Bible – Page 14

Second King, Part 2: We’ll See Who’s Boss

May 26, 2022 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

The last episode in the Old Testament story takes place in Persia, in Susa, the winter capital and royal residence. (In the summer, Susa was unpleasantly hot and thus inappropriate for a capital.) The king is Ahasuerus—more popularly known by the Greek version of his name, Xerxes. The episode begins in the third year of his reign (Es 1.3), which was 483 BC. The Greek historian Herodotus records that after his conquest of Egypt, which would have ended about this time, Xerxes convened an assembly of his nobles and announced his desire to invade and conquer Greece (Histories 7.8). Whether this is the occasion for the party in Esther 1 is just conjecture, but the timing seems about right, and it would make sense for Xerxes to display his wealth if he wanted to convince his nobles to support an invasion of Greece.

In any case, it was some party. The palace and banquet hall at Susa have been excavated, and the roofed hall was about the size of a football field. The hundreds (thousands?) of guests could eat, and drink, as much as they wanted. For six months. This king’s resources—and therefore his powers—are endless.

Right?

In a climactic, boastful display of power and pride, Xerxes calls for his wife to parade in front of his guests.

And she refuses.

The text doesn’t tell us why. Perhaps she was expected to appear nude. Perhaps she was pregnant; if the biblical Vashti is the same as Amestris, she was the mother of Artaxerxes, who would have born along about this time. Or perhaps she just didn’t want to be paraded around in front of a pampered, privileged, drunken mob.

But refuse she does. And so “Xerxes’ action is a parody on Persian might, for the powerful king could not even command his own wife” (HCBC). Xerxes, determined to punish her, seeks counsel from his advisers. Their immediate reaction shows that they are as self-obsessed as Xerxes himself; if Vashti can refuse her husband’s command, then—horror of horrors!—our wives can too. So, they advise, pass a decree—which in Persia is unalterable—banishing Vashti. It’s a broken world if a decree issued in drunkenness binds the rulers’ hands forever.

And the decree goes out “into all the king’s provinces” (Es 1.22), translated into all the recipient languages with the efficiency of the United Nations or the BBC. We won’t have anyone, not even the queen, disregarding the power of the One Great King, Xerxes.

It’s a big empire, stretching from India in the east to Ethiopia in the west (Es 1.1). But the Persians had ways of getting the message out efficiently. They had a sort of “Pony Express,” which Herodotus describes in something approaching wonder. Allegedly the riders could deliver a message from Susa to Sardis, in western Turkey, in 9 days or less. That’s 1200 miles.

Well. I guess we’ve solved that problem. Nobody’s bigger than Xerxes. Nobody tells him what to do. Not even his wife. Nosiree.

To be continued.

Photo credit: Xerxes’ tomb; dynamosquito from France, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Second King, Part 1: Introduction

May 23, 2022 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

At its heart, the Bible is a story. In the Old Testament, the story, which runs from Genesis to Esther, is about the nation of Israel, with a couple of appendices; the poetry and the prophets both give us background information and enrich the story in many ways, especially as they elucidate the nation’s relationship with God. But the story itself begins with creation and ends with … well, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Most Christians are familiar with at least the broad arc of the story. God creates the world perfect, and soon man disobeys him, plunging himself and his environment into a life of death. God promises to restore life—and his first narrated move, perhaps surprisingly, is to bring more judgment in a global flood and then in scattering Noah’s descendants across the planet.

But with one of those descendants, Abram, God begins to make a special people, soon naming them “Israel.” He makes grand promises to them, but in the short term at least, he doesn’t appear to be keeping them. Israel spends 400 years outside their gifted homeland, much of that time in slavery.

Then God calls an Israelite, Moses, to lead his people out of Egypt and back to The Land. Under Joshua they conquer Canaan, but they seem unable to govern themselves. After a long cycle of failure, they receive from God a king, David, and a promise that his line will never end.

But it does end. Or at least it seems to. Just a generation later David’s kingdom is divided by civil war, and most of the land—and the people—give sovereignty to an upstart, non-Davidic king. For 200 years there are two nations instead of one. And both sink into idolatry.

