What we learned about this period is three-fold:

• God didn’t want us to have kings – He alone wanted to be our King, and wanted us to call upon Him and obey Him.
• God wanted us to worship Him and Him alone. He was to not only be our King – but our only, one, true God.
• God didn’t care about a building for our worship – He just wanted us to worship Him in the tabernacle of our hearts.

But the kings have been less than perfect – so we’re going to learn something new in this era: Rebellion-Disintegration-Exile. Throughout human history, kingdoms and empires have often divided or fallen as the result of a single unwise decision made by a human leader. Both Solomon and his son Rehoboam qualify as human leaders who made unwise decisions. Solomon was told not to marry foreign wives, yet he had 700 wives of noble birth and 300 concubines – all from the nations surrounding Israel. What made it worse is that he embraced all of the foreign, false religions of his wives and concubines, and actually built temples and worship sites for them. The United Kingdom became a Divided Kingdom.

In my last blog, we talked about the United Kingdom, but in reality no one knew it was united because no one knew it was going to become divided. Back between 1914 and 1918, there was a great war encompassing much of the world. This conflict involved all of the world’s great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances: the Allies versus the Central Powers. More than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, were mobilized in one of the largest wars in history. More than 9 million combatants were killed. Do you know what they called this war? They called it “The Great War” and “The War to End All Wars” and “The War to Preserve Civilization.” We didn’t call it World War I because we hadn’t yet fought World War II. Sometimes we name things in the past, based on our current history.

The United Kingdom of Israel was called “United” because a day would come when it would be divided. The division between “Israel” in the north and “Judah” in the south came about as a punishment for Solomon’s apostasy. Solomon defiled the Temple he built for God. He set up Temple to other gods, and set up shrines and places of worship all through the land. That’s what “apostasy” is: total disregard for one’s faith; dismissing God as if He is unimportant or a figment of our imagination.

Read 1 Kings 11:29-35. The division of Israel into two kingdoms was actually decreed by God beforehand – for a purpose – to punish the line of David for Solomon’s faithlessness, idolism, and apostasy. However, the actual division was accomplished by means of the foolishness of Rehoboam, the son of Solomon. When Rehoboam became king of all Israel upon the death of his father, he gave the people a “take it or leave it” refusal when they asked for relief from their heavy government burden. Not only did most of them "leave it," they left him.

Read about how Israel becomes “Israel” and “Judah” in 1 Kings 12:1-24.

The United Kingdom of Israel lasted through the reigns of Saul, David and Solomon. But Solomon did not follow God – and so God punished the entire nation: after Solomon died, the kingdom split into two, the ten tribes of “Israel” (Reuben, Simeon, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Joseph (Ephraim and Manasseh) and Benjamin) with their capital up in Samaria, and the tribes of Benjamin and Judah forming the kingdom of “Judah” with their capital at Jerusalem. But that’s not the end of the story of these divided people.

Remember – I told you there would be Rebellion that led to Disintegration that ultimately resulted in Exile.

God punished the entire population of the Chosen People of Israel for what Solomon had done. Why? Because it wasn’t all Solomon’s fault. The nation of Israel was complicit as well.

You know how the laws of our land work.

• If you drive the getaway car for a bank robbery – you’re still guilty of bank robbery.
• If you know a crime is going to be committed – but you don’t do something about it, you’re guilty of the same crime.
• If you watch while someone gets beaten and do nothing to help – you’re going to be charged with a crime as well.

Sometimes it’s called “guilt by association.” You might also know it as being “in collusion” or “being an accomplice.” Israel was guilty of what Solomon did. God told them they shouldn’t have a king; that they wouldn’t like having a king; that an earthly king would cause them all kinds of hardships and would be a heavy burden to them.

All along, God has warned the people – and at every turn, they rebel or discount everything God tells them. . . so God ends up punishing them. They pleaded with the prophet Samuel for a king – and God let them have a king. Even then, God tried to get them to use the right word: “prince” indicating that God Himself and He alone would be their king, and that the “prince” would reign under God. Saul wouldn’t do it – so he was fired. David did reign under God – and even though he was basically a terrorist and did some spectacularly evil things, God left him on the throne and made an agreement that his royal lineage would remain on the throne. Solomon didn’t reign under God – in fact, he pretty much wrote God off and worshipped other gods. So God punished the entire nation of Israel for their collective unfaithfulness for not following God as their King.

The northern kingdom of Israel lasted just a little over 200 years. The kings of Israel did horrible things. It started with Jeroboam. Read 1 Kings 12:28-33. It didn’t get any better. Most of the kings of Israel (a.k.a. the northern kingdom) did similar things, and the Bible says similar horrible things about them. Check out Omri, the 7th king of Israel:

“But Omri did evil in the eyes of the Lord and sinned more than all those before him. He walked in all the ways of Jeroboam son of Nebat and in his sin, which he had caused Israel to commit, so that they provoked the Lord, the God of Israel, to anger by their worthless idols” (1 Kings 16:25-26).

