2 Kings 14

Amaziah’s reign is a study in a victory that swells into pride and a pride that breaks against a wall. He begins well enough: when he executes the servants who murdered his father, he spares their children, as it is written in the book of the law of Moses — the fathers shall not be put to death for the children… but every man shall be put to death for his own sin (Deut 24:16). A king bending his hand to the written word; each man answerable for his own sin, not his father’s.

Then he smites Edom in the valley of salt and takes the rock-city Sela — and the victory goes to his head. He sends to Jehoash of Israel, Come, let us look one another in the face. Jehoash answers with a parable: the thistle that was in Lebanon sent to the cedar… saying, Give thy daughter to my son to wife: and there passed by a wild beast… and trode down the thistle. The little thorn imagines itself fit to marry into the cedar, and is trampled before it finishes the sentence. Thou hast indeed smitten Edom, and thine heart hath lifted thee up: glory of this, and tarry at home.

The lifted-up heart will not stay home. Amaziah will not hear — for it came of Yahweh, that pride might be humbled — and the armies meet at Beth-shemesh. Judah is routed; the wall of Jerusalem is broken down four hundred cubits; the gold and the vessels of the house of Yahweh are carried off. The thistle that exalted itself is trodden down exactly as the parable said.

And yet, in the same chapter, mercy to the north for no merit of theirs. Jeroboam II restored the coast of Israel from Hamath to the sea, according to the word of Yahweh… which he spake by the hand of his servant Jonah the son of Amittai — because Yahweh saw the affliction of Israel, that it was very bitter… and there was not any helper. Even a sinful Israel is spared, not for righteousness, but because there was no helper and Yahweh’s compassion moved.

The heart lifted up by its small victories is heading for Beth-shemesh. Glory in the Edom you smote, and you will be trodden like the thistle that courted the cedar.

Ezekiel 4

The prophet stops speaking the judgment and starts being it — bearing the doomed city’s sin on his own bound body. Yahweh tells him to take a tile, draw Jerusalem on it, and lay siege against the brick with toy ramps and camps and battering rams, an iron pan set up as a wall of iron between the prophet and the city. This shall be a sign to the house of Israel. The siege is acted out in miniature, the prophet himself the besieger.

Then the long, strange burden. He lies on his left side three hundred and ninety days and lay the iniquity of the house of Israel upon it, then on his right side forty days for the house of Judah — I have laid upon thee… a day for each year. He is bound with ropes so he cannot turn from side to side until the days are finished. The prophet binds the iniquity of the house to himself and lies bound under it, day for a year, the living weight of the nation’s guilt pressed onto one man’s frame. It is the clearest figure yet of the Sin-Bearer — the Son of Man who would take the iniquity of the house onto his own body and be bound under it.

The famine is acted out too. He bakes a coarse bread of barley, beans, lentils, millet, and spelt, eats it by weight and drinks water by measure — siege rations — and is told to bake it over human dung. When he recoils — Ah, Adonai Yahweh! behold, my soul hath not been polluted — Yahweh relents to cow’s dung. I will break the staff of bread in Jerusalem, and they shall eat and drink in dread, and consume away for their iniquity.

The prophet does not merely announce the judgment; he is bound under it, bearing the iniquity of the house in his own body, day for a year — the sign of the Bearer who is to come.

2 Corinthians 12–13

Paul is given a thorn so that strength would not be his own — and learns the law of the kingdom in the refusal of his prayer. He has been caught up to the third heaven, into paradise, and heard unspeakable words; and lest the visions exalt him, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me. Three times he prayed it away. The answer was not the removal but the sufficiency: My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.

The vision itself asks what the third heaven is. Read prophetically, the “heavens” are not stacked skies but the successive orders of Yahweh’s purpose over his people: the Mosaic heaven of the Law, the Millennial heaven of Christ’s reign, and a third beyond them both. That third heaven is the everlasting age past the thousand years — the Hebrew ad, perpetuity itself, when death is destroyed and God is all in all (1 Cor 15:28). So Paul is caught not upward to a place but forward to that final age, and the paradise he enters is the restored Eden at the end of the purpose. The glory he was shown is the age to come — and even that he will not boast of.

So he turns the whole reckoning of strength upside down: Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me… for when I am weak, then am I strong. The thorn is not the failure of grace; it is the channel of it. What the proud heart of Amaziah could never learn — that the lifted-up heart is heading for a fall — Paul learns in reverse: the heart held down by a thorn is exactly where the power of Christ comes to rest.

Then the closing charge, addressed to every reader: Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates? The test is not of others but of self. And the letter ends with the threefold blessing — the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be with you all.

The thorn was the answer, not the obstacle. When the heart is held low, the power of Christ rests on it — examine yourself, and learn to be strong by being weak.