daily java

Daily Java: 

Abijam began to rule over Judah in the eighteenth year of Jeroboam’s reign in Israel. He reigned in Jerusalem three years. His mother was Maacah, the daughter of Absalom. He committed the same sins as his father before him, and he was not faithful to the Lord his God, as his ancestor David had been. But for David’s sake, the Lord his God allowed his descendants to continue ruling, shining like a lamp, and he gave Abijam a son to rule after him in Jerusalem. For David had done what was pleasing in the Lord’s sight and had obeyed the Lord’s commands throughout his life, except in the affair concerning Uriah the Hittite. (1 Kings 15:1-5)

You love your daughter. But she has given herself to a life of prostitution, drug addiction, debauchery. And it has come down to where she is shadow of her former self.

She was so beautiful. But that beauty is almost unrecognizable except in memory. But you still love her.

For the love of David, God held on to Judah for hundreds of years. David had loved God and God had returned the affection strongly.

But the problem was, just like it was with a lot of people in the Bible and in real life, David’s kids weren’t worth shooting.

A lot of that had been brought on by David himself. He was a great warrior and musician, but a lousy father. More than one of his kids tried to take over the kingdom. The one he gave it to, Solomon, turned out to be such a disappointment.

God had lavished wealth and wisdom on Solomon but Solomon had married a lot of women from cultures totally alien to the will of God. And his faith suffered for it. His wives pulled him away from God into idolatry.

Because of this, God took his kingdom away. After Solomon died, Israel was fractured and the small group of Judah became the kingdom of David’s heirs. The vast majority of Israel was ruled by someone else.

With the exception of three or four, every king was evil. Every king did almost exactly the same thing: they turned from God and began worshiping idols. It was an unholy fascination almost like the fascination some kids have for the occult and dark magic. They could not leave it alone.

Their descent into ugliness continued until finally they went too far.

But God stayed with them because of David.

It must have been sad to see them degenerate into a morass of idol worshiping fools, sacrificing their children to a fire god, giving their daughters as “holy prostitutes,” spending all their gold and silver on statues that were eventually stolen by conquering kings.

It took 350 years before they were finally conquered. And when they were, they had degenerated into a little country, ruled by others, exploited by foreign powers, enslaved and impoverished.

When David died, they were great. Three and a half centuries later, they were extinct.

But God held on with them, trying his best to show them a better way, until finally he washed his hands of them as a nation. He was through,

Yes, he kept them in their altered from, like keeping someone you love who has a terminal disease and caring for them as they died. But he kept them long enough that Jesus, his Son and our Savior came through them, as the son of David.

It would be like watching a beautiful daughter ruin herself with drugs and self-disfigurement, until she was a shadow of what she had been. But you love her and you care for her until finally she just leaves you and renounces her relationship to you. Yes, you would take her back in a minute, but she has to want to come back.

When Israel finally came back, after being slaves and reduced to almost nothing, they had finally broken their fascination with idols. But at what cost? They had lost their entire nation and were nothing more than a servant state in a greater country.

What a sad ending to such a great nation.