The word, proverb, typically refers to a short, clever saying that offers some kind of wisdom. This book has a lot of those. But they are almost all in the center section of the Book, Chapters 10 to 29. There is way more going on in the book of Proverbs, especially at the beginning, Chapters 1-9, & the conclusion, Chapter 30 & 31.
The book’s been designed with an introduction: Chapter 1, verses 1-9. It first of all links this Book to King Solomon. Remember the story in 1 Kings 3, Solomon had asked God for wisdom to lead Israel well. So Solomon became known as the wisest man in the ancient world. We are told in 1 Kings, Chapter 4, that he wrote thousands of proverbs & poems, & collected knowledge about plants & animals. Solomon was like the fountainhead of Israel’s wisdom literature. While not all the material in this Book is written by him personally, he is where Israel’s wisdom tradition began. The introduction says that by reading this Book you too can gain wisdom. Now, wisdom, for most of us, means knowledge. But the Hebrew word, khokhmah, means much more than just mental activity. It refers to action also. So think, skill, or applied knowledge. This is why back in the Book of Exodus, Chapter 31 it was artists & craftsmen in Israel who were said to have khokhmah. So the purpose of this Book is to help you develop a set of practical skills for living well in God’s world. This gets linked with another key idea in the introduction, the fear of the Lord. Now, fear here is not about terror, it’s about a healthy sense of reverence & awe for God, & about my place in the universe. It’s a moral mindset, that recognizes I am NOT God, & that I don’t get to make up my own definitions of good & evil, of right & wrong. Rather, I need to humble myself before God & embrace God’s definition of right & wrong, even when that’s inconvenient for me. This introduction leads us into the first main section of the Book, Chapters 1-9, which also doesn’t contain short one-liner proverbs. Rather, what we find here are 10 speeches from a father to a son, about how the son should listen to wisdom & cultivate the fear of the Lord, & live accordingly which means a life of virtue & integrity & generosity, all of which lead to success & peace. The father warns his son also about folly & evil, & stupid decisions, that will breed selfishness & pride, all leading to ruin & shame. So the son should make the pursuit of wisdom & the fear of the Lord his highest goal in life. This way of thinking, it forms the moral logic of this entire book. These speeches from the father also clue us into what Biblical wisdom literature is, & how it’s different from other parts of the Bible. These books explore how to live well in God’s world. But wisdom is not the same as law, like what Moses gave Israel on Mount Sinai, & it’s not the same as prophecy, divine speech to God’s people. Rather, wisdom literature has the accumulated insight of God’s people through the generations about how to live in a way that honors God & others. So through the book of Proverbs now, these human words about wisdom have been put together as God’s Word & wisdom to His people. --Which connects to the other thing you find in Chapters 1-9. There are four poems from lady wisdom. Here wisdom has been poetically personified as a woman who calls out to humanity to pay attention & to seek her. Wisdom says that she is woven into the fabric of the universe, & so wherever you see people making wise decisions, they are relying on her. You see someone being generous, or having sexual integrity, or upholding justice, they are drawing on wisdom. These lady wisdom poems, they are a creative, poetic way of exploring this idea that we live in God’s moral universe. And that goodness & justice are objective realities that we ignore to our own peril. So fearing the Lord, living wisely, it’s living along the grain of the universe. Together, these two sets of speeches from the father & lady wisdom, they make a powerful claim about this book, that you are not simply reading good advice, you are reading God’s own invitation to learn wisdom from previous generations. In the next section of the book, Chapters 10 through 29, we find hundreds of ancient proverbs. They apply wisdom & the fear of the Lord to every life topic you could imagine—family, work, neighborhood, friendships, sex, marriage, money, anger, forgiveness, alcohol, debt, everything. These are all filtered through the value system of Proverbs 1 through 9. These Proverbs, they are all pretty short. They are easy to memorize. And actually this section of the book is meant to become a reference work that you return to time & time again throughout the years which raises some important issues in learning how to read these Proverbs. First of all, proverbs are by nature about probabilities. So you fear the Lord, & you make wise good choices, things will likely go well for you. And if you don’t fear the Lord, you’re foolish, you’re life will likely not