Old Testament – Page 6

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

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.

Integrity Matters, Part 1: Two Commandments

November 1, 2021 by Dan Olinger 2 Comments

Everybody knows about the Ten Commandments. Not everybody knows what they are, and nobody obeys them perfectly, but the term is pervasive as an expression for Doing Good.

It’s been often observed that the commandments come on two tablets—not just literally (Ex 31.18), but logically as well. Commandments 1-4 address our relationship with God, answering to the Great Commandment (“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God,” Mt 22.36-38), while commandments 5-10 address our relationship with other humans, answering to the Second Commandment (“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” Mt 22.39). And within that second table, many have noticed that the last 4 seem to be related:

¹⁴You shall not commit adultery.
¹⁵You shall not steal.
¹⁶You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
¹⁷You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor (Ex 20.14-17).

Adultery and coveting (especially coveting your neighbor’s wife) seem of a piece, bookending the prohibitions on stealing and lying, or “bearing false witness.”

I’d like to spend a post or two on these last-mentioned two as connected. Stealing, I’d suggest, is really just a form of lying—which is why the two so often travel together.

Stealing, as we all know, is taking something that doesn’t belong to you. We know instinctively that that’s wrong, but it’s worth our time to think systematically through the reasons why.

Like all the other sins listed in the Second Table, stealing is failing to love your neighbor, since you’re depriving him of something that he has earned:

⁸Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. ⁹The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” ¹⁰Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law (Ro 13.8-10).

But when you do that, you’re engaging in a whole list of lies. You’re saying that
- Your neighbor is not in fact in the image of God, deserving your respect;
- What you’ve taken really and rightly belongs, or should belong, to you;
- God, your abundantly generous heavenly Father, hasn’t given you everything you need;
- You need more—and God doesn’t care enough about that need to give you what you need in a legitimate way;
- If you’re a believer, you’re saying that you haven’t taken off the cloak of ungodliness and put on the cloak of righteousness (Ep 4.17-25). You’re saying that God hasn’t fundamentally changed you from your unbelieving days. As a believer, you’re living as though you’re still by nature a child of wrath (Ep 2.3). That’s like being a square circle—it doesn’t make any sense at all.

So when you steal, you’re lying, in multiple and obvious ways. It’s no surprise, then, that Paul mentions both together:

²⁵So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. …²⁸Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy (Ep 4.25-28).

Note his requirement that thieves work “honestly” with their hands, in contrast with the lying way they had “worked” before.

When you steal, you’re not telling the truth, and you’re not living the truth. And there’s nothing good down that road. Since you don’t like it when other people do that to you, how can you possibly excuse it in yourself?

In the next post I’d like to look at an incident of lying and stealing in the Bible.

Part 2: Case Study

Photo by Sean Foster on Unsplash

Change, Part 6: Obedience

October 25, 2021 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Sovereign, Attentive, and Good | Part 3: Promise Keeper | Part 4: Present | Part 5: Trust

The second of three prescriptions God has for Joshua in a time of momentous change is as straightforward as the first:

being careful to act in accordance with all the law that my servant Moses commanded you; do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, so that you may be successful wherever you go (Jos 1.7b).

2. Obedience

God began by asking for Joshua’s trust; now he asks for his obedience.

As commentator David M. Howard writes, “It is striking that God’s instructions here to Joshua are not about military matters, given that Joshua and the Israelites faced many battles ahead. However, the keys to his success were spiritual, directly related to the degree of his obedience to God. The keys to Joshua’s success were the same as those for a king: being rooted in God’s word rather than depending upon military might (Deut 17:14–20, esp. vv. 16, 18–19)” (Joshua, New American Commentary, 85).

Obedience is a major theme in the book of Joshua. We shouldn’t be surprised that God peppers the book with reminders of the importance of obedience, given that the Israelites had just spent 40 years in the wilderness in response to their faithless refusal to enter the Land from Kadesh-Barnea (Num 14), and that before that, from the beginning of their time in the wilderness, they had complained of their circumstances and expressed doubt over the Lord’s character and motives (Ex 16.1-3). At the close of Moses’ ministry, God had predicted that this well-established pattern of disobedience would continue under the leadership of Moses’ successor (Dt 31.16).

As indeed it did. Immediately after the initial miraculous victory at Jericho, the disobedience of Achan led to death and defeat at Ai.

God’s plan was for them to do the hard work of taking the land. He would intervene spectacularly on their behalf as they crossed the Jordan (by parting it before them, Jos 3), surrounded Jericho (by collapsing the walls, Jos 6), and battled the southern Canaanite confederacy (by causing the sun to stand still, Jos 10), but He begins with their obedience.

