2 Chronicles 20

A vast confederacy — Moab, Ammon, and the men of Mount Seir — comes against Jehoshaphat, and his response is the chronicle’s clearest lesson in reliance: he sets himself to seek Yahweh, proclaims a fast, and prays before all Judah, we have no might against this great company that cometh against us; neither know we what to do: but our eyes are upon thee. The confession of helplessness is the doorway to deliverance — not a strategy, not an alliance, but eyes fixed on Yahweh when there is nothing left to do.

The answer comes through Jahaziel — God gives visions — a Levite standing in the midst of the congregation, and the name is the gift. The vision is not brought down from a platform; the man God gives it through is raised up out of the crowd of the helpless, one of the people who have just confessed they do not know what to do. And the word overturns the whole logic of battle: be not afraid nor dismayed by reason of this great multitude; for the battle is not yours, but God’s. And then the astonishing command: ye shall not need to fight in this battle: set yourselves, stand ye still, and see the salvation of Yahweh. It is the word of the Red Sea — stand still, and see the salvation of Yahweh — the deliverance that is wholly his, the saints called not to win but to stand and watch him win.

So they go out to war with a choir in the vanguard, singers unto Yahweh appointed to go before the army praising the beauty of holiness — which reads more exactly in their holy attire: the priests in white linen marching in front of the spears, the sanctuary’s uniform worn onto the battlefield. It is the fine linen that is the righteousness of saints (Rev 19:8), and the army that follows it sings Praise Yahweh; for his mercy endureth for ever. The army’s weapon is the song; and when they began to sing and to praise, Yahweh set ambushments against the enemy, who turn and destroy one another. Praise is the warfare; the relying, singing people never lift a sword, and the field is strewn with the dead of their enemies by the time they arrive.

They gather three days’ spoil and assemble in the valley they name Berachah — blessing — to bless Yahweh, and return to Jerusalem with psalteries and harps to the house of Yahweh. The battle that began in helplessness ends in a valley called Blessing; the fear of God falls on all the surrounding kingdoms, and the realm has rest. The brother-nations that came to spoil are spoiled, and the people who stood still and sang carry home the blessing.

But the chapter will not let us end on the high note, and the last three verses press themselves. Jehoshaphat joined himself with Ahaziah king of Israel, who did very wickedly, and the ships built at Ezion-geber are broken before they ever sail (20:35–37). The high places, the record adds, were never quite taken away. The man who stood still and watched Yahweh destroy a confederacy walks straight back into the yoke that nearly killed him at Ramoth-gilead. Reliance in the great hour is not the same thing as reliance as a settled habit — and what Berachah gives, Ezion-geber takes back.

Reliance confesses helplessness and fixes its eyes on Yahweh — the battle is not the saints’ but God’s; they stand still and sing while he wins, and carry home the blessing. But the valley of Blessing does not keep a man from the next unequal yoke; only a daily reliance does.

Daniel 2

Chapter 1 weighed the empire’s wisdom and found it ten times lighter than four undefiled captives; chapter 2 weighs its power. Nebuchadnezzar dreams and forgets, and demands the dream itself from his wise men on pain of death; they cannot, for there is no other that can shew it before the king, except the gods, whose dwelling is not with flesh. Daniel prays, the secret is revealed, and he blesses God in words that frame the whole book: wisdom and might are his… he changeth the times and the seasons: he removeth kings, and setteth up kings. The empires that look so permanent are pieces Yahweh moves; the God of heaven, not the king, governs the times.

The date of the chapter is doing work. The second year of Nebuchadnezzar is the fifth of Jehoiakim — the year the king of Judah took the roll of Jeremiah, cut it with a penknife three leaves at a time, and burnt it on the hearth (Jer 36:9, 22–23). In the same season the man on David’s throne is feeding the word of Yahweh to the fire, the pagan on Babylon’s throne is on his face before it: of a truth it is, that your God is a God of gods. The revelation Judah threw in the fire is given to Babylon in a dream. Yahweh does not lose his word when his own people burn it; he moves it to a Gentile bedchamber and sends a captive to read it.

The dream is a great image — a head of gold, breast and arms of silver, belly and thighs of brass, legs of iron, feet of iron mixed with clay. Daniel reads it as the succession of world-empires from Babylon onward, the four kingdoms that fill the times of the Gentiles, declining metal by metal from gold to crumbling clay. The whole long age of Gentile dominion is one image, magnificent and top-heavy, standing on feet that will not hold.