Then more judgment. God sends the rebel kingdom into exile in Assyria and warns the remnant Davidic kingdom, Judah, to straighten up. They don’t. And 150 years later they too go into Mesopotamian exile, this time in Babylon.

What about the promises—to Abram? to David?

One of many things we learn from this story is the danger of making snap judgments about God. As Creator of time and Lord over it, he has no need or inclination to hurry, and like any good teacher, he gives his students time to discover things for themselves—even if they’re slow learners.

The exiled Israelites never return from Assyria. But 70 years after Judah’s initial deportation, their enemies the Babylonians are dethroned from their regional domination when Persia overruns the capital. The Persian conqueror, Cyrus, is relatively enlightened for his time; he figures that the best way to achieve peace in an empire of conquered and displaced people groups is just to let them all go home.

And so, two years after the exiled Jews change emperors, the new guy says they can return to their homeland. Many people are surprised that the vast majority of exiles don’t take up the offer, but they shouldn’t be. It’s been at least 50 years since any of these people have seen their homeland—which means, of course, that most of the exiles had been born in Babylon. In a real sense, Babylon is home to them; they don’t feel like exiles at all.

So most of them stay. A relative few, under the leadership of Zerubbabel, and later Ezra and Nehemiah, return and begin the arduous task of rebuilding everything from scratch. But most stay.

And 50 years later, long after Zerubbabel and Haggai and Zechariah have fulfilled their ministries in Jerusalem, there is in the Persian capital of Susa, more than 200 miles east of Babylon, a Jewish man, apparently a government functionary. He is named for the Babylonian god Marduk. And his story is the last episode in the biblical story of the nation of Israel, the spine of the Old Testament.

We’ll spend a few posts looking more closely at the story of Mordecai, his king, and his cousin.

See you next time.

Photo credit: Xerxes’ tomb; dynamosquito from France, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

What Church Is For, Part 3: Maturity in Christ

March 17, 2022 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Grow Up | Part 2: No Longer Children

We can’t stop our problems by just gritting our teeth and trying harder not to be bad. We need what Thomas Chalmers called “the expulsive power of a new affection,” a love for something good that drives out our earlier affection for what was destroying us.

In Ephesians 4.14, Paul has focused on the negative behaviors, but he doesn’t leave us there. In verse 15 he moves on to the new affection.

“But speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ” (Ep 4.15).

The verb here is interesting. Our translation, like most in English, says “speaking the truth.” But the word “speaking” is not technically in the text. The word is a participle, all right, but it’s just the verb form of the noun “truth.” We might woodenly render it “truthing.”

Now, I’m not criticizing the translations. We don’t say “truthing” in English; we say “speaking the truth.” That’s the way the verb ought to be rendered.

But I would suggest that what Paul is commanding here is not just the surface-level, outward conformity that “speaking” might imply. It’s not just saying things that are technically true but (intentionally?) misleading.

It’s truthfulness. A deep, lasting commitment to being genuine all the way down.

If Jesus is the truth (Jn 14.6), then being committed to the truth is the only sensible way to be. Anything short of that is treason.

Note that the contrast in the context is being deceived, the way simple-minded children can be. We’re not supposed to be like that. We’re supposed to be controlled by the truth—to recognize, believe, accept, practice, and, yes, speak it.

How?

Paul gives two simple descriptors—

“in love.” That may mean “with love as our motivation,” and certainly our love for Christ, which issues in love for one another, can help us determine how we live out genuineness and authenticity. But it may also mean “by means of love” (what theorists call “the instrumental use”)—which means that we demonstrate our genuineness outwardly, by actions on behalf of others that serve as evidence of our inward love and compassion.
“into Christ.” Christ is to be our target, our goal. That means, of course, that we measure ourselves by him, that we love as he loves. But I suspect that it goes far beyond simple imitation. Christ is our focus, our aim, our goal; he is the reason we do what we do, so much so that we transcend thinking about our own interests and act sacrificially, as Christ himself “gave himself a ransom for many.” Now, we’re not going to be paying for anybody’s sins, but we can follow his example in thinking of others rather than ourselves.

