2 Chronicles 30

The second-month Passover is the keystone of the chapter, and it is a feast built on a concession to the unready. The law set the Passover in the first month; but the priests had not sanctified themselves in time and the people had not gathered, so Hezekiah keeps it in the second month — invoking the provision of Numbers 9 for the unclean and the man on a far journey. The feast that remembers the night Israel came out of Egypt is here kept late, by the unprepared, on the ground of mercy rather than of merit.

The posts run from Beersheba even to Dan with the king’s letters, calling the shattered remnant of the northern kingdom — what Assyria had left — to turn again to Yahweh. Beersheba is the well of the oath, Dan is the judge; between the place of covenant and the place of judgment the call goes out to a scattered people. Many of Ephraim and Manasseh laugh the messengers to scorn; but some humble themselves and come. The gospel call has always been mocked by the many and heeded by the few.

And the thing Hezekiah does not do is the whole difference between him and his great-grandfather. Jehoshaphat went north — down to Ahab’s table, into the environment of apostasy, and nearly died for it, and left the throne of David poisoned for three generations. Hezekiah does not go north. He sends letters and invites the north to come south, to Jerusalem, to the altar. He keeps the door open and the ground holy at the same time — the appeal costs him nothing of the separation, because the meeting-place is the house of Yahweh and not the high place of Bethel.

The heart of the chapter is Hezekiah’s intercession for the unclean. A great number had eaten the Passover otherwise than it was written, not having cleansed themselves; and the king prays, The good Yahweh pardon every one that prepareth his heart to seek God, the God of his fathers, though he be not cleansed according to the purification of the sanctuary. And Yahweh hearkened to Hezekiah, and healed the people. The prepared heart is accepted over the ceremonial qualification — God looks where man cannot, and the king who pleads is a shadow of the great High Priest whose intercession reaches past the rule to the heart.

The healing of the people names Yahweh-Rophe in passing — the same Name confessed at Marah, I am Yahweh that healeth thee. The defilement that should have barred them from the feast is covered, not by their cleansing, but by a mediator’s prayer answered. The Levites that taught the good knowledge of Yahweh feed the congregation; the Word and the intercession together carry the unclean into the feast.

So the joy returns. There was great joy in Jerusalem: for since the time of Solomon… there was not the like. The Peaceable One’s reign, gone since Solomon, is tasted again for a fortnight — the feast doubled to fourteen days because no one wanted it to end. A flicker of the kingdom: the King interceding, the unclean pardoned, the scattered gathered, the joy unbroken.

The heart that seeks him is the heart he heals; the rule could not let you in, but the Mediator’s prayer can.

Daniel 10

The man clothed in linen who stands over the river is the spine of the whole final vision, and he is the glorified Lord in the pattern Revelation will fill out. After three full weeks of mourning, Daniel by the Hiddekel lifts his eyes and sees him: clothed in linen, his loins girded with fine gold of Uphaz, his body also like the beryl, and his face as the appearance of lightning, and his eyes as lamps of fire, and his arms and his feet like in colour to polished brass, and the voice of his words like the voice of a multitude. John sees the same figure in Revelation 1 — the eyes of flame, the feet of brass, the voice of many waters, the golden girdle. Linen is the righteousness of the saints; the gold girdle is the priest-King. Daniel is shown the One the times of the Gentiles are bending toward.

The whole chapter is an enactment, and once seen it is hard to unsee. It opens in the third year of Cyrus — three, the number of raising out of death — and it moves in exactly that shape: the prophet mourning three full weeks, then falling as one dead, then a hand touching him, then set trembling on hands and knees, then stood upright, then strengthened to hear. Daniel is not merely overwhelmed; he is being taken through death and resurrection, the pattern of everyone who will stand in the multitudinous Christ. His mortality clings to him even as he rises from the prostrate condition of death — which is the honest experience of every saint between the call and the kingdom.

The flesh cannot stand in that presence. Daniel alone sees it; the men with him flee and hide, and in him there remained no strength… my comeliness was turned in me into corruption. This is the same falling-as-dead that lays John at the feet of the glorified Christ. Mortal nature collapses before glory — and the answer is not Daniel’s strength but a touch: O Daniel, a man greatly beloved — the word spoken over him three times across these visions (9:23; 10:11, 19) — and a hand that sets him on his knees and then upright.

