Dan Olinger

"If the Bible is true, then none of our fears are legitimate, none of our frustrations are permanent, and none of our opposition is significant."

Dan Olinger

 

Retired Bible Professor,

Bob Jones University

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Why Prophecy Is Hard—And Why We Disagree, Part 3

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I’ve asserted my thesis–Biblical prophecy is intentionally designed to be difficult to understand before the time of fulfillment—but to be quite clear afterwards—and I’ve given a couple of biblical passages that appear to confirm it. Now it’s time to work with an example, making the idea a little more concrete.

One of the most well-known prophetic passages in the entire Bible, at least among Christians, is Isaiah 53. It’s the fourth and last in a series of “Servant Songs” in Isaiah, and the most well known, primarily, I suppose, because Georg Friedrich Handel included much of it in his oratorio Messiah.

  • He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;
  • Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows;
  • With his stripes we are healed;
  • All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all;
  • He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter;
  • It pleased the LORD to bruise him.

We’ve heard the lines often, and they’ve become part of our consciousness, part of our culture, especially at Christmas.

Because of that familiarity, we’re unlikely to hear it the way Isaiah’s hearers—and Isaiah himself—did. The words were not familiar to them; they had to hear them, and try to understand them, for the first time.

And right in the middle of this song the Spirit has Isaiah write something that would have been quite puzzling to him and his Israelite audience:

  • He made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death.

Put yourself in Isaiah’s sandals.

Whaaaaat?!

That statement doesn’t make any sense at all.

The wicked and the rich don’t die similarly, and they’re not treated the same at the time. The wicked—criminals—are executed, probably by stoning, and their bodies are thrown out with the trash into the Valley of Hinnom, where the vultures pick at their rotting corpses until only the bones remain (Prov 30.17). A very undignified treatment.

The rich, on the other hand, are celebrated and mourned in their death, and their corpses are placed reverently in the family tomb, often a cave, sometimes carved laboriously out of solid rock.

How can both of these things be true for the Servant of Yahweh? How can he die in both disgrace and honor? How can he be numbered with transgressors and yet be buried with the rich?

As I say, our familiarity with these words—and with the prophecy’s fulfillment—means that the words don’t even give us pause. We nod our heads appreciatively, envisioning the fulfillment with perfect clarity—

  • Executed as a criminal, between two other criminals;
  • Has a secret disciple, a member of the Sanhedrin, well respected and very wealthy, who uses his influence to acquire the body after execution and places it in his own personal tomb.

Well, as a friend of mine used to say, “Hindsight’s 50/50.” :-) It’s easy to understand the question if you already know the answer, and it’s easy to “solve” a problem if you already know what happens.

But Isaiah and his hearers didn’t have any of that. They scratched their heads, grimaced, and wondered.

What could this possibly mean?

It’s obscure for more than 700 years. And during those years, generation after generation wonders.

And then, in real time and in the sight of all, the prophecy is fulfilled. The promise comes to pass.

And in an instant, the wonder of puzzlement gives way to the wonder of delight, and the fog lifts and understanding comes.

So that’s what it means! Wow!

The prophecy is obscure until the time of fulfillment—but then it’s as clear as day.

This isn’t some meaningless musing of a Nostradamus, whose prophecies are so vague that they could be fulfilled by any number of unspectacular events. No, this is a specific but incomprehensible prophecy, one that is immediately recognizable at its unique and precise fulfillment.

Discovery is a really great teaching technique. You remember what you discover, especially when the discovery hits you hard, right between the eyes. Especially when you solve a puzzle that’s been stumping the experts for centuries.

Maybe that’s why God did it this way.

Next time, I’ll draw some conclusions and applications from all this.

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Why Prophecy Is Hard—And Why We Disagree, Part 2

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Part 1

In my previous post I’ve stated my thesis:

Biblical prophecy is intentionally designed to be difficult to understand before the time of fulfillment—but to be quite clear afterwards.