Study Christ; learn Him; focus on Him; make Him the top priority (that’s what love is). As you then grow up into Him, you’ll be a person of truth rather than a victim of trickery.

If we do this kind of thinking, one person at a time, what kind of churches would we have? What kind of spiritual, mental, and emotional health would we have there?

Interestingly, Paul goes on to describe something almost like critical mass. The church fits together, with each part doing what it’s designed to do, until the body begins to construct itself. It doesn’t have to think about growing, or try harder to grow, or obsess about why it’s not growing. It just grows, because that’s what bodies do when they’re healthy.

And eventually, one great day, the church will be the kind of body that reflects gloriously on its Head.

May that day come soon.

Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash

What Church Is For, Part 2: No Longer Children

March 14, 2022 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Grow Up

We have some growing to do.

We’re not there yet. Even Paul says that he’s not where he needs to be (Php 3.12), and that he knows “in part” (1Co 13.12).

Paul now gives us our response—the medicine we’re supposed to take. In verse 14, he begins with the negative—“Stop this practice”; and then, in verse 15, he gives us the positive—“Here’s what you can do about it.” Today’s post focuses on verse 14.

^“As a result, we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming” (Ep 4.14).

God’s people are supposed to stop being children.

Now, I should note that there’s nothing defective about a child’s being a child. We all start out as children, and for a time that’s the right and natural place to be. We love children’s simplicity, and joy, and insight. Social media is filled with videos of children’s delightfulness.

Jesus even said that we grownups need to become like children, in some sense, before we can enter the kingdom of heaven (Mt 18.3-4; 19.14). The simple trust of a child for his parent is a powerful thing.

But children aren’t supposed to stay children. They’re supposed to grow up.

Specifically, they’re supposed to outgrow

Inconsistency

Paul describes a boat, “tossed here and there by waves,” at the mercy of its circumstances. Children can be like that. We all know that if one child in the church nursery starts to cry, we need to get him out of there fast, or else before long every child will be crying, and the more part will know not wherefore they are come together.

We’re supposed to get over our childlike tendency to be governed by what’s going on around us.

I think of that when I see my friends on social media given over to the Outrage of the Day. Somebody somewhere decides what we’re all going to be upset about this time, and we follow like sheep, sharing posts on issues about which we know nothing but immediately have an opinion. I saw a meme the other day that said something to the effect of, “And just like that everybody went from being expert epidemiologists to being experts in international relations.”

Yeah.

Paul’s context is more specific than just general inconsistency; he’s speaking specifically about “every wind of doctrine,” or teaching, specifically teaching about the faith. I have known people—and still do—who take up every half-witted heresy that comes down the pike. It’s like distortions of Scripture get all knotted up in their brains and just hang out together like they’re the last great hope of mankind.

We need to do better. We need to develop adult judgment—wisdom—that prevents us from being tossed around like that.

Naivete

Paul changes his image in the middle of the verse. He moves from natural forces—waves and winds—to moral ones—“by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming.”

The fact is that in a morally influenced world, the things calling for our attention are not always neutral distractions. Often they’re the schemes of people with evil intent. The distractors are up to something.

I’ve mentioned the delightfulness of a child’s naivete. Decades ago Johnny Carson was interviewing a boy, and the child pretty much took over the interview. He asked Johnny to do a magic trick for him, and Johnny obliged. The look of wonder on the boy’s face was pure innocence, just delightful. He really thought that quarter had come out of his own ear.

But again, children should grow up. Naivete is not a virtue in adults. We shouldn’t be buying what the ne’er-do-wells are selling. We should know the Scripture—and the world—better than that.

This post has been pretty negative, because this verse is negative. Next time we’ll look at the positive side.

Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash

What Church Is For, Part 1: Grow Up

March 10, 2022 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

“Experts” tell us that we can’t be productive or successful without goals. We should write down our daily, weekly, monthly, and annual goals, and check them off when they’re completed. We should constantly re-evaluate our goals to be sure that they match our priorities.

