2 Kings 7

Into the teeth of the famine, the word of Yahweh promises plenty by tomorrow. To morrow about this time shall a measure of fine flour be sold for a shekel… in the gate of Samaria. The siege that boiled children in chapter 6 will be lifted in a day — not by Israel’s sword, but by the bare word of the prophet.

The lord on whose hand the king leans answers with the sneer of unbelief: if Yahweh would make windows in heaven, might this thing be? Elisha’s reply is exact and terrible — thou shalt see it with thine eyes, but shalt not eat thereof. The man who measures Yahweh’s word by what his own arm can imagine will watch the salvation and be trodden down in it. And so it falls out: appointed to keep the gate, he is trampled by the very crowds rushing out to the plenty he said could not come.

The deliverance comes through the unlikeliest hands. Four leprous men sit at the gate — outcasts, unclean, shut out of the city by the law — and they reason their way to the only logic the desperate have left: why sit we here until we die? If they enter the city, famine; if they stay, death; so they will throw themselves on the mercy of the enemy camp. If they save us alive, we shall live; and if they kill us, we shall but die.

They find the camp empty. Yahweh had made the host of Syria hear a noise of chariots and horses, a great host, and they had fled at twilight, leaving tents, silver, gold, and raiment standing. The lepers eat, drink, and begin to carry off plunder — and then conscience stops them: We do not well: this day is a day of good tidings, and we hold our peace.

That sentence is the gospel in miniature. The good news of a deliverance already accomplished is carried first by the unclean and the shut-out, the ones with nothing to lose, who cannot keep silent on a day of good tidings. The enemy is already routed; the work is already done; the only thing left is to tell the starving city that the table is spread. It is the pattern of the gospel of the Kingdom — salvation by grace, the enemy overthrown by a sound from heaven and not by the strength of Israel, and the message entrusted to those the world counted as nothing.

The camp is already empty; the victory is already won. This is a day of good tidings — it is no day to hold our peace.

Lamentations 3

This is the center of the book, and at its very center the darkness turns. Lamentations is built of five poems; the middle one is the deepest and the longest — a triple acrostic of sixty-six verses, three lines to each letter, grief pressed through the whole alphabet three times over. It opens lower than anything before it: I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath. Yahweh has hedged him in, broken his bones, filled him with bitterness, made him drunk with wormwood.

And then, at the dead center, the hinge of the whole book swings: It is of Yahweh’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. The Hebrew is chesed — covenant-loyalty, the love that holds because Yahweh has bound himself to hold. In the lowest pit of the lament, the man remembers that the only reason anything of Israel survives is that Yahweh’s covenant mercy does not run out.

From that center the poem climbs. Yahweh is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him. It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of Yahweh. The discipline of grief becomes the discipline of waiting.

And one line reaches forward past Jeremiah to a greater Sufferer: he giveth his cheek to him that smiteth him: he is filled full with reproach. It is the posture of the servant of Isaiah 50, I gave my cheek to them that plucked off the hair — the posture the Lord himself would take, who when struck did not strike back. The man of sorrows in Lamentations is a true type of the Man of Sorrows who comes.

Plunged to the bottom of the pit, the soul finds the one floor that holds: his compassions fail not; they are new every morning.

1 Corinthians 16

The great resurrection epistle closes not with theology but with a collection, a journey, and a longing. Paul turns to the gathering for the saints — upon the first day of the week let every one of you lay by him in store, as God hath prospered him. The body provides for the body, ordered around the first day, the Lord’s day — the day of the firstfruits raised.

He speaks of an open door at Ephesus, a great door and effectual, and of adversaries with it — the two always come together. He commends the household of Stephanas, the firstfruits of Achaia, the first sheaf of that region gathered to Christ, and tells the ecclesia to submit themselves to such, and to every one that labors.

Then the charge that gathers the whole letter into five short beats: Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong. Let all your things be done with love. Vigilance, steadfastness, courage, strength — and over all of it, love, without which (as chapter 13 had said) the rest is nothing.

The letter ends with a word left untranslated, carried straight from the Aramaic of the early ecclesia: Maranatha — the Lord cometh, or Our Lord, come. The full phrase is Anathema Maranatha (16:22), and it faces two directions at once: taken together it sounds the warning of the judgment seat — accursed when the Lord comes — the reckoning for the one who has no love for him; taken as the standalone cry the early ecclesia made of it, it is the longing of the waiting body for its risen Lord. Both belong to the same appearing. The epistle that proved the resurrection of the firstfruits ends with the cry for the coming of the One who is risen — the hope is not a doctrine filed away but a cry on the lips of the waiting body, and a sober reckoning for the heart that does not love his appearing.

Watch, stand fast, be strong, and let love govern all — and over the whole of it, Maranatha: our Lord, come.