A frustrating read

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I am currently reading through 1 Kings and 2 Kings in my daily bible reading. And it is a frustrating experience. I am not really sure if anyone has ever felt so frustrated reading the bible.

And before I carry on, it is not because I dun understand what was being written and what God was trying to say in the word. To gain new insights everyday reading the bible should be a given but I think there will always be part that we will not understand. It is not because the records of the the kings are boring... genealogies are much more boring than that if you want to compare it this way.

However, if any discerning hearts read the books of 1 Kings and 2 Kings, the recurring theme of the books is always that the kings in succession had been doing evil in the eyes of the LORD and there were only that few kings who did right, and even so, only Josiah was whole-hearted in obeying Him. It is a frustrating experience reading how history keeps on repeating within the span of a few chapters, as if things never change and people remain so depraved. And of course, one might wonder why despite having a close relationship with God, Israel still got separated into two kingdoms and people began to do evil, despite God's constant intervention.

And it is scary to think that those examples apply to us today. The verse that best epitomise this is 2 Kings 17:32 - 'They appointed the LORD but they also appointed all sorts of their own people to officiate for them as priests in the shrines at the high places'... Does this sound familiar if we apply the spirit of what happened into our modern day context? Christians who believed in God and yet dabbled in all sort of things and believe in all sorts of things and pursued all sorts of things?

Scary and frustrating...

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