Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Faithless People, Faithful God | Historical Books | 1 Kings 14:21-31

Episode Date: August 28, 2025

What's the difference between Israel and Judah? What are Asherah poles? Do you worship God, or your idea of God? In today's episode, Patrick shares how 1 Kings 14:21-31 reminds us of God's faithfulness amid a faithless culture. If you're listening on Spotify, tell us about yourself and where you're listening from! Read the Bible with us in 2025! This year, we’re exploring the Historical Books—Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel, and 1 & 2 Kings. Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: 1 Kings 14:21-31

Welcome to 10 minute Bible talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. As we come to the end of 1st Kings chapter 14, I think it's important to remember the context. In the last few chapters, we saw how Solomon's son, Rehoboam, rebelled against God. And as a result, God allowed a civil war to happen in Israel. In the northern 12 tribes, they form a new nation, which keeps the name of Israel. they're led by a man named Jeroboam that God set apart to be king over them. The southern two tribes, Benjamin and Judah, become a different country, which is titled Judah because that's the bigger tribe.

And what you should know if you've never visited Israel, which is probably most of us, is that the northern part of Israel, which was called Israel, it's the most wealthy part of Israel. It's the greenest part of Israel. It has the most natural resources. And that's one reason why this northern Kingdom of Israel was usually the top dog. When the Northern Kingdom and the Southern Kingdom went up against each other, the North almost always won. It's also the reason why the Northern Kingdom often faced the most external threats. It was the more externally threatening of the two. And so as the story goes on, Jeroboam becomes king, and God challenges him to be like David, to walk in his ways and says that if he'll walk like David, God will bless him and his kingdom. But as we

saw in 1st Kings 13 and the beginning of 1st Kings 14, Jeroboam doesn't do that. He gives in to the people. He sets up idols and Asherapoles and they worship gods apart from Yahweh. And as a result, God says, okay, Jeroboam, he didn't hold up your end of the deal. And he allows Jeroboam's son to die. And he tells Jeroboam that a day is coming where he will rip away the kingdom from Jeroboam's descendants and send the people of Israel who committed idolatry alongside him, often to exile, beyond the river Euphrates. And as a reader, we're maybe expecting that something different is going on in the south. Yes, Rehoboam had a weak start, but perhaps he's learned his lesson.

And perhaps the southern kingdom will remain faithful where the northern kingdom remained faithless. And so the camera moves, as it were, from the northern kingdom and Jeroboam south to the southern kingdom. And in this passage, we see what's happening during the reign of Jeroboam in that southern kingdom where Rehoboam is still king. So we'll read this whole passage together. Verse 21. Rehoboam, son of Solomon, was king in Judah. He was 41 years old when he became king, and he reigned for 17 years in Jerusalem, the city the Lord had chosen out of all the tribes of Israel in which to put his name. His mother's name was Naima. She was an ammonite. So we need to pause right here,

because this little fact that his mom was an ammonite gets repeated twice in this passage. And there's a reason for it. That's because Israel's king was supposed to come from Israel's people. And yet we know that Solomon, Rehoboam's dad, had wives from many different countries, wives that worshipped other gods, wives that led the people into idolatry. And it turns out that Rehoboam's mom was one of these women. And the implication here is that just like his mom, Rehoboam is not going to be faithful to Yahweh. Rehoboam is going to worship the gods of the Ammonites. and as the king goes, so the people go. And so if Rehoboam does this, the people will be walking in idolatry. Let's continue. Judah, that's the name of the southern kingdom, did evil in the eyes of the Lord.

By the sins they committed, they stirred up his jealous anger more than those who were before them had done. They also set up for themselves high places, sacred stones, and ashorepoles on every high hill, and under every spreading tree. there were even male shrine prostitutes in the land. The people engaged in all the detestable practices of the nations the Lord had driven out before the Israelites. And so here we get our answer. It turns out that Judah really is no different than Israel. They commit all the exact same sins that Israel committed. Specifically, it talks about high places. These were places of worship that weren't the temple. And so in some cases, people were there worshipping Yahweh, but not in the way Yahweh had told them to worship him. but we get this added detail that in these high places there were Ashera poles.