In Ephesians 4 God gives His goals for the church. Church isn’t just something we go to as spectators, a place where we meet people and perform rituals. It’s a living organization with a specific mission. In this passage God lays out his goals for the organization of which He is chief executive officer.

He says first that he has given to the church all different kinds of people (Ep 4.11), who by their diversity, and consequent interdependence, will enable one another to minister effectively (Ep 4.12), which in turn will bring the whole body to maturity.

His first goal is pretty straightforward: he wants us to grow up. He measures that growth in two ways (Ep 4.13).

First, he says, we “attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God.” “The faith” is the doctrinal teaching of the Scripture; the church should be a teaching institution, and while some of us should be there to teach, all of us should be there to learn. Do you arrive at the services of the church each Sunday with that goal in mind? Do you lean into the teaching and preaching (and conversations in the hallways) with the intention of hearing and learning what the Bible says and how you should apply it?

But Paul doesn’t leave this merely an academic exercise; we also need to grow in our knowledge of Christ. Of course that means learning facts; you interact with friends and loved ones based on facts you have come to know about them over the years. But we all know that relationship is about more than facts. There’s a personal side, and an emotional side, and a volitional side; you want to be with the person, and you love being there.

And that changes how you live. Over the years I’ve learned that there are certain things my wife doesn’t like—things that I used to do comfortably and routinely before I knew her. I don’t do those things anymore. And I don’t miss them. I value my relationship with my wife more than I value those things.

Similarly I learn about Christ from the teaching and preaching at church, and from conversations with other believers. But I also learn about him by being around my fellow travelers and watching them, consciously or subconsciously. We share our relationships with Christ with one another, and we all grow closer to him.

Next, Paul says that we “attain to mature manhood,” and specifically “to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.” Commentators are divided on just how we should translate this phrase, but I would suggest that it is not “until we measure up to Christ,” or “until we’re as tall as Christ,” but rather, “until we show how tall Christ is.” I take that from later in the passage, where Paul says that the church is the body, and Christ is the head (Ep 4.15-16). If someone’s head is much too large for his body, the image can be grotesque. Our job is to grow as a body until we’re just the right size for the head, so that the overall picture is proportional and graceful.

I would suggest that pretty much every church has a lot of growing to do before it stops making Christ look unattractive. As I watch various people deconstruct their faith these days, I find that the motivating factor is often not something that God did, but something that his people did.

And thus has it ever been.

Next time we’ll continue in this rich passage to see what “mature manhood” looks like more specifically.

Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash

A Small Thought on What We Pray For

February 7, 2022 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

As I noted last time, I’ve been studying the book of Ruth lately. With the help of commentator Dan Block, I’ve been confronted with something in the book that I found striking.

Most commentators note that the book is mostly dialogue; about 52% of the Hebrew words there are spoken by various characters in the story. A recurring theme in these speeches is prayer for blessing:

“Now behold, Boaz came from Bethlehem and said to the reapers, ‘May the Lord be with you.’ And they said to him, ‘May the Lord bless you’ ” (Ru 2.4).
“Her mother-in-law then said to her, ‘Where did you glean today and where did you work? May he who took notice of you be blessed’ “ (Ru 2.19).
“Then he said, ‘May you be blessed of the Lord, my daughter. You have shown your last kindness to be better than the first by not going after young men, whether poor or rich’ ” (Ru 3.10).
“Then the women said to Naomi, ‘Blessed is the Lord who has not left you without a redeemer today, and may his name become famous in Israel’ “ (Ru 4.14).