go so well. Now, that is all often true, but not always. Which leads to the next point: that proverbs are not promises. They are not formulas for success. So, some Proverbs for example, “The fear of the Lord prolongs your life, but the years of the wicked are cut short.” or, “Train up a child in the way they should go & when they’re old they won’t turn from it.” So, yes, fearing God, being a moral person, will most likely lead to a better, longer life, & raising your kids in a stable, loving home, does set them up well. But there are no guarantees. Lots of things can & often do go wrong in our world. So lastly, proverbs by nature focus on the general rule, but not the exceptions, which are many. And the wisdom Books, actually aren’t ignorant of that. The exceptions are what the other wisdom Books, Job & Ecclesiastes, are all about. Together, these acknowledge that life is too complex for simple formulas, which is why we need all of the wisdom Books together to get the bigger picture. This all leads to the final section of the Book—two large collections of poems. First, poems from a man named Agur, who begins by acknowledging his own ignorance & folly, & his great need for God’s wisdom. Then Agur discovers that divine wisdom has been given to him, in the Scriptures, which teach him how to live well. So Agur is put before us as like a model reader of the book of Proverbs, somebody who’s always open to hearing God’s wisdom through the Scriptures. The final poems are connected to a man named Lemuel. He’s a non-Israelite king. He passes on the wisdom that was given to him by his mom. It’s guidance for being a wise & just leader. And then the final poem is an acrostic, or an alphabet poem, where each line begins with a new letter of the alphabet. The entire poem’s about the woman of noble character. It depicts a woman who lives according to the wisdom of Proverbs, & stands like a model of someone who takes God’s wisdom & then translates, it into practical decisions in everyday life, at work, or at home, in her family, & in her community. The book opened with words from a father to a son about listening to lady wisdom, & so now the Book closes by offering the words of a mother to her son about a woman who lives wisely. The Book of Proverbs is for every person in every season of life. It’s a guide for living wisely & well in God’s good world & that’s what the book of Proverbs is all about.
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It’s a collection of 150 ancient Hebrew poems, songs & prayers that come from all different periods in Israel’s history. Many of these poems are connected with King David—73, actually. He was known as a poet & a harp player. But there are many different authors behind these poems. There’s the poems of Asaph, or from the sons of Korah, & some are from other worship leaders in the temple. Even Solomon & Moses have their own poems & nearly one third of these are anonymous.
Many of these poems came to be used by the choirs that sang in Israel’s temple. But the Book of Psalms is actually not a hymn Book. At some point in the period after Israel’s exile to Babylon, these ancient poems were gathered together & intentionally arranged into the Book of Psalms before us. It has a very unique design & message that you’re not going to notice unless you read it from beginning to end. To see how the Book of Psalms is designed, it’s actually most helpful to start at the end. The Book concludes with five poems of praise to the God of Israel. Each one begins & ends with the word, “hallelujah”, which is Hebrew for a command to tell a group of people to praise “Yah”, which is short for the divine name Yahweh. Now that’s a really nice five-part arrangement & it looks like someone’s giving us a conclusion here to the Book. So, it invites the question, Does the Book have any other signs of intentional design? If you pay attention to the headings of the poems, you’ll notice that at five places your Bible translators have the heading “Book One”, “Book Two”, “Book Three”, “Four”, & “Five” at various points. These divide the Book into five large sections. The reason for this is that the final poem in each of those sections have a very similar ending that looks like an editorial edition. It reads something like, “May the LORD, the God of Israel, be blessed forever & ever. Amen & Amen.” So the Book has a conclusion, it has an internal organization into five main parts, & so the natural place to go from here is now the beginning—to look for an introduction. What do we find? Psalms 1 & 2, which stand outside of Book One because most of the poems in Book One are linked to David except Psalms 1 & 2, which are anonymous. Psalm 1 celebrates how blessed the person is who meditates on the Torah, prayerfully reading it day & night & then obeying it. Now the word, “Torah”, simply means “teaching” & more specifically it came to refer to the five Books of Moses that begin the OT. Here, actually, the word seems to be used