The political reason for this is that King Hoshea refused to remain a vassal of King Shalmaneser of Assyria and rebelled against his earlier agreement to be subject to the house of Tiglath-Pileser III (the father of Shalmaneser). When Shalmaneser ascended to the throne, Hoshea tried to forge a military alliance with Egypt so that Israel and Egypt could band together against Assyria. Believing the king of Egypt was going to help him, Hoshea stopped paying tribute to Shalmaneser, but Pharaoh So (likely Osorkon IV) did not come to his aid. Hoshea could not defend Israel without the help of an ally and he lost his bid for independence.
That was the political reason for the fall of Israel to Assyria. But the remainder of 2 Kings 17 provides us with the spiritual reason. The Lord had promised the people before bringing them into the promised land that if they remained faithful to Him no enemy would be able to stand against them. But He also warned them that if they did not remain faithful they would be conquered by their enemies. I want to take a moment for us to remind ourselves that we are all sinners and that it's not simply because the people of the northern kingdom were sinners that the Lord allowed them to be conquered. It's because they committed a particular type of sin: they forsook the Lord---the one and only God, the God who rescued them from slavery, the God who performed many miracles among them, the God who drove out the heathen tribes of Canaan and planted them in their place and made them into a great nation. No other god has ever done anything for them. No other god ever can because no other god exists.
The only example I can think of to compare this situation to would be if I, for example, decided that I was going to renounce the Lord Jesus Christ who saved my soul in order to bow down to false gods. Another example would be if, like those of the northern kingdom who mixed pagan worship rituals with their worship of the Lord, I still believed in and prayed to the Lord but I also believed in and prayed to other gods along with Him. No god has ever done anything for me except the Lord and to repudiate Him in favor of some other deity would be the worst type of sin. I would be harming not only my own life and the eternal destiny of my own soul but I might also influence others to do the same. The Lord would be within His rights if He put an end to my life for doing such a thing.
"All this took place because the Israelites had sinned against the Lord their God, who had brought them up out of Egypt from under the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt. They worshiped other gods and followed the practices of the nations the Lord had driven out before them, as well as the practices that the kings of Israel had introduced. The Israelites secretly did things against the Lord their God that were not right. From watchtower to fortified city they built themselves high places in all their towns. They set up sacred stones and Asherah poles on every high hill and under every spreading tree. At every high place they burned incense, as the nations whom the Lord had driven out before them had done." (2 Kings 17:7-11a) There were secret sins of idolatry and there were public sins of idolatry. The Lord saw them all because nothing is hidden from Him. When we arrive at the books of the prophets we will see the charges the Lord brought against the people and we will get a better idea of just how long the Lord pleaded with them to repent and just how many opportunities He gave them to do so. The Lord did not want the nation to fall to the enemy but this was the penalty He warned them about in Deuteronomy 28:36a: "The Lord will drive you and the king you set over you to a nation unknown to you or your ancestors."
This has come to pass because, "They did wicked things that aroused the Lord's anger. They worshiped idols, although the Lord had said, 'You shall not do this.' The Lord warned Israel and Judah through all His prophets and seers: 'Turn from your evil ways. Observe My commands and decrees, in accordance with the entire law that I commanded your ancestors to obey and that I delivered to you through My servants the prophets.' But they would not listen and were as stiff-necked as their ancestors, who did not trust the Lord their God. They rejected His decrees and the covenant He had made with their ancestors and the statutes He had warned them to keep. They followed worthless idols and themselves became worthless. They imitated the nations around them although the Lord had ordered them, 'Do not do as they do.'" (2 Kings 17:14-15)
The Lord had made it clear to them that He was uprooting the tribes of Canaan and planting them in their place because of the idolatry of the people of Canaan. He warned them that if they fell into idolatry He would uproot them too. Yet they fell into the same practices as the heathen tribes who had previously inhabited the land. Did they not believe the Lord would do as He said? Did they think the Lord would not judge them in the same way? Did they think that their relationship to Abraham, to whom the Lord made great promises and with whom the Lord made a covenant, would exempt them from judgment? I cannot say for certain what their reasoning was. I do know that all of us are capable of deceiving ourselves when we begin compromising our godly values. When we begin deliberately dabbling in sin, we begin rationalizing our reasons for doing so. We start making excuses for ourselves. We might even convince ourselves that we are hiding things from the Lord or that He understands why we are sinning and that He won't take any disciplinary action against us. We might delude ourselves into thinking that because we have enjoyed His blessings in the past, He will keep on blessing us. But He is not obligated to bless sin. If we do not continue living by godly principles, He has the right to remove blessings from our lives in an effort to encourage us to repent. He has the right to discipline us as a method of convincing us we need to repent. If we continue obstinately in sin, negatively affecting our lives and our souls and negatively affecting those around us, He has the right to take any action necessary as judgment for our refusal to listen to Him and to turn from our wicked ways.
As we continue to move through Chapter 17 for the next couple of days we will look at the sins of the northern kingdom in more detail and will study the fall of the kingdom in more detail.
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