Read Time: 8 minutes2 Samuel 4–5
The last claimant of the house of shame is murdered in his bed, and David executes the murderers. With Abner dead, Ish-bosheth (the man of shame) loses heart, and two captains — Rechab and Baanah — kill him as he rests at noon and bring his head to Hebron, expecting reward. They reckon as the Amalekite reckoned: that the beloved will pay for the death of his rival. David answers as before — how much more, when wicked men have slain a righteous person in his own house upon his bed? — and has them put to death. Twice now the throne is reached without the beloved’s hand shedding the blood that clears his path; he will not be enthroned by murder.
Mephibosheth is set in the seam — the lame son of the house, five years old when the kingdom fell. Between the death of the old house and the rising of the new, the narrator pauses on Jonathan’s son, lame of his feet, who fell from his nurse’s arms at the news of Saul and Jonathan’s death — five years old, the number of grace. The crippled heir of the fallen house, lamed in the moment of the kingdom’s collapse, is held in view for the day David’s hesed will seek him out (2 Sam 9). Grace marks the lame survivor for the king’s table before the king has even taken Jerusalem.
All Israel comes to Hebron: “we are thy bone and thy flesh,” and the shepherd is made king. The tribes gather to the place of joining and own what was true all along — thou wast he that leddest out and broughtest in Israel, and Yahweh said to thee, Thou shalt feed my people Israel. The kingship is framed as shepherding (Ps 78:70–72), and the king is bone and flesh of his people — the kinsman-king, one of the family, the figure of the One who would be made of the same flesh as his brethren (Heb 2:14). Thirty years old he begins (the priestly age, the age Christ began his ministry), reigning forty — the full span of probation.
The reign-count itself sounds the King to come. Over Judah at Hebron the beloved reigns seven years and six months — the seven of covenant — and in Jerusalem thirty and three years over all Israel and Judah. Those thirty-three years are the measure of the greater David’s life to his offering: the first beloved reigns thirty-three years in the city of peace, and the second lives thirty-three years and lays his life down at the tree. First the natural reign, then the spiritual life it shadowed — the Son of David whose years in the foundation of peace are crowned not by a long throne but by a sacrifice.
David takes the stronghold of Zion, and the city of the Jebusites becomes the city of David. The Jebusites taunt that the blind and the lame could hold him off; David takes the fortress anyway and names it the city of David, building from the Millo inward. Jerusalem means foundation of peace; Zion is the dry fortress-height the beloved makes his throne. The shepherd-king plants his throne on the mountain that will be called the mountain of Yahweh’s house — and David went on, and grew great, and Yahweh, the God of hosts, was with him.
Hiram’s cedars build the king’s house, and Yahweh breaks through the Philistines at Baal-perazim. The Gentile king of Tyre sends cedar and craftsmen — the nations bringing their glory to build the house of the beloved, a foreglimpse of the kingdom-age when the wealth of the nations comes up to Zion (Isa 60). Then the Philistines come up twice, and twice the beloved enquires of Yahweh before he strikes — the discipline that has marked him from the first. The first victory he names Baal-perazim, the master of breakings-forth: Yahweh hath broken forth upon mine enemies before me, as the breach of waters. In the second he must wait for the sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry trees — the rustle that is the signal of the God of hosts going out before him. The king who waits for the sound of heaven before he moves is the king Yahweh fights for.
The beloved takes Zion without seizing it by blood, enquires before every battle, and lets Yahweh break forth before him; the foundation of peace becomes the city of the king.
Jeremiah 10
“The customs of the people are vain” — the idol is a tree, cut, nailed, and dumb. Against the terror of the heavens that the nations fear, Jeremiah sets the idol’s pathetic biography: one cutteth a tree out of the forest… they deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not. A tree felled and nailed so it cannot fall over — they are upright as the palm tree, but speak not — carried because they cannot go. The thing men fashion to save them cannot even stand on its own; the maker must hold up the god he made.
“Be not afraid of them; for they cannot do evil, neither also is it in them to do good.” The idols are emptied of both terror and help — they can neither harm nor save. The fear of the nations is fear of nothing; they are altogether brutish and foolish: the stock is a doctrine of vanities. The whole religion of the carved tree is exposed as a teaching that teaches nothing — wood instructing its makers in folly.
“There is none like unto thee, O Yahweh; thou art great, and thy name is great in might.” Set against the dumb tree is Yahweh himself — Yahweh is the true God, he is the living God, and an everlasting King. He made the earth by his power, stretched out the heavens by his discretion; the portion of Jacob is not like them; for he is the former of all things. The contrast is the chapter’s whole argument: the dead idol that must be carried versus the living God who carries his people, the Maker of all things, and Israel is the rod of his inheritance.
“Every man is brutish in his knowledge; every founder is confounded by the graven image.” The craftsman who makes the idol is shamed by it — his molten image is falsehood, and there is no breath in them. The breathless idol exposes the breathlessness of the maker’s wisdom; the figure of breath (the Spirit) is precisely what the idol lacks and what the living God alone gives (Gen 2:7). What has no breath cannot give breath; only the living God breathes life.
