Secrets

"In the fifth year of King Rehoboam, Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem. He took away the treasures of the house of the LORD and the treasures of the king’s house. He took away everything. He also took away all the shields of gold that Solomon had made, and King Rehoboam made in their place shields of bronze, and committed them to the hands of the officers of the guard, who kept the door of the king’s house. And as often as the king went into the house of the LORD, the guard carried them and brought them back to the guardroom"  (1 Kings 14:25–28).

King Shishak besieged Jerusalem in a campaign to gain control of the trade routes through Palestine and the Negeb. King Rehoboam readily submitted to Shishak to spare his people the ravages of a prolonged siege.

Shishak sacked the city and took away the treasures of the temple and the palace, including the fabulous golden shields the king’s body-guard carried on state occasions. Rehoboam substituted shields of bronze to maintain the fiction that things were as they should be. It was a clever cover-up and he thought no one would know. But bronze tend to tarnish after a time.

Secrets (harbored hypocrisies) seriously mess with your mind: You become evasive, devious, deceitful, paranoid—fearful that you'll be exposed. In time others begin to distrust you because you don't ring true.

“Half the misery in the world comes from trying to look, instead of trying to be, what one is not. I would that not God only but all good men and women might see me through and through. They would not be pleased with everything they saw, but then neither am I... No one who loves and chooses a secret can be of the pure in heart that see God” (George MacDonald, The Flight of the Shadow).

David Roper

6.15.18