Sunday's reading comes from 1 Kings 12.
Rehoboam takes the hot-headed advice of the young men, ignoring the more considered advice of the older men, and this results in a state of near-civil war. This is office politics on a massive scale!
So we end up with two camps, Rehoboam with the houses of Judah and Benjamin, and Jeroboam with everybody else. And on the face of it, Rehoboam is the bad guy, the one who takes bad advice. But he also happens to be the King in David line, so in a very real way, he had God on his side!
Jeroboam is worried that if the people were to go back to Jerusalem to offer their sacrifices, they would go across to the other side and join Rehoboam's camp. So he comes up with a plan. Unfortunately that plan is to take him and the people who follow him completely outside of the will of God.
Jeroboam makes up a new religion! It's no longer required that you offer your sacrifices in Jerusalem, he's got a couple of golden calves that you can sacrifice to. And he invented a special holy day, a day he chose, nothing that God wanted!
We have so many new religions around us, made up by men, not instituted by God. Crystals that give you powers or ward off evil, books that appeared from nowhere written in sudo-Shakespearian English, special translations of the bible that will convince you that you can only go to heaven through knocking on so many doors a week.
We need to be certain of our faith if we are not to be misled, we need to be grounded in the Bible and in prayer. And more so if we are teachers, we need to be leading people in the truth, not in some false idea that we picked up from somewhere.
I remember a sermon I heard years ago. The preacher had come from a banking background. He explained that early on in his training he had had to spend hours studying genuine bank notes. The object was to help him spot forgeries. It was explained that it was pointless getting him to study forgeries, because no two forgers produce identical notes. But if he knew the real thing inside out, he would never fool for a forgery!
The analogy is clear, don't waste your time learning everything about this cult or that cult. Immerse yourself in the real thing (no - I'm not advocating using coca-cola in baptisms, that could be a whole new cult!). And when you have it straight in your own head, teach others to do the same! We need to be followers of the truth, not followers of a fake.
