A Mouthpiece from the LORD

Now we’re ready to get back into the narrative. You may remember that we were discussing the two differing perspectives found in the records of Samuel/Kings and Chronicles (you may want to refresh your memory by going back here and here). I made some hefty claims as to what I believe the competing agendas (“competing” may be too harsh, but I chose it intentionally here) might be within the larger “God-breathed” (inspired) story.

I suggested that one view of God’s narrative puts the focus on our obedience. We see stories that hinge upon some great moral failure of the leadership, bad decisions leading to momentum shifts, and whole periods of history defined by the idolatry of God’s people. I also mentioned that this was the predominant view that I was given as a youth, a Bible college student, and a young pastor. But what I also suggested was that the Chronicler, writing his record much later in history, with the benefit of hindsight and the perspective that came with it, was encouraging us not to miss the story that lies behind the story — the real fundamental reason for Israel’s collapse:

The lust for empire. The forgetfulness of God’s great project to bless all nations through them.

This is a major claim to make and so as we resume our walk through God’s story and the history of His people, we want to make sure we are examining the story to find out if there are any other clues as to what the agenda of the story might be. And this is the perfect place to begin such an inquiry into the story because we find ourselves on the brink of the prophets.

This would be a great place to remind ourselves of a point that we have made in passing when referring to prophets: In a biblical sense, the term “prophet” has very little to do with “future predicting” and everything to do with being a messenger for God. We often have been given the idea that a prophet is like a Godly “fortune teller” who speaks of future things to be fulfilled; this is problematic on multiple levels, not the least of them being the belief’s inaccuracy. The prophets serve as God’s mouthpieces. God has a message for the people and the prophet is the mouthpiece that speaks the message. And the term “message” would speak of a present tense exchange of words and ideas for a present moment.

God had a message for the people of Israel for THAT DAY. He was primarily giving them a message for themselves; not a cryptic message for the future that left the readers clueless and waiting for some future people (like us!) to figure it out one day. That message had plenty of purpose for the people to whom it was sent. Any additional layers to these prophetic utterances are simply icing on the cake.

So, before we dive into Amos, let’s make sure that we draw up an outline for the historicity of the prophetic movement. What was going on when these prophets spoke to the people and who were the people they spoke to?

Just a couple quick points: When we talk about time-period, I am certainly not referring to when the prophet was written; there is far too much debate that swirls around about when these messages were heard/created/penned. What interests me is where the “voice” of the prophets is supposed to be “heard” by the reader; at what point in the story should I hear the voice of Hosea? Likewise, I am not concerned with the “who wrote this book?” conversation for the very same reasons. I will not be diving into those discussions. I do believe that the Scripture is God-breathed in the form that it was given and I can hear the voice of God speaking through the story in its many forms. This is my non-negotiable belief. Everything else is pretty fluid in my mind.

PRE-ASSYRIAN PROPHETS: These prophets are the first to show up on the scene to bring God’s message of repentance. Before the enemies begin knocking on the door of Israel and Judah, before the threat of Assyria is realized, prophets like Hosea and Amos appear bringing a message to the northern kingdom of Israel. Prophets like 1 Isaiah (I know that’s confusing, wait on an explanation) and Micah bring messages to Judah.

ASSYRIAN PROPHETS: Once Assyria begins the long, brutal process of conquest throughout the land, the prophets Jonah and Nahum will speak about God’s patience and forthcoming justice. Zephaniah and 2 Isaiah will begin preaching a message of repentance to Judah, where they warn them of the danger that awaits them if they fail to learn the lessons of their brothers to the north.

BABYLONIAN PROPHETS: After Judah’s failure to repent, God will use Babylon to cart His people back to their former days of slavery to remind them of where they come from. Prophets like Jeremiah, Lamentations, Habakkuk, Joel, and Obadiah will speak during these trying times as Babylon sweeps through the land like a locust plague.

EXILIC PROPHETS: Having now been destroyed, Israel/Judah sits in Babylonian captivity, their house left desolate, and begin to wonder if there’s any hope for the future. Prophets like Daniel and Ezekiel enter the scene, encouraging their hearers/readers to understand why they sit in captivity and casting apocalyptic visions of hope. The words of 3 Isaiah contain some of the most beautiful poetry of the ancient world, while Job uses drama to bring perspective into human suffering.

THE REMNANT: Finally, the Jews are allowed to come back home and rebuild. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah tell the story of how this rebuilding period began; prophets like Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi accompany their work, encouraging the people to walk in the ways of God and recapture the mission of God in the world.

Throughout this survey of biblical prophets, my encouragement is to listen for the underlying message of God’s narrative. If the prophets serve as God’s mouthpiece, it should be very beneficial to notice what God’s message is, straight from His own mouth. I can promise you two things: You will hear talk of idolatry (and adultery, for that matter) that will remind you of the story of Samuel and Kings. I can also promise you that you will hear talk of justice and loving your neighbor as yourself. As we continue to wrestle with these two perspectives, I invite you to listen for which message begins to become dominant and overpower the story that God is inviting us to trust.