The strangest words in the chapter open the curtain on the war behind the thrones. The messenger says the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me one and twenty days until Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me. This is not a literal supernatural rebel; it is the angelic agency that contends behind the power-structure of Persia — the unseen ordering of the nations that runs underneath the visible empires of Daniel 2 and 7. The kingdoms of men are moved by hands they cannot see.

Michael — whose name asks who is like God — is the prince who stands for Daniel’s people. There is none that holdeth with me in these things, but Michael your prince. He is the captain of the angelic host, the agency through whom Yahweh works for the saints, and in the next chapter’s close he is the one who stands up when the dead awake. Not a co-equal person beside Yahweh, but the great prince bound up with the deliverance of the people — the same role Christ takes as head of the multitudinous body.

The man in linen has been read two ways, and both are worth holding. This readout takes him as the glorified Lord, on the strength of the Revelation 1 correspondence — the eyes of flame, the feet of brass, the girdle of gold. The other reading takes him as the multitudinous Christ, the head and the body seen as one figure, the voice of his words like the voice of a multitude being the tell. The two are not far apart, since the body wears the glory of the head; but the voice of a multitude is a real detail, and the reader can weigh it.

The chapter is given to a man too weak to receive it — fasting, mourning, undone — precisely so that the strength is plainly not his own. O man greatly beloved, fear not: peace be unto thee, be strong, yea, be strong. The beloved is strengthened to hear what he could not bear, by the One whose own strength is inexhaustible.

The flesh falls as dead before the glory; only the touch of the Beloved sets it on its feet to hear.

Acts 10

The sheet let down from heaven is the dividing wall coming down, and the command Rise, kill, and eat is the end of the clean-and-unclean boundary. Cornelius, a centurion, devout, praying always, gives alms; at the ninth hour — the evening sacrifice, the very hour the Lamb of Yahweh died — an angel tells him his prayer and his alms are come up for a memorial before God. The Gentile’s prayer is accepted as the evening offering ascends; the sacrifice is the ground on which the outsider is heard.

Peter on the housetop sees the vessel of all manner of beasts and the word, Rise, Peter; kill, and eat. The phrase has an older home: kill and eat is Moses’ own language in Deuteronomy 12, the permission given to Israel in the land — thou mayest kill and eat flesh in all thy gates, whatsoever thy soul lusteth after — the one place the Law loosened its grip on the table. The words that opened the table to Israel are the words that open it to the nations. Then: What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common. Thrice, as Peter was thrice restored. The cleansing is God’s act, not the flesh’s qualification — exactly Hezekiah’s principle on the other side of the canon: the heart God has prepared he will not call unclean. Peter walks into a Gentile house, a thing no lawful Jew would do, and finds the wall already down.

There is a sharp thing in the way Luke introduces this man. Cornelius is devout, God-fearing with all his house, generous in alms, praying always, of good report among the Jews, a just man — a stack of commendations most of us would settle for. And not one of them saved him. He still had to send to Joppa for a man who would tell him words whereby thou and all thy house shall be saved. The qualities were real; they were not the gospel. Yet one thing in that list is the thing Peter names as what heaven looks for: he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness — the fear within and the righteousness without, mind and hand together.

His confession is the chapter’s hinge: Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: but in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him. The gospel that ran from Beersheba to Dan now runs to the nations. No respecter of persons — the same God who pardoned the unclean at Hezekiah’s feast pours his Spirit on the uncircumcised here.

Then the Spirit falls on all them which heard the word, before baptism, before any work of the law — and the circumcision believers were astonished… that on the Gentiles also was poured out the gift of the Holy Spirit. Peter can only ask, Can any man forbid water? The firstfruits of the great ingathering are sealed: the door that Hosea will sing open — ye are the sons of the living God — swings on its hinge here.

What God has cleansed, no son of the rule may call common; the wall is down, and the unclean made clean are welcomed in.