Read Time: 7 minutes2 Samuel 18
The chapter turns on a tree, and everything in it bends toward that tree. David numbers his people and divides them in three under Joab, Abishai, and Ittai — and over the whole charge stands one word: deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom. The king who was driven out by his son will not have that son harmed. The flesh has risen against the anointed, and the anointed answers with mercy.
The battle is in the wood of Ephraim, and the wood is the real victor: the wood devoured more people that day than the sword devoured. Ephraim means doubly fruitful, and the irony is exact — the place named for fruitfulness becomes the place that swallows a rebel army. The land itself fights for David. Twenty thousand fall, and the forest does more than the steel. Some place the wood where Jephthah’s men once cut down the Ephraimites at the fords (Judg 12:4–6) — a possible reading; if it holds, the ground that swallowed Ephraim’s pride swallows Absalom’s.
Absalom is caught by his head in the great oak, and hangs between heaven and earth while his mule goes on without him. The man whose hair was weighed and admired (2 Sam 14:25–26) is hanged by the glory of his own flesh; his beauty is his snare. He hangs suspended — earth will not hold him, heaven will not receive him — the very posture of a man under the curse. Joab thrusts three darts through his heart, ten young men finish him, and he is flung into a pit under a great heap of stones.
The pillar he built tells the whole story of the flesh. I have no son to keep my name in remembrance, he had said, and reared a monument and called it after himself. The man who would seize his father’s throne cannot secure even his own name; the flesh grasps at remembrance and is buried under stones. The rebel hung on a tree is accursed — cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree (Deut 21:23) — and Paul reads that very curse onto the tree of Christ (Gal 3:13). Here the curse falls where it is earned. There it falls on the one who earned nothing of it.
Then Ahimaaz and the Cushite run with the tidings, and David waits at the gate of Mahanaim — two camps, the place where Jacob once met the hosts of God. The king asks only one thing of each runner: is the young man Absalom safe? And when the answer finally comes, the conqueror’s victory dissolves into a father’s grief: O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!
That cry reaches past David. He wishes he could have died in his son’s place, and he could not — no man can die for another rebel’s guilt and make it count. But the wish itself is a shadow thrown forward: there is a Son of David who did go to the tree, who bore the curse he had not earned, and who took rebels into himself not as a substitute paying a third party but as the kinsman bringing his own family up out of death. David weeps because he cannot. The greater David weeps, and then does what David could not.
The flesh that grasps at its own name is buried under stones; the Son who emptied himself of his name is given the Name above every name.
Jeremiah 22
Jeremiah is the Ox among the prophets — the cherubic face of the patient burden-bearer, the servant who plods under the yoke of the word and bears the grief of his people, answering among the prophets to Mark the Servant-Gospel as Isaiah the Lion answers to Matthew the King. The oracle is delivered to the house of the king of Judah, and its first word is justice. Execute ye judgment and righteousness, and deliver the spoiled out of the hand of the oppressor — this is the charge laid on the throne of David, and the chapter is a roll-call of the sons of David who failed it. The throne is held on condition, and the condition is mercy to the poor.
Josiah is held up as the measure. He judged the cause of the poor and needy; then it was well with him: was not this to know me? saith Yahweh. Knowing Yahweh is not an inward feeling here — it is doing justice to the afflicted. The kings who follow him are weighed against that line and found wanting.
Shallum — Jehoahaz — shall not return from the land of his captivity; he dies where he is carried. Then Jehoiakim, who builds his house by unrighteousness, who uses his neighbour’s service without wages, gets the bitterest sentence in the book: he shall be buried with the burial of an ass, drawn and cast forth beyond the gates of Jerusalem. The king who built a great house for his name is dragged out like a dead beast — the same lesson Absalom’s pillar taught, written now over a throne.
The chapter climaxes on Coniah, the signet plucked off Yahweh’s hand. Though Coniah the son of Jehoiakim were the signet upon my right hand, yet would I pluck thee thence… Write ye this man childless… for no man of his seed shall prosper, sitting upon the throne of David. The seal of the kingdom is torn off and the line is written barren as to the throne — and the clipped name says as much, for Jeremiah shortens Jeconiah to Coniah, the rule cut short in the very cutting-short of the name.