There are other prayers that call for blessing without using the word:

“And Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, ‘Go, return each of you to her mother’s house. May the Lord deal kindly with you as you have dealt with the dead and with me. ⁹May the Lord grant that you may find rest, each in the house of her husband.’ Then she kissed them, and they lifted up their voices and wept” (Ru 1.8-9).
“[Boaz said to Ruth,] ‘May the Lord reward your work, and your wages be full from the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to seek refuge’ ” (Ru 2.12).
“All the people who were in the court, and the elders, said, ‘We are witnesses. May the Lord make the woman who is coming into your home like Rachel and Leah, both of whom built the house of Israel; and may you achieve wealth in Ephrathah and become famous in Bethlehem. ¹²Moreover, may your house be like the house of Perez whom Tamar bore to Judah, through the offspring which the Lord will give you by this young woman’ “ (Ru 4.11-12).
“[The women of Bethlehem said to Naomi,] ‘May he also be to you a restorer of life and a sustainer of your old age; for your daughter-in-law, who loves you and is better to you than seven sons, has given birth to him’ “ (Ru 4.15).

That’s seven prayers (the last bullet point in each set being from the same prayer) in just four relatively short chapters.

Boaz blesses his field workers (and they him) and Ruth (twice).
Naomi blesses her daughters-in-law and Boaz.
The people of Bethlehem bless Ruth and Naomi.

Do you notice anything?

Nobody prays for his own needs. Not Boaz, the (likely) old bachelor, who, as it turns out, could really benefit from a wife, both as a companion and as the provider of a family line. Not Naomi, the childless widow who is in imminent danger of starvation. Not the people of Bethlehem, who have just emerged from a famine. And not Ruth, who has left all she knows to live in a foreign and hostile culture.

Nobody. As Block notes in the New American Commentary, “It is striking that no one in the book prays for a resolution of his own crisis. In each case a person prays that Yahweh would bless someone else. This is a mark of ḥesed” (pp 612-13).

Hesed is the Hebrew word translated “kindly” or “kindness” in Ruth 1.8, 2.20, and 3.10. It’s the “mercy” in the oft-used biblical statement that “[God’s] mercy endureth forever.” It speaks of fierce loyalty to a relationship that’s based on love.

Now, other biblical passages make it clear that praying for your own needs is not only tolerated but encouraged and even welcomed. Both Paul and Peter tell us to cast our care on God, making our requests known (Php 4.6; 1P 5.7). But against the dark background of the Judges, when “every man did what was right in his own eyes,” it’s remarkable to see a community where the first concern is for others.

Photo by Jack Sharp on Unsplash

Incomprehensible Faith

February 3, 2022 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

In my Bible study plan I’m always doing a deep dive on a section of Scripture. For the first three months of this year, I’m studying Ruth. I return to the book every day, studying it from multiple perspectives and reading. A lot.

A few days ago I thought of something that I’d never noticed before, after all these years of hearing and reading the story dozens of times. It’s something about the first major incident in the book.

We all know the story. Naomi and her husband move from Bethlehem—the house of bread—to Moab because of a famine. Their two sons marry Moabite women, and then all three men die. In the culture of that day, a childless widow is in very serious danger of starving to death. Naomi hears that the famine is over back in Bethlehem and decides to return—likely because she has family there who will be legally obligated to help her.

So far the story is pretty simple. But it’s complicated by the fact that one of her Moabite daughters-in-law, Ruth, wants to return with her.

Naomi argues against it, citing the obvious practical fact that Ruth is more likely to find a second husband in her own land. Naomi doesn’t mention the fact that the Moabites and the Israelites are enemies; the king of Moab had hired the prophet Balaam to curse Israel (Nu 22.4-5), and God had consequently cursed the king and his people (Nu 24.17). Surely Ruth’s marital prospects would be better in Moab.

But Ruth insists. She will go with Naomi; she will live with Naomi; she will adopt her people and culture; and she will worship her God (Ru 1.16)—for the rest of her life (Ru 1.17).

Why?

Look at this from Ruth’s perspective. The conventional wisdom in her day is that every ethnic group has its own god. Chemosh is the god of the Moabites—and their harvests are so plentiful that Yahweh’s people are coming over there to get a piece of the action. In all of Ruth’s experience to this point, she has seen nothing that would convince her that Yahweh cares for his people, or even that he is good. His people are starving, so Chemosh feeds them. Her father-in-law dies in Moab, as do his two sons, including Ruth’s husband, and all of them allegedly under the care of this tribal god Yahweh—who, to make matters worse, has placed her and her people under a specific curse.

