2 Kings 18

Hezekiah is the king who ground a sacred relic to powder when it became an idol — and then was told, at the wall, that his trust was worthless. He does right according to all that David his father did: removes the high places, breaks the images, cuts the groves. And then the startling act — brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it: and he called it Nehushtan, a mere piece of bronze.

That serpent was the cure Moses lifted in the wilderness, the figure of sin-in-the-flesh raised up so that those who looked might live — the very emblem the Lord would claim for his own lifting up (John 3:14). But the emblem of the cure had become the disease; the people were burning incense to the bronze image of the serpent — worshipping the figure of the flesh instead of looking through it to Yahweh. Hezekiah is faithful enough to destroy even a relic of Moses when it has become an idol. The thing that once healed, made an object of worship, must be ground to dust. Of him it is written: after him was none like him among all the kings of Judah… he trusted in Yahweh.

Then the test of that trust. Sennacherib takes the fenced cities and sends the Rabshakeh to the wall, and the whole speech is an assault on faith. What confidence is this wherein thou trustest?… thou trustest upon the staff of this bruised reed, even upon Egypt, whereon if a man lean, it will go into his hand, and pierce it. He sets Yahweh on the level of the idols of the nations — hath any of the gods of the nations delivered his land? — and warns the people, let not Hezekiah make you trust in Yahweh. The siege is fought first as a siege of the heart’s confidence.

The bronze serpent that once healed becomes an idol and is ground to powder. The flesh must never be worshipped, even when it once was the figure of the cure.

Ezekiel 8

Carried in vision to Jerusalem, the prophet watches the temple fill, room by room, with the very abominations Hezekiah had purged — and worse. The Spirit lifts him by a lock of mine head to the inner gate, and there, while the glory of the God of Israel still stands in the house, Yahweh shows him four escalating horrors, each greater than the last.

First, at the north gate, the image of jealousy — an idol planted in Yahweh’s own courts, provoking the jealousy of the One who shares his glory with no other. The phrase is not loose: there was a law of jealousy (Num 5), the ordeal by which a wife suspected of unfaithfulness was brought before Yahweh and put to the test — and here the temple itself is the wife brought to that bitter test, her adultery proved against her in her husband’s own house. Then a hidden door, and behind it the seventy elders in the chambers of imagery, the walls pourtrayed with creeping things and beasts, every man with his censer, a thick cloud of incense rising — and their creed: Yahweh seeth us not; Yahweh hath forsaken the earth. Secret idolatry justified by a practical atheism — they worship idols in the dark because they have decided Yahweh has stopped looking.

Then the women at the gate weeping for Tammuz — mourning a Babylonian dying-god in the house of the living God, lavishing grief on a counterfeit. And last, the greatest: about five and twenty men between the porch and the altar, in the holiest place where the priests should stand, with their backs toward the temple of Yahweh, and their faces toward the east; and they worshipped the sun. The priests themselves, in the inmost court, have turned their backs on Yahweh to bow to the rising sun.

Backs to the temple, faces to the sun — the exact inversion of worship, performed by the priests in the holiest place. This is why the glory must depart: not because Yahweh abandons lightly, but because his house has been turned inside out, the divided heart of the north now enthroned in the inner court of the south.

The house is corrupted from court to sanctuary, from people to priests — backs turned on Yahweh to bow to the sun. The glory cannot remain in a house turned inside out.

Luke 4

The Son meets the adversary in the wilderness and will not bow — the true Worshipper against the backs-turned priests of Ezekiel’s vision. Led by the Spirit, fasting forty days, he is tempted three times, and answers each with the word. Turn stones to bread? — man shall not live by bread alone. All the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time for one act of worship? — thou shalt worship Yahweh thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. Cast thyself from the temple’s pinnacle? — thou shalt not tempt Yahweh thy God. Where the wilderness generation failed for forty years, and where the priests turned their backs on Yahweh to worship the sun, the Son refuses the whole world rather than bow to any but Yahweh.

There is a deeper figure under the sequence. On the day of atonement two goats made a single offering: one killed, one led away alive into the wilderness (Lev 16). The Son comes up from Jordan having gone down into the baptism that signifies death — the slain goat — and is then led into the wilderness as the living one driven out, bearing the trial alive where the other could only die. It is why John, watching him come back, says Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world (John 1:29): the sin-principle had been met in the wilderness and not given in to.

Then Nazareth. He reads from Isaiah — The Spirit of Adonai Yahweh is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor… to preach the acceptable year of Yahweh — closes the book — and where he closes it speaks as loudly as what he reads. He stops in the middle of Isaiah 61:2, after the acceptable year of Yahweh and before the day of vengeance of our God — the acceptable year belongs to this coming, the day of vengeance to the next, and he will not read the second clause into the first. Then he says, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears. The Anointed One, the Spirit upon him, stands in the synagogue and declares the glory present in flesh. But when he reminds them that Elijah was sent to a Sidonian widow and Elisha cleansed Naaman the Syrian — grace reaching past Israel to the Gentiles — they rise in fury and try to throw him from the brow of the hill. He passes through the midst of them. Rejected in his own town.

At Capernaum the authority is unmistakable. The unclean spirit cries, I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God, and is silenced and cast out; Peter’s mother-in-law is healed; the sick are brought at sundown and healed one by one. I must preach the kingdom of God to other cities also: for therefore am I sent. The glory that is leaving the temple of stone is doing, in the synagogue and the streets, what that house no longer did.

The Son refuses the kingdoms rather than bow, and stands in the synagogue with the Spirit upon him. The glory the temple lost is now anointed in flesh.