own priests. III. He altered the feast, which was a reminder of the great deeds of God, and made it a mere nature-and-harvest feast. That is the greatest tyranny when the ruler of a land makes himself the master also of the faith and conscience of his subjects.
—In the estimation of the people of the world this policy of Jeroboam is held to be proper, because they consider that religion is to be established, held, and altered as may be useful and good for the land and the people and the common interest, and that the regimen is not for the sake of the religion, but the religion for the regimen. Consequently Jeroboam acted well and wisely in the matter. But God says, on the other hand, all that I command you, that shall ye observe, ye shall not add thereto (Deuteronomy 12:32). For godliness is not to be regulated by the common weal, but the common weal is to be regulated by godliness. Every government which employs religious instrumentalities, and interferes with the faith of the people, not for the sake of God and the salvation of souls, but for the attainment of political ends, shares the guilt of the sin of Jeroboam, and involves itself in heavy responsibilities.—Cramer.
1 Kings 12:28. “Whereupon the king took counsel.” Compared with 1 Kings 12:26—“And Jeroboam said in his heart.” The mental toils of the cunning.
1. A wicked, crooked policy involves far more anxiety and labour than a straightforward policy.
2. The sinful plotter is in a perpetual fever of fear—he is in antagonism with both God and man.
3. Many of the schemes of the cunning are too diabolical to be divulged; they must be hidden within one solitary breast. What a horrible picture is presented by such a mind to the eye of the Omniscient!
4. A temporary success intensifies the mental pressure.
5. The most complicated contrivances of the cunning end in humiliating defeat.
—He invented a political religion, instituted feasts in his own times different from those appointed by the Lord, gave the people certain objects of devotion, and pretended to think it would be more inconvenient and oppressive to them to have to go up to Jerusalem to worship. This was not the last time that religion was made a state engine to serve political purposes. It is strange that in pointing out his calves to the people he should use the same words that Aaron used when he made the golden calf in the wilderness, when they must have heard what terrible judgments fell upon their fore fathers for this idolatry.
—Oh, the mischief that comes of wicked infidelity! It was God’s prophet that had rent Jeroboam’s garment into twelve pieces, and had given ten of them to him, in token of his sharing the ten tribes; who, in the same breath, also told him that the cause of this distraction was their idolatry. Yet now will he institute an idolatrous service for the holding together of them whom their idolatry had rent from their true sovereign to him. He says not, God hath promised me this kingdom; God hath conferred it; God shall find means to maintain his own act; I will obey Him, let Him dispose of me. The God of Israel is wise and powerful enough to fetch about his own designs; but, as if the devices of men were stronger than God’s providence and ordination, he will be working out his own ends by profane policies. Jeroboam, being born an Israelite, and bred in the court of a Solomon, could not but know the express charge of God against the making of images, against the erection of any rival altars to that of Jerusalem; yet now that he sees both these may avail much to the advancing of his ambitious project, he sets up those images, those altars. Wicked men care not to make bold with God in cases of their own commodity. If the laws of their Maker lie in the way of their profit or promotion, they either spurn them out or tread upon them at pleasure. Aspiring minds will know no God but honour. Israel sojourned in Egypt, and brought home a golden calf; Jeroboam sojourns there, and brought home two. It is hard to dwell in Egypt untainted. Not to savour of the sins of the place we live in is no less strange than for wholesome liquor tunned up in a musty vessel not to smell of the cask. The best body may be infected in a contagious air. Let him beware of Egypt that would be free from idolatry.—Bp. Hall.
—To the perverted man, what he shall do for his God is forthwith too much. In matters of faith and of the homage due to God, we should not consider what is convenient and agreeable to the great mass, but should enquireire only for what God prescribes in His Word. He who conciliates the sensuonsness and the untutored ways of the masses, and flatters their unbelief or their superstition, belongs to the false prophets who make broad the way of life. Doctrines and institutions which depart from the revealed Word of God are often praised as progress and seasonable reforms, while in truth they are steps backward and corrupting innovations. In Christendom we pray no longer to wood and stone, and to golden calves, and think ourselves thereby raised far above a darkened heathenism, but, nevertheless, we often place the creature above the Creator, and abandon ourselves to it with all our love, and consideration, and service. Behold the things and persons thou lovest with thy whole heart and strength, these are thy gods. What use of typical representations in the worship of God is permitted, and what is forbidden?—Calwer.
1 Kings 12:30. Idolatry a sin.
1. It is a violation of the Divine commandment (Exodus 20:4).
2. It ignores the claims of the Most High.
3. It is degrading to the votary.
4. It is pernicious in its example to others.
5. They who think to secure their safety by sin only hasten the ruin they would avoid.
—As a great tree in a forest, when it falls drags down many others with it, so also are many others carried along by the bad example of those who rule when they fall away from their religion, or sin otherwise grossly against God.—Starke.