Let me explain my basis for concluding that.

To begin with, this principle is directly stated in both Testaments.

In the Old Testament, we find a description of Daniel receiving a prophecy:

1 At that time shall arise Michael, the great prince who has charge of your people. And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time. But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone whose name shall be found written in the book. 2 And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. 3 And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above; and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever (Dan 12.1-3).

Daniel is then told to “shut up the words and seal the book, until the time of the end” (Dan 12.4). So God’s intention, in this case, is that the prophecy not be generally distributed. So far, so good.

Then Daniel sees a vision of two men, one of whom asks the other, “How long shall it be till the end of these wonders?” (Dan 12.6b). To which the other responds

that it would be for a time, times, and half a time, and that when the shattering of the power of the holy people comes to an end all these things would be finished (Dan 12.7b).

Perhaps your immediate response is, “Huh?” “Time, times, and a half a time?” What kind of an answer is that? What does it mean?

Well, you’re in good company, because Daniel himself thought the same thing (Dan 12.8a), and he asked for an explanation (Dan 12.8b). And he was told, “Go your way, Daniel, for the words are shut up and sealed until the time of the end” (Dan 12.9).

In other words, “Never mind; I’m not going to tell you.”

And Daniel is the prophet!

And why is the meaning withheld from the very one who’s supposed to write about it?

Because it’s not for now; it’s for later.

None of your business.

Well, that’s intriguing. God has no intention that anyone, including even the prophet, should understand the prophecy at the time it was given. No one will understand it until it’s fulfilled. Then they’ll understand.

And that’s what God intended all along.

Well, that’s Old Testament. Got anything from the New Testament?

Well, as it happens, I do. Thanks for asking.

In his first epistle, Peter describes the glories of our salvation and the plan of God that brought it about. Along the way he notes that the Old Testament prophets weren’t able to understand those things the way we have been able to (1P 1.10). Specifically, he says, they were puzzled by the apparent conflict between the reigning King, the eternal Son of David (2Sam 7), and the suffering Servant, who was executed without a defense (Isa 53). How could both of those be true of the same person? (1P 1.11).

And Peter notes that God revealed to them “that they were serving not themselves but [us],” who would come later and see those prophecies fulfilled (1P 1.12).

So in these cases, God clearly intended the predictions to be obscure, puzzling.

I should say that I don’t think this was always the case. When Jeremiah prophesied that Judah would be in captivity in Babylon for 70 years (Jer 25.11) and would then return (Jer 29.10), he understood what he was saying, and he intended his hearers to understand as well. He even bought a piece of land and buried the deed (Jer 32.9-15) to show them the kind of confidence that they should have in the Lord’s keeping of this promise.

But it was not at all uncommon for God to give a prophecy that seemed incomprehensible at the time, and he did so intentionally.

Next time we’ll look at an example of such a puzzling prophecy, one that has since been fulfilled. By studying that example we’ll be able to see more concretely how confusing such a prophecy would be initially, but how perfectly clear it would at the time of fulfillment. And that insight may help us understand why God is speaking so obscurely in the first place.

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Why Prophecy Is Hard—And Why We Disagree, Part 1

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A lot of Christians are confused, and some are even troubled, by biblical prophecy. It seems really hard to understand—what’s with those wheels that Ezekiel saw? and how do you get seven heads and ten horns on a beast? Other Christians are troubled by the fact that nobody can seem to agree on how things are supposed to turn out. Some people have been predicting the Rapture for decades now—and they’ve been wrong every time. And others, who look like perfectly good Christians, chuckle, “Rapture, huh? You don’t really believe that, do you?”

There’s a reason for all this. And when you understand it—the reason, not the prophecies—you’ll realize that there’s really nothing to be upset about.

Let me see if I can clarify some things.

