Sermons

Rehoboam inherited a strong and stable kingdom built by David and Solomon. But once the kingdom was firmly established, he grew proud and abandoned the law of Yahweh, and all the people followed him and turned to idolatry. In the end, only five years into his reign, Shishak king of Egypt invaded, and the treasures of the temple and the royal palace were taken.

Though guilty of the same sin, Rehoboam and the people humbled themselves before God and repented, and so they escaped complete destruction; yet through the suffering of becoming Shishak’s servants, they had to learn how serving God differs from serving the world. Even so, because he never set his heart firmly to seek Yahweh, he remained an evil king. Yet even he was buried in the city of David, which shows that the covenant God made with David was faithfully kept to the end, despite the weakness and failure of his descendants.

From his grandfather David and his father Solomon, to the help of the priests and Levites early in his reign, to Shishak’s invasion and the rebuke of the prophet Shemaiah, Rehoboam was given opportunity after opportunity to turn back to God. He took the evil path not because he lacked opportunities, but because, having been given them, he did not choose the way of faith. Before the opportunity given now, the choice still remains to seek God with an undivided heart.

As the first service of 2025 draws near, a new year has been given once again, whether the past year was spent well or not. This church, too, has come to be what it is today through twenty-two years of events great and small, and none of them simply happened by chance.

The same stretch of time does not bring the same growth to every member of the congregation. Those who received their troubles as a calling entrusted to them by God, and went down on their knees, grew in faith; those who poured out their feelings unchecked and complained did not mature as far. Facing death in prison, the apostle Paul wrote to several churches, urging them to live a life worthy of the calling they had received. Such a life means laying down one’s own will and bearing with one another in humility, gentleness and patience. Moses, who went on interceding for the people of Israel to the end, even as God’s anger burned against their sin, was held up as an example of that gentleness.

When each person grows according to the measure of Christ’s gift granted to them, and all work together, the church is built up as the complete body of Christ. It begins with learning to hold back just once, even in moments of anger and of feeling wronged; and those single moments, one upon another, form a firmness that no attack from the world can shake.

The infant Jesus laid aside the throne of heaven and was born in the lowliest of places, a stable and a manger. To rescue humanity, held in darkness by the sin of the first man, Adam, he had to come in a body without sin and overcome the power of death through his death on the cross and his resurrection.

Because he descended to the very lowest place, Jesus was able to embrace all humankind. Those who follow Jesus, who came as the light, have now become children of light, and each must set the light of life they have received upon a lampstand. Yet the light a person carries can shine only on what lies around them, so brothers and sisters in the faith need to gather together and keep one another’s lamps from going out. The strong crushing the weak by the logic of power was no different in the Rome of Jesus’ day than it is in the world today; but as in the dream of the great statue that Daniel made known, all those kingdoms will fall, and only the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, the living stone, will stand forever.

Christmas marks that forgiveness of sins and that life, but it must not end there. Having received that grace, God’s people are called to love their families and their fellow believers, and to grow into mature Christians who hold the light of life high in a world growing ever darker.

Abijah, the son of Jeroboam, fell ill. Despite his father’s hardness of heart, he had remained good in the sight of God to the last, yet his sickness came upon him because of his father’s sin. Jeroboam sent his wife in disguise to seek out the prophet, but the child died, just as had been foretold.

In the eyes of the world, a child’s mortal illness is a misfortune; before God, it was the last opportunity for repentance given to Jeroboam. And for Abijah it was grace, for God took his life before the judgment that would destroy his whole house could fall. It is precisely a desperate trouble beyond any human power to resolve that God uses, in his compelling work, to turn people’s eyes to him.

The world and God draw the line between suffering and blessing in different places. Jeroboam let his opportunity pass, never able to lay himself honestly before God, while Abijah, after a brief affliction of the flesh, was gathered into God’s arms. Rather than resenting present hardship, what is needed is a faith that can see the opportunity God has left open within it.

A prophet from Judah comes to Bethel and boldly proclaims the word of God before the king. The judgment comes to pass there and then, exactly as spoken: the altar is split apart and the king’s hand withers. The prophet firmly refuses the king’s invitation to a meal and, as he was commanded, sets off home by another road.

Yet when the old prophet of Bethel falsely invokes the name of God to call him back, the man who moments earlier had stood unshaken before the king gives way all too easily. Relieved at having finished a great task, and swayed by the authority of one who was a prophet like himself, he watered down the word with his own reasoning. People are most easily brought down not in the place of fear, but in the smooth stretch where they believe they have done the work well.

In the end he is killed by a lion on the road home. The word he delivered was fulfilled to the letter, yet he himself failed to obey to the last. For those who have received the word of God, faith is measured not by knowledge or long experience but by whether they live that word out, and whatever temptation or hardship they meet, they must not turn back from the way they were going.

Jesus came into the world with no place even to be born, and he died on the cross by the most brutal of punishments. Yet on the third day he rose again, and as his followers looked on, he was taken up into heaven, promising that he would come again.

Because his first coming was fulfilled just as the Old Testament foretold, his second coming, though not yet fulfilled, will certainly take place. Living now in the last days, we must first examine whether our hearts are good soil, before asking what we will offer God at Thanksgiving. A thanksgiving offering, acts of service, or the satisfaction of having been zealous may not, by themselves, be the fruit God desires.

