1 Kings 12 and 13 illustrate greatly the sovereignty, as well as the faithfulness of God. Remember that God promised to secure David’s throne for David’s descendants forever (2 Samuel 7:13). All of it, however, was conditional on Israel – as well as David’s descendants – continuing to be faithful to the Lord (1 Kings 9:3-7).
God would have been well within His rights to abandon Israel.
But God didn’t. In God’s eyes, a promise is a promise – conditional or not.
And so the Lord kept His promise to David by preserving Rehoboam’s kingship, but he vastly reduced the kingdom. The fault was both monarchial and national. Solomon worshiped other Gods and therefore lost the right to rule. The people worshiped other gods and lost the privilege of belonging to God. But God doesn’t give them up.
Rehoboam’s problem was that he failed to follow his father’s advice about listening to wise counsel, but listened to his foolish friends instead. Jeroboam’s problem was that he simply didn’t trust the God who had made his kingship possible. Both would be failures.