Out Our Way: Along the Covenant Trail with Goliath

Out our way, Goliath and I used to ride in the hills behind the corral and arena area - and not too far past the pasture gate was a junk pile. Mostly old boards and such, but clearly things that were no longer of any use and just tossed away to decay and fall apart.

Years ago when I worked with the Salvation Army, I regularly drove truckloads of unusable and worthless junk to the landfill east of town. At one tim, all of it had been new and valuable, filling the purpose for which it had been made. But in time, worn out or simply discarded as useless, it became nothing but junk.

The history of Israel after the foolish kings - Saul, David and Solomon - is the history of a people and a nation who began to decline into a junk yard.

Created as the people of God, chosen and set aprt to show the world the way back to the Lord, Israel forgot and even rejected that purpose. The people called to be the witness to God ceased to function as such and so began to decline, wear away and become useless. 

After Solomon's death, his successor proved to be such a haughty and foolish man that 10 of the 12 tribes of Israel seceeded from the Covenant community and set up a separate kingdom. The Northern Kingdom - the 10  break away tribes - kept the name of Israel but quickly forgot the Lord. The southern Kingdom - made up primarily of the tribe of Judah - took the name of that tribe for their nation. They remained ruled by descendants of David, maintained the Temple in Jerusalem, but were no longer Israel. Now they were Judahites - or, as we call them today, Jews.

The northern Kingdom quickly lost its sense of connection as God's people, and began to blend in with pagan cultures. Like Solomon, while they built a new temple to the Lord in Samaria - they also built pagan temples as well.

In the southern Kingdom, the outward symbols of the faith remained and people tended to be a bit more loyal to their calling than their northern brethren, but they too began to drift away from their calling as God's witnesses to the world.

The Books of Kings tells the tragic story of the great nation of God deteriorating into a junkyard of secularism and loss of focus. The chosen people stopped accepting God's choice.

Prophets were sent to the people to remind them of their calling and the vast treasure house of spiritual gifts God had given them was cast aside like so much junk and forgotten.

In time, the 10 tribes of the north were absorbed into the pagan and secular world, conquered, dispersed and lost forever. The so-called 10 lost tribes of Israel had exchanged the glory of the Kingdom of God for the junkyard of the world and lost it forever.

In the southern Kingdom, even after the disastrous example of their northern brethren and the warning of more prophets, many followed their brethren in exchanging the glory of God for the debris and junk of the secular world. Many - but not all.

Even when both the northern and the southern kingdoms were destroyed and ceased to exist, some few - the "faithful remnant" - hung onto the treasures and refused to accept the junkyard as their destiny. They hung on and in time, came back to the Promised Land after exile and reestablished the nation, if not the old kingdom, for now they finally understood what God had said through the prophet Samuel that the only true kingdom that cannot tarnish, decay or turn to junk is the one ruled by God and not by kings and human governments and institutions. 

This past Tuesday was not just Hallowe'en, but also Reformation Day, a reminder that God still rules in this world and in His Church. Though we may, like Israel and Judah, forget from time to time who we are and Whose we are, God does not. Even in this time of shrinking congregations, God is still at work and a faithful remnant who will never trade the Kingdom of God for the junkyard remains intact. And in God's time, the Light of the world will burn brighter than ever and the world will see this present darkness fade disappear. Read your history and see that it does indeed repeat itself and as always, the darkness must give way before the Light.

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John Bruington and Goliath serve the First Presbyterian Church in Havre, Montana.