Stage Five · Legacy — the gold can leave without the ceremony changing
Nobody announces the day the gold goes.
That is the part men get wrong about drift. They expect a collapse. A phone call. A confrontation. Something loud enough to date. So they watch for the loud thing, and the quiet thing walks off with everything they built.
There is a scene in Chronicles that almost nobody preaches, and it is the most accurate picture of spiritual drift in the Old Testament. It is not a scene of a man falling apart. It is a scene of a man keeping up appearances so well that the appearance outlives the thing it was supposed to represent.
Solomon Made Them Out of Gold
Solomon had made ceremonial shields for the house of the LORD and the king’s house — two hundred targets and three hundred shields of beaten gold, the kind of thing a kingdom makes when it has more glory than it knows what to do with. They were not weapons. They were a statement. The guard carried them when the king went up to worship.
Then came Rehoboam, Solomon’s son. And before the shields went anywhere, something else went first.
And it came to pass, when Rehoboam had established the kingdom, and had strengthened himself, he forsook the law of the LORD, and all Israel with him. (KJV, 2 Chronicles 12:1)
Read the order of that sentence slowly, because the order is the whole lesson. He did not forsake the law of the LORD when he was desperate. He forsook it when he was established. When he had strengthened himself. The drift did not start in the crisis. It started in the competence.
Five years later Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem, and the bill arrived.
So Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem, and took away the treasures of the house of the LORD, and the treasures of the king’s house; he took all: he carried away also the shields of gold which Solomon had made. (KJV, 2 Chronicles 12:9)
He took all. That is the kind of loss a man cannot hide.
Except Rehoboam hid it. Here is how.
Instead of Which, He Made Shields of Brass
Instead of which king Rehoboam made shields of brass, and committed them to the hands of the chief of the guard, that kept the entrance of the king’s house. And when the king entered into the house of the LORD, the guard came and fetched them, and brought them again into the guard chamber. (KJV, 2 Chronicles 12:10-11)
Sit in that for a second.
The procession still happened. The guard still came. The shields still got fetched from the guard chamber, still carried up to the house of the LORD, still carried back and racked in exactly the same place. If you stood in the street in Jerusalem on a worship day, you saw what you had always seen: the king, the guard, the shields, the ceremony, right on schedule.
From ten feet away, brass looks like gold.
That is drift. Not the end of the routine. The hollowing out of the routine while the routine marches on. The practice survives; the substance is substituted. And because the practice survives, nobody — not the crowd, not the guard, maybe not even the king — has to say out loud what everybody would have to deal with if the procession simply stopped.
Hosea names that condition in nine words that should make every established man uncomfortable:
Strangers have devoured his strength, and he knoweth it not. (KJV, Hosea 7:9)
He knoweth it not. Not he denies it. Not he hides it. He does not know. The strength is already gone and the man is still walking around with the posture of a man who has it.
You Already Know What Your Brass Is
I am not talking about the man who quit. The man who quit knows he quit. He is not confused about his condition; he is just tired of it.
I am talking about the man whose calendar has not changed in a year.
- He still reads in the morning. He could not tell you one thing he read this week.
- He still prays before meals. He has not prayed about the thing he is actually carrying in four months.
- He still goes to church. He has not told a soul there the truth since the spring.
- He still has the accountability call on the calendar. The call has become a weather report.
- He still says the words to his wife. The words used to cost him something.
Every one of those is the guard fetching the shields. Right on time, out of the same chamber, up to the same house. And brass, every one.
Here is why this is Stage Five work and not Stage One work. In Stage One a man is exposed — the thing is obvious, he just has to stop managing it. By Stage Five, nothing is obvious. He has real freedom behind him, real habits in place, real credibility in the room. He is established. He has strengthened himself. And that is precisely the position Rehoboam was standing in when the text says he forsook the law of the LORD.
The disciplines that got you free can keep running after the heart that built them has gone somewhere else. A routine is a container. It will hold whatever you put in it, including nothing.
