Mosaic (Part 3)

Sermon: The Epic Stories of Kings (Part 4)

Rehoboam and Jeroboam-- Seeking Approval

Hank Fortener, one of the other Mosaic pastors, came on stage.  He was wearing a shirt and tie, but he also sported jeans, leather bracelets, and a full, scraggly beard.  Tall and lean with somewhat disorderly hair sticking up beyond his headset mic, Hank exuded trendy.  At first, I thought he was just a campus pastor who had come up to do a scripture reading or warm us up for Erwin.  It took me a second, but I soon realized that Hank was there to preach the actual sermon, and what a sermon it was.  Sure, I was a little surprised that I wouldn’t get to hear Erwin speak, but Hank hit me with a great message, and I think it was one that I needed to hear.

Hank started by wishing us all a happy Fourth of July and mentioned casually that he was trying to be a little less serious on stage after his past few sermons.  “Yeah, Erwin keeps telling me to lighten up up here.”  Maybe it was his candor and informality that caused me to go so long without even realizing I was listening to a sermon.  He was just sort of up there talking to us, and in retrospect, that’s a very good thing.  After all, some of the best sermons I’ve heard are the ones that are conversational enough to invite responses after the service, and this was certainly one of those.

Hank gave a little background and explained that the sermon series on Kings had already covered three leaders: Saul, David, and Solomon-- none of them perfect, but all of them ordained by God.  The problem is that, after these three, the history of Israel moves into kind of a gray area, and it’s a little difficult to discern who is supposed to come next.  Still, the inexperienced Rehoboam steps up to the plate, and Hank explained that this is a biblical character to whom he is particularly drawn because of the difficult circumstances surrounding his reign and because of the complicated factors that influenced his ultimately bad decisions.  Hank read to us from 1 Kings 11:41-12:17 (TNIV) before walking us through the passage and the history that followed:

       As for the other events of Solomon’s reign—all he did and the wisdom he displayed—are they not written in the book of the annals of Solomon?  Solomon reigned in Jerusalem over all Israel forty years.  Then he rested with his ancestors and was buried in the city of David his father. And Rehoboam his son succeeded him as king.

       Rehoboam went to Shechem, for all Israel had gone there to make him king.  When Jeroboam son of Nebat heard this (he was still in Egypt, where he had fled from King Solomon), he returned from Egypt.  So they sent for Jeroboam, and he and the whole assembly of Israel went to Rehoboam and said to him: “Your father put a heavy yoke on us, but now lighten the harsh labor and the heavy yoke he put on us, and we will serve you.”

       Rehoboam answered, “Go away for three days and then come back to me.” So the people went away.

       Then King Rehoboam consulted the elders who had served his father Solomon during his lifetime. “How would you advise me to answer these people?” he asked.

        They replied, “If today you will be a servant to these people and serve them and give them a favorable answer, they will always be your servants.”

        But Rehoboam rejected the advice the elders gave him and consulted the young men who had grown up with him and were serving him.  He asked them, “What is your advice? How should we answer these people who say to me, ‘Lighten the yoke your father put on us’?”

        The young men who had grown up with him replied, “These people have said to you, ‘Your father put a heavy yoke on us, but make our yoke lighter.’ Now tell them, ‘My little finger is thicker than my father’s waist.  My father laid on you a heavy yoke; I will make it even heavier. My father scourged you with whips; I will scourge you with scorpions.’”

        Three days later Jeroboam and all the people returned to Rehoboam, as the king had said, “Come back to me in three days.”  The king answered the people harshly. Rejecting the advice given him by the elders, he followed the advice of the young men and said, “My father made your yoke heavy; I will make it even heavier. My father scourged you with whips; I will scourge you with scorpions.”  So the king did not listen to the people, for this turn of events was from the LORD, to fulfill the word the LORD had spoken to Jeroboam son of Nebat through Ahijah the Shilonite.

        When all Israel saw that the king refused to listen to them, they answered the king:

        “What share do we have in David,

        what part in Jesse’s son?
        To your tents, Israel!

       Look after your own house, David!”

        So the Israelites went home.

        But as for the Israelites who were living in the towns of Judah, Rehoboam still ruled over them.