I should begin by defining what I’m talking about. When I say “prophecy,” I’m talking about biblical predictions, places where the Bible says that something’s going to happen in the future. Technically, everything the Bible says is “prophecy,” in the sense that it’s a message from God to humans, delivered through mouthpieces, prophets. But here I’m using the word more narrowly.

The Bible does make a lot of predictions. The first one is in Gen 3.15, where God predicts that “the seed of the woman” will crush the serpent’s head. The last one is Jesus’ statement, “Surely I come quickly,” in Rev 22.20. And there are a lot of them in between.

We can sort them into 2 groups—those that have been fulfilled, and those that haven’t. A great many of those that have been fulfilled are about just 2 events—the exiles of Israel (especially the exile of Judah to Babylon and back) and the first coming of Christ. It can be instructive to study how those prophecies were stated and then how they were fulfilled; I think that study serves as a kind of lab for how we should expect other prophecies to be fulfilled (more on that later).

Most of the ones that haven’t been fulfilled are about the end times—what we call eschatology. And there is where most of the disagreement is among biblical scholars and among everyday Christians.

So why all the disagreement?

I would suggest that it springs primarily from the way God has chosen to give his prophecies.

In short, they’re really hard to understand.

Note that I’ve said that this is “the way God has chosen” to speak to us about these things. The fact that the predictions are obscure is not some kind of defect in God’s ability to communicate, some failure on his part. And I don’t think it’s a problem with our ability to understand, either.

Why do I say that? Because there are all kinds of statements in the Scripture that we understand perfectly well. God can speak clearly when he wants to, and he is completely justified in holding us accountable for those things. He’s told us who we are, where we came from, who he is, and how we can have a relationship with him. These things are clear, and life and death hang on our responding rightly to what he has clearly told us.

But when we cross over into predictive prophecy, it seems as though everything just goes a little crazy. Suddenly we’re knitting our eyebrows, furrowing our foreheads, shaking our heads. Wheel in a wheel in a wheel, indeed.

This stuff is hard. Charles Hodge, the great Princeton theologian of the 19th century, said frankly that nobody was qualified to interpret biblical prophecy unless he’d spent an entire lifetime doing so—and since he, Hodge, hadn’t, he wasn’t going to make any authoritative pronouncements.

So here’s my thesis.

Biblical prophecy is intentionally designed to be difficult to understand before the time of fulfillment—but to be quite clear afterwards.

God has decided, for reasons of his own, to speak this way. I’ll speculate later on a possible reason for that, but for now I’d like to spend a few posts demonstrating

  • that my thesis is true,
  • that it explains the current diversity of views about the end times, and
  • that it gives us some guidance on how we ought to study and apply these matters.

(If you’re expecting me to finish the series by telling you when Jesus is coming back, you’re going to be disappointed.)

See you next time.

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The Really Important Bible Story that Hardly Anybody Knows About, Part 5

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December 18, 520 BC, has been a pretty good day so far; Haggai’s third sermon has given us a lot to chew on.

But he’s not done yet.

Later the same day, Haggai delivers his fourth and final sermon, and it goes far beyond any of the others.

This sermon is different from the others; for starters, it’s delivered not to the crowd of onlookers or the workers themselves, but to just one man—the governor, Zerubbabel (Hag 2.21).

And it’s brief and to the point.

And cryptic.

Haggai talks about the shaking that’s coming (Hag 2.21b-22). He’s mentioned that before, in his second sermon (Hag 2.6-7). And in that day, he says to Zerubbabel, I’m going to make you a signet ring!

And that’s it. End of sermon, end of book.

What on earth does that mean?

Zerubbabel would know very well what it means. I’ve mentioned that he’s the grandson of the last Davidic king. This statement is about his grandfather.

His grandfather went by several names. Jehoiachin. Jeconiah. Or just Coniah.

And in his reign of just three months (2K 24.8), he was an evil, evil king. So evil, in fact, that God had placed a special curse on him through Jeremiah: he would be cut off, the royal signet ring pulled off of God’s finger and cast aside (Jer 22.24-27). And worse, none of his descendants would ever sit on the throne of David (Jer 22.30).