Why seek shelter under the wings of such a god? What has he ever done for his own people, let alone an enemy?

Was it Naomi’s love for and trust in her own god? Well, she believes that her god, Yahweh, has taken someone who was full and has left her empty. A few days from now she will tell her own people no longer to call her by her name, Naomi, which means “pleasant.” Instead, she will say, call me Mara—“bitter.” My god has not been good to me.

So why does Ruth go with Naomi? And especially, why does she seek to worship Naomi’s god?

Well, for all her imperfections, Naomi does recognize that God is in charge. (And here I begin to capitalize the word again.) It is he who has brought food back to Bethlehem (Ru 1.6). It is he, not Chemosh, who she confidently believes will prosper the lives of her daughters-in-law (Ru 1.8-9). Even though his hand has gone out against her (Ru 1.13), she still believes that he is strong enough to bless, and she prays that he will. You don’t pray to someone you don’t believe in.

Apparently, Ruth sees in Naomi’s imperfect faith something greater than what she sees in the worshippers of her tribal god. For all of the trouble, for all of the pain, this is a God worth following—even at the cost of leaving home, family, culture, and language to go to a land where you’re under a curse, where you will likely face deep, overt, and lifelong discrimination.

So she goes.

And she finds that her faith is richly rewarded. This Yahweh, she finds, does indeed direct circumstances, even down to the portion of the community field where she happens to go looking for loose grain lying on the ground or standing beyond the reaches of the reapers’ sickles around the edges.

This is a God worth trusting. Worth following.

No matter what.

Photo by David Marcu on Unsplash

Mercy on the Mountain, Part 3: Why the Killing Stopped

January 31, 2022 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Place Is Important | Part 2: Where the Killing Stops

Last time we saw God, whom I take to be the Father, order the Angel of YHWH, whom I take to be the Son, to stop the killing of plague victims as a consequence of David’s sin of numbering the people. In both of the accounts, the writer notes immediately that the angel was at a threshing floor owned by a man named Araunah (2S 24.16), or Ornan (1Ch 21.15). To us readers, it seems that God’s command was prompted in some way by the location.

What was it about this site that moved God to intervene with compassion? Why did the killing stop … here?

Well, this site has a history. It had a history in David’s day, and it has had a history ever since.

We first find it referred to by God himself, as “one of the mountains that I will tell you of” (Ge 22.2) in the land of Moriah. God chooses this hilltop as the place where he will ask Abraham for the ultimate act of obedience—the sacrifice of his own son, the son of his old age, the son of promise. As we all know, Abraham obeys, even tying Isaac on the handmade altar and taking the knife in his hand to kill him. The author of Hebrews tells us later what Abraham was thinking: that once he had killed his son, God would surely raise him from the dead (He 11.17-19)—because Isaac was, after all, the son of promise, the son through whom all the nations of the earth would be blessed. This faith is all the more remarkable in that in Abraham’s time, no one in history had ever been raised from the dead.

But he didn’t kill his son, did he?

Why not?

Because as he raised the knife, an angel—the Angel of Yahweh—seized his hand (at least metaphorically) and stopped him. In essence, he said, “No one is going to die here today.” And a substitute, a ram, served as the sacrifice instead (Ge 22.13).

Now, if my speculation is correct, the Angel who seized Abraham’s hand was the Son of God. And when that same Angel was killing in judgment on sin in David’s day, the Father reenacted the earlier scene by stopping his own Son.

These two accounts make a marvelous pair. But they still don’t answer our question: what moved the Father to stop the judgment? Surely the memory of Abraham’s faith wasn’t enough, was it?

As I noted last time, the Chronicles account ends with David saying that this spot would be where the Temple would be built (1Ch 22.1). And so it was. And for the next 4 centuries or so, Israel sacrificed to God there, and his glory filled the Temple (2Ch 7.1).

But eventually the Temple priests fell into apostasy, and the Lord withdrew from his Temple (Ezk 10.18-19). And then the Temple was destroyed (2Ch 36.19).