Then a stone was cut out of the mountain without hands — not quarried by men, of no human origin — and it strikes the image upon his feet, and the whole towering thing becomes chaff that the wind carries away. The stone is the kingdom of God, cut without hands because it is not raised by human power, striking at the feet because it comes in the latter days of the divided iron-and-clay. It is the same stone the builders rejected, now the smiting and the filling stone.

And the stone is not the King by himself. It is the multitudinous Christ — the head and the body together, the saints coming with him to break the image and the same company filling the earth when the mountain grows. One stone, many stones; cut without hands, because no hand of man quarried either this kingdom or its king.

And the stone does not merely topple the image; the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth. Daniel’s word is plain: in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed… it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever. The mountain that fills the earth is the kingdom of God — literal, on the earth, ending the empires and standing for ever. The empires are chaff; the stone is the mountain that remains.

The God of heaven moves the empires like pieces and reads their whole age as one falling image — and the stone cut without hands, the kingdom of God, smites it to chaff and becomes a mountain filling the earth.

John 20–21

The stone is rolled away and the tomb is empty — but not disturbed. The detail that stopped Peter and John where they stood is the linen: the graveclothes lying, and the napkin wrapped together in a place by itself. Lazarus came out of his tomb still bound hand and foot and had to be loosed; this tomb keeps the linen and loses the body. The one was a resuscitation, the other is a resurrection — a man who came through the wrappings and left them folded, and who will never need them again.

Mary, weeping, takes the risen Lord for the gardener until he speaks her name — and then must not hold him: touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father. The reason is in the calendar. It is the first day of the week, the day the sheaf of firstfruits was waved before Yahweh (Lev 23:11–12), and the sheaf is presented before it is handled. He is the wave-sheaf, and the presentation comes first; her hands may have him afterwards, and for ever.

So he gives her the message that names the Father’s relation to the risen Son: I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God. Even raised and glorified, the Son has a God — the Father is the God of the risen Christ, the only true God of the high-priestly prayer, now the God of the firstborn from the dead as well as of his brethren.

He comes among the disciples with Peace be unto you, shows the hands and the side — the marks of the offering carried into the resurrection body — and breathes on them: Receive ye the Holy Spirit. The breath is the breath of new creation, the ruach that filled Adam and raised the dry bones, now breathed on the gathered disciples.

Thomas is not in the room, and eight days later the Lord comes back for one man. The number is not incidental: eight is the cutting off of the flesh, the circumcision day, the day past the seventh where the new creation begins. The doubter is met on the eighth day, given the marks he demanded, and answers My Lord and my God — the Father manifested in the risen Son, the glory of the one true God shown in the man he raised, drawing from the last hold-out the highest confession in the book.

John names his whole purpose here: these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name. Not God the Son but the Son of God — and life through his name, the name that means Yahweh saves. The resurrection is written so that faith may lay hold of the Christ and find life in him.

By the sea of Tiberias the risen Lord feeds the disciples again, and the empty net fills at his word with a hundred and fifty and three great fishes — the net that holds and does not break, the full catch of the great harvest, the multitude gathered in. It is the eighth sign of the Gospel, and the eight sounds a second time in two chapters: seven men fish all night and take nothing, and the new creation’s harvest comes up at the word of the risen Lord in the morning.

And Peter, who denied three times, is restored by three times lovest thou me? — but the words are not the same words, and the difference is the point. Twice the Lord asks with agapaō, the self-giving covenant love; twice Peter answers with phileō, the warmer, smaller word — claiming only the affection he still dares claim after the fire in the courtyard. The third time the Lord comes down and uses Peter’s own word: phileis me? And Peter is grieved — because the Lord has stopped asking for what he cannot yet promise and met him exactly where he is. The restoration is not Peter climbing up to the word; it is the Lord coming down to it.

Then the charge that gathers the whole shepherd-thread: feed my lambs… feed my sheep. The denier is made an under-shepherd of the one flock, and the last word is the first: Follow me.

The risen Son still has the Father for his God; he breathes the Spirit of new creation, draws the highest confession from the doubter, fills the net with the great harvest, and restores the denier to feed the sheep.