1 Chronicles 29

David’s last public act is a willing offering for the house he will never see built. He gives of his own gold of Ophir over and above all his royal provision, and asks, who then is willing to consecrate his service this day unto Yahweh? — the word is fill his hand, the language of priestly ordination, so that every willing giver plays the priest, filling his own hand with an offering. The princes and people answer with gold, silver, brass, iron, and precious stones, offering willingly, with perfect heart, and the people rejoiced, for that they offered willingly. The temple is funded not by levy but by glad gift; the house of Yahweh rises on a flood of free-will offering.

The gathering has a shape worth naming: this is the second time Solomon is made king. The first was a hurried anointing at Gihon to stop Adonijah’s coup before it hardened; this one is deliberate, public, before all Israel, with the treasure heaped and the nation glad. And for these last days the two kings stand together — the warrior who cleared the ground and the man of rest who will build on it, over one people at once. The Personage of the two advents, shown in a single hall.

David’s prayer over the gifts is the high point, and it dismantles every claim of human merit: thine, O Yahweh, is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty… thine is the kingdom, O Yahweh, and thou art exalted as head above all. Then the line that turns giving inside out: all things come of thee, and of thine own have we given thee. The gift was never the giver’s to begin with. Israel gives back to Yahweh what was always His; the offering is not generosity toward a needy God but the glad return of borrowed wealth.

The prayer names Israel’s true standing on the earth: we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding. The richest king of the age confesses he owns nothing and stays nowhere — a pilgrim whose days are a passing shadow. The same confession the saints make in Hebrews and Peter: strangers and sojourners, holding the world loosely because the abiding city is still ahead.

The prayer ends where every honest accounting ends — at the One who reads the giver, not the gift. I know also, my God, that thou triest the heart, and hast pleasure in uprightness. The gold is weighed on the floor and the heart is weighed in heaven, and only one of those weighings decides anything.

Solomon is then made king and sat on the throne of Yahweh — the throne is named as Yahweh’s own, the kingdom His before it is the king’s. David dies in a good old age, full of days, riches, and honour, his work of preparation finished and the house left in the hands of the man of rest. The warrior who could not build has given everything he had so that the builder might begin.

The house rises on a willing offering of what was Yahweh’s all along — given by strangers and sojourners whose days are a shadow, on a throne that is Yahweh’s own.

Ezekiel 38

The oracle turns to the latter days and to a great northern power: Gog, of the land of Magog, chief prince of Meshech and Tubal, drawn out with all thine army… a great company with bucklers and shields, Persia, Cush, Phut, Gomer, and Togarmah of the north quarters gathered with him. This is the standing prophecy of a final confederacy that comes down upon a restored Israel — the northern invasion that the Christadelphian reading has long located near the end of the times of the Gentiles, when the land lies open and the nations move against it.

Two phrases frame the oracle, and between them they hold the whole purpose. It opens with Son of man — the title Ezekiel wears through the book, and the title of the one to whom the Father hath given… authority to execute judgment also, because he is the Son of man, who will carry out this very judgment with his saints beside him. It closes with they shall know that I am Yahweh. What we are and what Yahweh will be known to be: mortal flesh addressed as son of man at one end, the Name filling the earth at the other, and the business of the chapter is the closing of the distance between them.

The timing is fixed precisely: in the latter years thou shalt come into the land that is brought back from the sword, and is gathered out of many people… which have been always waste: but it is brought forth out of the nations, and they shall dwell safely all of them. The invasion presupposes a regathering — a people brought back and dwelling unwalled — so the prophecy belongs to the phase after Israel’s return, the time of trouble that breaks upon a gathered but not yet secured nation. Art thou he of whom I have spoken in old time by my servants the prophets? — Gog is the convergence of all the prophets’ northern-enemy oracles into one.

Gog’s motive is bare greed: he comes to take a spoil, and to take a prey; to turn thine hand upon the desolate places that are now inhabited, and upon the people gathered out of the nations, which have gotten cattle and goods. The merchant-nations protest only to ask for a share — art thou come to take a spoil? The whole movement is a grasping at what is not his, a reach for a land and a people that belong to Yahweh — the same grasping instinct as Edom and the proud king, now massed into a final army.

But the invasion is itself drawn by Yahweh’s hook: I will turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws, and I will bring thee forth. The spoiler is lured to the place of his judgment. Yahweh’s fury rises, the land quakes, every man’s sword turns against his brother, and I will plead against him with pestilence and with blood… and great hailstones, fire, and brimstone. And the purpose is declared: thus will I magnify myself, and sanctify myself; and I will be known in the eyes of many nations, and they shall know that I am Yahweh. The grasper’s end is the revealing of the Name.

A final northern army gathers to spoil a regathered land — but the spoiler is hooked and drawn to judgment, that the nations may know that the land, and the Name, are Yahweh’s.

John 4

At Jacob’s well, weary at the sixth hour, Jesus asks a Samaritan woman for water and offers her better: whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life. The living water is the Spirit and the life it gives — a spring set inside the believer, not a cistern to be carried, the same flowing gift the prophets pictured in clean water and a river from the sanctuary. She comes to draw and is offered a well of her own.

He stays two days in that city — the same two days he waits before going to Lazarus, and the same measure that answers to the two thousand years in which the word has been refused at home and received abroad. The Master rejected in Judea abides among Samaritans, and many more believed because of his own word.

The conversation moves to worship, and the woman raises the old dispute — this mountain or Jerusalem? Jesus lifts worship off every map: the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth… God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. Worship is unbound from the place. The temple month meets its own horizon here — the house on Moriah was the right place, but the Father seeks worshippers, not a postcode, and the Spirit-worship that is coming needs no mountain.

That she is a Samaritan — an outsider, a woman of mixed worship and broken history — is the point of the sign. The living water and the true worship are offered first to the one the religion of the day would have walked past; the well of Jacob waters a daughter of the nations. The fields are white already to harvest, and the first sheaf is a Samaritan town believing because of the saying of the woman.

The healing is timed to the hour. The fever left the nobleman’s son at the seventh hour — and the fever of unbelief will leave Israel in the seventh millennium, when they look on him whom they pierced and find the word spoken from a distance was true all along.

The reading closes with the second sign, and again John numbers it himself — this is again the second miracle that Jesus did, when he was come out of Judaea into Galilee — the nobleman’s son healed at a word from a day’s distance — himself believed, and his whole house. The word that gives living water gives life across the miles; faith takes Christ at his bare word and finds it true. The well, the worship, and the word all do the same thing: they carry life to those far off.

The living water is a spring set in the believer, worship is unbound from the mountain, and the gift goes first to the outsider — the well of Jacob waters a daughter of the nations.