How about that. God just cursed the Messianic line. To all appearances, his promise to David (2Sam 7.4-17) was over. No eternal Messianic king after all.

The end of hope.

And now, to Zerubbabel, two generations later, he speaks again of the signet ring. What does it mean? Will Zerubbabel become king again?

Not until the shaking (Hag 2.21-23). When would that be?

Well, Zerubbabel never becomes king, so not in his lifetime. And not for the next 400 years, through all of Zerubbabel’s royal descendants (Mt 1.12-16). And along about 5 BC, the royal heir—cursed—is a carpenter in Nazareth.*

He will never be king. Nor will any biological son.

I think he knew that. The very existence of the genealogy in Matthew 1 testifies to the fact that the Jews kept track of such things.

And now he learns that his fiancée—a woman whose character he had never questioned—is with child, and he knows he’s not the father.

Anguished, he ponders his next step. In the dark of night, a heavenly messenger appears to him. The situation is not what you think, he says. Marry the woman. Adopt the baby.

Joseph’s reputation will be ruined if he does what the messenger says. It will cost him everything.

But he does it anyway. Does he know? Does he realize that this is God’s remarkable way of keeping an apparently broken promise? Or does he just figure that you ought to do what a heavenly messenger says?

He adopts the baby.

And in that instant, it all comes together. The adopted child becomes the legal heir to all the promises of God to David. He becomes the eternal king, the child born to bear all government on his shoulders. Yet he is not heir to the curse on Coniah. He can reign.

How much do we owe to this Joseph, the man who sacrificed everything to follow God’s hard command and then disappeared entirely from history? What if he had said, “No, let the next generation do it!”?

There can be no next generation. Daniel predicted the death of Messiah around AD 30 (Dan 9.24-26). This is the time. If Joseph doesn’t do it, the promises are all broken, and it all falls apart.

Back to Haggai’s day. Does Zerubbabel understand any of this? Can he make sense of the prophecy of the signet ring?

We’re not told. Maybe Haggai explained it to him. Maybe he never knew. Maybe he thought, “And this is the thanks I get?!”

But the theme of the sermon is clear to us. God keeps his promises.

He has made plenty more. And he keeps them all.

Walk in the light of that trust.

* What follows assumes that Matthew’s genealogy is the royal line of David culminating in Joseph, while Luke’s genealogy is a non-royal Davidic line culminating in Mary. No space to defend that view here, but it’s common and justified at length in standard reference works and commentaries.

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The Really Important Bible Story that Hardly Anybody Knows About, Part 4

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So far we’ve seen Judah return from Babylonian Captivity and re-establish themselves in the land. We’ve seen them respond, 16 years later, to Haggai’s urging that they rebuild the Temple. We’ve seen God encourage them that his blessing would be on this Temple, in a special way.

And so the work continues.

But now there’s a new problem.

Routine sets in. The workers go to work every day at the Temple site, and they begin to lose appreciation for the special character of the work they’re doing. And not in the way you’d expect—they don’t say, “Ho-hum, let’s get this job done and move on to the next one.” No, the distortion in their thinking is much more pernicious than that. While continuing their appreciation for the significance of the work itself, they twist its purpose. They begin to make it about themselves rather than the God of heaven.

“I’m working on the Temple!” they think. “I’m a cut above!”

And if “I’m special!” then I suppose I have certain privileges, don’t I? If God appreciates my work for him, then I probably don’t have to care all that much about the details of my own thinking and my own living. That’s for the little people. I’m special. My work makes me so.

On December 18, three months into construction, Haggai trudges up to the Temple site once again.

“I have a question for you,” he says. “It’s about the Law. Call the experts; I want to get their opinion” (Hag 2.11).

If someone is carrying some sacrificial meat, he says, and he rubs up against something, does the holy meat make the other thing holy (Hag 2.12a)? In other words, does holiness rub off?

