M’Cheyne Bible Reading Plan

King Rehoboam

12 Rehoboam went to Shechem, because all the Israelites had gone there to make him king. ² At this time, Nebat's son Jeroboam was still in Egypt. He had been living there since he ran away from King Solomon. When he heard the news about Rehoboam, he returned home. ³ The Israelites sent a message to Jeroboam to meet with them. Then Jeroboam and the whole group of Israelites went to speak to Rehoboam. They said to him, ⁴ ‘Your father caused us to work too hard. Please make the work easier for us. If you do that, we will serve you as our king.’ ⁵ Rehoboam answered them, ‘Go away for three days. Then come back to me.’ So the people went away.

⁶ Then King Rehoboam went to talk to the older advisors who had served his father Solomon. He asked them, ‘What answer should I give to these people?’ ⁷ The old men said to him, ‘If you agree to help these people today, they will always serve you as their king. So do what they are asking you to do.’

⁸ But Rehoboam did not agree with their advice. Instead he talked to some younger men. They had been his friends since they were young and now they were his advisors. ⁹ He asked them, ‘What do you think that I should say to these people? They want me to make their work easier.’

¹⁰ Rehoboam's young advisors said, ‘Those people said to you, “Your father made us work too hard. Please make our work easier.” You should tell them, “Even my little finger is thicker than my father's whole body! ¹¹ My father made you work hard. I will make you work even harder! My father punished you with little whips. I will punish you with whips that bite your skin!” ’

¹² Jeroboam and all the people returned to Rehoboam after three days. That was because the king had said, ‘Return to me in three days.’

¹³ King Rehoboam spoke cruel words to the people. He did not agree to say what the older men had told him to say. ¹⁴ Instead, he did what the young men had suggested. He said to the people, ‘My father gave you work that was too hard for you. I will make it even worse! My father punished you with little whips. I will punish you with whips that bite!’

¹⁵ So the king did not agree to do what the people wanted him to do. It was the Lord who caused this to happen. He had already given his message about this to Nebat's son Jeroboam. The prophet Ahijah who came from Shiloh had spoken the Lord's message to Jeroboam.

¹⁶ All the Israelites realized that the king refused to listen to them. So they said to the king,

So the Israelites went to their homes.

¹⁷ But Rehoboam continued to rule over the Israelites who lived in the towns of Judah.^[a]

¹⁸ King Rehoboam sent a man called Adoniram to talk to the Israelite people. Adoniram had authority over the men who had to work for Rehoboam. But the Israelites threw stones at Adoniram and they killed him. So King Rehoboam quickly got into his chariot and he escaped to Jerusalem. ¹⁹ Since that time, the tribes in the north of Israel have not accepted the authority of King David's descendants.

²⁰ All the Israelites heard that Jeroboam had returned from Egypt. So they asked him to come to a meeting of the people. They decided to make him king over all Israel. Only the tribe of Judah still served David's descendant as their king.

²¹ Rehoboam arrived back in Jerusalem. He brought together all the men from the tribes of Judah and Benjamin who knew how to fight. There were 180,000 of them. Solomon's son Rehoboam wanted to attack the Israelite tribes so that he could rule them again as king. ²² But God told the prophet Shemaiah, ²³ ‘Say this to Solomon's son Rehoboam, the king of Judah. Say it to all the people of Judah and Benjamin, and to all the other people. ²⁴ This is what the Lord says: “Do not attack your brothers, the Israelites. Do not fight against them. Instead, you must all go home. I, the Lord, have decided that this must happen.” ’

So they obeyed the Lord's message. They went back to their homes, as the Lord had commanded them to do.

King Jeroboam

²⁵ Jeroboam made Shechem into a strong city. He lived there, in the hill country of Ephraim. He also went to make Penuel a strong city.

²⁶ Jeroboam thought, ‘I do not want the people of my kingdom to accept David's descendants as king again. ²⁷ The people that I rule will go to the Lord's temple in Jerusalem to offer sacrifices there. Then they may decide to serve Rehoboam, king of Judah, who was their master before. They might kill me and then go back to serve King Rehoboam.’

²⁸ So King Jeroboam talked to his advisors. He used gold to make images of two young cows. He said to the people, ‘It is too difficult for you to go to Jerusalem to worship the Lord, as you have done before. So I have made these gold cows for you instead. Look at them, Israelite people! These are your gods that rescued you and brought you out from Egypt.’

²⁹ Jeroboam put one gold cow in Bethel. He put the other gold cow in Dan.^{[b] 30} But that caused the Israelite people to do a very bad thing. They went to Bethel and to Dan to worship the gold cows.

³¹ Jeroboam also built places on hills for people to worship. He chose men who were not from Levi's tribe to be priests. ³² He decided to have a festival on the 15th day of the eighth month each year. He wanted it to be like the festival that they had in Judah.^[c] He offered sacrifices on the altar in Bethel to the gold cows that he had made. He also chose priests to serve at the places that he built for people to worship.

³³ On the 15th day of the eighth month, Jeroboam offered sacrifices on the altar that he had made at Bethel. That was the special day that he himself had decided to choose as a festival for the Israelites. On that day, he burned incense on the altar.

Christ is more important than anything

3 My Christian friends, there are a few more things that I want to say. You belong to the Lord, so be happy! It is no trouble for me to write the same things to you again. And it will help to keep you safe.

