2 Kings 9

The chapter is the sword of judgment falling on the house of Ahab, and it begins with oil. Elisha sends a son of the prophets to Ramoth-gilead with a box of oil to anoint Jehu king over Israel — I have anointed thee king over the people of Yahweh, even over Israel — and with the anointing comes the commission: thou shalt smite the house of Ahab thy master, that I may avenge the blood of my servants the prophets… at the hand of Jezebel. The young prophet pours the oil, opens the door, and flees. The captains ask, wherefore came this mad fellow to thee? — the messenger of Yahweh dismissed as a madman, as the prophets so often were.

Jehu drives for Jezreel, and the watchman’s report becomes proverbial: the driving is like the driving of Jehu the son of Nimshi; for he driveth furiously. Furious zeal, racing toward judgment. He meets Joram in the portion of Naboth the Jezreelite — the exact ground stolen by Ahab and Jezebel — and there shoots him through the heart, casting his body into Naboth’s field. I will requite thee in this plat, saith Yahweh. The blood of the murdered righteous is repaid on the very plot it was shed for.

Then Jezebel. She paints her face and tires her head and looks out the window, queenly to the last, and taunts him: Had Zimri peace, who slew his master? Jehu calls up, Who is on my side? who? — and at his word the eunuchs throw her down. Her blood is sprinkled on the wall and the horses; she is trodden under foot. When they go to bury her, the dogs have done the work of the prophecy: they found no more of her than the skull, and the feet, and the palms of her hands. The carcass is as dung upon the face of the field.

This is the seed of the serpent meeting its sentence. Jezebel — the harlot, the witch, the persecutor of the prophets — is the very embodiment of the enmity Genesis 3:15 set between the two seeds, and her end is the bruising of that head. Revelation will lift her name as the type of the seducing apostate power (Rev 2:20), and her judgment here prefigures the fall of that greater Jezebel. The painted face and the dogs are the whole flesh in one picture: glory on the outside, dung in the end.

The harlot is painted at the window and dung in the field by evening. The flesh adorns itself to the last; its end is written.

Lamentations 5

The last lament is the prayer that breaks the pattern. The four poems before it marched through the Hebrew alphabet, letter by letter, grief held inside a form. This one has the right number of verses — twenty-two, one for each letter — but it is not an acrostic. The form has collapsed. The alphabet can no longer contain the grief; the structure gives way and becomes bare petition. That breakdown is itself the lament: order has failed, and all that is left is to cry.

The prayer reckons up the loss without ornament. Remember, O Yahweh, what is come upon us. The inheritance is turned to strangers, the houses to aliens; they are orphans, fatherless; they buy their own water and wood; they get their bread with the peril of their lives because of the sword of the wilderness. Servants rule over them. And the confession beneath it all: the crown is fallen from our head: woe unto us, that we have sinned!

The crown fallen is the centre of it. The royal glory of David’s city is in the dust, and they know why — not bad luck, but sin. There is no self-justification left in the fifth chapter, only the naked admission that the judgment is deserved.

And then, against the wreckage, one unshaken thing: Thou, O Yahweh, remainest for ever; thy throne from generation to generation. The earthly crown is fallen, but the throne of Yahweh is not. On that one fixed point the book makes its final plea: Turn thou us unto thee, O Yahweh, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old. Even repentance is asked for as a gift — turn us, and we shall be turned; we cannot even return without thee.

The book does not end resolved. The last words, as the KJV gives them, are but thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us — a plea with no answer printed beneath it. The Hebrew is genuinely open here: the closing ki im can carry the flat rejection the KJV hears, or — as the RV margin and Rotherham read it — unless thou hast utterly rejected us, for though thou hast not utterly rejected us, a faint note of hope slipped into the final line. Either way the book itself withholds the resolution — whether the last word is a closed door or a door left ajar, the answer does not come in the book. It comes in the One who would later weep over the same city and give his life to renew its days.

The crown is fallen, but the throne remains. Turn us, and we shall be turned — for we cannot even come back to thee by our own strength.

2 Corinthians 3–4

Paul sets the fading glory of Moses’ face against the surpassing, increasing glory of the new covenant. The saints are his letter, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God… in fleshy tables of the heart. He is a minister of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. The law engraved on stone came with such glory that Israel could not look on Moses’ face — but that glory was a fading one, and Moses veiled it so they would not watch it die away.

That veil becomes the figure for Israel’s blindness. Until this day remaineth the same veil untaken away in the reading of the old testament; which veil is done away in Christ. When the heart turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. And then the glory of the new covenant: we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory — not a glory fading like Moses’, but one increasing, transforming the beholder into what he beholds.

Chapter 4 holds that glory in the humblest possible vessel. We have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us. The clay jar is on purpose — so that no one mistakes the light for the lamp. And the jar takes a beating: we are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed. The saint carries about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest — death at work in the vessel so that resurrection-life shows through the cracks.

And so the great weighing: our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. The outward man perishes; the inward is renewed day by day. We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal. The earthen vessel cracks toward a glory it cannot yet hold.

The lamp is clay so that the light is plainly God’s. The vessel cracks, the outward man perishes — and the weight of glory grows in the dark.