with both meanings in mind, which explains why it has five main parts. The Book of Psalms is being offered as a new Torah that will teach God’s people the lifelong practice of prayer as they strive to obey God’s commands given in the first Torah. Psalm 2 is a poetic reflection on God’s promise to King David from 2 Samuel, Chapter 7—that one day a Messianic King would come & establish God’s Kingdom over the world, defeat evil & rebellion among the nations. Psalm 2 concludes by saying that all of those who take refuge in the Messianic King will be “blessed”. Precisely, the word used to open Psalm 1. So together these two poems tell us that the Book of Psalms is designed to be the prayer Book of God’s people as they strive to be faithful to the commands of the Torah, as they hope & wait for the future Messianic Kingdom. With these two themes introduced we can start to see how the smaller Books have been designed, as well, around these two ideas. For example, Book One has, right at the center, a collection of poems, Psalms 15-24, that opens & closes with a call to covenant faithfulness. Then, Psalms 16-18, we find a depiction of David as a model of this kind of faithfulness. He calls out to God to deliver him & God elevates him as king. In the corresponding set of poems, Psalms 22-23, the David of the past has become an image of the Messianic King of the future, Who will also call out to God, He will be delivered & then given a Kingdom over the nations. Right at the center of this collection is a poem, Psalm 19, dedicated to praising God for the Torah. So here we go, the two themes, from Psalms 1 & 2 are bound together tightly here. Book Two opens with two poems that are united in their hope for a future return to the temple in Zion. This is the image closely associated with the hope of the Messianic Kingdom. Then Book Two closes with a poem that depicts the future reign of the Messianic King over all of the nations. This poem’s really amazing, because it echoes all of these other passages from the prophets about the Messianic Kingdom. It concludes by saying that this King’s reign will bring about the fulfillment of God’s ancient promise to Abraham to bring God’s blessing to all of the nations. Book Three also concludes with a poem reflecting on God’s promise to David, but this time, in light of Israel’s exile. So the poet remembers how God said He would never abandon the line of David. But now he’s looking at Israel’s rebellion & its result & destruction & exile, & the downfall of the line of David. So the poet ends by asking God to never forget His promise to David. Book Four is designed to respond to this crisis of exile. So the opening poem returns us back to Israel’s roots with a prayer of Moses. He does what he did on Mount Sinai after the golden calf incident, which is to call upon God to show mercy. The center of Book Four is dominated by a group of poems that announce that the Lord, the God of Israel reigns as the true King of the world. And that all creation, trees, mountains, rivers, are all summoned to celebrate that future day, when God will bring His justice & Kingdom over all the world. Book Five opens with a series of poems that affirm that God hears the cries of His people & will one day send the future King to defeat evil & bring God’s Kingdom. This Book also contains two larger collections, one called the “Hallel”, the other called “The Songs of Ascents”. Each one of these collections concludes with a poem about the future Messianic Kingdom. These two collections together, they sustain the hope for a future exodus-like act of God to redeem His people. Then, right between them, is Psalm 119. It’s the longest poem in the Book. It’s an alphabet poem each line begins with a new letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It explores the wonder & the gift of the Torah as God’s Word to His people. So here, we go, the themes from Psalm 1 & 2, Torah & Messiah combine all together here in Book Five. --Which brings us all the way back to that five poem conclusion. In the center poem, Psalm 148, all creation is summoned to praise the God of Israel because He has, “raised up a horn for His people”. Now the “horn” here is a metaphor of a bull’s horn raised in victory. This image echoes back to the same image used in Hannah’s song (1 Samuel, Chapter 2) but also to the earlier Psalm 132. The horn is a symbol for the future Messianic King & His victory over evil. It’s a fitting conclusion to this amazing Book. Here’s one more thing that you are likely going to miss if you don’t read this Book in order. There’s lots of different kinds of poems in the Book of Psalms, but they all basically fall into two big categories—either poems of lament or poems of praise. Poems of lament express pain, confusion & anger about how horrible the world is & how horrible the things are happening to the poet. So these poems draw attention to what’s wrong in the world & they ask God to do something about it. There’s