Nearly every king of Israel has a similar byline: he did evil in the eyes of the Lord by following the sins of Jeroboam, son of Nebat. . . There’s Rebellion that led to a total Disintegration that ultimately results in Exile. The prophets Elijah and Elisha, Jonah and Amos – all warned the Israelites of the northern kingdom of their treachery and evil. But they wouldn’t listen. So – 200 years and 20 kings later, Israel is conquered by the Assyrians, and by 721 BC nearly every person had been taken into exile to Assyria. Read 2 Kings 17:1-23.

Wait a minute – even Judah was failing in keeping the commands of the Lord? Yep. About 135 years later, in 586 BC, after continual warnings from Isaiah and Jeremiah and other prophets, the southern kingdom of Judah was conquered by the Babylonians, and nearly all of the people were taken into captivity to Babylon. The Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed at that time and all of the beautiful artifacts were destroyed or were stolen and are still missing today.

What about Israel – the northern kingdom? What happened to them? A few were left in the land – just a few farmers and sheepherders here and there. It as the custom of the Assyrians to bring in people from other lands to occupy a land they had just conquered – it was a pacification technique and a way of utilizing the land to produce food and taxable income – so those aliens came in and intermingled with the few remaining Israelites in the north and became known as the Samaritans. The vast majority of the Israelites never returned, and we now know them as the “Lost Ten Tribes of Israel.”

What about Judah – the southern kingdom? Babylon fell to the Persians, and a king of the Persians allowed the people of Judah to return to their homeland after 70 years in captivity. They weren’t really captives per se – but they had created new lives for themselves in Babylon, and now they were allowed to return. Any Babylonian wives or children had to be left behind – because the people of Judah were into racial purity at the time – and the descendants of those who returned to the city of Jerusalem in Judah have become the Jewish people of today.

Here is a certainty from our reading of 1 and 2 Kings and 1 and 2 Chronicles:

The people Rebel
their rebellion leads to a total Disintegration of their society
that disintegration ultimately results in being Exiled by God.

Is there something we can learn from this? A lot of the things we see happening in the world today are scary. I am writing this blog soon after the 9.0 earthquake in Japan, followed by the horrific tsunami. At the time of this writing, we’re still unsure of the condition of the Japanese nuclear reactors that are in various stages of melt-down. We’re fighting a war in Afghanistan, Iraq, and are part of a coalition of nations putting military pressure on Libya. Many people have asked if these are indications of the end of time. Earthquakes seem to be increasing. Tsunamis seem to be happening more and more often. Wars break out. Rumors of more wars on the horizon. People have even speculated about the law barring collective bargaining in Wisconsin may be the beginning of the end of our American way of life – surely a sign of the end.

Let me reassure you of a couple of things. We don’t know when the end of human history is coming. Jesus said that even he did not know – only the Father in Heaven knows that timeline.

Something else has happened in recent years to make these events seem all the more scary: cell phones now have international reach; they have video cameras built in; there are social networks like Facebook and Twitter that allow instantaneous uploading of videos and audio files and pictures that can be viewed by millions of people all over the world as the events unfold. We now get news instantaneously instead of the next day or the next week.

Earthquakes and tsunamis are more obvious because we’re made aware of them the instant they happen and we see the devastation first hand over and over again. It may hurt our hearts and trouble our minds – but that doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world.

The trouble we see in the Arab world is not a Muslim problem and it’s not an end-times issue. It’s an Arab-world change in politics started by young, eager, desperate men and women who want a chance at life. If anything – these political changes should hearten us. Americans understand protests, rebellion, and revolution. Our freedom was paid for with the blood of our ancestors – and our freedom continues to be held up by the blood of our brave soldiers each and every day. What’s happening in the Arab world is not a sign of the end of human history – just a very painful change from one history to a new future.

The point I want to make is this: everyday we invite God to enter into humanity and “help us”, “bless us”, “show us the way”, and “change our hearts.” Sometimes God enters our world to intervene and grow us up and we’re surprised by His arrival. god can enter into humanity through upheavals, shaken-up governments, economies gone haywire, and normal turned on its head. When humanity rebels – God has been known to send disintegration – and to lead us into exile for our own sake.

As Christ’s Church – we should remember to pray in a couple of ways – ways we can learn from the Divided Kingdom:

• We should pray for His Kingdom and His will to be first in our lives.
• We should ask Him to forgive us when we sin against Him.
• We should ask Him to keep us from the temptations that threaten to destroy us.
• We should ask Him to deliver us from the evil that threatens to overtake us.
• We should fall down before Him and thank Him that He never will send us away – but that He will instead create in us clean hearts and renew right spirits within us.