Year 6, Day 310: 2 Chronicles 10

Theological Commentary: Click Here

Discipleship Focus: Guidance

• Guidance: God grants us His guidance.  Sometimes this guidance is God leading us away from temptation.  Sometimes this guidance is helping us to follow in a direction for which He has chosen.  Our default position should be to wait for God’s guidance and then follow when it comes.

It is David’s grandson that becomes king when the wheels come off of the Hebrew nation.  Do you hear that?  David’s grandson!  We’re on the third generation from David and the country is already split into two separate nations!  It’s hard to think about how it happened so quickly.

In fact, the Bible is very clear about this.  We’re not told about this event in Chronicles, but if we turn to 1 Kings 11:29-39 we can see the answer.  Solomon let in the foreign gods.  Solomon made treaty after treaty with foreign nations.  Solomon brought the daughters of foreign kings to his homeland as a sign of the pacts between them.  With those daughters come the foreign gods.  With those foreign gods comes rebellion.  It’s actually quite simple.  Because the foreign gods have become popular in God’s nation, God tells His prophets that the split will occur after Solomon’s death.

The worship of God is about humbleness and coming before Him to serve Him.  It is about acknowledging that our ways are not as good as His ways.  But with the introduction of foreign gods, the people are faced with an opportunity to pick gods that match their own personal needs, desires, goals, and ideology.   Instead of a nation rooted in humbleness before God, we have a nation seeking to justify their own desires.

We can see the effect of the foreign gods in Rehoboam.  Rehoboam seeks the advice of the elders.  They tell him to ease the burden of the people so that the people will serve him for his whole life.  But that’s not what Rehoboam wants.  He doesn’t want to live less posh than his father.  Rehoboam wants more luxury!  So Rehoboam listens to the people who think like him – the people he grew up with.  Rehoboam isn’t looking to be humble; he is looking to justify what he wants!

Rehoboam isn’t willing to listen to good sound advice because he has been brought up in a culture that allows him to find a belief system that justifies his thinking.  The only guidance that Rehoboam will listen to is his own.  His mind is not open; it is closed.

<><