a lot of these in the Book which tells us something important, that lament is an appropriate response to the evil that we see in our world. But what you’ll notice is that lament poems predominate earlier in the Book, in Books One through Three. But pay attention, because you’ll see praise poems occasionally too. Praise poems are poems of joy & celebration, & they draw attention to what’s good in the world. They retell stories of what God has done in our lives, & thank God for it. In Books Four & Five, you’ll notice that praise poems come to outnumber lament poems. And it all culminates in that five-part hallelujah conclusion. So this shift from lament to praise, this is profound. It tells us something about the nature of prayer: As we hope for the Messianic Kingdom, as the Book teaches us to do, this will create tension for us as we look out on the tragic state of our world & of our lives. So the Psalms teach us not to ignore the pain of our lives, but at the same time, Biblical faith is forward looking, looking to the promise of God’s future Messianic Kingdom. So Torah & Messiah, lament & praise, faith & hope, that’s what the Book of Psalms is all about. It’s a profound & very unique Book of the Bible for lots of reasons. The story is set in the very obscure land that’s far away from Israel, Uz. The main character, Job, he’s not even an Israelite. And the author, who’s anonymous, doesn’t even set the story in any clear period of ancient history. This all seems intentional though. It’s like the author doesn’t want us to be distracted by historical questions, but rather to focus simply on the story of Job & on the questions raised by his experience of suffering.
The Book of Job has a very clear literary design. It opens & closes with a short narrative prologue, & then an epilogue. Then the central body of the Book is dense Hebrew poetry, representing conversations between Job & four dialogue partners called the friends. These conversations are then concluded by a series of poetic speeches given by God to Job. Let’s dive in & we’ll see how it works together. The prologue introduces us to Job & we’re told that he’s a blameless, upright man who honors God. He’s a super good guy. Then all of a sudden we’re transported into the heavenly realms & God is holding court with His staff team. It’s a very common image in the Old Testament, describing how God runs the world. Among the heavenly beings in a figure called the Satan, which in Hebrew means the Accuser, or, the Prosecutor. It’s like we’re watching a court scene. God presents Job as a truly righteous man. Then the Accuser challenges God’s policy of rewarding righteous people like Job. He says the only reason Job obeys you is because you bless him with prosperity. Let Job suffer, then we’ll see how righteous he actually is. Then God agrees to let the Accuser inflict suffering on Job. It’s at this point in the story that most of us go, What? Why did God do that? Then we assume that this Book is going to answer that question, why God allows good people to suffer. But as you read on, the Book doesn’t answer that question, nothing in the Book ever answers that question. The prologue is setting up the real questions this Book is trying to get at. Questions about God’s justice, & whether God operates the universe according to the strict principle of justice. The response to those questions comes as you read through to the end of the Book, not at the beginning. The ultimate reason for Job’s suffering is simply never revealed. So the prologue concludes with a suffering & bewildered Job who is rebuked by his wife, & he’s approached by three friends who are going to try & provide wisdom & counsel. Their names are Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, & Zophar the Naamathite. They are all non-Israelites like Job. They represent the best of ancient near-eastern thinking about God, & suffering, & the human condition. This moves us into the main part of the book. First Job speaks. This is how this section of the book works: First Job is going to speak, & then will follow a response from a friend. Then Job will respond to that friend, then another friend will respond to Job’s response. And so on & back & forth for three cycles. This whole debate is focused on three questions: Is God truly just in character? And, does God run the universe on the strict principles of justice? And, if so, then how is Job’s suffering to be explained? As we’re going to see, Job & the friends, they’re working from a huge assumption about what God’s justice ought to look like in the world. Namely, that every single thing that happens in the universe should operate according to the strict principle of justice. So if you’re a wise, good person, & you honor God, good things will happen to you. God will reward you. But if you’re evil & stupid & do sinful things, bad things will happen to you. God will punish you. Job’s constant argument throughout his speeches is this: first of this that