Israel becomes Egypt

Oh, the pain of leaving things out.

I'm preaching on 1 Kings 11-12 on Sunday. As is always the case with preaching, the aim is to help people to hear what that part of Scripture is saying to us today. And in order to be clear, you have to be ruthless. So often, there are all kinds of really interesting things you've learnt and discovered in the text, and they have to go on the proverbial cutting-room floor.

Things like: The massive Egypt motif in 1 Kings 11-12.

To give you a little taster, here's Provan:

As Moses led his people out from slavery under the house of the Egyptian Pharaoh, so Jeroboam will lead Israel out from ‘slavery’ under the house of David; as God hardened Pharaoh’s heart in order to accomplish all his will, so the hardness of Rehoboam’s heart will precipitate this schism also. The exodus will take Israel towards a new promised land, but they will soon be led off their path, as ‘Jeroboam as Moses’ is transformed into ‘Jeroboam as Aaron,’ who fashions golden calves from their land and exile in another. (Page 103)

And here's another quotation:

The people’s complaint is precisely that their identity has, under Solomon, become confused. They are no longer the people set free to live in the promised land. They have become once more a people under harsh labour, as they were in Egypt (Exodus 1:4; 2:23), toiling as oxen would under a heavy yoke. Jeroboam appears as a kind of second Moses, implicitly taking a leading role in the approach to Rehoboam. (Page 104)

There's more in the text, but those two quotations will give you a taster.

But there's not going to be time on Sunday even to go there briefly. I'll leave it to you, reader, to get your nose freshly into the text of 1 Kings and enjoy the beautiful way the story is told, and the artistic way in which the writer teaches us about God and his people.