Sunday Sermonette: The wages of sin are delayed

Ch. 14 tells essentially parallel stories about Jeroboam in Israel and Rehoboam in Judah. Both kingdoms start putting up shrines to other Gods Yahweh gets mad. However, in the case of Jeroboam his vengeance is for some reason delayed. He kills one of Jeroboam ' s babies but another son does succeed Jeroboam, and the kingdom otherwise goes along just fine for the time being. (Yahweh will get around to clobbering them later.) As for Rehoboam and Judah, the consequences aren ' t really all that bad. Pharaoh comes and takes some treasures, and Rehoboam has to replace Solomon ' s gold shields with bronze ones, but that ' s about it. Nevertheless it ' s the same basic Groundhog Day story we ' ve been reading since Judges. The people fall away from perfect allegiance to Yahweh and pay consequences.Just a couple of specific points. David is once again represented as a paradigm of virtue but of course he was not, in fact he was one of the most despicable characters in all of literature. There are two references here to other books which have  been lost, The Chronicles of the Kings of Israel and The Chronicles of the Kings of Judah. This raises the question of when and how this particular set of books, and not others, ended up being canonized and becoming part of the Tanakh. The Septuagint (as we have noted before, a translation of the Hebrew Bible into Koine Greek) was completed in the second century B.C. It includes some books that are not in the Masoretic text but all of t...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs