2 Chronicles 24

Joash begins well — all the days of Jehoiada the priest — and repairs the neglected house of Yahweh, setting a chest at the gate into which the people gladly cast their offerings until the temple is restored. The record keeps insisting on a pairing: the king and Jehoiada give the money out, the king and Jehoiada see the work done, and what Athaliah and her sons stripped out of the house to enrich the house of Baal (v. 7) comes back in by the hands of a king and a priest working as one. Jehoiada — Yah hath known — is the man Yahweh knew when the line was down to one hidden child; and the crown and the mitre restore the house together, which is the shape of the kingdom to come: kings and priests (Rev 5:10). While the priest who saved him lives, the king does right. But the good is borrowed, not owned: his faith leans on Jehoiada and does not stand on its own, and when the old priest dies the props are pulled away.

After Jehoiada’s death the princes flatter Joash into abandoning the house of Yahweh for the groves and idols. When Zechariah, Jehoiada’s own son, stands in the court and warns them — because ye have forsaken Yahweh, he hath also forsaken you — the king has him stoned in the very court of the temple. The king murders the son of the man who saved his life, in the house he had repaired; his dying word is Yahweh look upon it, and require it. The blood of the prophet cries from the temple floor — the blood the Lord himself will name among the martyrs.

The requital is swift. A small Syrian force defeats Joash’s great army because they had forsaken Yahweh; he is left badly wounded, and his own servants kill him on his bed for the blood of Zechariah. He is buried in the city but not in the sepulchres of the kings.

And the two burials set side by side are the chapter’s own verdict. Jehoiada the priest is buried among the kings, because he had done good in Israel, both toward God, and toward his house. Joash the king is buried outside them. The priest who ruled like a king lies with the kings; the king who murdered the priest’s son does not. The grave sorts them, and it sorts them backwards from the crowns they wore. The king who began by repairing the house and ended by defiling it with a prophet’s blood is weighed by his end, and found wanting.

The chapter is a warning about inherited faith that never becomes one’s own. Joash was kept alive in the house of God, crowned by a faithful priest, set on a repaired temple — every advantage of godly nurture — and none of it held once the man who carried him was gone. The faith that lives only while a stronger believer holds it up is no faith at all; when the prop falls, the borrowed devotion falls with it, and the heart shows what it always was.

The king who did right only while his mentor lived turns, once the prop is gone, to idols and to a prophet’s blood — borrowed faith that never became his own collapses, and he dies weighed and found wanting.

Daniel 5

Belshazzar throws a great feast and, in his cups, calls for the holy vessels taken from the temple in Jerusalem, to drink wine from them while praising the gods of gold and silver. The desecration is deliberate — the cups consecrated to Yahweh turned to idolatrous revelry — and in the same hour the fingers of a man’s hand write upon the plaster of the wall, and the king’s knees knock together in terror.

Daniel reads the writing and first reads the king. He recounts Nebuchadnezzar’s humbling — driven to the beasts till he knew the Most High rules — and lays the charge: thou his son, O Belshazzar, hast not humbled thine heart, though thou knewest all this. The sin is not ignorance but refusal of a known lesson; and worse, the God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy ways, hast thou not glorified. The king who held his very breath from Yahweh’s hand would not glorify the hand that held it.

Then the writing: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. God has numbered the kingdom and finished it; thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting; the kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians. The proud reign is set on the scales of the just balance and comes up short — weighed and found wanting — the same verdict that fell on Joash, now written on a palace wall. That night Belshazzar is slain, and Babylon, the head of gold, passes to the silver, exactly as the image foretold.

Two things the chapter assumes and never says are worth supplying. First, Daniel had been waiting decades for this night: Jeremiah’s word against Babylon was carried down to Babylon and read aloud there, then bound to a stone and thrown into the Euphrates — thus shall Babylon sink, and shall not rise (Jer 51:59–64). Second, the river is how the city fell. The Medo-Persians turned the Euphrates out of its channel and came up the dry bed into the heart of the city, and one of the great brazen river-gates had been left unbarred. The word was cast into the Euphrates, and the Euphrates was dried up to fulfil it.

