False Hopes

Counterfeit Coinage

The Scriptures leave us in no doubt why ancient Israel, then Judah lost their independence and became vassal states.  Both the northern and southern kingdoms were subjugated by foreign powers, eventually passing from human history.  Israel went first, then one hundred years later Judah followed.

Why?
  The reflexive, yet wrong, explanation is that God does not care about nations, kingdoms, politics, justice, law, or national religion.  Such things, we are told, are not within the purview of His redemption.  On the contrary, it is precisely because God's redemption includes all human culture that judgement fell upon Israel and Judah.  Both had rebelled against God and His covenant of grace; certain inevitable consequences followed.

Following the breakup of Israel after Solomon the northern kingdom of Israel, based in its capital city Samaria, never had a king or ruler who acknowledged and feared God.  The books of I and II Kings provide an enduring indictment of that Kingdom: it had a succession of rulers who were inveterate in their following after the sins of Jeroboam (its first king) who made Israel sin.  Jeroboam was a pagan, pure and simple, although part of the covenant people.  He was an idolater and used the power of the state to introduce and enforce idolatrous worship in Israel.

Judah had both faithful and unfaithful kings (and one perverse queen).  Judah also has an enduring indictment: even the faithful kings who feared and loved Yahweh failed to "remove the high places" which were shrines of idol worship in Judah.

Israel's sin was flat out, full throated national idolatry.  Its infidelity is the template for our modern secular states in the West, where the dominant and established creed is "There is no god but Man and the state is His servant."  Judah's sin is more likely to be found within the visible church in the West.  The church formally professes to fear and love the Lord Jesus Christ, but tolerates all sorts of compromises and dalliances with official, established paganism.

The point is that the tolerances and compromises of Judah led in time to exactly the same results as the open rebellion of Israel.  The Assyrians were God's avenging angel upon Israel; the Babylonians a century later were His avenging angel upon Judah.  But the end-game was the same.  The great challenge of our day in the churches of the West is to fear the Lord Jesus and remove the high places--all the compromises with idolatry which we currently tolerate in our midst.

Syncretism is never a coin of the realm in God's Kingdom.