2 Chronicles 35

Josiah’s Passover is the greatest since the days of Samuel, and it is a feast of blood rightly applied — and then the same king dies for refusing a word he should have heard. He sets the priests in their charges, restores the ark to the house, and keeps the Passover so fully that there was no Passover like to that kept in Israel from the days of Samuel. And the record points at who paid for it: Josiah gave to the people, of the flock, lambs and kids… to the number of thirty thousand, and three thousand bullocks: these were of the king’s substance. Nobody brings his own lamb. The king provides the lamb for every household in the nation, out of his own goods — which is the shape of the thing the feast was always about. The lambs are killed, the blood sprinkled, the people fed; the reform that found the lost book now keeps the feast the book commands. The Passover lamb stands at the center, as it always does — Christ our Passover, the blood between the people and the destroyer.

But the size of the feast is not the measure of the nation, and the prophets standing in the crowd say so. Jeremiah and Zephaniah are prophesying through these very years, and their verdict on this same reform is blunt: the people kept the letter of the Law scrupulously and never knew its spirit — Judah hath not turned unto me with her whole heart, but feignedly (Jer 3:10). The crowds came in their thousands, the requirements were carried out exactly, the ceremonies of David and Solomon were revived to the detail — and much of the enthusiasm was the novelty of the thing, and the true spirit of repentance was missing. A feast can be kept perfectly and repented of not at all. Which is why the praise is worded as carefully as it is: there was no Passover like it from the days of Samuel — the greatest feast in the history of Judah, kept by a people whose repentance was their king’s and not their own.

Then the chapter turns, and the turn is a warning. Necho king of Egypt comes up to fight at Carchemish and has no quarrel with Judah; he sends word to Josiah, forbear thee from meddling with God, who is with me, that he destroy thee not. The strange thing is that the word is true — he came… from the mouth of God. The word of God can come through an unexpected mouth, and the godly king, who tore his robe at the book, will not hear it from a Gentile’s lips.

So Josiah disguises himself — the same self-hiding that undid Ahab — goes down into the valley of Megiddo, and is struck by the archers. Have me away; for I am sore wounded. He is carried to Jerusalem and dies, and Jeremiah laments him, and all Judah mourns. The best king of Judah falls by ignoring a word, in a valley whose name the Apocalypse will borrow for the gathering of the nations — Megiddo, Armageddon.

The lesson sits uneasily against the Passover that opened the chapter, and it is meant to. A man may keep the feast with his whole heart and still stumble at the next word if he will not bend his ear to it. Hearing is not a season but a habit — the tender heart of chapter 34 must stay tender, or even a Josiah will go down to Megiddo in disguise.

Keep the feast with your whole heart — and keep your ear open to the next word, whatever mouth it comes from, or the feast will not save you in the valley.

Hosea 3

The chapter is the gospel in three verses: the prophet buys back his adulterous wife at the price of a slave, because that is what Yahweh is doing with Israel. Go yet, love a woman beloved of her friend, yet an adulteress, according to the love of Yahweh toward the children of Israel. The verb is the whole chapter. In chapter 1 the command was take; here it is love. He is already married to her — there is nothing left to take. The second command is harder than the first by the exact distance between duty and the heart: love the woman who left. Gomer has run to her lovers and ended in bondage, and Hosea does not divorce her — he redeems her, fifteen pieces of silver, and an homer of barley, and an half homer of barley. The price of a slave (Exod 21:32 valued a slave at thirty; she is bought at half that and some grain) — the bride is purchased out of her own ruin. And the Law would have done something else with her entirely: the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death (Lev 20:10). She had no claim on him but the stones. Yahweh’s love goes past the Law’s own verdict — the same scene the Lord stood in when they dragged a woman taken in adultery into the temple court and he stooped and wrote in the dust and nobody threw anything. The Law was right about her. Love bought her anyway.

This is the kinsman-redeemer at work — the go’el who buys back what the family has lost, one of the family bringing the family out of bondage by his own act. Hosea pays for the wife who wronged him; Yahweh pays for the people who left him; and the price is borne by the redeemer, not exacted from the redeemed. The redemption is an act of love before it is anything else: according to the love of Yahweh.

