2 Kings 17:22 Meaning and Explanation

The people followed where their first king had led. They walked in all the sins of Jeroboam which he did and departed not from them, holding the false worship through every reign that followed. What one king began, the nation made its own and would not let go.

A sin embraced long enough becomes a way of life, and a way of life is hard to leave. Israel had every chance to depart and chose instead to remain. Habits of the heart, passed down and unexamined, can carry a people to ruin. The grace of repentance is precisely the power to depart, to break with what has bound us and turn at last to the Lord who waits to receive us.