By the word of the LORD he cried out against the altar: “Altar, altar! This is what the LORD says: ‘A son named Josiah will be born to the house of David. On you he will sacrifice the priests of the high places who make offerings here, and human bones will be burned on you.’” – 1 Kings 13:2

Today’s Scripture Reading (October 9, 2016): 1 Kings 13

Dr. Love, otherwise known as Leo Buscaglia, once wrote that “Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy.” Buscaglia came to study the science of disconnectedness after the suicide of one of his students. His life was spent on trying to reconnect people with each other and their environments. And he is right. Worry alone changes nothing. That is not to say that there are not steps that we could take that can alter the event about which we are concerned. If worry produces positive action inside of us, then it has a purpose. Essentially, Buscaglia was worried about the disconnectedness of people which could lead to a student committing suicide, and so he spent his life trying to be a catalyst of connection to anyone who would come near. But too often, worry does not produce that kind of positive result. Instead, it saps the joy out of today, or it effectively spreads the sorrow of tomorrow over a much wider swath of time.

If there was ever any doubt that Jeroboam had committed a sin against God by erecting idols in the north to compete for the hearts of Israel with the God who had brought the people out Egypt, here that doubt is erased. The idea, at least in Jeroboam’s mind, was a complete separation between the Northern Kingdom that he ruled over and the Southern Kingdom governed by the descendants of David. With his idols in the north, there would now be no reason for his people to make the trip south to worship God.

But God was never onside with Jeroboam’s plan. Instead, he sends a prophet with a very accurate prophecy. There is coming a descendant of David who would sacrifice the false priests of Jeroboam on this very altar. He would defile everything that Jeroboam had strived to build. The King was not bigger than God. And then the prophet names the one who would do these things – his name would be Josiah, literally meaning the one supported by God – Jeroboam, on the other hand, had become the one opposed by God.

It would take 350 years for the prophecy to be fulfilled. But after 350 years, Josiah steps onto to the stage. 2 Kings reports this.

Even the altar at Bethel, the high place made by Jeroboam son of Nebat, who had caused Israel to sin—even that altar and high place he demolished. He burned the high place and ground it to powder, and burned the Asherah pole also. Then Josiah looked around, and when he saw the tombs that were there on the hillside, he had the bones removed from them and burned on the altar to defile it, in accordance with the word of the Lord proclaimed by the man of God who foretold these things (2 Kings 23:15-16).

But the reality was that Jeroboam did not know that the prophecy would take three and a half centuries to become a reality. For Jeroboam, the prophecy would become a worry that robbed every day of its joy. For the rest of his life, he would be searching for the one from Judah named Josiah. The one, supported by God, who God had sent to destroy him.  

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: 2 Chronicles 10