Read Time: 7 minutes1 Kings 14
Jeroboam’s child falls sick, and the king who built golden calves sends his wife in disguise to the true prophet for a true word — the same instinct as Zedekiah’s, wanting Yahweh’s answer while refusing Yahweh’s way. But Ahijah is blind with age, and the disguise is useless before the word: Come in, thou wife of Jeroboam; why feignest thou thyself to be another? The eyes that cannot see the costume see straight to the heart; no disguise hides anything from the word of Yahweh.
The sentence on Jeroboam’s house is total. Because he cast me behind his back and made other gods, his line will be cut off, as a man taketh away dung, till it be all gone; the dogs and the fowls will eat his dead. Yet one mercy is folded in: the sick child will die and be mourned and buried, because in him there is found some good thing toward Yahweh — alone of all Jeroboam’s house, he will reach a grave. Even under a house’s ruin, the one good thing is seen and honored. The child dies as the prophet speaks; the word is exact.
The view shifts to Judah, and it is no better. Rehoboam’s people built them high places, and images, and groves, and there were sodomites in the land; Judah does according to all the abominations of the nations Yahweh cast out. The southern kingdom, for all its temple and its Davidic throne, walks the Canaanite road too. The division of the kingdom did not divide the sin; both houses go after the gods of the land.
And the price comes quickly. Shishak king of Egypt comes up against Jerusalem and took away the treasures of the house of Yahweh — the very gold the queen of Sheba had marvelled at — and Rehoboam, unable to replace the golden shields, makes shields of brass to carry in their place. The gold of Solomon’s glory is carried off to Egypt, and brass is hung in its place — a perfect emblem of a kingdom keeping the forms of glory while the substance is gone. The shields still gleam at a distance; up close they are only brass. The same hollowing runs through the north, and it is the sharpest lesson of the day: Jeroboam never openly opposed the worship of Yahweh — he perverted it. The feasts went on, the sacrifices went on, the psalms of David were still sung; only the substance was tampered with, and the people quietly deterred from going up to the true house. Brass for gold in the north as well as the south. The danger is rarely open denial — it is the slow neglect of what was received, and of those who were valiant for it before us. No disguise stands before the word; the one good thing is honoured even in a doomed house; and the gold of the glory is replaced with brass.
Jeremiah 40
After the fall, Jeremiah is set free, and the place of his release preaches. He is loosed at Ramah — the ‘high place’ north of the city where the captives were mustered for the march — the very ground where Jeremiah had heard Rachel weeping for her children (Jer 31:15), and where Matthew would hear her weeping again over Bethlehem’s slain (Matt 2:18): the place of mourning for the carried-away becomes the place where the faithful prophet is set at liberty. And the manner of it is striking: the Babylonian captain Nebuzaradan hands him the word of Yahweh as plainly as any prophet could. Yahweh thy God hath pronounced this evil upon this place… because ye have sinned against Yahweh, and have not obeyed his voice. The pagan officer states Judah’s own indictment back to her — the enemy understands what the covenant people would not, that the catastrophe was the harvest of disobedience, not the failure of Yahweh.
Jeremiah is given a free choice — Babylon with honor, or to stay in the land — and he chooses to stay with Gedaliah, the governor the Babylonians set over the poor remnant at Mizpah. Gedaliah’s counsel to the frightened survivors is gentle and sane: fear not to serve the Chaldeans: dwell in the land, and serve the king of Babylon, and it shall be well with you. It is Jeremiah’s own counsel from years back — submit to the appointed yoke and live — and for a moment the broken people gather wine and summer fruits and begin again under it.
But a warning comes through Johanan: Ishmael the son of Nethaniah is coming to kill you, sent by the king of Ammon. Ishmael is the serpent’s seed in that hour — a man of the royal line turned assassin, the Shimei of Jeremiah’s day — and Johanan even offers to deal with him secretly and quietly remove the threat. And Gedaliah — good, trusting, fatally unsuspecting — believed them not, and forbids the act: Thou shalt not do this thing: for thou speakest falsely of Ishmael. The honest governor cannot believe in the treachery aimed at him; he would not seek counsel of Yahweh through the prophet at his own table, and his refusal to credit the warning leaves the door open for the murder the next chapter records.