No, the priests—the experts—say (Hag 2.12b). Holiness doesn’t rub off.

OK, next question.

If someone has touched a dead body, he’s unclean, right (Lev 22.4)? Now, if this unclean person touches something else, does he make the other thing unclean (Hag 2.13a)? Does corruption rub off?

Yes, they say (Hag 2.13b). Corruption pollutes.

So holiness doesn’t rub off, but unholiness does?

Right.

You already knew that, didn’t you? When you wash your hands, rubbing them on a dirty surface doesn’t make the surface clean; it makes your hands dirty again. My pastor from years ago* once said, “When you put on white gloves and play in the mud, you don’t made the mud glovey; you make the gloves muddy.”

These men thought that working on the Temple construction was making them clean. On the contrary, when they showed up every day, they were dragging their corrupt hearts onto the site and defiling it by their very presence (Hag 2.14).

They were undoing with their hearts what they were doing with their hands.

And as a result, God’s judgment on their land continued despite their (merely) external obedience (Hag 2.15-18).

But if they would trust and obey, if they would believe his word, despite the desolation all around them, the blessing would come (Hag 2.19).

So what’s the theme of Haggai’s third sermon? Love first, then obedience.

And so it is with us. We think that our association with other believers, with churches, with institutions, our work for God, enables us to cut corners in our love for him.

But it doesn’t.

God doesn’t want your stuff. He doesn’t even want your frenetic activity—he really doesn’t need your help to advance his kingdom—so much as he wants your heart. Mary knew that, and Martha, I suspect, eventually learned it (Lk 10.38-42).

So stop a minute, rethink, reorient.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

Put the important stuff first.

And then, sure, get back to work. With a reoriented heart, the work takes on a whole new perspective.

* That was Chuck Swindoll, Waltham (MA) Evangelical Free Church, 1966-67.

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The Really Important Bible Story That Hardly Anybody Knows About, Part 3

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It’s October of 520 BC, and the returned exiles from Babylon have begun construction on the new (Second) Temple under the leadership of their governor, Zerubbabel, in response to the urging of the prophet Haggai. But just a month into the effort, discouragement has set in.

It appears that there are some older folks watching as the young bucks do the heavy lifting. They’re old enough to remember the First Temple, Solomon’s Temple, now gone for 66 years. Let me tell you, that was quite a piece of work, they say. The gold. The silver. The ivory. And those two columns on the front porch. Six feet in diameter. Three stories tall. Bronze four inches thick around a hollow core. Now that was a temple. This one? Not so much. Ah, well. I guess you can do only so much with rubble.

On the 17th of October, Haggai returns to the deflated construction workers with another message from God. He confronts the problem directly.

The old men are right—as far as they go, he says. This one isn’t going to have all the gold and silver and ivory of Solomon’s Temple (Hag 2.3). But this time is different. This one isn’t going to be about gold and silver. Gold and silver are trivial; if you need gold and silver to make this Temple great, I can get you all the gold and silver you need. I put the ore in the hills, and I know exactly where it all is. I can get it for you if I want to (Hag 2.8).

But this time I’m doing something much, much bigger than mere shiny things. This Temple is going to be different.

The day is coming, he says, when I’m going to turn the whole world upside down (Hag 2.6-7). I’m going to do something unprecedented, unimaginable. And when I do, the eyes of the entire world are going to be focused on this Temple, the one you’re building—and it will shine with a glory that gold and silver could never approach (Hag 2.7).

You see, what the construction workers couldn’t possibly know is that in a little more than half a millennium, a little baby boy would be brought into this Temple to be dedicated to the Lord, and a prophet named Simeon would be among the first to know that this was a baby like no other (Lk 2.25-35). And a dozen years later, the same boy would sit in this Temple and confound the rabbis there with the wisdom of his questions (Lk 2.41-50). And as a man he would stride into this Temple—“My Father’s house!”—and drive out those who had filled the courtyard with abusive money-making schemes, robbing God’s people in the very place God had designed to be their sanctuary (Jn 2.13-17). Twice! (Lk 19.45-46). And there he would teach (Jn 10.22-38).

