2 Chronicles 31

The heaps of firstfruits are the chapter’s image, and they are what abundance looks like when a people give before they count the cost. The Passover ended, Israel goes out and breaks the images, cuts down the groves, throws down the high places — not only in Judah but in Ephraim and Manasseh. Reform that begins at the altar moves out to pull down every rival. The putting-off of idols is the first fruit of the feast; you cannot keep the Passover and keep the high places too.

And there is a point easy to miss in the enthusiasm: the high places had to go even where they were dedicated to Yahweh. Moses had named one place where the Name would dwell, and an altar to Yahweh anywhere else is not a lesser obedience but a violation (Deut 12:5–6). A right worship in a wrong place is still a high place. A sober footnote belongs here too — the altars in the north came down because the northern administration was too weak to stop it, and the hearts of the people were never touched. Judah’s throw-down was repentance; Ephraim’s was permission.

Hezekiah then sets the courses of the priests and Levites in order and commands the people to give the portion, that they might be encouraged in the law of Yahweh. The ministry is sustained so that the Word can be taught; the body feeds those who feed it. And the people answer beyond all measure — the firstfruits of corn, wine, and oil, and honey, and of all the increase of the field — until the offerings lie in heaps from the third month to the seventh.

When Hezekiah asks about the heaps, Azariah the chief priest answers with the chapter’s quiet lesson: Since the people began to bring the offerings into the house of Yahweh, we have had enough to eat, and have left plenty: for Yahweh hath blessed his people; and that which is left is this great store. Seek first the kingdom, and the rest is added. The giving did not impoverish them; it opened the windows of heaven, and the surplus was the proof.

The chapter closes on the man himself: In every work that he began in the service of the house of God, and in the law, and in the commandments, to seek his God, he did it with all his heart, and prospered. The wholehearted servant — the verse names the secret of the reign. Not divided, not hedging, not keeping a high place in reserve; all his heart, and the prospering follows the wholeness, not the other way round.

Give before you count, and the heaps will say what no words could; the whole heart is the one that prospers.

Daniel 11

This is the most detailed prophecy in all Scripture, and its long catalogue of kings is the skeleton of the times of the Gentiles. The man in linen, still speaking, traces the future from Persia’s last kings to a mighty king of Greece — Alexander — whose realm is broken, and divided toward the four winds of heaven, not to his posterity. Then the long grinding war of the king of the south and the king of the north — the Egyptian Ptolemies and the Syrian Seleucids — pushing back and forth across the land that lies between them: the glorious land, Israel, the anvil on which the empires hammer.

The detail is so exact that the unbelieving mind insists it must be history written after the fact; but that is the point of prophecy — I have told you before it come to pass. And the chapter opens by telling you who is doing it: the speaker says I stood to confirm and to strengthen him — the angelic hand that wrestled with the prince of Persia in the last chapter is the hand that moves every king in this one. Chapter 10 is the engine room of chapter 11. The long catalogue is not a list of what men did; it is a record of what the God guided men into, and the I speaking in verse 2 is Gabriel. The chapter has been traced king by king before — Bro Thomas’s Exposition of Daniel walks the whole span, from the last kings of Persia to the day the northern power pitches the tabernacle of his palace in the glorious holy mountain — and the arc it follows is the arc of the chapter itself: Gabriel’s hand on every reign from Cyrus to Armageddon. Out of the wars rises a vile person who profanes the sanctuary, takes away the daily sacrifice, and sets up the abomination that maketh desolate — Antiochus in the foreground, and behind him the larger pattern of every power that defiles the holy place. The seed of the serpent wears many faces, but the work is always the same: to desolate what belongs to Yahweh.

The chapter’s center of gravity for the saint is verses 32 to 35. The people that do know their God shall be strong, and do exploits. And they that understand among the people shall instruct many: yet they shall fall by the sword, and by flame… to try them, and to purge, and to make them white, even to the time of the end. The saints under Gentile dominion are refined, not exempted. The furnace is not a sign of abandonment; it is the whitening of the holy people, the same fire that tried Daniel’s three companions.

