Read Time: 6 minutes1 Kings 16
The chapter is a graveyard of kings, each worse than the last, and it reads like a kingdom in free-fall. Baasha’s house is cut off by the word of Jehu the prophet; Elah is murdered drunk; Zimri reigns seven days and burns the palace down over his own head when the army turns on him. The treachery of the flesh consumes itself; the man who killed his way to the throne sits in it a week and dies in the fire he lit. The north has no stable thing in it; dynasty devours dynasty.
Out of the wreckage rises Omri — a man for whom expediency was the only god, who did worse than all that were before him — and then his son, and with him the chapter names the bottom: Ahab the son of Omri did evil in the sight of Yahweh above all that were before him. He marries Jezebel, the Zidonian, and brings Baal home to Israel — builds him a house, an altar, a grove — and Ahab did more to provoke Yahweh to anger than all the kings of Israel that were before him. The apostate king and the foreign idol-queen are now on the throne, and the long war between Baal and Yahweh is set.
A small notice closes the chapter, easy to miss and heavy with meaning. In his days did Hiel the Bethelite build Jericho — and he lays its foundation in the death of his firstborn and sets its gates in the death of his youngest, according to the word of Yahweh, which he spake by Joshua (Josh 6:26). A curse spoken five hundred years before falls to the letter on the man who defies it. The accursed city is rebuilt in the apostate generation, and it costs the builder his sons — the word standing across the centuries even here, in the smallest aside.
So the chapter that records the deepest apostasy also records the surest word. Israel has thrown out Yahweh for Baal, the throne is a slaughterhouse, the curse rebuilds Jericho on dead children — and through it all the word of Yahweh does exactly what it said it would do. The kingdom devours itself and bows to Baal, and even there the word spoken centuries before falls to the letter.
Jeremiah 42
The frightened remnant, leaderless after Gedaliah’s murder, comes to Jeremiah with what sounds like perfect submission. Pray for us unto Yahweh thy God… that Yahweh thy God may shew us the way wherein we may walk — and they swear, whether it be good, or whether it be evil, we will obey the voice of Yahweh. They ask for the word and bind themselves by oath to obey it — and the asking looks like faith itself. But the pronoun gives them away: they say Yahweh thy God, the prophet’s God, not our God — coming to borrow Jeremiah’s God for a verdict while not owning him as their own.
Ten days Jeremiah waits, and the word comes clear and kind. If ye will still abide in this land, then will I build you, and not pull you down… Be not afraid of the king of Babylon… for I am with you to save you. The promise is presence: stay in the place of discipline, do not run, and Yahweh himself will be with them to deliver. But the warning is just as plain — if ye wholly set your faces to enter into Egypt, the sword and the famine they fear will follow them there, and there they will die. Stay and live; flee and perish.
And Jeremiah, who knows them, names the rot under the request. Ye dissembled in your hearts, when ye sent me… saying, Pray for us… and according unto all that Yahweh shall say, so declare unto us, and we will do it. They asked for guidance with their minds already made up. The oath was a formality; the heart had already chosen Egypt before the word ever came. It is the oldest religious fraud — to seek the word as cover for the path you have already taken.
This is Zedekiah’s sin made corporate, and the chapter is a mirror held up to every prayer that wants Yahweh to bless a decision already made. The honest prayer says show me the way and I will walk in it; the dissembling prayer says confirm the way I have chosen, and calls the true word a lie when it crosses the plan. They swore to obey and had already decided; the prayer that asks the word only to cover its own choice is no prayer at all.
Mark 16
Very early on the first day of the week the women come with spices to anoint a dead body, worrying about the stone — who shall roll us away the stone? — and find the great worry already gone. The stone is rolled back, the tomb is open, and a young man in white sits where the body had lain: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here. The grave that swallowed the King on the sabbath cannot hold him on the third day; the women came to tend a corpse and met an empty tomb.
The first word of the resurrection is a sending. Go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee. The risen Shepherd goes before the scattered flock — and Peter, who denied him three times, is named specifically, the failure singled out for the good news. The resurrection does not begin with thunder over Jerusalem; it begins with frightened women told to carry word to a broken, scattered company that the Shepherd has gone ahead of them.
He appears first to Mary Magdalene, then to two on the road, then to the eleven as they sit at meat — and each time the report is met with unbelief, until he himself reproves their hardness of heart. Their unbelief had a reason, and it is worth naming: they could not conceive that Yahweh would let his Son be cursed by his own law on a tree (Deut 21:23), and so had concluded he was not after all he which should have redeemed Israel (Luke 24:21). The very thing that redeemed them was the thing that looked to them like proof he was not the Redeemer. Even his own will not believe the resurrection until they see it — and there is a figure in the order of it. Mary, healed of her affliction and first to see him, is the believing ecclesia carrying word; the eleven who will not credit it until he stands before them are Israel after the flesh, the veil still on their eyes, who will not look on him until the day they look upon him whom they pierced and mourn (Zech 12:10). The risen King meets the unbelief not with rejection but with a commission: Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved.
The book that began the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God ends with that gospel going out to every creature, confirmed by signs, while the King is received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God — the place Psalm 110 appointed him, the place he told the high priest he would take. The crucified King is risen, exalted, and proclaimed to all the world. The empty tomb is the hinge of everything; the stone the women feared is the stone already rolled away. They came to anoint a body and found the grave empty — he is risen, he goes before them, and the gospel goes out to every creature.
Synthesis and Exhortation
The day sets one note of life against a world of death. The northern kingdom devours itself and bows to Baal; the remnant of Judah swears to obey and flees to Egypt against the word; and into a stretch this dark breaks the empty tomb. Everything around the resurrection is collapse — apostasy, treachery, a curse falling on dead children, a people running from the only place of safety — and in the middle of it the stone is rolled away and the King is risen. The lamp that burned down to a tree and a tomb in the last reading is not put out; it is raised.
And the readings turn on one fault and its cure: the heart that asks the word but has already chosen against it. Israel chose Baal; the remnant chose Egypt with an oath of obedience on its lips; even the disciples chose unbelief until they were made to see. Against all of it stands the risen Shepherd who goes before his scattered flock and names Peter the denier in the first message of grace. The same word that fell on Hiel to the letter is the word that raised the King to the letter — he is risen, as he said. The One whose word never fails in judgment is the One whose word never fails in resurrection.
So the day asks for the honest heart and the believing one. Do not pray as the remnant prayed, seeking the word as cover for the Egypt you have already chosen; say truly show me the way, and I will walk in it, and then stay in the place of discipline where Yahweh promises I am with you to save you. Do not be slow of heart to believe the resurrection because the world around you is all apostasy and collapse; the tomb is empty, the Shepherd goes before you, and your name — like Peter’s — is spoken in the good news even after your failure. Ask the word with a heart not yet decided, stay where he is with you to save, and believe the empty tomb: the King is risen and goes before you.