And one day—one dark Friday afternoon—as the priests were going about their normal duties in the Holy Place in this very Temple*, with a horrifying crack, the veil of this Temple would be torn in two, from the top to the bottom, without hands, leaving the way open into the very presence of God for everyone.

Gold and silver? Trivial stuff.

This is about eternal things, life-changing things, world-shaking things.

So keep working, the Lord says. Your work matters, even if it doesn’t look like it to the folks looking on. This is really, really big.

What’s the theme of this second sermon?

It’s God who makes the work great.

Any work done for him, in obedience to his commands, is infinitely great, because the one for whom it’s done is infinitely great.

Labor on, my friend.

* Of course I’m aware that by Jesus’ time Herod the Great had massively renovated the Temple, with the effect that it was significantly greater and more impressive than was the one Zerubbabel’s workers constructed. But Haggai doesn’t make that distinction, and neither will I. The building they were beginning work on would eventuate in world-shaking developments.

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The Really Important Bible Story That Hardly Anybody Knows About, Part 2

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In my last post I introduced the story of Haggai, one of two prophets who preached to the Jews who had returned from captivity in Babylon. As I noted there, they had rebuilt the altar and reinstituted animal sacrifice, so as to address their most pressing need, a right relationship with God. And they began to rebuild the Temple until local opposition stopped them.

It’s now 16 years later, and the Temple remains in ruins, with a functioning altar standing amidst the rubble. On August 29, 520 BC, the word of Yahweh comes to Haggai. The Lord directs the message to Zerubbabel, the governor, and to Joshua, the high priest. (Obviously, this is not the Joshua we know best; he’s been dead for nearly a thousand years.)

Haggai begins by telling the hearers to “Consider your ways” (Hag 1.5)—in other words, to rethink what they’re doing. Something is wrong with their priorities.

What could that be? Well, they’re living in nicely decorated houses—well beyond what’s functionally necessary—and the Lord’s house still lies in ruins (Hag 1.4, 9b).

And for at least the most recent of these past 16 years, God has been nudging them toward dependence. He has withheld the rain that would provide bountiful crops (Hag 1.10)—something the Lord had promised them if they would but serve him (Dt 7.12-13). Every sector of the economy has been affected—the grain, the grape, the olive, and all the other agricultural products; and the suppression of this key element of the economy has exerted downward pressure on even the wages for labor (Hag 1.11).

And the judgment has not been limited to decreased income. Cash outflow has been increased at the same time:

You have sown much, and harvested little. You eat, but you never have enough; you drink, but you never have your fill. You clothe yourselves, but no one is warm. And he who earns wages does so to put them into a bag with holes (Hag 1.6).

Does that sound at all familiar? Have you ever seen the bills increasing just at the times that you need to cut expenses to match your income? Frustrating, isn’t it?

Now, I’m not saying that when that happens to you, God is judging you, and you need to go out and build a temple—or even put more money in the offering plate. God has many reasons other than judgment to take us through deep waters and fiery trials, and in fact Christ has endured all of the judgment that God has ever had for us.

But at least this common experience helps us understand a little bit of what Judah was going through.

And what does the Lord prescribe as the solution to the problem?

Get some wood. Build the house. Glorify God (Hag 1.8).

I don’t think the solution to divine displeasure is to work harder; the Scripture pictures God as a God of grace, of love, of care. And that is the key to what he’s asking for here.

The problem is not their failure to build the Temple; that’s the symptom. The problem is that they don’t care about their God as much as they care about themselves. And so God tells them, yes, to get wood and build the house—and most important, in that to glorify him, to make him look big, to demonstrate by their actions that they hold him close and hold him reverently, that they value him above all else.