And yet the curse is not the end of the Branch. The same signet image returns to Zerubbabel — I will make thee as a signet, for I have chosen thee (Hag 2:23) — and the legal line through Jeconiah runs down to Joseph in Matthew 1, while the blood line runs another way to Mary. The Coniah curse stands: no natural son of his sits on the throne. The virgin’s Son threads the needle the curse left open.
The throne is held by the one who does justice to the poor; every grasping son is buried like Absalom, and the Branch comes another way.
Romans 9
Paul takes up Jeremiah’s grief over the same people and carries it further. He could wish himself accursed from Christ for his brethren’s sake — Israel, to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants… and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came. The verb is imperfect. Bro. Thomas pressed the point in the Herald (1853): euchomēn is imperfect middle, I was wishing — a wish in the past tense, the old cry of Saul the unconverted, not a present readiness the apostle holds out as our model. He has every reason to despair of them, and instead he opens the deepest question in the letter: has the word of God failed?
His answer is the line that governs the whole chapter: they are not all Israel, which are of Israel. Descent from Abraham guarantees nothing; the children of the promise are counted for the seed. Isaac, not Ishmael. Jacob, not Esau. The promise has always run through a chosen line, narrowing toward one Seed — and this is not a new severity but the way Yahweh has worked from the first.
The hard sayings come next, and they need the apostolic key, not the Calvinist one. Jacob have I loved, and Esau have I hated; the elder shall serve the younger; Yahweh will have mercy on whom he will have mercy. Hated is loved less, not the vehemence the English carries — there must be love before there can be hatred. Election here is purposive, not a cold lottery of individuals sorted before birth into bliss and torment. It is Yahweh’s freedom to choose the line through which his purpose runs — and that purpose is mercy, gathered finally into Christ and open to all who are in him.
The potter and the clay says the same. Hath not the potter power over the clay? — and this is Jeremiah’s own figure (Jer 18), the prophet’s clay in the potter’s house. Yahweh shapes vessels of mercy afore prepared unto glory, and the astonishing turn is that these vessels are called not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles. The narrowing line is about to widen into a flood.
Israel after the flesh stumbled, Paul says, because they sought righteousness as it were by the works of the law, and they stumbled at the stumblingstone — Behold, I lay in Sion a stumblingstone and rock of offence (Isa 8:14; 28:16). The Rock that is salvation to those who trust him is the stone that breaks those who trip over him. Same stone, two destinies — exactly Absalom and the obedient son, the bad king and the Branch.
The promise was never carried by the flesh; it is carried by the Seed, and whoever is found in him — Jew or Gentile — is a child of the promise.
Synthesis and Exhortation
Three rejected sons, and one accepted one, run through the day. Absalom hangs on the tree under the curse he earned. Jehoiakim is buried like an ass and Coniah’s seed is written off the throne. Israel after the flesh stumbles at the stone. In every case the lesson is the same: the flesh cannot inherit, the grasping son cannot keep his name, descent and beauty and ambition come to a pit and a heap of stones. They are not all Israel, which are of Israel.
But over all three readings stands the figure the rejected sons make visible by contrast — the Son who took the curse he did not earn. David could only wish he had died for his rebel boy; the greater David went to the tree and bore what Deuteronomy pronounced over everyone hanged there, so that the curse spent itself on the one place it had no claim. The Branch comes past the barren throne. The Rock that breaks the proud is the refuge of the lowly. The vessels of mercy are filled — and they include the Gentiles, the far-off, the ones with no natural claim at all.
So the day asks each of us which son we are. Not by blood — the children of the promise are counted for the seed — but by whether we are found in the chosen Seed or grasping after our own name like Absalom with his pillar. The throne of David was always held on the condition of mercy to the poor and the doing of justice; was not this to know me? saith Yahweh. To know him is to do that. The flesh builds monuments and is buried under stones. The promise runs through the one who emptied himself, and through all who are gathered into him.
Do not build a pillar to your own name. Be found in the Seed, and the Name that cannot be plucked from Yahweh’s hand will be put upon you.