Read Time: 7 minutes1 Chronicles 18–19
These chapters are the establishing of the kingdom by the sword, the necessary work before the peaceable reign can come. David smites the Philistines, Moab, Hadarezer of Zobah, the Syrians of Damascus; he takes Gath and her towns, garrisons Edom, and the refrain rings over it all: thus Yahweh preserved David whithersoever he went. The warrior-king subdues the enemies on every border so that the kingdom can stand. This is the Davidic half of the threefold pattern — Saul the failed king, David the warrior who establishes, Solomon who reigns in peace and builds the house. The victories can be counted as seven campaigns, answering to the seven thunders of Revelation 10 — a possible reading that sets David’s border-wars as the type of the multitudinous Christ’s latter-day march, the warrior subduing the nations before the peaceable reign begins.
The spoil is not hoarded but dedicated. The shields of gold, the exceeding much brass, the silver and gold of all the subdued nations — David dedicated them unto Yahweh, and that brass and bronze become the raw material Solomon will cast into the temple’s vessels. The wealth of the warrior’s victories is laid up for the worship of the peaceable son. Conquest serves the sanctuary; the sword clears the ground the temple will stand on.
What the Chronicler leaves out says as much as what he puts in. Between these campaigns Samuel sets David’s kindness to Mephibosheth, Saul’s crippled grandson lifted to the king’s table (2 Sam 9); the Chronicler passes it by, as he passes by nearly everything in David’s dealings with Saul’s house. His subject is not David’s private character but David as the founder of the theocracy — the throne, the borders, the treasure, the courses of the temple that will stand on the ground he is clearing. The omissions are not concealment; they are focus.
Chapter 19 turns on a studied insult. David sends comfort to Hanun on his father’s death, and Hanun’s princes persuade him the envoys are spies; so he shaves them, cuts their garments off at the buttocks, and sends them away in shame. The kindness of the king is read as a threat by a suspicious heart — the same misreading Michal made at the window, the world unable to believe that the anointed one means good. David covers his humiliated men until their beards are grown: tender of their shame, not their service.
The war that follows is fought on the watchword Joab gives his brother Abishai as the Ammonites and hired Syrians press them front and rear: be of good courage, and let us behave ourselves valiantly for our people, and for the cities of our God: and let Yahweh do that which is good in his sight. It is the whole posture of the saint in the field — do your part valiantly and leave the outcome to Yahweh. The Syrians break and flee; Ammon flees; the hired help deserts; and Syria makes peace and would help the children of Ammon no more.
The warrior-king subdues every border and lays the spoil up for the house — valor spent for the cities of God, the outcome left to Yahweh.
Ezekiel 30
The oracle gathers Egypt under the great prophetic banner: the day of Yahweh is near; it shall be the time of the heathen. Egypt is not judged alone but as the head of a confederacy — Ethiopia, Libya, Lydia, Chub, and the men of the land that is in league fall with her by the sword. The day of Yahweh is the recurring note of all the prophets, the in-breaking of judgment that runs from these local fulfilments to the great and final one; Egypt’s fall is one early enactment of a day that will at last gather all the proud nations.
The sentence ranges across the whole land in a roll-call of doomed cities — No (Thebes, the great capital), Sin (Pelusium, the strength of Egypt), Noph, Aven, Pi-beseth, Tehaphnehes. Each name is struck in turn; the fire is set in Egypt; the multitudes are cut off. The thoroughness is the point. When Yahweh judges a proud power he does not leave a corner of its glory standing; the whole apparatus of the world-system comes down together.
The repeated figure is the arm of Pharaoh broken. I have broken the arm of Pharaoh king of Egypt; and, lo, it shall not be bound up to be healed. The arm is strength, the power to wield the sword; Yahweh breaks it and refuses to splint it. And then the deliberate contrast: I will strengthen the arms of the king of Babylon, and put my sword in his hand. The same Yahweh who breaks one arm strengthens another — the nations are arms he raises and breaks at will, and the sword passes from hand to hand only as he gives it.
The refrain that closes the panels is the purpose of the whole judgment: they shall know that I am Yahweh, when I have set a fire in Egypt. The breaking of the dragon’s arm is not vengeance for its own sake; it is revelation. The proud power that said my river is mine own is brought low precisely so that the nations, and Egypt itself, will know who actually holds the sword and made the river.