he’s innocent, so the implication of that is that his suffering is not a divine punishment. We know from the prologue both of these things are true. Remember God Himself said Job is righteous & blameless. So Job concludes his argument by accusing God. God either doesn’t run the world according to justice, or even worse, God Himself is simply unjust. The friends on the other hand, they beg to differ. Their argument is that God is just. The implication being that God always runs the world according to justice in this way. So they conclude by accusing, not God, but Job. Job must have done something really, really bad for God to punish him like this. They even start making up possible sins that Job must have committed. Job protests to all of this. In fact he gets so fed up with the friends that he eventually just gives up on them. He takes up his case directly with God. Now, something to be aware of is that Job, he’s on an emotional roller coaster in these poems. He used to think that God is just, but now he can’t reconcile that with his suffering. So in some outbursts, Job, he’ll accuse God of being a bully. Once he even declares that God has orchestrated all the injustice in the world. But the moment he utters that thought he’s terrified of it because he wants to hope & believe that God is truly just. Job is all over the place in this section. So he makes one last statement of his innocence, & then he demands that God show up personally to explain Himself. It’s at this point that a surprise friend shows up, Elihu the Buzite. Now, he’s not an Israelite, but he does have a Hebrew name. Elihu, he has the same assumption as Job & the friends. He argues that God is just & that implies that God always operates the universe according to justice. But then Elihu draws a more sophisticated conclusion about why good people suffer. It may not be punishment for sin in the past. God might inflict suffering as a warning to help people avoid sin in the future. Or God might use pain & suffering to build character or to teach people valuable lessons. Elihu doesn’t claim to know why Job is suffering, but one thing he is certain of, Job is wrong to accuse God of being unjust. Job doesn’t even respond to Elihu, & the dialogue comes to a close. It’s like the wisdom of the ancients has been spent & the mystery remains. Then, all of a sudden, God shows up in a whirlwind. He responds to Job personally. He first responds to Job’s accusation that He’s unjust & incompetent at running the universe. God takes Job on a virtual tour of the universe. He starts asking him all these questions about the order & origins of the cosmos. Was Job ever around when God architected the earth or organized the constellations? Has Job ever commanded the sunrise or controlled the weather? God has His eyes on all of these cosmic details that Job has never even conceived of. Then God starts going into detail describing the grazing habits of mountain goats, & how deer give birth, or the feeding patterns of lions & wild donkeys. What’s the point of all this? Remember the assumption of Job & his friends, about what it looks like for God to run the world according to justice? Underneath that assumption is a deeper one, that Job & his friends have a wide enough perspective on life to make such a claim about how God ought to run the world. God’s response with this virtual tour, it deconstructs all of these assumptions. It first of all shows that universe is a vast, complex place, & that God has His eyes on all of it, every detail. Job, on the other hand, has only the small horizon of his life experience to draw from. His view of the world is very limited. So what looks like divine injustice, from Job’s point of view, needs to be seen in an infinitely larger context. Job is simply not in a position to make such a huge accusation about God. After the virtual tour, God asks Job if he would like to micromanage the world for a day, according to the strict principle of justice that Job & his friends assume: Punishing every evil deed of every person at every moment with precise retribution. The fact is, that carrying out justice in a world like ours, it’s extremely complex, it’s never black & white, like Job & the friends seem to think. Which leads to God’s last point. He starts describing these two fantastic creatures, Behemoth & Leviathan—which some people think are poetic depictions of a hippo & a crocodile. But more likely they refer to well known creatures from ancient near-eastern mythology that are used elsewhere in the Bible as symbols of the disorder & danger that exist in God’s good world. These creatures, they are not evil, God’s actually quite proud of them. But they are not safe either. The point is that God’s world is amazing & very good, but it’s not perfect or always safe. God’s world has order & beauty, but it’s also wild & sometimes dangerous, just like these two fantastic creatures. So we come back to the big question of Job’s suffering. Why is there