Readings for today: 1 Kings 15:25-16:34, 2 Chronicles 17
Today’s reading highlights what happens when a nation or a people or an individual abandons God. We descend into chaos. We drag everyone down with us. Everyone who is under our authority. Everyone over whom we have influence. Everyone who lives under our rule and reign. Jeroboam was an unfaithful man. Though raised up by God, he quickly abandoned God’s ways and refused to obey God’s commands. Particularly concerning worship. He set up idols in his cities so his people wouldn’t go down to Jerusalem. He set up a new priesthood to replace the Levites. He builds new temples and shrines and establishes new cultic practices. In essence, Jeroboam creates a whole new religion to replace that which God established in His Word. The result is judgment. Jeroboam dies. A battle for the throne ensues. Kings are murdered. Families massacred. Entire households wiped out to the last man. It is brutal. It is bloody. It is like an episode of Game of Thrones.
Chaos is what happens when humanity tries to live without God. This is the central message of the Bible. We are sinful and corrupt to the core. We are selfish and greedy. We have a lust for power that will never be quenched. Given the right set of circumstances, all of us are capable of great evil. If there’s one thing history demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt, it’s that human beings are totally depraved. The evidence is overwhelming. The case is convincing. God’s verdict is just. We all deserve death. We all deserve judgment. We all contribute to the chaos of our world either by the things we do or the things we refuse to do. And that’s why we need Jesus.
Jesus is the prince of peace. The destroyer of chaos. The one who holds the authority over life and death. Sin and evil. The one who died in order to save. I love how one of my favorite authors, Paul Scherer, once put it, writing in the midst of World War II - “(Christ) stands not at the circumference but at the center of the human experience because sin stands there: to be met in the gospel with more than love; to be met with rescue. (In Christ) all that could become man in God and all that could become God in man got into the world to work out His holy will, not around the edges but from the very heart and core of all that is worst and most irrevocable about living. The 20th century, the death that rains out of the skies, stripped and broken lives wandering forlornly across the frontiers of Europe, war chattering its red insanities on the horizon of every day that dawns, your life, my life, with their old habits that cling like barnacles to a ship’s hull, all of it piling up into weird and monstrous shapes! The hand that lays hold of such a world is terrible, crushing empires; but pierced, bringing life again out of death. Lifting all our wrong and all our rebellion until it becomes as it were God’s own, and He Himself becomes it’s victim. There is no deliverance out of the process of history. There is only deliverance in it, and that by a God who is not alone outside it or against it but in the process Himself.”
Friends, the only hope we have for peace in the midst of our chaotic world is Jesus. The Prince of Peace. The Author of our salvation. The Name that is above every name. The Wonderful Counselor and Mighty God. And the good news of the gospel is that He has come to deliver us! He has come to rescue us! He has come to meet us right where we are in the middle of all we are going through! He will never leave us or forsake us! He will never abandon us to our fate! He is with us. He is for us. And if we will simply humble ourselves and turn to Him, we will find Him waiting with open arms. May we turn to Him as a nation. As a church. As individuals. So that we may receive the peace that only He can bring.
Readings for tomorrow: 1 Kings 17-19