“O Yahweh, correct me, but with judgment; not in thine anger, lest thou bring me to nothing.” The chapter closes in the prophet’s prayer — and in his identification with the wounded nation. He accepts the correction but pleads for measure: with judgment, not in fury. The weeping prophet who carried the tears of Yahweh now carries the plea of the people, asking that the discipline not be the end of them. Pour out thy fury upon the heathen that know thee not — the nations that serve the dumb tree — but correct the covenant-people in mercy.
The idol is a nailed tree that cannot stand and cannot save; the portion of Jacob is the living God who made the heavens and breathes life. Fear him, not the carved wood.
Matthew 21
The Son of David enters Zion on the colt, and the city David took now receives David’s greater Son. From Bethphage (house of unripe figs) by the mount of Olives, the King sends for an ass and a colt, the foal of an ass, and rides in fulfilling Zechariah: Tell ye the daughter of Sion, Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass. The crowds spread garments and branches and cry Hosanna to the Son of David; Blessed is he that cometh in the name of Yahweh (Ps 118:26, the Tetragrammaton under the Greek). The very city the first David captured in today’s other reading now hails the second David — though it does not know its hour.
The King cleanses the temple with the words Jeremiah spoke at the gate. He casts out the buyers and sellers, overturns the tables, and declares my house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves — joining Isaiah 56:7 to Jeremiah 7:11, the very oracle read three days ago. The Son of David does at the temple what Jeremiah did at its gate: he exposes a religion of structure without obedience. It is the second time he has inspected the house and found it defiled (Jn 2:13–17), the King going through the courts as the priest went through a leprous house (Lev 14) — to pronounce it unclean and cast out what spreads the plague. And then the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them — the very ones the Jebusites named as keeping David out of Zion (2 Sam 5:6) are welcomed and healed by the greater David in the house. The King receives whom the fortress excluded.
The fig tree withered: leaves without fruit, judged in a day. Hungry, he comes to a fig tree and found nothing thereon, but leaves only — and it withers at his word. Fig is Israel in her fruit-bearing (Jer 8:13 — there shall be no figs on the fig tree), and the tree full of leaves and bare of fruit is the nation that has the show of religion and none of its substance — the same charge as the den of thieves, now in living parable. The mountain-moving faith he names beside it is the answer to the barren tree: a living faith bears what the leafy tree could not.
“The baptism of John, whence was it?” — the question that silences the rulers. They demand his authority; he stakes it on theirs to answer one question about John, and they will not, for they feared the people. The men who guard the temple cannot say whether the forerunner was from heaven — and so forfeit the right to judge the One he announced. The refusal to own the truth they know is the same flesh Jeremiah named in the lying pen of the scribes.
Two parables seal the verdict: the two sons, and the rejected stone. One son says he will not go and goes; the other says he will and does not — and the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you, for they repented at John’s word and the rulers did not. Then the husbandmen who kill the heir to seize the vineyard, and the King quotes Psalm 118 again: The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner; this is Yahweh’s doing (Ps 118:22–23). The builders of the house reject the cornerstone — and the kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof. The fruitless fig, the rejected stone, the vineyard given to others — one verdict in three figures.
The Son of David enters his city and finds it leafy and fruitless; he cleanses the house, heals the excluded, and gives the kingdom to a people that will bear fruit.
Synthesis and Exhortation
The day is built on one great rhyme: the beloved takes Zion. In 2 Samuel the first David captures the stronghold of the foundation of peace, makes it the city of the king, and grows great because the God of hosts is with him. In Matthew the greater David rides into the same city as its meek King, hailed as the Son of David, and enters the house to cleanse it. The first David is welcomed by a people owning him bone and flesh; the second comes to his own and finds the builders rejecting the cornerstone. The throne of David that 2 Samuel watches the shepherd grow into is the throne the Son of David goes up to take — through the offering he has been foretelling since the mountain.
The threads of the week converge here with unusual force. Jeremiah’s charge at the temple gate — a den of robbers — becomes the Son of David’s word in the temple courts. Jeremiah’s barren fig (8:13) becomes the leafy fruitless tree withered at the King’s word. And against the nailed tree of Jeremiah 10 — the idol that cannot stand or save — stands the living King who breathes life, heals the blind and lame, and receives the very ones the fortress shut out. The carved wood must be carried; the living King carries his people. The fortress excludes the blind and the lame; the King welcomes and heals them.
So the exhortation gathers the whole week to a point. Enquire of Yahweh before you move, as the beloved did before every battle, and wait for the sound of the going in the tops of the trees rather than running ahead of him. Fear the living God, not the carved tree — glory not in the work of your own hands, which has no breath, but in the Maker who breathes life. And bear fruit, not leaves only: the fig full of leaves and the temple full of buyers were judged together. The King who rode into Zion meek and lowly is the King who took it, and the kingdom is given to a people bringing forth the fruits thereof.
Be a tree that bears fruit and not leaves only; welcome the King who welcomes the blind and the lame; and fear the living God, who carries his people while the idol must be carried.