Like every good sermon, this one has a theme, a key takeaway idea. How would you state it?

I’d put it pretty simply: God comes first.

We put him first. In everything—in our thoughts, in our plans, in our labors, and especially in our affections—because if he is first there, he will be first everywhere else.

The account tells us that Zerubbabel, and Joshua, and all the people responded to Haggai’s words as they should have. With the promise of the Lord’s presence and empowerment (Hag 1.13), they get wood, and they begin to build the house. Construction begins just 23 days later (Hag 1.15).

This is a great first step. But as we’ll see, setting off down the path of obedience does not mean that the path will be straight, or level, or free of danger. In less than a month, God’s people will need another sermon.

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The Really Important Bible Story That Hardly Anybody Knows About, Part 1

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There’s a standard set of Bible stories that we grow up hearing in Sunday school. In the Old Testament, Adam and Eve; Noah; Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph; Moses and Joshua; maybe a judge or two; David and Solomon; Elijah and Elisha; Daniel.

We know that Judah went into captivity in Babylon, and we hear how Nehemiah rebuilt Jerusalem’s walls afterwards, but everything in between is kind of fuzzy.

It shouldn’t be.

Ezra begins with the story of Cyrus, who had conquered Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians, announcing that any peoples conquered and displaced by the Babylonians could return to their homeland. Apparently he figured that conquered peoples might be less prone to rebellion if they were happy. Quite an enlightened despot, he was.

Well, that meant that the Jews could go home.

Relatively few of them did (42,360 [Ezra 2.64]). That seems surprising until you realize that most of the Jews in Babylon by that time had been born there; the last deportation had been 50 years earlier, in 586 BC. No reason to go to a city they’d never seen—which, incidentally, was in ruins and had been for 50 years.

The leader of those who did return was named Zerubbabel, the grandson of the last Davidic king, Jechoniah, who had been cursed by God (Jer 22.34ff) along with his descendants. So Zerubbabel is not going to be king, even if Cyrus would hear of such a thing. He’s the governor.

The returnees arrive in Jerusalem (Ezra 1.11), and the first thing they do is rebuild the altar (Ezra 3.2). It’s easy to see why they did this; their Law said that there was no forgiveness of sins without blood sacrifices (Lev 17.11), and it also said that sacrifices could be offered only at the Temple site, where God had placed his name (Dt 12.11). For the 50 years since the Temple had been destroyed, there had been no blood sacrifice, and thus, as far as they knew, no forgiveness of sin.

So they build the altar first, on the site of the old Temple, and the blood flows once again. There is peace with God.

Then they begin reconstruction of the Temple itself (Ezra 3.8). But they’ve gotten no further than laying the foundation when they run into political opposition from the locals (Ezra 4), and the work stops (Ezra 4.24) until the second year of Darius—a 16-year hiatus.

So for 16 years the priests lead animals out into the center of the vacant lot where the Temple used to be, and on the altar, under the open sky, amid the rubble, they slaughter and sacrifice them. The proper place, all right, but hardly a fitting one for sacrificing to the God of heaven.

During those 16 years the residents of Jerusalem aren’t idle. They rebuild their houses, plant their gardens, and do all the other work necessary to establishing a normal life in the long-abandoned land. They even have time to raise their standard of living by paneling their houses and decorating them far beyond simple functionality.

While dust swirls, and rain falls, and animals crawl over and around the naked altar where God meets his people.

After 16 years of this—God is patient—two prophets come to Jerusalem to reorient the people’s priorities. Their names are Haggai and Zechariah. We know little of either of them beyond their names and the fact that they prophesied. Haggai’s brief book consists of four sermons he preached in 520 BC, sermons that led to the reconstruction of the Temple and the refocusing of the spiritual life of Judah.

The sermons are preached over a period of just less than 4 months. The specific date for each sermon is given—which means that Haggai is the only book of the Bible for which we know the precise date(s) of its writing.

