2 Chronicles 28

Ahaz is the nadir of the line of David — he makes molten images of Baalim, and burnt his children in the fire, after the abominations of the heathen, the worship of Molech come into the house of David itself. The king who should guard the holy gives his own sons to the fire; sin in the flesh reaches its darkest in a son of David offering his children to an idol.

And the ground he does it on has a name: the valley of the son of Hinnom. That ravine under the city wall, fouled by the fires of Molech, is the place Josiah will defile past use, the place Jerusalem will burn its refuse, and the place whose name the Lord himself will take up — ge-hinnom, Gehenna, the standing word for the fire that ends in destruction and not in torment. The rubbish-fire of the canon is named after the pit where Ahaz burned his sons. The word for the second death was coined in the darkest chapter of David’s line. Defeat follows the apostasy: Syria and Israel slaughter and carry off captives by the thousand.

But a strange mercy breaks in from the north. The prophet Oded meets the victorious army of Israel returning with Judean captives and warns them not to enslave their brethren; and the men of Ephraim clothed all that were naked among them… and gave them to eat and to drink, and anointed them, and carried all the feeble upon asses, and brought them to Jericho. In the middle of the darkest chapter, captors clothe, feed, anoint, and carry home their enemies — a flash of the mercy that the Samaritan parable will make a gospel, neighbor-love shown to the wounded by the unlikely hand.

Ahaz only hardens. Defeated, in the time of his distress did he trespass yet more against Yahweh, sacrificing to the gods of Damascus with the ruinous logic because the gods of the kings of Syria help them, therefore will I sacrifice to them, that they may help me — though they were the ruin of him, and of all Israel. The same folly as Amaziah, now hardened past hope: he worships the gods of the nation that beat him. Affliction that should humble only hardens the heart already set against Yahweh.

His last act seals it: he shut up the doors of the house of Yahweh, and made altars in every corner of Jerusalem and every city of Judah. The presence is locked out; the lamps go dark; the worship of the true God is barred from his own house while idols crowd every street. This is that king Ahaz — the son of David who shut the door on Yahweh. The temple thread reaches its lowest point: the house built for the presence, sealed shut against it.

Ahaz, darkest of David’s line, burns his children to idols and shuts the doors of the house of Yahweh — yet a flash of mercy clothes and carries home the captives, the gospel-neighbor-love glinting in the darkest chapter.

Daniel 8

Daniel sees a ram with two horns — the two horns were high; but one was higher than the other, and the higher came up last — pushing west, north, and south, and then a he-goat from the west crossing the earth without touching the ground, who smites the ram and breaks his horns. The figure would have landed at once on anyone who had stood in Shushan: the Persian kings wore a ram’s head of gold in the place of a crown, ram’s heads are stamped on their coins, and ram’s heads with unequal horns are carved on the portals of Persepolis. The empire’s own heraldry is the symbol Gabriel uses, and the unequal horns are the Mede who came first and the Persian who came up last and higher. Yahweh names the beast with the beast’s own badge.

Gabriel names them plainly: the ram is the kings of Media and Persia, the goat the king of Greece, its great horn the first king — Alexander, the conqueror who moved so fast he seemed not to touch the earth. The vision is the second and third kingdoms of the image and the beasts, now seen in their own conflict.

The goat’s great horn is broken at the height of its strength and four horns rise in its place — Alexander’s empire split among his generals — and out of one of them comes a little horn that grows exceeding great toward the south, and toward the east, and toward the pleasant land. This horn magnifies itself even to the prince of the host, takes away the daily sacrifice, and casts down the place of his sanctuary. The sanctuary is trodden underfoot — the holy place profaned, the daily offering stopped, by a power that exalts itself against the Prince of the host.