Now, I don't blame you if you don't know what that is, but if you live in the United States, you might be familiar with the idea of totem poles, basically trees that are carved to look like animals. And that's kind of what an Asherah pole was. It was a great tree that was carved to look like the goddess Asherah. Asherah was the consort, the mother god, to Iya, the father god, in much of Canaanite mythology. And it's clear that in Israel, they took on some of these Canaanite ideas, and they depicted Ashera as the wife of Yahweh. But Yahweh wants the people to know, I and I alone am God. I don't have a wife. There are no other gods. There is no mother God. There is only me. And so when the Israelites worship Yahweh plus Asherah, it means they're not worshipping

Yahweh at all. They're just worshipping an idea of Yahweh that they have in their heads, an idea that's shaped by the nations around them. And I think this is still a temptation for us today. We all have a picture of Jesus, we all have a picture of God in our minds. The question is, is that picture shaped by what God says about himself? Or is it shaped by our culture? It's not hard to find Christians who say things like, well, if God was really loving, then he would believe X. And since I believe he's loving, he must believe what I believe.

We see this when it comes to sex and sexuality in our culture. We live in a very sensual culture. And in Christian circles, it sounds like as long as sex is in a loving relationship, it must be fine. And so we transform what God says, which is that sex is between a man and a woman in the context of a covenantal relationship. And we expand it and say, no, God being a good loving God, he must affirm my view of sex and sexuality. That's just a small example, but it shows that the same temptation to make God into our own image, to make God into the image of our culture, well, it's nothing new. The passage goes on. In the fifth year of King Riaboem, Shishak,

King of Egypt attacked Jerusalem. He carried off the treasures of the temple of the Lord and the treasures of the royal palace. He took everything, including all the gold shields Solomon had made. So King Rehoboam made bronze shields to replace them and assigned those to the commanders of the guard on duty at the entrance of the royal palace. Whenever the king went to the Lord's temple, the guards bore the shields, and afterwards they returned them to the guardroom. Now, why is this story in here? Well, I think it's rather symbolic. It's a sign that the wealth of Solomon's kingdom has suddenly disappeared. If Solomon's kingdom was a golden era, then Rehoboam's kingdom is an era of bronze, of less valuable metal. And it's suggesting that Judah, the kingdom that still has the line of

David, well, it's in a state of decline. It's moving away from God. That's what the story of kings wants to tell us again and again and again. What makes this passage so fascinating to me, is that we kind of expect God to come in and do to Rehoboam what he did to Jeroboam, which is say, look, you committed idolatry, I'm taking the kingdom away from you, I'm going to send you off into exile. But that doesn't happen. And it doesn't exactly tell us why, but if you're reading along with these books, you know the reason why. It's because God made a promise to David. And he said, David, if you're faithful, if you walk alongside me, I will keep your descendants on the throne. And so God is showing grace and mercy.

mercy to Rehoboam, the line of David. He's saying, even though you are faithless, I will be faithful. Even though you rebel against me, I won't turn on you. Again, I think this is really good news for us, because we may not be Rehoboam, we may not commit the sins of Rehoboam, but the truth is we are all faithless in our own way. We all turn against God, we all rebel against God, and we wonder in our hearts, how is God going to respond to this reality, to my sin, to my shame, to all the things that I've done wrong? And I think the answer is the same. Even though you are faithless, I am faithful. And we can ask the question why. And the answer isn't because of David long ago. It's because of great David's greater son. Because Jesus went to the cross and he died for our sins. He paid the

penalty for every wrong deed that we do. He was faithful where we were faithless. so that in him we might be declared faithful, so that in him we might become righteous, so that by his death and his resurrection, we might receive what he deserved, while he received what we deserved, which was death, separation from God, and destruction on the cross. Of course, all of this grace and mercy that God is showing to Rehoboam is for a purpose. God is kind to us because he wants to lead us into repentance, and that's his hope for this Southern Kingdom of Judah, that if he continues to show them kindness, despite their failures, they would see his goodness, they would see his mercy, they would see his grace, and that would

motivate them unto obedience. The same is true in our life. We do fail time and time again, and God is faithful and just to forgive us, but he doesn't forgive us so that we can lightly and blithely go about sinning as we did before. He does that precisely because he wants to transform us, because he wants to inspire us and lead us to walk in obedience with him. So I want you to think about your own life. All the idols that you have, the Asherapoles, the high places, the things that you lay your life down for. It might be success. It might be sexuality.

It might be your self-righteousness. There's a million things that we can turn into idols in our lives. God sees them and he's not happy with them. And yet he forgives us in Jesus' name. And when he forgives us, he calls us to something higher, to walk in his ways, to be in his presence, and to learn to become like him.