Every good sermon has a clear and concise theme, or what you might call a thesis statement, that the hearers can take away and put into action immediately. Haggai’s sermons are no exception.

The next 4 posts will explicate each of these four sermons—and you’ll find that their themes, their directives, are as timely today as the day they were preached.

Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

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On the Theology of Temporal Power

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A while back I posted on the contrast between the weapons of political combat and those of spiritual combat. I argued the obvious point that the latter are more effective than the former, even in political combat. And along the way I stated that political power disappears rapidly and often unexpectedly.

That’s borne out repeatedly and pervasively in Scripture by both assertion (in Proverbs and often elsewhere) and example (throughout the stories of the kings, both Israelite and pagan). Shelley’s Ozymandias taught us nothing new.

A passage that particularly drives home this point is Isaiah 14. The chapter appears toward the beginning of a section on God’s sovereign plan for the nations with whom Judah regularly dealt: Babylon and Assyria, the Big Ones (13-14), Philistia (14.28ff), Moab (15-16), Syria (17-18), Egypt (19-20), Babylon again (21), Edom (21.11ff), Arabia (21.13ff), Israel (22), and Tyre (23).

After describing the military defeat of Babylon in chapter 13, Yahweh turns Isaiah’s prophecy toward the fate of Babylon’s king in chapter 14. His power having been broken, all his old enemies will join in celebrating his collapse (Isa 14.6-8). All the dead will come to mock his arrival at the gates of hell (Isa 14.9). Great and mighty kings, once unimaginably powerful on their earthly thrones, now effete in the realm of the dead, sarcastically welcome his “royal procession” from power to irrelevance (Isa 14.10-11). He who had once sent insufficiently powerful enemies to the grave (Isa 14.6) is now there himself, food for worms (Isa 14.11).

Verse 12 begins a paragraph that many interpreters see as having a double reference, describing the fall of Satan from heaven. I’m not convinced of that. I don’t see anything in the passage that couldn’t be accurate of the king of Babylon. Some point to the words “I will be like the Most High” in v 14, but my response is to ask, “Have you never talked to a politician?” There’s nothing in the reported words of the king that any US Senator hasn’t thought.

I think many interpreters are influenced by the fact that God here calls the king “Lucifer,” an accepted name for Satan. But I note that this is the only use of the name in Scripture—Satan is never called that anywhere else—and so to use it as evidence that this is Satan is circular reasoning. Since the name simply means “Light-bearer” (as the name Christopher means “Christ-bearer”), there’s no reason it has to apply to Satan. If the king of Egypt thought he was the sun god—as did Louis XIV—it’s not difficult to imagine that the king of Babylon might have called himself the Morning Star, the planet Venus.

So I don’t think “Lucifer” is actually a biblical name for Satan, and I’m inclined to think that what we’re reading here says nothing of Satan but lots about the king of Babylon and, by extension, all earthly kings. (For the detail-obsessive reader, let me answer the question hovering in your mind: I do think Ezekiel 28, addressed to the king of Tyre, has a double reference to Satan, since the context supports that.)

The upshot of all this is that those who hold political and military power also hold highly exalted opinions of themselves because of that power—opinions that are short-sighted and completely unfounded. Kings, emperors, presidents, and prime ministers all go the way of all flesh. Representative rulers lose their power when their terms expire, and even autocrats and dictators-for-life inevitably die, and regardless of the expense of the state funeral, someone else will take their place, and life will certainly go on for the people over whom they had so much power.

Is this the man that made the earth tremble—that shook kingdoms?! (Isa 14.16).

How shortsighted it is to worship at that altar! How foolish to look there for deliverance!

Come instead—boldly—to the throne of grace (Heb 4.16), to the one seated high upon a throne, whose train fills the temple, a house filled with smoke! (Isa 6.1; Jn 12.41). Come to the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, who was, and is, and is to come! (Rev 1.8).

His kingdom lasts forever, and his will is done to all generations.

Now that’s power.

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