suffering in God’s world? Whether it’s from earthquakes or wild animals or from other humans. God doesn’t explain why. What He says is that we live in an extremely complex, amazing world, that at this stage, at least, is not designed to prevent suffering. And that’s God’s response. Job challenged God’s justice, God responds that Job doesn’t have sufficient knowledge about our universe to make such a claim. Job demanded a full explanation from God & what God asked Job for is trust in His wisdom & character. So Job responds with humility & repentance. He apologizes for accusing God & he acknowledges that he’s overstepped his bounds. Then all of a sudden the book concludes with a short epilogue. First God says that the friends were wrong. That their ideas about God’s justice were just too simple, not true to the complexity of the world or God’s wisdom. Then God says that Job has spoken rightly about Him. This is surprising, because it can’t apply to everything Job said. I mean, we know Job drew hasty & wrong conclusions. But God still approves of Job’s wrestling, how Job came honestly before God with all of his emotion & pain, & simply wanted to talk to God himself. God says, that’s the right way to process through all of this, through the struggle of prayer. The book concludes with Job having his health, his family, his wealth all restored. Not as a reward for good behavior, but simply as a generous gift from God. And that’s the end of the Book. The Book of Job, it doesn’t unlock the puzzle of why bad things happen to good people. Rather it does invite us to trust God’s wisdom when we do encounter suffering, rather than try & figure out the reasons for it. When we search for reasons we tend to either simplify God—like the friends—or like Job, accuse God, but based on limited evidence. So the Book is inviting us to honestly bring our pain & our grief to God, & to trust that God actually cares & that He knows what He’s doing. And that’s what the book of Job is all about. It’s one of the more exciting & curious Books in the Bible. The story is set over 100 years after the Babylonian exile of the Israelites from their land. While some Jews did return to Jerusalem (remember Ezra & Nehemiah), many did not. The Book of Esther is about a Jewish community living in Susa, the capital city of the ancient Persian empire. The main characters in this story are two Jews, Mordecai, & then his niece, Esther. And then there’s the king of Persia, who’s something of a drunken pushover in this story. Then there’s the Persian official, Haman, the cunning villain.
This is a curious Book in the Bible, mainly for the fact that God is never even mentioned, not once. Which might strike you as kind of odd. I mean, isn’t the Bible about God? But this is a brilliant technique by the author, who’s anonymous, by the way. It’s an invitation to read this story looking for God’s activity. There are signs of it everywhere. The story is full of very odd “coincidences” & ironic reversals. It all forces you to see God’s purpose at work, but behind the scenes. Let’s just dive into the story. The Book opens with the king of Persia throwing two elaborate banquet feasts that last a total of 187 days. It’s all for the grandiose purpose of displaying his greatness & splendor. On the last day of the banquet feast, he’s really drunk, & he demands that his wife, Queen Vashti, appear at the party to show off her beauty. She refuses, & so in a drunken rage the king deposes Vashti & makes this silly decree that all Persian men should now be the masters of their own homes. Then he holds a beauty pageant because he wants to find a new queen. This is like a really bad soap opera. It’s right here, that we are introduced to Esther & Mordecai. Esther hides her Jewish identity & enters the beauty pageant—& wins! The king is so obsessed with Esther that he elevates her to become the new queen of Persia. After this, & even more serendipitous, is the fact that Mordecai just happens to overhear two royal guards plotting to murder the king. He informs Esther, who in turn informs the king, & Mordecai gets credit for saving the king’s life. Right here, from the beginning, God’s not mentioned anywhere, but this all seems providentially ordered. What is it that God’s up to? You have to keep reading. We’re next introduced to Haman, who’s not actually a Persian. He’s called an Agagite. He’s a descendant of the ancient Canaanites (remember 1 Samuel, Chapter 15). The king elevates him into the highest position in the kingdom & he demands that everybody kneel before Haman. Well, when Mordecai sees Haman, he refuses to kneel, which of course fills Haman with rage. When he finds out that Mordecai’s Jewish, Haman successfully persuades the king to enact this crazy decree to destroy all of the Jewish people. To decide the date of the Jews’ annihilation, Haman rolls the dice. A die is called Pur in Hebrew (tuck that away for later). Eleven months later, on the thirteenth of Adar, all the