The bought-back wife is then put under discipline — and the redeemer puts himself under it too. Thou shalt abide for me many days; thou shalt not play the harlot, and thou shalt not be for another man: so will I also be for thee. That last clause is the loveliest line in the chapter. He does not impose a waiting on her that he refuses himself. He waits as long as she waits. The husband who paid the price keeps the same abstinence he asks of the wife who wronged him, for exactly as long — and the whole present age is the two of them waiting.

The many days are the long dispersion — a betrothed people kept in waiting, neither divorced nor yet brought home, set apart for the husband who paid for them. The discipline is not rejection; it is the keeping of a redeemed wife until the wedding.

And what she is stripped of is the strangest list in the prophets — and it is a double stripping. Without a king, and without a prince — no throne. Without a sacrifice, and without an image — the image is a standing pillar, the mark of the false worship. Without an ephod, and without teraphim — the ephod carried the Urim, the true oracle; the teraphim were the household idols, the false one. She is left with neither her worship nor her idols. That is the state of the Jew since AD 70 with uncomfortable precision: kept from idolatry as no other nation has been kept, and kept from the altar too — owned as a wife, restrained from her lovers, and without the conjugal rites. Neither divorced nor home.

And the close lifts the eye to the latter days. The children of Israel shall abide many days without a king, and without a prince, and without a sacrifice… afterward shall the children of Israel return, and seek Yahweh their God, and David their king; and shall fear Yahweh and his goodness in the latter days. David their king is the Beloved who is coming — not the son of Jesse asleep in the dust, but his greater Son, sought by a restored Israel at the end of the many days. The redemption paid now is consummated then.

The bride is bought out of her ruin at the redeemer’s own cost, kept through the many days, and brought home at last to seek David their king.

Acts 18–19

These chapters are the gathering of the bought-back bride out of the nations, and they end with a bonfire of the things the redeemed once served. At Corinth Paul finds Aquila and Priscilla, reasons in the synagogue, and is told by the Lord in the night, Be not afraid… for I have much people in this city. The bride is being purchased here, name by name, in the very city of Aphrodite. He lodges with them because they are of the same trade, and the detail is not filler: the bride at Corinth is bought over a workbench, in the ordinary hours, by two tentmakers and a third talking while their hands are busy. Apollos comes through — mighty in the scriptures, but knowing only John’s baptism — and Priscilla and Aquila expounded unto him the way of God more perfectly. Even the eloquent must be brought into the fulness.

And the ecclesia bought here did not stay strong for long — which the letters remember better than Luke does. Paul leaves Corinth having gathered a great company out of the most profligate city in Greece, and within a few years the vices of the old city are back inside the house: doubt, error, party spirit, schism. The correspondence is not even all preserved — he refers to a letter that has not survived (1 Cor 5:9) — and the great epistle that did survive he wrote from Ephesus (1 Cor 16:8), out of the very stay these two chapters are describing. The bride is bought in a city and must then be kept in it. The gathering is the beginning of the work, not the end of it.

At Ephesus Paul finds twelve disciples who have not received the Spirit — We have not so much as heard whether there be any Holy Spirit. They had John’s baptism only; rebaptized into the name of the Lord Jesus, the Spirit comes. The half-told gospel is completed, as Apollos’s was — the way of God made perfect where it had been only begun.

Then the power of the Name is shown against the counterfeit. The seven sons of Sceva try to use the name of Jesus as a charm — Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are ye? — and are driven naked and wounded out of the house. The Name is not a spell to be borrowed by men who do not belong to him; it answers only to those who are his.

And the fear that falls produces the bonfire. Many who used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver. The redeemed burn what they once served — and count the cost as gladly as they once counted the gain. Then Demetrius and the silversmiths riot for Diana, whose trade the gospel threatens; the city roars Great is Diana of the Ephesians for two hours, and the word of the Lord grew mightily and prevailed. The dead goddess shouts; the living word prevails.

The bride is gathered out of Corinth and Ephesus name by name — and the proof of redemption is a fire made of the things she used to serve.