But it was rebuilt. And though there is no record that the visible glory of God returned to the new structure, God promised that he would make it far more glorious than Solomon’s Temple had ever been (Hg 2.7-9).

And after 4 more centuries—of silence—God began to move again.

A poor young couple brought their baby to the Temple to be circumcised, and a prophet spoke marvelous words about him (Lk 2.34-35). Twelve years later that same boy astonished the priests there with his words (Lk 2.46-47). Then the boy became a man and drove the moneychangers out of his Father’s house (Mt 21.12-17) and healed and taught there (Mk 12.35; Jn 5.14; 7.14; 8.20; 10.23; 18.20).

And then, one day, as hours of midday darkness lifted, the veil of the Temple was torn in two, from the top to the bottom (Mt 27.51), demonstrating that the way to God was open (He 6.19-20).

Why?

Because on another ridge of that same hill, the Son—the Angel who had stopped Abraham from sacrificing his son—gave himself as the perfect Ram, the substitutionary sacrifice for the sins of all mankind.

I wonder.

I wonder if the Father, knowing all that had happened, and would happen, on that threshing floor, was moved to reach out and stay the hand of the Son, the Destroying Angel, and say,

“The killing stops here.”

Indeed it does.

Photo by Hugo Teles on Unsplash

Mercy on the Mountain, Part 2: Where the Killing Stops

January 27, 2022 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Place Is Important

In response to David’s sin of numbering his army, God gives him a choice of punishment, and David chooses to place himself in the hand of God, in a plague, rather than in the hand of the surrounding enemy nations (2S 24.14). In the resulting outbreak (called “pestilence” by the KJV) some 70,000 Israelites die (2S 24.15). Warren Wiersbe has noted that the consequences of this sin—at least in the cost to human life—were far greater than the consequences of David’s sin with Bathsheba.

We read that the agent of this death plague was “the Angel of the LORD” (2S 24.16). We don’t find this surprising initially, because this same angel is said to slaughter the Assyrian army in their tents as they besiege Jerusalem (2K 19.35). But on second thought this strikes us as exceedingly odd.

Why is that? Because a great many interpreters of the Bible, myself among them, believe that “the Angel of the LORD” who appears in the Old Testament is none other than a preincarnate appearance of the Son, Jesus Christ. There is much to say about this theory—a former student of mine wrote his PhD dissertation on the question—but the arguments in brief are that

sometimes the angel speaks of God in the third person (Ge 16.11; 22.12a, 16), and other times he speaks as God (Ge 16.10 [cf 13]; 22.12b; Judg 2.1-4);
the only member of the Godhead ever said to have taken a body is the Son; and
the Angel never appears after Jesus’ conception by Mary. (In the KJV references to the angel in several NT passages [Mt 1.20, 24; 2.13; 28.2; Lk 2.9; Ac 5.19; 8.26; 12.7, 23] there is no definite article in the Greek.)

Now if this view is correct, then we have the Son—gentle Jesus, meek and mild—acting in vengeance on the sin of David, and literally massacring people.

This is not what we expect.

We know that he will sit in judgment at the end of time (Mt 25.31-46; cf Re 20.11-15), and we know that the book of Revelation speaks of “the wrath of the Lamb” (Re 6.16), but still, this is not how we typically think of Jesus.

Our sense of cognitive dissonance is increased when we read here that “the LORD”—who is here distinguished from the death angel, and is thus apparently the Father—intervenes to prevent the angel from carrying out any more executions (2S 24.16). The Son is executing people, and the Father intercedes to restrain him? Isn’t that the very opposite of the picture the Scripture gives later, in speaking of the Son as interceding on our behalf with the Father (Ro 8.34)?

Counterintuitive.

The Son carries out divine wrath in judgment for sin, and at a key point in the process the Father seizes the hand bearing the sword, and says, “Enough. The killing stops here.”

This is a remarkable moment.

Why does he do this? Why does he “repent” (2S 24.16) of the disaster he is bringing, and stop the killing? What motivates him at this moment, in this place?