And the allies go down with her. Egypt is judged not alone but with the men of the land that is in league, for they had mocked at Israel’s trouble — and nothing shelters a people who trust a power Yahweh has come out to contend with. The confederates who laughed at Jerusalem’s fall are gathered into the fall of the confederacy.
Yahweh breaks one arm and strengthens another, and will not splint the proud — that the nations may know whose hand holds the sword.
Galatians 5–6
The letter’s whole argument lands on one imperative: stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. To turn back to circumcision is to make Christ of no effect and to become debtor to do the whole law. Freedom is not a step toward law-keeping but its end; in Christ neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails, but faith which worketh by love.
But liberty is not licence. Use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another — for the whole law is fulfilled in one word, thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. The freedom Christ gives is freedom from the flesh, not freedom for it; the saint who is loosed from the law is bound by love, which does more than the law ever could.
Then the great antithesis: flesh against Spirit. The flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other. Paul lists the works of the flesh — they end in they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God — and over against them the single ninefold cluster of the fruit of the Spirit, beginning with love and ending against such there is no law. The contrast is not law versus freedom but two principles warring in the one believer, and the question is which one is fed.
The decisive word is sacrificial: they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts. This is the old man put to death — not the mortal nature magically removed, but the whole self-pleasing principle nailed up and reckoned dead in the one joined to Christ. If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit. The death is settled; the walk is daily.
Chapter 6 brings it down to the body’s life together — bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ — and a lexical turn resolves the apparent contradiction with every man shall bear his own burden a few verses on. The first word is baros, the crushing weight too heavy for one back, which the brethren lift together; the second is phortion, the soldier’s own pack, the personal load each must carry to the judgment seat and answer for himself. Shared weight now, individual reckoning then. And then the inexorable law of the harvest: whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. He that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting. And Paul’s final boast strips away every other ground of glory — God forbid that I should glory, save in the offering of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world. In the death of Christ the whole world-system is dead to him, and he to it. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature — the new creation, the only thing that finally counts. Watch the pronouns as he closes: they desire to make a fair shew in the flesh (v. 12); you they would have circumcised (v. 13); I will glory in nothing but the death of my Lord (v. 14). And the last credential he offers is his own scarred body — I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus — the man who preaches a crucified Christ carrying the evidence of it in his skin.
The flesh is crucified and the Spirit walked in daily; the only boast is the death of Christ, the only thing that counts a new creation.
Synthesis and Exhortation
The day is about two warfares and the harvest each one reaps. In 1 Chronicles the warrior-king subdues the nations on every border and lays the spoil up for the house of Yahweh; in Ezekiel 30 Yahweh breaks the arm of the proud dragon-power and will not let it heal. Both are the outward conflict — kingdoms raised and broken, the sword passing from hand to hand at the will of the One who holds it. Galatians turns the same warfare inward: the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, the two are contrary, and the kingdom is inherited by those in whom the Spirit, not the flesh, has won.
The link runs through the broken arm and the crucified flesh. Egypt’s strength is broken and refused healing because it said my river is mine own; in Galatians the saint takes the same sentence on himself voluntarily — they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh. What Yahweh does to the proud nation from without, the believer does to the proud principle within: nails it up, reckons it dead, refuses to splint it back to life. And the harvest is exact either way — sow to the flesh and reap corruption, sow to the Spirit and reap life everlasting.
So the exhortation is to fight the war that actually decides the inheritance. The borders of the kingdom were never finally secured by David’s sword or lost by Pharaoh’s; they are won in the one place every saint commands — whether the flesh or the Spirit is fed. Stand fast in the liberty; do not use it for the flesh; by love serve one another. And let every other ground of boasting fall away, for the spoil of this war is not laid up in a treasury but harvested at the resurrection: life everlasting to those who sowed to the Spirit, a new creation that alone will stand when the world-system, like Egypt’s arm, is broken and not bound up.
Crucify the flesh as Yahweh breaks the proud, and sow to the Spirit — for the only boast that survives the day of Yahweh is the death of Christ and the new creation it makes.