When Solomon was king, he worked the people hard to build his kingdom and took a lot of their money to build his stuff.

Then when Rehoboam became king the people asked the new king to take some of the load off of them.

Rehoboam asked the older men what to do about this

and then he asked the younger men who were his friends.

The older men told Rehoboam that the people would follow him gladly if he made their life easier by taking off some of the load.

But the younger men were puffed up in themselves that they were the king's friends and they told Rehoboam to make it harder for the people. So he did.

The king spoke meanly to the people and told the people he was going to make life harder for them so the people left and wouldn’t do anything for the king at all.

The king gathered an army to make the people come back and serve him, but God sent word to the king, Do not fight against your brothers, Go home everyone of you. So Rehoboam obeyed the words from God.

The king made big walls around the city to protect the people and he built strong cities.

People from Israel who wanted to follow the Lord came to Rehoboam while the king of the other people who left, started following the bad one and made two golden calves to bow down to.

After Rehoboam became a strong king, he and all the people of Israel turned away from the Lord God

and what the Lord said.

The Lord God is the one who protected them

and they turned away from their protector.

So a bad king with 1200 chariots and 60,000 horsemen came to fight against Israel and take their land and their stuff and make them slaves because they turned away from the Lord God.

The Lord God sent one of His prophets, named Shemaiah, to the king and his leaders, to say, This is what the Lord says, Since you have left Me, I now leave you to this king.

The leaders and the king made their hearts low before the Lord and bowed down to Him and said, The Lord is right.

When the Lord saw that the leaders and the king humbled themselves toward Him, he came to Shemaiah and said, They have stopped lifting themselves up against Me, so I will give them some help, but I will let this bad king have some power over them so they will know how good I want it to be for them and not trust these other things.

The bad king fought against Jerusalem but only took treasures from the king’s house and from the temple of the Lord.

And he carried away the hundreds of gold shields that Solomon had made.

He didn’t take the people out of their special land.

Rehoboam made shields of brass in place of the gold ones that were taken away.

Because Rehoboam turned back to the Lord and quit being puffed up in his heart, the Lord quit being mad at him and didn’t destroy him and the city where the Lord chose for His name to be.

Things went well in that whole family of Israel called Judah.

The king did the bad thing because he didn’t set it in his heart to seek the Lord God.

After 17 years being king, Rehoboam slept with his fathers and his son, Abijah was king in his place.