Immediately after the Father’s command to the Son, the narrator says, “And the angel of the LORD was by the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite” (2S 24.16; the parallel account [1Ch 21.15] says “Ornan the Jebusite”).

The narrator says this for a reason; he seems to want us to connect the Father’s words with the location. So where is this place?

We know that threshing floors were flat places used to beat the harvested grain to separate the grain kernels from their husks. The farmer would then winnow the grain, throwing it into the air with shovels so that the wind would blow away the lighter husks, leaving the heavier kernels to fall back to the ground. Since wind was an important part of the process, winnowing was often (though not always) done on hilltops.

There are a lot of hills in Israel. Where was this one?

We don’t have to guess. The Chronicles account ends with David identifying this threshing floor as the place where the Temple would be built (1Ch 22.1).

This is the Temple Mount.

And that, I think, gives us some help in determining why the Father spoke up at this place and told the Son, “The killing stops here.”

Mercy on the Mountain, Part 1: Place Is Important

January 24, 2022 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

For some reason, I’ve always felt a very keen sense of Place. I’m moved by being in places where important things happened; I recall the power of the moment when, on a lunch break from work at the CVS on Tremont Street in Boston, I walked down Tremont to State Street and, just around the corner, found a simple bronze plaque on the wall of State Street Bank, right next to the drive-through lane. I remember its wording to this day: “D. L. Moody, Christian evangelist, friend of man, founder of the Northfield Schools, was converted to God in a shoe store on this site.”

I’m similarly moved by going back to places where significant things happened to me—places where I lived, went to school, traveled, camped, experienced unusual spiritual growth. And my favorite place in the world, though one I can rarely get to, incites powerful memories and emotions.

In consequence, I find it interesting that even though God is infinite—unbound by space—and existed before there was even such a thing as “location,” he seems to see Place as significant. He tells his people more than once to mark significant places with memorial altars (e.g. Ge 35.1; Jos 4.3). The biblical narrative is rife with place names, and often the narrative seems to be telling us more than just where that town got its name; it’s more than just what critics deride as an “etiological tale.”

An example of this divine focus that I find particularly interesting is a biblical site that was known by the Canaanites as the threshing floor of Araunah (or Ornan) the Jebusite. Multiple threads of the biblical narrative weave themselves around this otherwise unremarkable place.

I’d like to take a few posts to tell that story.

I’m not going to start where the Bible first mentions the place—I’ll get back to that later—but at an incident in the life of King David, toward the end of his life. We find two accounts of the event, in 2Samuel 24 and 1Chronicles 21.

There we read that David ordered a census of his army. Right away we notice two things that seem odd.

First, the Samuel account says that God moved David to order the census, while the one in Chronicles says that Satan did. Critics have made much of this supposed contradiction, but the many thinkers who have responded to them have demonstrated that the allegation of error is not well founded; since God is sovereign, there is a sense in which, by allowing others to act, and especially by using even evil acts to accomplish his purposes—for he is never frustrated—he can be said to “do” anything that happens (cf Gen 50.20; Am 3.6). (And of course he is not the author of sin, but precisely how that all works is beyond me, and it’s beyond you too; if you think you understand the infinite with a brain the size of a small cantaloupe, then you most certainly don’t.)

The second odd thing is that while David’s general Joab, David himself, and God all agreed that the census was sinful, the passage never tells us why—and frankly, it doesn’t seem like all that big a deal to us, especially since God himself had commanded earlier censuses (censi?) (Nu 1.1-2; 26.1-2). Several possibilities have been suggested; the two most common are that it was an act of pride by David, betraying confidence in his armies rather than in God, and that he may have failed to pay the temple tax historically connected to censuses (Ex 30.13; suggested by Josephus).

At any rate, the act is viewed unanimously as sinful. The prophet Gad brings David a message from God, offering a choice of three punishments: famine, war, or plague (which were, incidentally, the promised curses for disobeying the covenant [Dt 28.20ff]). In a cry of deep faith, David commits himself to the hands of God, choosing plague (1Ch 21.13).

What happens next is remarkably counterintuitive.