And in turn, there’s a reason that he has asked for their faith before asking for their obedience. They wouldn’t step into the raging Jordan unless they believed that he would part the waters; they wouldn’t march in military aggression against the walled city of Jericho unless they believed that he would collapse the walls; they wouldn’t go into a days-long battle against the southern Canaanite confederacy unless they believed that he would make it possible for them to mop up the scene while there was still daylight.

Trust, then obey.

What of us?

We don’t have a land to conquer; we have other, different commands to obey. We are called to be ambassadors, representing him faithfully in the midst of unbelief, taking the Good News to a sometimes unwilling, even aggressively hostile audience, with weapons that are spiritual, not carnal, and with the very confidence and grace of the Son.

But we have advantages Israel didn’t have. “Christians under the new covenant have the two-fold advantage that Christ satisfied the law’s demands and promises (Mt. 5:17; Rom. 3:21–26) and through the Spirit has written the law upon their hearts (2 Cor. 3:3–6; Heb. 8:7–13; 10:15–18)” (Gordon McConville, New Bible Commentary, 237). Our obedience to the Great Commission is spiritually empowered by the Commissioner himself. He has rendered us fit for the task and inclined to obey—in even the hard things. “Like Joshua, Christians do not succeed spiritually because they obey God’s Law. Instead, God through Christ enables them to have victory over sin” (Richard Hess, The Tyndale OT Commentary).

So it turns out that the old children’s chorus expresses just exactly what’s called for from us adults: “trust, and obey.”

And we can do it.

Part 7: Meditation

Photo by Martin Adams on Unsplash

Change, Part 5: Trust

October 21, 2021 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Sovereign, Attentive, and Good | Part 3: Promise Keeper | Part 4: Present

Having reminded Joshua of whom he serves, thereby assuring him of success through changing times, God now outlines his expectations: how should Joshua respond in this potentially unstable situation?

He presents Joshua with a “to do” list of just three items, all of which make perfect sense and strike us an eminently reasonable.

1. Trust

⁶Be strong and courageous; for you shall put this people in possession of the land that I swore to their ancestors to give them. ⁷Only be strong and very courageous … (Jos 1.6-7).

OK, I grant you that there’s no mention of the words trust, believe, or faith in there. Fair enough.

But if he’s going to stiffen his spine and lead 600,000 men into battle against people who are fighting for their homes—and who offer their own babies as fiery sacrifices to persuade their gods to give them bounteous crops—then he’s going to have to believe what the Lord has just told him—and what he tells him again in this sentence: that God’s power and presence is going to give him victory in all the coming battles.

That’s faith. That’s trust.

You don’t charge into the lion’s mouth unless you trust the lion tamer’s power over the lion. If Joshua allows his fear of failure—the consequences for which are extreme—then he’s telling God that he doesn’t believe him. As one commentator notes, “Fear and anxiety are tantamount to unbelief.”

It’s worth noting, I think, that God speaks of Israel’s “inheriting” the land (KJV NKJV ESV NIV) that he had promised them. You don’t “inherit” something by stealing it or taking it by force; you “inherit” it legally, because it is rightfully yours. “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof” (Ps 24.1 KJV)—or in modern parlance, the earth and everything in it belongs to God. The land of Canaan doesn’t belong to the Canaanites; it belongs to God, who can bequeath it to whichever heir he chooses. And he chooses Joshua and the people of Israel, Abraham’s seed.

Similarly, we have an inheritance that is ours by right and that we shall certainly receive. Peter writes,

³Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, ⁴and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, ⁵who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time (1P 1.3-5).

We need not fear any current chaos, personal, familial, civic, national, or global. Our inheritance is “imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven” for us. Our Father is infinitely more reliable than the governor, the banker, the taxman. Our inheritance is sure.

And so Peter can immediately say,

⁶In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, ⁷so that the genuineness of your faith—being more precious than gold that, though perishable, is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed (1P 1.6-7).

Trials do not terrorize God’s people; they are merely a mechanism for removing impurities in us and rendering us clearer trophies of his grace, more effective ambassadors of his kingdom.

Trusting God brings a calm confidence that astounds the terrorized. Sometimes they think we’re stupid; sometimes they think we’re crazy; sometimes they think we’re insufficiently concerned and therefore unloving.

No. None of those things. Calm, confident, trusting in the good plan of a strong and kind heavenly Father.

Part 6: Obedience | Part 7: Meditation

Photo by Martin Adams on Unsplash

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