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We want the old and the young to work side by side, if the work is to last and the sanctuary is to be ample enough to embrace all shades of character and tendencies of thought. If either the grey beards of Solomon's court or the hot heads of Rehoboam's get the reins in their hands, they will upset the chariot. That mingled sound of weeping and joy from the Temple hill tells a more excellent way.
The Messianic prediction, or the expectation that the kingdom, divided in Rehoboam's reign, once more united under a prince of the house of David, should be exalted to new bloom and lustre, which in the older prophets was the natural and historically explicable form in which the ideal of Israel's future presented itself to the seer, but which, under the influence of the changed political conditions, had already been replaced in the later prophecy by the more general conception of a future triumph of the true religion of which Israel was the bringer, returned, yet not as the ideal of the prophetic spirit, but as a dogma, the product of scriptural interpretation.
King Shishak stood over the captives grasping a group of them by the hair and smiting them with a club, and slaves carried the golden treasures that had been stripped from the temple at Jerusalem, and the plunder taken from Rehoboam's palace. On our return to Luxor my donkey boy Abda and I had a disagreement.
He chose for his subjects Rehoboam's answer to the suffering Israelites: "My little finger shall be thicker than my father's loins; my father hath chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions"; and Samuel prophesying to Saul how dearly he shall learn that "Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness as an iniquity and idolatry."
That divine control does not in the least affect the freedom or the guilt of the actors. Rehoboam's disregard of the people's terms was 'a thing brought about of the Lord, but it was Rehoboam's sin none the less. That which, looked at from the mere human side, is the sinful result of the free play of wrong motives, is, when regarded from the divine side, the determinate counsel of God.
So now there were two kings in Israel, and Rehoboam's kingdom was called the kingdom of Judah, and that of Jeroboam was called the kingdom of Israel; but after the kingdom was divided no kings ever reigned who could be compared with David and Solomon.
They might have endured the separate monarchy, but they could not endure the separate Temple. So all priests and Levites in Israel, and all the adherents of the ancestral worship in the Temple at Jerusalem, withdrew to the southern kingdom and added much to its strength. Rehoboam's narrow escape taught him neither moderation nor devotion, his new strength turned his head.
And Asa had an army of men that bare targets and spears, out of Judah three hundred thousand; and out of Benjamin, that bare shields and drew bows, two hundred and fourscore thousand: all these were mighty men of valour. 2 CHRON. xiv. 2-8. Asa was Rehoboam's grandson, and came to the throne when a young man.
Now therefore when he fell upon the country of the Hebrews, he took the strongest cities of Rehoboam's kingdom without fighting; and when he had put garrisons in them, he came last of all to Jerusalem.
So here Rehoboam's sins take visible form in Sheshak's army. He has sown the dragon's teeth and they spring up armed men.
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