—Every accessory to sin is filthy, but the first authors of sin are abominable. How is Jeroboam branded in every of these sacred leaves. How do all ages ring of his fact with the accent of dishonour and indignation. “Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, that made Israel to sin.” It was a shame for Israel that it could be made to sin by a Jeroboam; but O, cursed name of Jeroboam, that would draw Israel to sin! The followers and abettors of evil are worthy of torment, but no hell is too deep for the leaders of public wickedness.—Bp. Hall.
1 Kings 12:31. We have in the new covenant no Levitical priesthood, indeed, but a pastoral and preaching office which the Lord has instituted, so that thereby the body of Christ may be edified (Ephesians 4:11). He who despises this office, and thinks that any one without distinction and without a lawful calling may exercise it, is a partaker in the sin of Jeroboam. “No one,” says the Augsburg Confession, “shall teach or preach publicly in the church, or administer the sacrament, without due calling.”
—It is not the metal that makes their gods, but the worship—the sacrifices. What sacrifices could there be without priests? No religion could ever want sucred masters of Divine ceremonies. God’s clergy was select and honourable, branches of the holy stem of Aaron. Jeroboam rakes up his priests out of the channel of the multitude: all tribes, all persons, were good enough to his spurious devotion. Leaden priests are well fitted for golden deities. Religion receives either much honour or blemish by the quality of those who serve at her altars. We are not worthy to profess ourselves servants of the true God if we do not hold his service worthy of the best.—Bp. Hall.
1 Kings 12:32-33. The empty pretences of Ritualism.
1. Ritualism is not absolutely essential to spiritual religion.
2. Its highest function is only as a means, and that chiefly to the most rude and ignorant.
3. It may be altered according to the whim or wish of an irreligious sovereign.
4. It is most claborate and showy where the worship is most idolatrous.
5. It is disappointing to the sincere and spiritual worshipper.
6. All pretences to religious zeal, contrary to God’s revealed will, are but the devices of Satan, more fatally to delude men’s souls.
—We must not conceal from ourselves that there are many persons who, at the bottom of their hearts, will think that Jeroboam acted wisely in the course he took, and cannot see how he could have got over the difficulty in his path but by some such course as that which he adopted. How could he otherwise have managed? The answer is, he need not have managed at all. He had been appointed king under the Divine sanction. He held his crown under the condition of obedience, and on that condition the continuance of the crown to his house was pledged to him. Nothing was wanted on his part but unreserved faith in that promise. If Jeroboam had possessed that faith he would have been free from any anxiety on the subject, he would have felt that it was safer to incur an apparent danger in pursuing the career of duty and right doing, than to seek exemption from it by unlawful doing and tortuous policy. The Lord had given him every reason to trust in the sufficiency of His protection when He had compelled king Rehoboam to dismiss the forces with which he was prepared to fall upon him in his comparatively helpless condition. If it be asked how he was to be secured from the danger which stood so distinctly before him, we can only answer, “We do not know.” Nor had Jeroboam any need to know. God knew; and it was his clear course to do right, trusting all the rest to God.—Kitto.
1 Kings 12:32. The Feast of Tabernacles, to be observed in the seventh month (Leviticus 23:34), Jeroboam transferred to the eighth month. A plausible occasion for this arbitrary deviation from the law which repeatedly names the seventh month as the time appointed of the Lord (Leviticus 23:34; Leviticus 23:39; Leviticus 23:41), might be found in the circumstance that in the northern districts of his kingdom the grain ripened at least a month later than in the southern Judah, as this festival was to be kept at the ingathering of the fruit of the land (the grain); the proper ground, however, lay in the design to make the separation also in a religious aspect as complete as possible, although he adhered to the day of the month on account of the weak, who might take offence at the innovations. For that there were many besides the priests and Levites who were highly dissatisfied with these illegal proceedings appears from the notice (2 Chronicles 13:16) that Israelites out of all the tribes devoted in heart to the Lord went to Jerusalem to sacrifice there to the God of their fathers. Still, not content with all this, with erecting sanctuaries and places of worship, instituting priests and changing feasts, Jeroboam himself offered sacrifice at the altar at Bethel, in order to prove himself to be the spiritual head of his kingdom.—Keil.
—The festivals which an entire people celebrate in remembrance of the great deeds of God for them are the support of their faith and of their life of fellowship. It is to destroy this life when, from prejudice and for the sake of outward worldly considerations, arbitrarily they are altered or abandoned.
1 Kings 12:33. As it is good and praiseworthy when kings and princes engage in the service of God along with their subjects, and set them a good example, so also is it blameworthy when they do it only to win the people over to themselves, and to secure their authority over them.—Lange.
—“Which he had devised of his own heart.” The entire system of Jeroboam receives its condemnation in these words. His main fault was, that he left a ritual and a worship where all was divinely authorized, for ceremonies and services which were wholly of his own devising. Not being a prophet, he had no authority to introduce religious innovations. Not having received any commission to establish new forms, he had no right to expect that any religious benefit would accrue from them. He was placed in difficult circumstances, but he met them with the arts of a politician, not with the single-mindedness of a saint. His arrangements had a certain cleverness, but they were not really wise measures; instead of securing and strengthening, they tended to corrupt, and so to weaken the nation.—Speaker’s Comm.