² Be very careful! Some people are teaching bad things. They say that you must cut your bodies. They are like dangerous dogs. Do not believe them! ³ But we are truly God's people. And it is not because someone has circumcised us. It is God's own Spirit that leads us to worship God. We thank God because of what Christ Jesus has done for us. We know that it is not human ideas that can save us.^[a]

⁴ For myself, I could have trusted those human ideas. Perhaps somebody may think that they could trust in those things to save them. Then I would have an even better reason to trust in them. ⁵ I belong to Israel's people, to Benjamin's tribe. I am a true Jew. They circumcised me when I was eight days old. I was a Pharisee, and I obeyed the Jewish rules very carefully. ⁶ I tried very much to please God. So I caused a lot of trouble and pain for the Christians. I obeyed the rules of God's Law, and nobody could say that I did anything wrong.

⁷ All those ideas seemed very important to me then. But now they are worth nothing to me, because I trust in Christ. ⁸ Yes, now that I know Christ Jesus as my Lord, that is the most valuable thing. Nothing else is important at all. I have thrown everything else away, so that I can serve Christ. All those other things are like dirt to me. I think about them like that, so that I can have Christ. ⁹ I want to be united with him. Because I believe in Christ, God accepts me as right with him. I know that I cannot become right in any other way, even if I obey all of God's Law. When I trust in Christ, God accepts me as right because of my faith.

¹⁰ Yes, I want to know Christ better and better. I want to know the power which God showed when Christ rose from death. I want to have the same kind of troubles that he did. I want to obey God like he did in his death. ¹¹ Then I hope that I also will become alive again after death.

Christians do not belong to this world

¹² I am not saying that I have already reached that place in my life. I have not yet completely become the person that God wants me to be. But I am trying very hard to reach that place. That was Christ's purpose when he first made me his own. ¹³ My Christian friends, I do not think that I have reached that place yet. But this is what I do: I do not think about past things that have already happened. Instead, I try hard to reach the things that are in front of me. ¹⁴ I am like a runner who wants to reach the end of the race. I run straight towards that place, so that I can win God's gift. Because I belong to Christ Jesus, God has called me to live with him in heaven. That is God's gift to me at the end of the race.

¹⁵ All of us should agree to live like that, if we properly understand God's message. If you think differently about these things, God will show you clearly what is right. ¹⁶ But we should continue to live in the way that we already know is right.

¹⁷ My Christian friends, you should try to live in the way that I do. Carefully watch other people who live like that. We have shown you what is right. ¹⁸ Many people live in a way that shows they do not agree with God's message. I have told you about these people many times before. And now I am crying when I tell you about them. I am very sad, because they speak against Christ's death on the cross. ¹⁹ In the end, God will destroy them. Their stomach is what they worship. They are proud of things that should make them ashamed. Their thoughts are full of things that belong to this world. ²⁰ But as for us, the home where we belong is in heaven. We are waiting for the Lord Jesus Christ to come from there. He is the one who will come from heaven and save us. ²¹ He will change these weak bodies that we have now on this earth. He will make them become strong and beautiful, like his own body that he has in heaven. Christ will use his great power to do this. That is the power that he uses to rule over everything.

Two buildings near the temple

42 Then the man took me out through the north gate of the inside yard of the temple. We went into the outside yard. We arrived at a building that was in the north wall of the inside yard. ² This building was 50 metres long and 25 metres wide. Its entrance was towards the north. ³ There was a 10 metre space between one side of this building and the temple in the inside yard. The building's other side was opposite the path in the outside yard. It had three levels of rooms in two rows that were opposite each other. ⁴ A path went between the two rows of rooms. It was 50 metres long and 5 metres wide. The entrances to the rooms were on the north side. ⁵ The rooms at the top level were not as wide as the rooms below them. And the rooms at the middle level were not as wide as the rooms at the lowest level. This was because the higher rooms needed more space in front of them. ⁶ They did not have pillars to hold them up as other rooms in the temple yards did. Instead, the walls of the lower rooms held up the rooms above them. So the rooms of each level were smaller than the rooms below them. ⁷ There was a wall that went across the outside yard in front of the lowest rooms. The wall was 25 metres long. ⁸ The row of rooms in the outside yard was also 25 metres long. But the other row of rooms in the inside yard, opposite the temple, was 50 metres long. ⁹ The lowest level of rooms had an entrance from the outside yard at the east end of the building. ¹⁰ This entrance was at the end of the wall in the outside yard.

There was another building like this one on the south side of the temple. It was opposite the other building and it also had two rows of rooms. ¹¹ There was path between the two rows. They looked the same as the rooms on the north side. The size of the rooms and the entrances were the same as those of the other building. ¹² There was an entrance in the wall opposite the doors of the inside row of rooms. There was also an entrance at the east end of the path between the rows of rooms.

¹³ Then the man said to me, ‘These rooms that are on the north and south sides of the temple's inside yard are holy. They are for the priests who serve the Lord in his temple. In these rooms, the priests will eat the most holy sacrifices that they offer to the Lord. They will put the most holy offerings there. It is where they will put the grain offerings, the sin offerings and the guilt offerings. The priests will do that because the rooms are holy.

¹⁴ When the priests go into the holy place of the temple, they must not leave until they change their clothes. Before they go into the outside yard, they must take off the special clothes that they wear to serve the Lord. Those clothes are holy, so they must put on other clothes. Then they can go out to the places where the people meet.’

¹⁵ The man finished measuring everything inside the place where the temple was. Then he took me out through the east gate. He measured all around the outside of the temple yards. ¹⁶ He used his stick to measure the wall on the east side. It was 250 metres. ^17-19 Then he measured the north side and the south side and the west side. Each side measured the same as the east side. ²⁰ So the wall made a square around the place where the temple was. Each side was 250 metres. The wall made the holy place separate from the ordinary places around it.

God judges all people