2 Kings 17:21-22
“… and Jeroboam drave Israel from following the LORD, and made them sin a great sin. For the children of Israel walked in all the sins of Jeroboam which he did; they departed not from them;”
Imagine leading the people of a kingdom into a life of sin and away from the Lord. Imagine leading the people of a kingdom into a dishonorable lifestyle and death. That’s what Jeroboam did. As the first king of a divided nation, the Northern Kingdom of Israel, he will always be remembered for that. What exactly did he do? He set up false places of worship and created idols (gods) which he claimed delivered Israel out from under Egyptian captivity. Then he selected people to serve as priests who were unfit and untrained to do so. Why did he do all these things? Because he didn’t want the people in his kingdom to return to Jerusalem to worship and offer sacrifices in the fear that they would return (repent) to the Lord and then kill him (1 Kings 12:26-31). His motives were purely selfish! And because of what he did and its lasting effect on the people within his kingdom, the Lord rejected the Northern Kingdom and allowed it to be conquered and carried away into captivity (2 Kings 17:23).
The lessons of the Bible are clear. Good leadership is hard and seemingly rare. Think about the great leaders in the Bible … Moses, Joshua, David, Daniel, and Christ our Lord. They were determined to do what was right in the eyes of the Lord. That required a willingness to serve and not be served. That required strength to protect those who were weak or helpless. Bad leadership, on the other hand, exists in abundance and is selfish in origin. At its core, to them, it is all about “me”, “my”, and “mine”. The catastrophic result of such deeds is recorded in the Bible, in man’s history, and is regrettably numerous.
See it for what it is. Don’t allow bad leadership to lead you away from the Lord and into a path of destruction.