The chapter sits in an uneasy lull — a remnant gathering fruit in a ruined land, a good man over them, and a knife already on its way. It is the fragile peace after judgment, real but precarious, and it will not hold, because the violence of the flesh has not yet finished with this people. The enemy himself names the cause of the ruin; the gentle governor offers the remnant a quiet life under the yoke — and will not believe the knife is coming.
Mark 14
The longest chapter in Mark moves through one night toward an offering, and it opens with a woman who understands what the disciples do not. She breaks an alabaster box of costly ointment over his head, and against the grumbling that it was wasted he says: she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying. While the rulers plot and a disciple bargains, a woman alone reads that he is going to die — and the night is weighed in two prices. Her broken box was nard worth three hundred pence, near a year of a laborer’s wages, poured out without counting; that same hour Judas goes to the priests and sells the same head for thirty pieces of silver, the price of a gored slave (Exod 21:32), the very sum Zechariah named for the shepherd’s wage (Zech 11:12–13). Love spends a year’s living on him; the flesh prices him at a slave.
At the Passover he takes the bread and the cup and gives them a new meaning. Take, eat: this is my body… This is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many. The blood of the new covenant — the covenant Jeremiah promised, written on the heart — is his own, given to bring the many in. This is not a price paid to an offended third party; it is the covenant-blood of the kinsman, the offering that opens the inward law and the remembered-no-more forgiveness to all who are gathered into him. He will not drink of the fruit of the vine again until that day that I drink it new in the kingdom of God.
In Gethsemane the cup becomes agony. Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt. He drinks willingly the cup set before him — the cup of suffering and death, the depth of the human lot under sin, taken up by the one man who, sharing our nature, never sinned in it — and the victory of the night is won here, in a sweat and a surrender, before a hand is laid on him. Not what I will, but what thou wilt is the whole obedience of the second Adam in a single sentence.
Then the betrayal by a kiss, the flight of the disciples, the arrest. Before the high priest the false witnesses cannot agree, until the priest asks directly: Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed? And he answers without hiding: I am: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven (Dan 7:13). The confession that condemns him is the confession of the King who will return in glory — they tear their clothes and call it blasphemy, and condemn the One who told them the truth.
The chapter ends with Peter outside, warming himself, denying three times before the cock crows twice, and going out to weep bitterly. The rock who swore he would die with him cannot own him to a servant girl — and the contrast with the silent, faithful Master inside is the whole measure of the night. The woman anointed him for burial; the friend sold him; the chief disciple denied him; and he went toward the offering alone, having said not what I will, but what thou wilt. The covenant-blood is poured for many, the cup is taken in Gethsemane with a willing “thy will be done,” and the King confesses the truth that condemns him while his closest deny and flee.
Synthesis and Exhortation
The day lays the offering of the true King against the long failure of every other house. Jeroboam’s line is swept away like dung; Judah’s gold is carried to Egypt and brass hung in its place; the remnant gathers fruit under a knife it will not see coming. And into that world of disguised kings, hollow glory, and unbelieved warnings comes the One who hides nothing — who lets a woman anoint him for burial, who names his own blood the blood of the new covenant, who confesses to the priest the very truth that will kill him. Where the kingdoms kept the forms and lost the substance, he pours out the substance itself.
And the center of it is the cup taken in the garden. Every earlier reading has refused the appointed yoke and the humbling word — Rehoboam, Zedekiah, Jeroboam, the husbandmen — wanting the kingdom on their own terms. In Gethsemane the true King takes the cup he could have refused and says not what I will, but what thou wilt, and there the whole obedience the flesh never managed is finally rendered. The blood of the new covenant that Jeremiah saw written on the heart is poured out by the willing hand of the kinsman, shed for many to bring them into the covenant and the forgiveness that remembers sin no more. The old houses fell because they would not obey; the new covenant comes because One did.
So the day asks where we stand in that night — and it offers only a few places to stand. We can be Judas, selling him for what the world will pay; Peter, swearing loyalty and denying him at the first cold question; the sleeping disciples, willing in spirit and weak in flesh. Or we can be the woman, who alone read the hour and gave her costly best while there was time. Pour out the alabaster while he may still be anointed; do not keep the forms and lose the substance like a kingdom hanging brass where the gold once was. And when the cup comes that you would rather pass, pray as he prayed — not what I will, but what thou wilt — for that is the obedience the kingdoms never gave, and the door into the covenant sealed in his blood. Be the woman, not the betrayer; pour out your costly best; and when the cup is bitter, say with him, not my will but thine.