God Himself granted to Jeroboam the northern tribes for a kingdom. There was no sin breaking up the nation that way. Where Jeroboam sinned was twisting religion to political ends.
Here in America, the churches have joined in the sin of Jeroboam. We haven’t raised rival temples, in that we don’t have one single Temple of God, but symbolically, we have raised up a rival religion: We have made the state our god.
When I merely hint or suggest to the faithful followers of Christ our wars are wrong, there will be no substantive discussion of issues. There is a mindless emotional bristling that I am tearing at the fabric of our nation in failing to support the troops. And somehow a mindless devotion to destruction of a bunch of people who did us no harm is equated to true devotion to God.
Jesus Christ did not support any human government, refusing to let Himself be dragged into the conflict. He did suggest it’s simpler to let Rome have what she justly demanded — tribute — but devotion and loyalty was God’s. He also noted we should avoid cursing those who ruled, even if they ruled unjustly. Not that it would make any difference whether we cursed them or didn’t, in the sense God was already on the case. The point was proper respect, as was the entire subtext of His comments about loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself. That pretty much equates to giving what each is properly due.
When His disciples began spreading His message after that first Christian Pentecost, it was most assuredly a call to petition for citizenship in a higher domain, that of Heaven. That was offered as the Empire which ruled all Creation. When the demands of loyalty compete, Heaven wins. You should willingly give up your life if that’s what it costs you to remain loyal to God as your ultimate Lord.
So I don’t counsel you revolt, nor do I suggest there is any good thing which comes from efforts to replace what we have here in the U.S. with something else. God’s taking care of that; America has sinned too much for too long, is doomed. Wrath has begun falling already. But the point is American Christians have tried to drag Jesus into supporting mindless bloodlust. They don’t examine the facts about what we are doing in this world, but simply repeat verbatim the lies told them by a government which does not love Jesus. Don’t confuse them with facts, because in their blinded minds, that marks you as the enemy.
In later generations, after the Northern Kingdom was exiled to other lands, and the Assyrian Empire imported a mixed bag of others into their place, they naturally wanted to know about the local gods of Samaria. So Assyria sent back the priests who had supported the corrupted version of worship which mimicked the Temple worship in Jerusalem. Naturally, to support this false cult, they had chopped out lots of textual material from the Law of Moses.
Modern American Christians have chopped out of their Bibles the intellectual culture in which it was written. They refuse to read it with the eyes of those who wrote it, but read it with foreign eyes, minds deeply instilled with a foreign understanding which rejects all the assumptions of the people of the Bible. No, it’s not that they don’t understand the epistemology of the Bible; they bluntly reject it. Try just once in a Baptist church, or some other mainstream evangelical congregation, to mention the Ancient Near Eastern Mystical understanding of things, and they’ll go ballistic on you. They have chopped out a lot of Scripture by refusing to understand it as written.
It didn’t matter how wise and powerful were the rulers of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. God took them down, and they were never heard from again. America is next in line for the same judgment.