Notice how Rehoboam delayed the treaty decision, which might seem prudent at first, but then he still wound up acting irresponsibly later on.  Hank highlighted how this meeting was taking place in the south (Judah), a land of little more than sand dunes.  The real fertile land was to the north (Israel), meaning that Rehoboam might want to keep these people happy so that he’s not just ruling over a bunch of sand.  Regarding the decision he was facing, Rehoboam sought advice from Solomon’s wise old advisors (and to be advisors to such a legendarily wise king, these must have been some pretty sharp dudes), but the young king ultimately ignored their advice in favor of the input of “the young men who had grown up with him.”  Hank told us that this phrase might be better translated, “the children who had grown up with him,” because the biblical chroniclers of this event want to play up that these are immature men who are no more experienced than Rehoboam himself.  They’re his buddies, and they are very much children or --more accurately-- party boys.

Because he was still being such a kid, Rehoboam’s next meeting with the Israelites causes the legendary schism between the North and South.  Seriously, look at the language Rehoboam is using here: “I will scourge you with scorpions”?  Really?  What grownup talks like that?  It’s like a little kid using the biggest, scariest words he knows to make a threat.  How do you scourge someone with scorpions?  He’s just trying to one-up Solomon.  Of course, while we’re on that subject, Rehoboam also makes the claim, “My little finger is thicker than my father’s waist.”  Hank paused for a moment to see if people would sense where he was going with this and make the connection for themselves.  Looking around in feigned awkwardness, Hank hesitantly said, “Um . . . he’s not really talking about his little finger here.”  Yep, Rehoboam, despite being young and dumb, is citing his manhood as a credible source of kingly authority.  Real mature, Rehoboam.  Real mature.

I was starting to wonder why Hank had said that he was so drawn to this king, and I was glad that he finally gave us an answer:

Different voices in our lives pull us in different directions.  As it says in Galatians, we must constantly wrestle with the dueling desires of the flesh and the spirit.  We must resolve the conflict between a drive to reach out to others and the lonely addictions that keep us in isolation.  We must move toward the people we want to become.  Rehoboam, on the other hand, has chosen to remain a child in the darkness of ignorance.  He has taken the fertile kingdom for granted in an attempt to assert his manhood, and, as a result, he has lost Israel.  Of course, his brother Jeroboam doesn’t actually fare much better in the long run.

Taking over in the north, Jeroboam wants to prevent his subjects from journeying down to the holy city of Jerusalem (which is still in Rehoboam’s kingdom), so he builds his own center of worship in the far northern city of Dan, and he fills it with golden idols-- hey, it’s what the people want, right?  This reveals that Jeroboam has his own insecurities.  He is afraid of people journeying down to the holy city and staying there in Judah, so he is willing to create a city of idols just to appease his people and keep them in Israel.  Hank compared him to the infamous “No City Sports Fan”-- you know, the individual who cheers for the team of wherever he happens to be at the time.  He’s someone who doesn’t have any real loyalties but just goes along with whatever in order to please the people around him.  In the back of Jeroboam’s mind, Hank suggested that maybe there’s a voice, and that voice is telling him, “You have to do it.  You have to do it, or you will lose them.”

Both of these kings bend over backwards to accommodate the people around them and make foolish decisions in a quest for approval.  They should be ruling boldly and doing what is true to them, but instead, they wimp out and cave to the pressure of their peers.  Do we do this in our own lives sometimes?  Do we wimp out and appease people instead of being bold?  Why is it that we need the approval of others so much?  What are we trying to prove, and to whom are we really trying to prove it?  Hank talked about the “sin of agreement,” when the brave and righteous thing would be to disagree with someone whom we know to be out of line, but we just go along with whatever they say because we value their approval.  It takes a lot of strength to disagree sometimes, especially when we know that jobs or friendships may be on the line.  Showing an impressive amount of vulnerability, Hank talked about how he will sometimes “play small” to maintain people’s approval.  Whenever he does something impressive, he never broadcasts it, but he doesn’t do this so much out of humility; he’s afraid that his accomplishment will intimidate people, and they will push him away.  In particular, Hank recently modeled for an advertising campaign with Sunglass Hut, meaning that he got to fly out to a photo shoot in Hawaii, and his face was going to be in their catalogue and at all their kiosks and stores.  That’s a pretty impressive accomplishment, but do you know how many people Hank told about it?  Maybe half a dozen of his family members.  He had done something very cool, but he was afraid that his friends might feel threatened by it, so he played small.  How often do we do this as Christians?  We have something great to offer, but for fear of scaring off someone we care about, we downplay it and play small.  Do we really care that much about approval that we can’t take even the slightest joy when a blessing comes into our lives?

