Too Much

 October 9, 2021

“It’s too much for you.”    —1 Kings 12:28. 

The civil war had been relatively bloodless. Rehoboam, king of the southern kingdom of Judah which he inherited from his father Solomon, held sway over Jerusalem, center of the religious cult of worship in the temple his father had built. Jeroboam, leader and now king of the 10 northern tribes that constituted Israel, possessed the greater portion of the land and people, but lacked the unifying symbol of the temple with its grounding in the ancient Mosaic law. 

Jeroboam was no slouch. He understood the necessity for a unifying national religion, and the danger posed by the affinity and allure of the temple cult—the heart and soul of the nation for two generations. To ensure the loyalty of his people to his rule, he established two religious centers, one in the north, and the other in the south of his newly-minted nation, made two calves of gold, and said to the people the words quoted above: “It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem. Here are your gods, O Israel, which brought you up from the land of Egypt!”

Jeroboam officially enshrined what we do unofficially on a regular basis: he appealed to the desire for an accommodating religion (“It’s too much for you to go up to Jerusalem”), and our tendency to baptize whatever we want by claiming it is God (“Here are your gods which brought you up from the land of Egypt!”).

Making worship easy, convenient, and comfortable is one of the ways the devil buys our loyalty. Often when it’s time to say goodbye we say, “Take it easy!” It is a terrible thing to say. There is a time for rest and relaxation, but it is a dangerous way of life. When it comes to matters of faith, we are already too prone to do as did Jeroboam, devising in our own hearts a convenient religion that only leads us away from the One True God to those of our own imagination. We compound the sin when we convince ourselves that we are being faithful because we call the gods of our imagination by the holy Name of Jesus Christ. 

Whenever I think following Christ along the narrow path he laid out is too much, I am in danger of laying down the Cross and abandoning him for a less strenuous and demanding religion. That religion always leads to death. Jesus came to give us life abundantly, as we walk the narrow and often difficult way that leads to life.