Readings:
1 Kings 14
Acts 27

1 Kings 14

Jeroboam started off on the wrong foot, and it in,y got worse from there. What started as maybe a syncretism between idolatry and true religion, ends up with the Israelites worshiping all the gods of their neighbors. Not only was the prophecy against the altar at bethel and the illicit priesthood he’d created, but now even Jeroboam himself and his lineage will be destroyed.

The king’s son is ill and he sends his wife to the home of the prophet to see what will happen. There he gives her the bad news, and more than that he tells her that only her sick son will see a grave of all their family. The rest of the males will rot in the streets and be eaten by animals. But the child is innocent and so after his death he’ll receive a proper burial.

As a further punishment for their idolatry and turning away from the God that brought them out of Egypt, the prophet tells them that they will be uprooted from the land and scattered beyond the Euphrates river. This doesn’t happen immediately, but eventually they’ll be conquered by the Assyrians and exiled from the land. But that’s later on…

Meanwhile down in Judah, the people there are doing the same thing that the people up north are doing. They are worshiping idols, and building altars to Canaanite gods on all the hills around Jerusalem. They even had cultic male prostitution in their midst.

Before he dies his kingdom is raided and despoiled by the king of Egypt, and as a sign of this impoverishment, the shields of gold that his father famously made are stolen and replaced with shields of bronze. Judah has centuries left ahead of it, but it’s glory days are now fading in the rear view mirror.

From this point forward, the norther kingdom is known as Israel and it never has a single king who is righteous, and their people commit abomination after abomination. While in the southern kingdom, that will now be known as Judah, they’ll have a mix of righteous and wicked kings, and though their people will regularly commit serious sins they’ll also be occasionally called to repentance by their righteous kings. This occasional 180 from sin forestalls their own judgement and exile for a few centuries after the northern kingdom is destroyed.

Acts 27

Paul sails for Rome, and after several port calls they find themselves on a new ship. This ship is an Alexandrian ship most likely hauling grain back to Rome, as Egypt was the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. When they reached Crete, it’s mentioned that Paul believed it was past sailing season and they should sit tight for the winter because it was already past the day of atonement, which is in late September on our calendar.

But after Paul raised his concerns with the soldier acting as his guard he is ignored and the voyage continues on. They set out from Crete and are almost immediately caught in a storm and Luke recounts their foundering and then wreck on the shore of Malta in great detail.

Paul encourages the people on the boat, over 200 of them, that they’ll all survive but the ship will be lost. This is one of the four times that Paul has been shipwrecked during his evangelical journeys, so he was more used to it that your average person. God told him he would stand before Caesar and he had no reason to doubt him, so he remained calm and that calmed the rest of the people aboard. When the ship ran aground they all make it ashore alive, and that in itself is no small miracle.

Tomorrow’s Readings:
Ecclesiastes 7-9
Acts 28