The Story Behind the Story (part two)

This is the second part to a two-part blog post. To have an understanding of where we are at, you will want to go back and read this post to catch up.

The huge hint that clues us in is not only to notice what the Chronicler leaves out of his story, but what he puts in. There is a huge addition of material about the Temple. For the Chronicler, the story is — on some level — about the Temple of the LORD.

The author rearranges the events of David and Solomon’s life to make some big points. In the first story, David expresses his desire to build God a house in 2 Samuel 7. The plea seems almost insignificant and unnoticeable; this part of the story makes no grand splash in the greater picture. Yet, in the Chronicles version, it is this request that almost seems to serve as the hinge point of the David story. In 1 Chronicles 17, David asks God to build the temple and everything in the story seems to change. David will no longer seem to be concerned about kiddush haShem. Now, David seems to be bent on conquest and plans for building the Temple and supplies for the Temple.

And why did David ask to build the Temple anyway? Because he felt guilty about the kind of life he was living.

“Why should I live in a palace of cedar, while my LORD lives in a tent?”

God’s response: “I like my tent, thank you very much. When did I ever ask you (or anyone else) for a house?”

David is wrestling with the kind of person he’s becoming. He’s no longer the poor little shepherd boy, living out in the fields with his father’s sheep. He’s not just a raggedy ol’ kid marching down the hillside with his sling.

He’s a big, mighty king — living in a palace of cedar. And it makes him a little nervous.

And he becomes obsessed (with the best of intentions, I believe) with remedying the situation by building God a glorious house.

But it’s all starting to look a little more like empire and a little less like shalom.

This will get passed on to his son Solomon, who will take his father’s blueprints and exponentially increase the Temple’s grandeur. And Chronicles will waste no time in letting you know exactly where it stands on Solomon. In the very first chapter of 2 Chronicles, the author makes a point of including this paragraph:

Solomon accumulated chariots and horses; he had fourteen hundred chariots and twelve thousand horses, which he kept in the chariot cities and also with him in Jerusalem. The king made silver and gold as common in Jerusalem as stones, and cedar as plentiful as sycamore-fig trees in the foothills. Solomon’s horses were imported from Egypt and from Kue—the royal merchants purchased them from Kue at the current price. They imported a chariot from Egypt for six hundred shekels of silver, and a horse for a hundred and fifty. They also exported them to all the kings of the Hittites and of the Arameans.

And in the course of four verses, Solomon breaks every one of the commands of the king from Deuteronomy 17.

This isn’t looking good for Solomon. And the whole story will show the greatness and grandeur of Solomon that comes at the expense of God’s kingdom project. As the first paragraph after Solomon’s death will have the people of Israel approaching his son, Rehoboam, begging for him to loosen the yoke of Solomon from around their necks. Because building an empire always comes at a price.

You see, the story isn’t just about your morality and obedience. The story that God is telling in this scripture is inviting us to see the story behind the story.

And we’ve seen this story before; it’s the same one God’s been trying to tell from the beginning.

We’ve seen it here.

And here.

And here.

And here.

We’ve seen it a lot. And God continues to invite us to trust that we’re okay and we don’t need more. He invites us to enter His rest and wait on every word. He invites us to sit in the shade and not worry too much about houses made of cedar — whether they are ours or His.

As one final thought, in case anybody continues to wrestle with whether they agree with my take on the story, I would invite you to wrestle with these two mirror passages.

The first one from 2 Samuel 24:

Again the anger of the Lord burned against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, “Go and take a census of Israel and Judah.”
So the king said to Joab and the army commanders with him, “Go throughout the tribes of Israel from Dan to Beersheba and enroll the fighting men, so that I may know how many there are.”
But Joab replied to the king, “May the Lord your God multiply the troops a hundred times over, and may the eyes of my lord the king see it. But why does my lord the king want to do such a thing?”
The king’s word, however, overruled Joab and the army commanders; so they left the presence of the king to enroll the fighting men of Israel.

And the other from 1 Chronicles 21:

Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel. So David said to Joab and the commanders of the troops, “Go and count the Israelites from Beersheba to Dan. Then report back to me so that I may know how many there are.”
But Joab replied, “May the Lord multiply his troops a hundred times over. My lord the king, are they not all my lord’s subjects? Why does my lord want to do this? Why should he bring guilt on Israel?”
The king’s word, however, overruled Joab; so Joab left and went throughout Israel and then came back to Jerusalem.

So was it Satan or the LORD who had David take the census?

And why does the Chronicler add a statement to Joab’s response?

Could it be that from the perspective of the first author, David did something that the LORD was not happy about (again, making this about David’s obedience/morality), but from the perspective of the Chronicler, it was the lust after empire — the lie of the serpent, the temptation not to trust the story — that actually led Israel as a nation (not just David as a man) into the sin that would lead them into captivity? It is clear in these passages that David is struggling with an obsession of empire — strength, might, security. I would also add that in the historical world, a census was almost without exception accompanied with a tax. You don’t suppose David is trying to acquire the recourses for an upcoming building project, do you?

Not that building projects are bad. They are not. David’s house of cedar is amoral. There’s nothing right or wrong about it.

The Temple of the LORD is amoral. Whether it’s a tent or a gold-plated temple doesn’t matter to God.

There’s nothing wrong with church buildings, church budgets, or institutions that have to pay the bills.

But there’s this horrible temptation to start to build empires and forget what it means to kiddush haShem.

And there’s the constant voice and persistent invitation to remember your days in a field, shepherding sheep; to remember the shade of a rotem bush in the desert; and never to forget that you were once slaves in Egypt.

If you don’t remember, you just might become Pharaoh yourself, gathering slaves from every corner of the earth to accomplish your will (1 Kings 5:13, 9:15, 21; 2 Chronicles 8:8).  And if that happened, God just might hear the cry of the oppressed and begin the work of rescuing His kids…