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…

The Story Behind the Story (part one)

In order to fully understand this post, you will want to go back and read the last post, as its content will be essential to following the conversation you’ll find in this post.

So, keeping in mind the two different biblical sources we have for Davidic/Solomonic history, I want to take a look at how the two sources tell their history and what kinds of conclusions we can draw by noticing their differences. So first, let’s do a fly-by summary of what’s seen in the Samuel/Kings account.

SAMUEL/KINGS

After a seven chapter biography of Saul — his selection, his struggle, and his rejection — we are introduced to the shepherd boy David in the chapters that describe his anointing, his service of Saul, and the defeat of Goliath. Immediately following the Goliath story, Saul begins to deal with the jealously and ill-will he feels toward David. The remainder of 1 Samuel (over ten chapters) will outline the long and arduous pursuit of David by Saul, and the story goes to great lengths to display David’s humility, morality, and refusal to do anything that would not kiddush haShem.

1 Samuel ends with Saul hopelessly taking his life and 2 Samuel will begin with David mourning the death of his enemy. The first nine chapters of 2 Samuel record how David solidifies his throne in Israel, yet we cannot move past this without making two points: 1) Everything David does in establishing his throne is completely void of self-indulgence. David’s actions will continue to kiddush haShem, and we’ll even have over three chapters dedicated to David establishing the seat of God in Jerusalem, bringing the Ark of the Covenant to rest in that place, and his subsequent prayers, praise, and celebration. 2) David’s “military approach” is so counter-intuitive, that it continues to throw David’s men off their hinges. David will continue to mourn the death of his enemies and slay HIS OWN MEN when they attempt to murder the king’s enemies on their own. The story reads as a completely wacky tragedy for those trying to learn how to live in an upside-down kingdom that brings shalom to chaos.

At this point, the story turns to David’s defeat of the Ammonites and the famous story of his relationship with Bathsheba. After the story of Bathsheba, David’s life will take a turn for the worse. His family becomes a heaping pile of dysfunction, his own children begin raping and killing each other, and Absalom will chase his father through the kingdom (echoes of Saul?) and David will run from a son who eventually dies at the hands of his leading general, who will pay for that protection with his life. David will count his fighting men — a move that will get him in trouble — and the book of 2 Samuel comes to an end.

The book of 1 Kings begins with the throne of Solomon being established and his many building projects. Queen Sheba visits Solomon in chapter 10, where we are told about Solomon’s incredible splendor. Now, while there are some possible hints that things aren’t as great as they appear in the preceding chapters, the first indication that the author of Kings give us in in the middle of chapter 10 where we are told that Sheba’s gift (probably a treaty tax of good faith) weighs 666 talents — a deliberate attempt by the author to tell us we’ve reached a turning point in the story. In fact, it’s going to be this long list of treaties that gets Solomon in trouble, as each treaty is signed by the marriage of Solomon to a daughter of the opposing king/queen. The very next chapter tells us about Solomon’s 700 wives and how they lead him astray to idolatry; it is at this point where Solomon’s kingdom falls apart.

So, if we were to step back and ask what the author is saying about this story, I think we would see a definite point. The Samuel/Kings agenda is to say that the Kingdom falls because of immorality. The definite, undeniable turning point in the David story is his sin with Bathsheba; it’s David’s immorality that leads to his downfall. In a very similar fashion, it is Solomon’s immorality that leads to his downfall and the definitive shift in his story, as well. His wives will lead him into idolatry. From the perspective of the first source, the problem is clear. These men have a problem holding true to God’s path (we haven’t mentioned “trusting the story” in a while, but it certainly fits here).

CHRONICLES

However, the story of Chronicles tells a completely different story, and it’s not because the author is trying to save space. Let’s look at the differences between the two sources.

After a lengthy section of genealogies, the Chronicler spends his time introducing you to the reign of David. There is no effort spent in trying to put David’s morality on display, only his pedigree. There’s no discussion about his exclusion of Saul or how he goes about his warfare. Even more surprising is the absolute exclusion of the Bathsheba debacle. The telling of Chronicles is void of a morality parade. For the author of Chronicles, David’s kingdom consisted of something other than a high moral ethic and it fell for a far broader reason than the moral failure of a leader.

Likewise, the story of Solomon is completely void of the mention of Solomon’s many wives and his subsequent idolatry. What is so striking about this for me (your experience might be different) is that throughout my life I have been taught about the moral (particularly, sexual) failures of these two men, yet another biblically-inspired author seems to be trying to convince us not to miss the bigger point.

The author of Samuel/Kings is not incorrect in the way he tells the story at all. All the observations he makes about the moral struggle are true and the agenda that drives the story is useful and compelling for the reader to become a particular kind of individual. But remember that the Chronicler is trying to write about history with a sense of hindsight and perspective; I feel as though he is trying to tell us that we may miss the forest for the trees if we aren’t careful. To put it another way, there is a story BEHIND the story.

 

 

And this post became so long, that I've split it into two parts.  Come back on Monday to find wrestle more with the story that may lie behind the history of the Old Testament.