What the Chronicler Says the Real Problem Was
Chronicles does not leave us to guess. Two verses after the brass shields, it gives the diagnosis:
And he did evil, because he prepared not his heart to seek the LORD. (KJV, 2 Chronicles 12:14)
Prepared not his heart. The word carries the sense of setting something firmly in place, fixing it, aiming it on purpose. Rehoboam did not aim. He let the machinery of a godly kingdom run on momentum and he never once turned his heart and pointed it at God deliberately.
That is the sentence under every brass shield. Not rebellion. Not scandal. Just an unaimed heart riding a working system.
And it is worth noticing what Chronicles does not say. It does not say the ceremony was wrong. The procession was a good thing. The guard was doing his job. Keeping the form was not the sin. Keeping the form as a substitute for the substance was.
The One Question That Finds Brass
Drift does not respond to more routine. You cannot fix brass shields by polishing them. You fix them by weighing them.
So here is the weighing. Take the practices you still perform and ask one question of each: what did this cost me this week?
Gold costs. Brass does not. A prayer that cost you nothing — no honesty, no surrender, no uncomfortable sentence — may still have happened, but it did not happen in gold. A conversation where you told your friend the version of your week that keeps him comfortable cost you nothing. An hour of reading that never once put you under the text cost you nothing.
David prayed the version of this question that invites God to do the weighing:
Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. (KJV, Psalm 139:23-24)
Notice he asks to be searched. A man who has been in his routines long enough cannot be trusted to audit them alone — he has stood ten feet away from his own brass for so long that it still looks like gold to him. So he asks God to come closer than ten feet. And then he lets one other man do the same, because Scripture puts the remedy for a slowly hardening heart in the plural:
But exhort one another daily, while it is called To day; lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. (KJV, Hebrews 3:13)
Deceitfulness. Hardening is a deceiver’s work, and a deceived man is by definition the last man qualified to notice. That is not an insult. It is the reason God gave you a brother.
Remember From Whence Thou Art Fallen
Jesus wrote a letter to a church in exactly Rehoboam’s condition — busy, orthodox, hard-working, enduring, and hollow — and the correction He gave was three short moves:
Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love. Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works. (KJV, Revelation 2:4-5)
Remember. Go back and find the day it was gold. Not to grieve it — to locate it. Name the season when the prayer cost you something and you could have told anyone what you read. That memory is a measuring stick, and you need one, because drift is only invisible when you have nothing to measure against.
Repent. Say the real sentence. Not “I have been in a dry season.” Dry season is a weather word and it makes you the victim of a climate. Rehoboam was not rained on. He prepared not his heart. The honest sentence has a subject and a verb: I stopped aiming. I have been carrying brass and letting people believe it was gold, and the person I fooled best was me.
Do the first works. Not more works. The first ones. Jesus does not tell a drifting church to add a program. He tells it to go back and do the costly, unimpressive, early things again — the ones that were never for an audience, because in the beginning there was no audience.
The Gold You Cannot Lose
Here is the mercy in this story, and it is bigger than the warning.
Rehoboam’s gold was gone because Rehoboam was the one holding it. Everything a man guards himself is eventually carried off by somebody stronger than he is. That is not pessimism; that is the history of every kingdom and every self-made holiness.
Which is why the gospel does not hand you the shields and wish you luck. Your standing before God was never the thing you kept in the guard chamber. It is held somewhere Shishak cannot reach.
Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy. (KJV, Jude 24)
He is able to keep you. Not able to help you keep yourself. The gold in that verse is Christ’s righteousness credited to you, and it does not dull, does not get swapped out in the night, and does not depend on whether you had a good week. That is exactly why you can afford to look honestly at your brass. A man whose standing is secure is the only man who can stand to be searched.
So go open the guard chamber. Pick up what you have been carrying up to the house of God. Feel the weight of it. If it is light, say so — today, out loud, to God and to one man.
The procession is not the problem. It never was. But a man who will not weigh what he carries will go on carrying brass in a gold ceremony until somebody opens the chamber after he is gone and finds out what his sons inherited.
Weigh it while it is called today.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist