2 Chronicles 12:8

2 Chronicles CONTRASTED SERVICES2 Chronicles 12:8 . Rehoboam was a self-willed, godless king who, like some other kings, learned nothing by experience. His kingdom was nearly wrecked at the very beginning of his reign, and was saved much more by the folly of his rival than by his own wisdom. Jeroboam’s religious revolution drove all the worshippers of God among the northern kingdom into flight. They might have endured the separate monarchy, but they could not endure the separate Temple. So all priests and Levites in Israel, and all the adherents of the ancestral worship in the Temple at Jerusalem, withdrew to the southern kingdom and added much to its strength. Rehoboam’s narrow escape taught him neither moderation nor devotion, his new strength turned his head. He forsook the law of the Lord. The dreary series, so often illustrated in the history of Israel, came into operation. Prosperity produced irreligion; irreligion brought chastisement; chastisement brought repentance; repentance brought the removal of the invader-and then, like a spring released, back went king and nation to their old sin. So here-Rehoboam’s sins take visible form in Sheshak’s army. He has sown the dragon’s teeth and they spring up armed men.

Shemaiah the prophet, the first of the long series of noble men who curbed the violence of Jewish monarchs, points the lesson of invasion in plain, blunt words: ‘Ye have forsaken Me.’ Then follow penitence and confession-and the promise that Jerusalem shall not be destroyed, but at the same time they are to be left as vassals and tributaries of Egypt-an anomalous position for them-and the reason is given in these words of our text. I. The contrasted Masters. Judah was too small to be independent of the powerful warlike states to its north and south, unless miraculously guarded and preserved. So it must either keep near God, and therefore free and safe from invasion, or else, departing from God and following its own ways, fall under alien dominion. Its experience was a type of that of universal humanity. Man is not independent. His mass is not enough for him to do without a central orb round which he may revolve. He has a choice of the form of service and the master that he will choose, but one or other must dominate his life and sway his motions. ‘Ye cannot serve God and Mammon’; ye must serve God or Mammon. The solemn choice is presented to every man, but the misery of many lives is that they drift along, making their election unawares, and infallibly choosing the worse by the very act of lazily or weakly allowing accident to determine their lives.

2 Chronicles 12:8. They shall be his servants — That is, they shall be much at his mercy, and put under contribution by him, and some of them taken prisoners, and held in captivity by him: that they may know my service, and the service of the kingdoms, &c. — That they may experimentally know the difference between my yoke, and the yoke of a foreign and idolatrous prince. The more God’s service is compared with other services, the more reasonable and easy it will appear. And, whatever difficulties or hardships we may imagine there are in the way of obedience, it is better, a thousand times, to go through them, than to expose ourselves to the punishment of disobedience. Are the laws of temperance thought hard? The effects of intemperance will be much harder. The service of virtue is perfect liberty, the service of vice perfect slavery.