ACTS BIBLE
From Judges to the Temple's Fall week 6 · 1 Kings 12:25-33; 1 Kings 18:20-39; 2 Kings 17:6-18
Jeroboam sets up two golden calves, Elijah calls fire on Carmel, Amos and Hosea plead, and in 722 BC Assyria carries the ten tribes away.
Solomon's son Rehoboam goes up to Shechem to be made king, and the northern tribes meet him there with a request: lighten the yoke your father laid on us and we will serve you. The old men who had served Solomon tell him to agree. The young men he grew up with tell him to show them who is master, and he takes their advice: my father hath chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions (1 Kings 12:14). Ten tribes go home and make Jeroboam their king. Judah and Benjamin stay with the house of David.
So from about 930 BC there are two kingdoms, Israel in the north with its capital eventually at Samaria, and Judah in the south with Jerusalem and the Temple.
Jeroboam sees his problem at once. If his people keep going up to Jerusalem for the feasts, their hearts will go back to the house of David. So he makes two calves of gold, sets one at Bethel and one at Dan, and tells the people in the very words Aaron had used at Sinai, behold thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt (1 Kings 12:28). He appoints his own priests from whoever will serve, his own feast, and his own month for it, which he had devised of his own heart (1 Kings 12:33).
It was a political arrangement, and politically it worked for two hundred years. Every king of the north after him is measured by it, and the verdict is the same each time: he departed not from the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin.
Under Ahab and his Sidonian queen Jezebel the north goes further. Baal becomes the religion of the court, and the prophets of the LORD are hunted down. Elijah appears without introduction, announces a drought, and in the third year of it summons the nation to Mount Carmel: How long halt ye between two opinions? if the LORD be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him (1 Kings 18:21). The people answer him not a word.
Four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal cry out from morning to noon and cut themselves until the blood runs, and nothing happens. Elijah rebuilds the altar of the LORD with twelve stones, one for each tribe, the ten that had seceded included. He has water poured over the sacrifice three times, and prays once. Fire falls and takes the offering, the wood, the stones, the dust and the water in the trench, and the people fall on their faces: The LORD, he is the God (1 Kings 18:39).
Within a day Jezebel has sworn to kill him, and Elijah is in the wilderness asking God to let him die. Ahab is still king. One afternoon on Carmel had not turned the nation, and God does not promise Elijah that it will turn. He tells him instead that he has kept seven thousand in Israel who have not bowed to Baal (1 Kings 19:18). God knew the number of the faithful when Elijah thought he was the last of them.
A century on, the north is rich under Jeroboam II, and God sends two more prophets to it. Amos, a herdsman from the hills of Judah, preaches against beds of ivory and courts that sell the poor for a pair of shoes: But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream (Amos 5:24). Hosea is told to marry a woman who will be unfaithful to him, and to take her back, so that his own marriage will show Israel what God is doing with them: How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? (Hosea 11:8).
They did not listen. Assyria laid siege to Samaria for three years, and in 722 BC the city fell. The inscriptions of Sargon II claim more than twenty-seven thousand people carried off from it. The ten tribes were scattered through the Assyrian empire and foreigners were settled in their towns. At that point 2 Kings 17 stops telling the story and explains it, and the explanation has nothing to do with armies: they would not hear, but hardened their necks (2 Kings 17:14).
God had sent prophet after prophet before the end came (2 Kings 17:13). He still does. His word goes before his judgment, and in the last days he sent his Son, who lived the faithful life Israel never lived and bore on the cross the wrath that fell on Samaria, so that whoever hears him and comes will not be cast out.