Which is why the sixth vial reads as it does: the great river Euphrates; and the water thereof was dried up, that the way of the kings of the east might be prepared (Rev 16:12). What the Medes and Persians from the sun’s rising did to Babylon in a night is the pattern of what the saints from the sun’s rising do to Babylon the Great — the drunken feast, the unbarred gate, the dry channel, the kingdom changing hands before the wine is off the table.

And there is something in the hand itself. The fingers that write are a man’s hand — and under the wings of the cherubim was the hand of a man (Ezek 1:8), the same hand that held out the roll for the prophet to eat (2:9) and took him by a lock of his hair (8:3). Ezekiel was Daniel’s contemporary in the same exile. The cherubic hand does not only feed the faithful the word; it writes the word over the proud, and Belshazzar is reading the same script Ezekiel swallowed.

The fall of Babylon in a single night is the canon’s standing picture of the proud world-power judged — the city drinking from holy vessels and praising dead gods, weighed and found wanting and broken in an hour. The empires that profane the holy and refuse to glorify the God in whose hand their breath is are numbered and finished; the hand that wrote on the wall holds every kingdom’s days. The gold of Belshazzar’s gods could not buy one more hour.

The king who profanes the holy vessels and will not glorify the God who holds his breath is weighed in the balances and found wanting — and proud Babylon falls in a night, the head of gold passing to the silver as the image foretold.

Acts 3–4

Peter and John go up to the temple at the hour of prayer, being the ninth hour — and the hour is not scenery. Israel prayed three times a day (Ps 55:17; Dan 6:10), and the ninth hour was the hour of the evening sacrifice: the hour the lamb went up, the hour Gabriel came to Daniel while he prayed, the hour the true Lamb cried it is finished. The apostles walk up at the offering-hour, and a man is raised at the gate.

He is lame from his mother’s womb and above forty years old (4:22) — a full probation on a mat at the Beautiful gate, carried there every day of the ministry of the man in whose name he is about to stand. Peter has no silver: in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk. Every word of that name is doing work — Yahshua, Yahweh shall save; Christ, the Anointed; of Nazareth, the separated one. And Peter takes him by the right hand and lifts him up — ēgeiren, the word used of Christ raised from the dead. The man is not merely mended; he is raised, and he leaps.

Peter turns the wonder into a charge and an offer: ye denied the Holy One and the Just… and killed the Prince of life, whom God hath raised from the dead. And he names the One Moses foretold: a prophet shall Yahweh your God raise up unto you of your brethren, like unto me; him shall ye hear (Deut 18:15). Raised up — the same word again. The name that healed is the name of the One they crucified and Yahweh raised; the Prince of life cannot be held by death, and his name still raises the fallen.

The offer is repentance and restoration: repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord; and he shall send Jesus Christ… whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things. The exalted Christ is received in heaven only until the appointed day, and then sent back — the restitution of all things, the kingdom restored, the return Acts has already promised. The blotting out of sins now, the restitution then.

Hauled before the council, Peter is filled with the Spirit and makes the exclusive claim that has rung ever since: neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved. Against the gods of gold that Belshazzar praised, against every other refuge, there is one name that saves — the name of the crucified and risen Christ, the stone the builders rejected become the head of the corner.

The rulers command them to be silent, and the apostles answer with the witness’s settled refusal: whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye. For we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard. They will not stop, and the gathered believers pray not for safety but for boldness — and the place is shaken, and they speak the word with boldness. The witness that cannot be silenced is the mark of a people filled with the Spirit poured out.

The Prince of life whom death could not hold heals in his name; salvation is in no other name; the heaven receives him only until the restitution of all things — and the witnesses cannot but speak what they have seen.