The beginning of the Kingdom of Israel's apostasy is recorded in I Kings 12:25-33. Fearing that he might eventually lose political control over the ten tribes because of their long-standing religious ties to Jerusalem, capital of the Kingdom of Judah (verse 27), Israel's Jeroboam I instituted a state religion designed to meet his peoples' needs for convenience—and his own need for control. He built two shrines, one in Bethel, at the southern extremity of his kingdom, the other in Dan, near its northern boundary (verse 29). He exiled the Levites, the priestly tribe established by God, and installed in their place a priesthood of his own devising (verse 31). Finally, he moved the fall holy day season from the seventh month to the eighth, effectively setting aside the Sabbath commandment, since the annual holy days are God's Sabbaths (see Leviticus 23:1-3, 23-44). All this "became a sin" for Israel (I Kings 12:30).

Jeroboam's movement to false religious practices took deep root. In fact, the house of Israel never departed from the practices he established (II Kings 17:21-23). Having abandoned the Sabbath, the God-given sign marking them as His people (Exodus 31:13), the people of the northern tribes eventually lost their identification. That is why most Israelites do not know who they are to this day: The forefathers abandoned the sign that denoted their connection to God.

Take this line of thought to its logical conclusion: The Sabbath is a memorial to creation and, by extension, to the Creator God (see Exodus 20:11). Modern-day Israelites do not know who they are today because their forefathers abandoned this memorial to the Creator. Therefore, modern-day Israelites have come to abandon more than the sign: They have abandoned the God to whom the sign points. They no longer know the true God.

Here we see a sad cause and effect. Failure to recognize modern-day Israelites is failure to recognize the God who made Israel! The virulent secularism running rampant in Israel today has its roots in Sabbath-breaking. The antidote for secularism in the West is not government-mandated religious observance. Increased Sunday-church-attendance will not slow the flood of secularism; after all, most Sunday worshippers passively accept the doctrines of evolution and socialism just as avowed atheists do.

Attempting to unite a people with its God through these measures will fail. However, one will never find a Sabbath-keeper who is a secularist, for the Sabbath-keeper has maintained his link with the Creator God. Sabbath-keeping and secularism are diametrically opposed.

For years, the people of the southern Kingdom of Judah walked in the footsteps of their brethren in the north. However, a number of them then took a different path. The result of that change is in itself proof that God's Sabbath is a sign pointing to the Creator God.

Jeremiah 17:19-27 records God's promise to a Sabbath-keeping people. Here, He warns Jerusalem's inhabitants to "bear no burden on the Sabbath day, nor bring it in by the gates of Jerusalem; . . . nor do any work, but hallow the Sabbath day, as I commanded your fathers" (Jeremiah 17:21-22). If they heeded, God continues, "then shall enter the gates of this city kings and princes sitting on the throne of David, . . . accompanied by the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem; and this city shall remain forever" (Jeremiah 17:25). However, Sabbath-breaking will have dire consequences: "But if you will not heed Me to hallow the Sabbath day, . . . then I will kindle a fire in its gates, and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem, and it shall not be quenched" (Jeremiah 17:27). (For the fulfillment of this prophecy, see Jeremiah 39:8; II Chronicles 36:19.)

The people of Judah did not heed God's warning and, as a result, "kings and princes" no longer sit "on the throne of David" in Jerusalem. God moved the Davidic monarchy northwest to the British Isles, and the people He moved to Babylon. Jerusalem burned.

Those who returned from Babylon after seventy years did not learn their lesson. Nehemiah must have stood horrified at the Sabbath-breaking he witnessed among the Jews who returned from exile in Babylon. He

. . . saw in Judah some people treading wine presses on the Sabbath, and bringing in sheaves, and loading donkeys with wine, grapes, figs, and all kinds of burdens, which they brought into Jerusalem on the Sabbath day. And I warned them about the day on which they were selling provisions. . . . "What evil thing is this that you do, by which you profane the Sabbath day? Did not your fathers do thus, and did not our God bring all this disaster [i.e., the destruction of Jerusalem] on us and on this city? Yet you bring added wrath on Israel by profaning the Sabbath." (Nehemiah 13:15, 17-18)

Both Ezra and Nehemiah worked diligently to teach the Jews to keep God's Sabbath holy. It was during this time that many Jews took a different path than those of Israel. While Israel never returned to the practice of Sabbath-keeping, the descendants of the tribe of Judah (with Levi) came to keep it—albeit with the wrong intent, which Jesus Christ frequently addressed (Matthew 12:10-12; Mark 2:23-28; 3:1-4; Luke 6:6-9; 13:14-17; 14:1-6; John 7:22-24). They kept it throughout the hideous Maccabean period and later throughout the long Roman occupation. They kept it after the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. They kept it in the Diaspora—during the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. They kept it whether they dwelt in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, or later, America. Many keep it to this day. Because they do, they know who they are! They know who their Patriarchs were.

Like a neon sign, the mark of the Sabbath, identifying Jews as worshipping the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, shines brightly through their history, through the darkness of the Holocaust ghetto and oven, even piercing the murky gloom of today's secularism and humanism. In large measure, the experience of the Jews shows that God's mark, the Sabbath, does in fact identify a people as worshipping the God of the Patriarchs.

Had the northern ten tribes "remember[ed] the Sabbath day, to keep it holy" (Exodus 20:8) even half as well as the Jews do, they would today have a fair idea of their roots. Having forsaken the keeping of the seventh-day Sabbath, the peoples of the Kingdom of Israel, over time, forgot the God of their fathers, as well as His revelation and His prophets.

"Beware," one of the greatest of those prophets declares, "lest you forget the LORD who brought you out of the land of Egypt" (Deuteronomy 6:12). Forgetting the God who separated them from the other nations, ten-tribed Israel, scattered and wandering, became separated from their God and ultimately grew to be like other nations. Becoming like them, Israel became lost among them. Beware.