One of the repeated noises you hear in 2 Kings is the continual refrain that such and such a king did evil in the sight of the Lord and specifically that they continued in the sins of Jeroboam son of Nebat.

If you know the story, when Israel split into two kingdoms (Israel in the north and Judah in the South), in a bid to stop his people wandering down to Jerusalem to worship at the temple and spend all their money in the now rival Judean economy, Jeroboam set up two golden bulls at Dan and Bethel. Now they have their own centres of worship, nobody needs to put themselves in danger walking to Jerusalem and, best of all, the money associated with worship will stay in Israel’s economy.

The problem is that these golden bulls became a continual snare for Israel. They consistently worshipped these idols. They continued to ignore God’s word, law and covenant and instead worshipped God in the way they wanted, where they wanted, how they wanted and it was a matter of continual displeasure from Yahweh. Prophets consistently told them so and warned them. The Lord consistently brought issues to them to cause them to repent. But on and on they went.

This pattern repeats throughout 15 chapters of 2 Kings before the Lord brings the Assyrians up against Israel and begins taking them into exile. This is an exile that God promised would come if his people continued to be disobedient. Even by chapter 15, there is a still a tiny rump of a nation and people left in Samaria, but Israel is teetering on the precipice of total wipeout at this point.

One of the key messages that seems to be driven home in 2 Kings 15 is that there is no such thing as a little theological or doctrinal deviation. I suspect Jeroboam didn’t have any thought that his setting up of a couple of bulls would have such disastrous consequences. And who would have thought that two little statues would lead to such ongoing sin, repeated again and again, until the Lord eventually brings an exile upon the people? The little innovation of Jeroboam in worship was the fundamental foundation of the destruction of his nation.

You don’t have to look too far in church history to see how this plays out. When the difference between life-giving gospel orthodoxy and destructive heresy is two letters (homoousious or homoiousios), even little doctrinal divations are seen to matter. The same issues whipped up by Arius and addressed at Nicea are the same issues that are alive and well in all manner of cults and sects today. The difference between saving belief in the biblical Jesus and destructive heresy that puts you outside the kingdom can be apparently tiny.

The same goes for all manner of doctrinal deviations too. What may seem like a minor deviation from what scripture teaches may just be the very doctrine that works its way out in such ways that it impacts all manner of things that ends up wreaking havoc in your church. We may think of it as a small thing. A tiny matter. An issue that isn’t all that significant. But if it is a deviation from pure worship, if it is a deviation from what we believe the scriptures teach, we may well end up seeing that little compromise work its way out in all sorts of interesting and often destructive ways.

Part of that issue may be that our underlying approach to the scriptures – allowing us to content ourselves with such deviations – is the problem. A little compromise here opens up the liklihood of further compromise there. A wiggle on this allow us to use the same reasoning to wiggle on that. Before long, it becomes clear that our compromises and wiggles are, to all intents and purpose, the product of our view of God’s word. It is closer to a set of suggestions we can take or leave as we see fit. Certainly we give ourselves room to explain away the bits we would rather not have. But as Augustine famously said, if we take the bits that we like, and leave the bits that we don’t, it isn’t God we believe, but ourselves. And if our trust is fundamentaly in ourselves and not the Lord, what good is a faith like that to us?

When it comes to the worship of God, he has set the terms of how he will be worshipped. He has told us how we are to relate to him, what he demands of us and the means by which he wants us to worship him. We do not have the right to innovate and determine that God would be happy with our inventions and to do away with things he has not asked of us. We may just find those little deviations end up deviating the church right out of existence in the long run.