The grain in the fields is already white and the harvest is overdue, yet there are no laborers. True laborers are scarce because people heap up their devotion on top of a self they have never nailed to the cross. Now, without delay, we must deny ourselves, answer the call, and offer the fruit of faith that God is looking for in the last days.

When Nahash king of the Ammonites died, David sent envoys to his son Hanun to offer condolences, repaying the kindness Nahash had shown him. Swayed by his officials, Hanun humiliated the envoys, and then, driven by fear, started a war himself and paid a heavy price.

Years later, when Solomon died and Rehoboam came to the throne, an opportunity was given once more: the people asked him to lighten the heavy taxes and forced labor laid upon them. Rehoboam set aside the counsel of the older advisers, followed the young men instead, and declared that he would rule the people even more harshly; as a result the kingdom was torn in two. Jeroboam, too, had been given his throne by God and had received a promise like the one made to David, yet he feared that the people’s hearts would turn back toward the temple in Jerusalem, so he made golden calves and opened the way to idolatry.

When God warned of judgment, that judgment would fall only on those who stayed where they were; it was a chance to escape it by turning back. Rehoboam and Jeroboam alike let that chance slip through fear and a sense of their own inadequacy, and Jeroboam’s kingdom fell after twenty-four years. A heart that trusts God without doubting and waits on him is the way to be remembered as David is.

From his birth Solomon was loved by God and given the name Jedidiah. While he relied on God, he received wisdom and made the kingdom prosper, yet one by one he broke the laws a king was bound to keep: that no foreigner be set on the throne, that he not multiply horses, nor take many wives, nor heap up wealth.

In the end his marriages to foreign women turned his heart, so that he built high places before the temple in Jerusalem and led the whole nation into idolatry. This was no mistake born of ignorance but apostasy, committed by a man who knew the truth. Yet God did not cut him off completely, as he had done with Saul. He did not take away the whole kingdom, but left one tribe for David’s sake.

In his last years Solomon repented of his sin and turned back. Through that one remaining tribe Jesus Christ came as a son of David. Though human faith may waver, God keeps his covenant faithfully to the very end.

The Queen of Sheba hears of Solomon’s fame only by report and travels a long way to see him. When she meets him in person, she finds that the report had actually fallen short of the truth. Deeply moved, she praises God and presents many gifts.

Solomon’s fame came through the name of Yahweh. Yet even at that very moment, Solomon was handing over to foreigners the land God had given, putting to work as slaves the peoples God had commanded to be utterly destroyed, and bringing in a culture of idolatry through trade with foreign nations. Behind the glory on display, a crack of disobedience was already growing.

There are times when God does not stop a hardened heart right away but leaves it as it is. This is because of his love, which waits for people to turn back. God’s people must examine whether, drunk on success and prosperity, they have lost sight of God, and must make the grace they have received the place where they turn their lives around.

When Solomon had finished building both the temple and the royal palace, God appeared to him once more and told him that his prayer had been heard. Yet what God spoke was not blessing alone; it came with a charge to walk with a whole heart, as his father David had done, and to keep God’s statutes. With it came a warning: if they were not kept, the temple would be destroyed and Israel cast out.

Solomon prayed for the sins of the people to be forgiven, yet he never looked at his own sin. He had taken a foreign woman as his wife and kept her close to the ark of the covenant. God’s promise is a law in which blessing and curse are set side by side. Obedience brings blessing from one generation to the next, while disobedience means judgment comes to pass just as it was spoken. In the end that prayer was answered. In later years the kingdom was divided, the temple lay in ruins, and Israel was carried away into captivity.

The warning of judgment is not meant to make people afraid. It is a word of love, calling them to turn back without delay from where they stand. The moment of thinking something has been achieved is the most dangerous moment of all, for then pride smothers gratitude. God’s people must therefore take care lest they fall, and before praying for others they need first to ask that they themselves be broken.

After Solomon has brought the ark of the covenant into the Most Holy Place, he sees the glory of God filling the temple, and he intercedes for the people and blesses them. He confesses that even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain God, yet he pleads that this same God will keep his eyes on the temple and hear the prayers of his people.

The temple is precious not because of the building itself, but because it is the place where God’s mercy and the prayers of his people meet. The confession that God keeps his covenant with those who walk before him with all their heart carries the same weight as the obedience of Abraham, who did not hold back his son but gave him up to God. Solomon’s intercession embraces Israel’s sin and repentance, and even the prayers of foreigners, showing that God is Lord not of one nation alone but of all creation.

Now the true temple is not a building but Jesus Christ, and those united with Christ are themselves that temple. As we take hold, day by day, of the hand of grace that God holds out to us, we find strength to live in obedience to his commands. Not only when we gather but also in the scattered places of our everyday lives, we are being built into a temple where God dwells.

At the dedication of the temple, Solomon confesses that Yahweh dwells in the thick darkness. The God known only as light appeared in thick darkness both at Mount Sinai and in the Most Holy Place.

This darkness is not evil; it points to God’s infinity, which human wisdom and knowledge can never fully contain. Just as no light, however great, can light up an infinite space, the more one comes to know God, the more one’s own ignorance only grows. Even so, God set his name in the temple and, confining himself to a lowly place, chose to be with his people.

The temple was not a place where people confined God but a place of meeting that God had granted, and his presence depended on obedience to the covenant. Later, when Israel forsook the covenant, the temple was finally destroyed. Remembering that the more one knows, the more the boundary of what one does not know grows as well, it is right to become all the more humble before God as the knowledge of him grows.