2 Chronicles 36

The book of Chronicles ends in fire and exile, and the reason is given in one terrible phrase: they mocked the messengers until there was no remedy. The last four kings fall in quick succession — Jehoahaz carried to Egypt, Jehoiakim and Jehoiachin to Babylon, Zedekiah blinded and bound. Each did that which was evil in the sight of Yahweh his God. The throne of David gutters out; the long descent that began with the high places ends at the gates of Babylon.

The verdict on the nation is the chapter’s center. Yahweh God of their fathers sent to them by his messengers, rising up betimes, and sending; because he had compassion on his people… but they mocked the messengers of God, and despised his words, and misused his prophets, until the wrath of Yahweh arose against his people, till there was no remedy. The Word despised is the cause of the ruin — not Babylon’s strength, but Judah’s deafness. The compassion that rose up early to send is met with mockery, and mercy itself runs out of room.

So the house burns. They burnt the house of God, and brake down the wall of Jerusalem, and burnt all the palaces thereof. The vessels carried away, the survivors led to Babylon, the land left empty. And the emptiness is given a meaning: the land lies desolate to fulfil the word of Yahweh by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her sabbaths… to fulfil threescore and ten years. The land keeps the sabbaths the people would not — seventy years of rest stolen back from a people who would not let the land rest.

But the book will not end in the dark. And what Cyrus is, the Chronicler assumes you already know from Isaiah. A hundred and fifty years before he was born, Yahweh called this Persian by name — Cyrus, he is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure (Isa 44:28) — and then went further than that: thus saith Yahweh to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden (Isa 45:1). His anointed. His messiah. The only Gentile in Scripture given that title, raised up to end an exile, break the gates of brass, and send a people home to build a house he would never see. Chronicles ends on a type of the Christ wearing a pagan crown — the king from the east who frees the captives and rebuilds the city.

The last lines leap seventy years forward to the first year of Cyrus, whose spirit Yahweh stirs to proclaim, Yahweh God of heaven… hath charged me to build him an house in Jerusalem… Who is there among you of all his people? Yahweh his God be with him, and let him go up. The fire is not the last word; the going-up is. Chronicles closes not on the ash of the temple but on the open door home, the same word that opens Ezra.

The Word despised brings the fire and the seventy years — but the compassion that rose up early to send is the same that stirs a king’s heart to open the door home.

Hosea 4

Hosea names the disease beneath the exile: there is no knowledge of God in the land, and a people without that knowledge is a people destroyed. The opening word is a courtroom word. Yahweh hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land — the Hebrew is rîb, a formal suit, a judicial action. Read it exactly: Yahweh stands here as the plaintiff against his own people, and the chapter is the case laid out. He is not venting; he is prosecuting. And the charge sheet is because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land. In place of the knowledge are swearing, and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery — the commandments broken one by one, they break out, and blood toucheth blood. When the knowledge of God drains out of a land, the land itself sickens: therefore shall the land mourn, and the beasts and the fish fail with it.

The most quoted line is the indictment of a whole people through its teachers. My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me. The destruction is by famine of knowing, and the famine starts at the top — the priest who should have carried the knowledge has thrown it away, and the people perish in his ignorance. Like people, like priest — the shepherd’s failure becomes the flock’s grave.

The office that failed has a name: there was no teaching priest. It is the Chronicler’s own diagnosis of the same disease — Israel hath been without the true God, and without a teaching priest, and without law (2 Chron 15:3) — and it is exactly what Jehoshaphat had once cured by sending princes and Levites through every city of Judah with the book of the law in their hands. A priesthood that will not teach leaves every man to his own desire, and a nation left to its own desire does not drift toward Yahweh.

The harlotry that runs through the whole book surfaces here as the engine of the ruin. The spirit of whoredoms hath caused them to err, and they sacrifice on the tops of the mountains under oak and poplar, because the shadow thereof is good. The covenant wife chases the comfortable shade of the idols; the spirit of whoredoms blinds before it destroys, so that the people cannot even see the cliff they are walking off.

And the chapter ends with the most frightening sentence Yahweh ever speaks. Ephraim is joined to idols: let him alone. To be let alone is the deepest judgment — not struck, not corrected, but abandoned to the thing chosen. The hand that tore in order to heal (the next chapter’s hope) here lifts off entirely; the patient who will not be treated is left to the disease he loves. It is the verdict 2 Chronicles 36 was narrating from the other side: the messengers mocked until there was no remedy, and the people let alone.

A people perishes for want of knowing him — and the last and worst mercy withdrawn is to be let alone with the idol you would not give up.

Acts 20

Over against the failed shepherds of Judah stands Paul at Miletus, the faithful shepherd who held nothing back — and the chapter frames him with a man raised from the dead. At Troas, gathered to break bread on the first day of the week, Paul speaks till midnight — long preaching, Luke says, hours of it — and it is a fair guess that a discourse that long, on that night, must have had the resurrection in it somewhere. Which is when Eutychus — his name means good fortune — sunk in sleep in the third loft, falls three storeys and is taken up dead. Paul goes down, embraces him — his life is in him — and the boy is brought alive. Life returns where the Word is being broken open, a raising in the middle of the breaking of bread, the third storey echoing the third day.

Then the Miletus farewell, the most pastoral words in Acts. Paul calls the elders of Ephesus and lays his ministry bare: he kept back nothing profitable, I have not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of God. The whole counsel withheld nothing — this is the exact opposite of the priest of Hosea 4 who rejected knowledge, and of the messengers of 2 Chronicles 36 who were mocked. Paul can say I am pure from the blood of all men, because he gave them all of it.

The charge to the elders names the flock’s worth and its danger together. Take heed… to all the flock, over the which the Holy Spirit hath made you overseers, to feed the ecclesia of God, which he hath purchased with the blood of his own Son. The flock was bought with the blood of God’s own Son — not the blood of God himself, but of the One he gave, the Lamb whose blood Josiah’s Passover figured. A flock that costly is worth dying for, and worth feeding the whole counsel.

And he warns of the wolves. After my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock; also of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples. The danger is the shepherds who reject knowledge all over again — Hosea 4 waiting to repeat in the ecclesia. The word for perverse is worth having: it means distorted, twisted out of true. Not the open denial, which anyone can see coming, but the doctrine bent a few degrees off the line — recognisable, quotable, and wrong at the joint. And they arise of your own selves. The wolves come in from outside; the twisters grow up inside. His defence is to commend them to God, and to the word of his grace, and to leave them the saying of the Lord, It is more blessed to give than to receive. They weep most at his word that they shall see his face no more, and bring him to the ship.

The faithful shepherd holds nothing back, feeds the flock bought with the blood of God’s own Son, and guards it against the wolves who reject the knowledge the people need to live.