And then the question. It is not Daniel who asks it but a holy one overheard in the vision, and it is the saints’ own cry: how long shall be the vision concerning the daily sacrifice, and the transgression of desolation, to give both the sanctuary and the host to be trodden under foot? It is the question under the fifth seal, the question of every generation ground down by the horn — not will it end but how long. And it is answered with a number, which is mercy: unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed. The desolation is measured, and beyond it lies cleansing — the holy place trodden down is not abandoned but reserved for restoration. The same pattern runs through the month: Belshazzar profanes the vessels, Ahaz shuts the doors, the little horn stops the sacrifice — and against every defilement stands the promise that the sanctuary will be cleansed. The treading-down has a number; the cleansing is sure.

Gabriel sets the whole vision at the time of the end, and Daniel is left fainting and sick, astonished at a vision he cannot fully grasp. The prophecy reaches past Antiochus and Greece to a latter-day self-exalting power that treads the holy place and is broken without hand — the pride that magnifies itself against the Prince of princes meeting the same end as every proud horn. What exalts itself against the Prince of the host is broken without a human hand, as the stone was cut without hands; the sanctuary trodden now will be cleansed.

The ram and goat fall as Gabriel names them, and a self-exalting horn treads down the sanctuary and stops the daily sacrifice — but the desolation is numbered, the sanctuary will be cleansed, and the pride against the Prince is broken without hand.

Acts 8

The chapter opens with a burial and closes with a baptism, and the movement from death to life is the whole shape of it. The stoning of Stephen breaks into a great persecution; devout men carry him to his grave with great lamentation; and Saul made havoc of the ecclesia — lumainomai, a word for defiling and disfiguring a thing, the treatment of something to be shamed rather than merely opposed. And the believers are scattered — they that were scattered abroad went every where preaching the word. The attempt to crush the ecclesia spreads it; the blood of the first martyr becomes seed. Persecution does not stop the word but flings it outward, and the gospel takes its first steps beyond Jerusalem exactly as the risen Lord said: Judea, then Samaria, then the ends of the earth.

Philip goes down to Samaria — the despised half-breed neighbor — and the city receives the word with joy. The middle wall is coming down: the gospel crosses the oldest Jewish-Samaritan divide, and the Spirit is given through the apostles’ hands. Even Simon the sorcerer, who would buy the gift with money, is rebuked — thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money — for the gift poured out at Pentecost is not for sale. The river flows to Samaria, and it cannot be bought.

Then Philip is sent to a desert road to meet the Ethiopian eunuch, a foreigner and an official, reading aloud the very heart of the suffering-servant prophecy: He was led as a sheep to the slaughter; and like a lamb dumb before his shearer, so opened he not his mouth. The eunuch asks of whom speaketh the prophet this? and Philip, beginning at the same scripture, preached unto him Jesus. Isaiah 53 opened to a man from the ends of the earth — the offering of the Lamb explained, and the foreigner brought in. The suffering servant opened to the stranger is the river of Ezekiel reaching the Gentile, the inheritance widening to the sojourner.

See, here is water; what doth hinder me to be baptized? — and the question has more in it than the man knows. He is a eunuch, and the Law had shut that door in plain words: he that is wounded in the stones… shall not enter into the congregation of Yahweh (Deut 23:1). What doth hinder me is a real question with a real answer in Moses. But he is reading Isaiah, and three chapters on from the scroll open in his lap the answer is already written: neither let the eunuch say, Behold, I am a dry tree… unto them will I give in mine house and within my walls a place and a name better than of sons and daughters (Isa 56:3–5). The dry tree is promised a name in the house. Nothing hinders, because the Lamb he has just been reading about took the hindrance away. He goes down into the water and comes up rejoicing, carrying the gospel home toward the ends of the earth. The river from the sanctuary, deepening and healing, has reached a foreigner on a desert road; the gospel that began in Jerusalem is already flowing to the nations. The Lamb led to the slaughter is the fountain, and the stranger is the first far-off drinker.

The scattering flings the word to Samaria and beyond; the gift of the Spirit cannot be bought; and the suffering Lamb of Isaiah 53 is opened to an Ethiopian on a desert road — the river reaching the stranger, the inheritance widening to the ends of the earth.