Rehoboam and Jeroboam are struggling with approval themselves.  They value the opinions of their friends and advisors and subjects so much that they won’t just be themselves.  In all their gestures to try and maintain the approval of others, they’ve forgot that the only approval they should really care about is God’s.  Their hearts have bent away from God and have turned to stone; they rule despotically and arrogantly, all because they have lost track of what really matters.  Of course, centuries later, Christ would come to earth to turn hearts of stone back into flesh.  Christ connects us and helps us overcome the darkness in which we have shrouded ourselves.  Christ laughs with us about our foolish desires to attain approval, and Christ offers us a bridge back to God.  When we focus so much on the approval of others, it comes at a great cost, and Jeroboam and Rehoboam would soon learn this the hard way.

The two kings went to war, and in the midst of this, in rolled Shechem, an opportunistic ruler from Egypt.  As a kid, Hank’s granddad used to delight in watching cheesy old movies, one of his favorites being a classic film about King Solomon’s mines.  I should clarify that we’re talking about a much older movie here-- like the 1950 one, not the Richard Chamberlain/Sharon Stone one.  Hank’s granddad would always say repeatedly throughout the movie, “They’re wasting their time.  Solomon’s treasure is in Egypt.”  Hank wouldn’t understand the significance of this comment until reading about Shechem years later.  In the middle of the conflict between Israel and Judah, Shechem swept in and stole Solomon’s treasure right from under Rehoboam’s nose.  Most notably, he stole the golden shields on the front of the temple, a huge insult to Rehoboam and the kingdom of Judah.  Embarrassed by the theft of the golden shields, Rehoboam commissioned shields of bronze to be forged and put up in their place.  After all, in the sunlight, who could really tell the difference?  Rehoboam had to keep up appearances.  He had to maintain the people’s approval.

Of course, we probably shouldn’t judge Rehoboam too harshly until we stop and think: What are the bronze shields in our own lives?   What are we pretending?  What lies are we maintaining to keep the approval of the other people in our lives?  (Shades of Rick Warren!  I feel like I’ve heard this somewhere else recently.)  Perhaps what we have here is a metaphor for the internal battle we fight to be our true selves.  This isn’t really a story about a divided kingdom at all; it is the story of two divided men.

Hank shared another story about trying to prove something to himself and win approval.  He was embarrassed by his small grill in his backyard, so he and his wife went to buy a new one at the Home Depot-- the largest grill in their price range as a testament to Hank’s manliness.  Of course, the Home Depot offers free assembly if you’re willing to pay for delivery.  “Aha,” Hank thought to himself, “That’s how they get you!  Well, I’m sure we can get this thing home and put it together ourselves.”  After quite an ordeal that involved going home and getting a different car just to transport the thing, Hank found himself assembling a massive grill in his backyard.  Alone.  Unassisted.  In the back of his mind was a little egotistical voice cheering him on the whole time.  “You can do this, man!”  Hank pieced the grill together and had everything pretty well figured out, but then came a terrifying instruction in the booklet.  “The next step requires two people.”  Uh oh.  It was a cruel taunt from the writers of the instructions.  Two people?  There was no one around.  Hank thought about neighbors or friends or maybe waiting for his wife to get home, but then the little voiced popped into his head again: “You can do this, man.”    So there he was, trying to position a massive grill into the frame unassisted, slamming the huge object down onto the frame and hoping for the phantom click that would tell him that it had slid into place.  He was at this for a while, but, finally, his goal was accomplished, and Hank could celebrate!  On his deck, visible from his window, was his new pride and joy.  His great manly accomplishment.  His grill.  Hank could look out the window and beam at it with pride, but the words from the instruction booklet were reverberating in his mind:

The next step requires two people.

Maybe that is the best antidote for our addiction to approval: two people.  Maybe through the support of friends and family, we can break our addiction and be free to stand up for who we really are.  Maybe we need another person to remind us to listen for God’s voice, not the voices of our peers.  Get a friend or family member or significant other to help you with this.  Maybe work out a code word for social settings.  We all need someone else to speak the truth to us sometimes.  We all need someone else who can help drive us toward a more solid relationship with Christ.  We all need someone to talk to, someone who knows our struggles and can relate.  Maybe you need more though, like a support group or community group.  Perhaps you could benefit from participating in Celebrate Recovery.

God is calling us to lead whole and independent lives.

God is calling us to live with Him.

Hank bowed his head in prayer and thanked God for the day and the church and the story of Rehoboam and Jeroboam.  He thanked God for showing us the independence within us and asked for strength in overcoming our dependence on the approval of others.

Hank said, “Amen.”

I thought, “You said it, brother.”