The vision climbs toward a king who shall do according to his will; and he shall exalt himself, and magnify himself above every god. He regards not the God of his fathers, but honors a god of forces — a power that trusts in arms and fortresses and worships its own strength. This is the man-of-sin pattern, the self-magnifying horn, the figure that runs through papal Rome and gathers at the end into the king of the north who comes against the glorious land.

And he comes to nothing — but note where he is standing when he does. He shall plant the tabernacle of his palace between the seas in the glorious holy mountain; yet he shall come to his end, and none shall help him. The last self-exalting king pitches his tent on Zion and dies there — the tabernacle of a man planted on the holy mountain, and no helper when the reckoning comes. That is where the whole catalogue has been running: not to a battlefield in Syria but to the hill Yahweh has chosen.

He shall come to his end, and none shall help him. Every self-exalting power in the chapter ends the same way — Alexander broken, Antiochus spent, the final king collapsing with no helper — while the people who know their God are made white. Set this in the latter-day flow: the king of the north pressing into the land is the northern invader of the prophets, and his end is the threshold of the King’s own standing-up in the next chapter.

The empires rise to magnify themselves and end with none to help them; the saints go through the fire and come out white.

Acts 11–12

Antioch is the launch-point of the whole Gentile age, and the new name given there says what these people are: they belong to the Christ. Peter rehearses the Cornelius vision to the circumcision party, and his defense is unanswerable: Forasmuch then as God gave them the like gift as he did unto us… what was I, that I could withstand God? They fall silent and glorify God — then hath God also to the Gentiles granted repentance unto life. The wall that came down in Joppa stays down in Jerusalem.

In Antioch the scattered believers speak the Lord Jesus to the Greeks, and the hand of the Lord was with them. Barnabas is sent, and the word of his exhortation is worth stopping on: that with purpose of heart they would cleave unto the Lord. Both words repay opening. Cleave is prosmenō — to stay fixed to, to remain attached; not admiration but adherence. And purpose is prothesis — the same word the Greek uses for the shewbread, the loaves of the setting forth that stood before Yahweh continually in the holy place (Heb 9:2). The prothesis of the heart is a heart set out before him like the bread on the table: placed there deliberately, and left there.

Barnabas fetches Saul, and for a year they teach a great multitude; the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch. This readout takes that as the Name stamped on the people — they are Christ’s own. It has been read the other way: the word appears only three times in the whole New Testament (here; Acts 26:28, from a king’s sneer; 1 Pet 4:16, if any man suffer as a Christian), the disciples never adopt it of themselves, and it was the apostasy of the second century that took it up. It may well have started as the nickname the men of Antioch threw at them. Both can stand: a name given in scorn that says exactly the truth — these people belong to the Christ — which is how the ecclesia has usually been named. A famine is foretold; the disciples send relief to the brethren in Judea, each according to his ability — the heaps of Hezekiah’s chapter, in gospel form.

Then the chapter turns dark and then bright. Herod stretched forth his hands to vex certain of the ecclesia — kills James with the sword, the first of the apostles to fall, and seizes Peter, meaning to bring him out after the Passover. The exodus pattern runs underneath the rescue. It is the days of unleavened bread; the ecclesia keeps prayer without ceasing; and at night the angel comes, the chains fall, the iron gate opens of his own accord, and Peter walks free as Israel walked out of Egypt.

The contrast with Daniel 11’s self-magnifying king is exact. Herod, arrayed in royal apparel, takes the people’s cry — the voice of a god, and not of a man — and gave not God the glory, and is eaten of worms, and dies. The beast-king who seizes the glory that is God’s alone is consumed by the lowest of creatures. And the verse that follows buries him: But the word of God grew and multiplied. The persecutor rots; the Word increases.

The king who takes the glory is eaten of worms; the Word he tried to chain grows and multiplies over his grave.