Back To Bethel, Part 2

Thus, I’ve always wondered why the people who survived, when the lions were attacking (at will?), didn’t band together with bow and arrows, or swords, or spears—or something!—didn’t even try to defend themselves. What did they do? They appealed to the king of Assyria! They didn’t repent and seek God, nor did they even ask the people of Judah for help. The trip took any number of days (weeks?) before making it to Nineveh and back. And what was the king’s advice? “Take one of your priests back there, and let him teach the people what to do (paraphrased) The king basically said, “Don’t bother me—take care of it yourself.”

Sure enough, along comes one of the priests (see v. 28) and goes where? Bethel! It’s one of those coincidences that not only was the True God worshiped at Bethel, but it’s also one of the border towns between the two kingdoms. Even worse, this was where the first king of the northern kingdom built a false god, a golden calf, and commanded the people to worship it. Incredible as it sounds, this priest does begin to teach the people (had they started to mix and mingle or intermarry by this time?) so even though they had made their own idols, they also “feared the Lord (v.33)”! Just think, after taking a look at the list of various gods and perhaps goddesses now in (perhaps, infesting?) Samaria, they could have had a different “god” to worship every day of the week. Perhaps this is where the original “coexist” movement came into being!

Something to keep in mind: a lot of religions don’t mind “co-existing” as long as they’re on top and everyone else is on the bottom. The Christian faith, and lands where Christianity is the majority religion, is one of the few that actually allows for religious freedom. Can that be true of other countries?

An additional comment about these various idols and “gods” in verses 30-31: the commentators aren’t in agreement as to how the names should be translated or, in other words, what the “god” actually looked like or was represented. It’s another irony in that the people who made these idols, either carving wood, like a totem pole, or working with gold and silver to make metallic images (“molten images”, King James Version) but that effort didn’t amount to two cents in God’s estimation! All the effort to create these idols was for nothing.

So let’s make this personal. The Bethel experience can be ours if we want it. I hope we want the right kind of Bethel experience, like Jacob did. He got right with God, and stayed right, as far as we can tell. This experience, in 2 Kings 17, is the wrong kind of Bethel experience. There was no call to repentance, no appeal to the God of Israel and Abraham, no journey to the Temple in order to approach God, and no effort to love the Lord, only to fear Him. They missed a golden opportunity to make a true new start, and paid dearly until years later when the (by now) Samaritans adopted the Books of Moses and built their own temple. Nobody knows for sure if they were ever born again until the time of Jesus, though.