Jews will die. Haman & the king then have a drinking banquet to celebrate their really horrible decision. So the focus now turns to Mordecai & Esther, who are the only hope for the Jewish people. They make a plan that Esther’s going to reveal her Jewish identity to the king, & ask him to reverse the decree. But, approaching the king without a royal request is, according to Persian law, an act worthy of death. So in a key statement, Mordecai, he’s confident that even if Esther remains silent that deliverance for the Jews will arrive from another place. Then Mordecai wonders aloud, he says, “Who knows, maybe you’ve become queen for this very moment.” Esther responds with bravery, & she purposes to go to the king with her amazing words, “If I perish, I perish.” Then, in what unfolds, we watch the ironic reversal of all of Haman’s evil plans. Esther hosts the king & Haman at a first banquet. She says that she wants to make a special request to both of them at an exclusive banquet the following day. So Haman leaves the banquet totally drunk. He sees Mordecai in the street. He fumes with anger & he orders that a tall stake be built so that Mordecai can be impaled upon it in the morning. It seems like things can’t get any worse for the Jews & for Mordecai. But all of a sudden the story pivots. It just so happens that night the king, he can’t sleep. He has the royal chronicles read to him for good bedtime reading. He just happens to hear about how Mordecai had saved the king’s life. He had totally forgotten! So in the morning Haman enters to request Mordecai’s execution, & the king in that moment orders Haman to honor Mordecai publicly for saving his life. So now Haman has to lead Mordecai around the city on a royal horse telling everyone to praise him. This moment in the story its a pivot for the whole Book. It begins Haman’s downfall & Mordecai’s rise to power. Watch how this works. The day after is Esther’s second banquet. The king & Haman arrive, & Esther informs the king that first of all she’s Jewish, & second, that Haman has enacted a decree to murder her & to murder Mordecai, who saved his life, & to murder all of the Jews. The king’s had a lot to drink, so when he hears this news he goes into yet one more drunken rage. He orders that Haman be impaled on the very stake he made for Mordecai. It’s ironic, & a grizzly way for Haman to go. Haman’s execution, however, doesn’t solve the problem of the decree to kill all of the Jews. So the focus now turns to Esther & Mordecai as they make a plan to reverse the decree. They discover that the king can’t revoke a decree that he’s already made. So instead the king commissions Mordecai to issue a counter-decree. On the appointed day that all of the Jews were supposed to be killed, the 13th of Adar, now the Jews are ordered to defend themselves & to destroy any who plotted to kill them. Then Mordecai, Esther & Jews everywhere hold banquets & feasts to celebrate this new decree. Mordecai is elevated to a seat beside the king. Eventually the decreed day comes. The Jews triumph over their enemies. First they destroy Haman’s family, & then any other Persian officials who had joined in Haman’s plot. Then on a second day they get permission to destroy any who plotted against them throughout the entire kingdom. This results in joy & celebration as the Jews are rescued from inhalation. The story then tells about how Esther & Mordecai established by decree this annual two day feast of Purim to commemorate their deliverance from destruction. The name of the feast comes from Haman’s dice, remember? Pur-im. The book concludes with a short epilogue as Mordecai is elevated to second in command in the kingdom. We are told now of his royal greatness & splendor as the Jews thrive in exile. Step back, notice how this whole story’s been designed. The story was full of moments of ironic reversal. But we can now see the whole story is structured as an ironic reversal, right down to the details. The king’s splendor & feasts & decrees are mirrored by Mordecai’s splendor & feast & decrees at the end. Esther & Mordecai, they first save the king, but now in the end they save all of the Jews. Then you have Haman’s elevation & edicts & banquet that get reversed by Mordecai’s elevation & edict & banquet. Then at the center you have Esther & Mordecai’s planning scenes, & then Esther’s two banquets that act as a frame around the greatest moment of reversal in the whole story, Haman’s humiliation & Mordecai’s exaltation. Beautiful. Another fascinating feature of this Book is the moral ambiguity of the characters. There’s a lot of drinking & anger & sex & murder, of which Mordecai & Esther are a part. Not to mention their violation of many commands in the Torah, like marrying Gentiles or eating impure foods. So the story’s not putting Mordecai & Esther as moral examples, as if it endorses all of their behavior. But they are put forward as models of trust & hope when things get really bad. So the book of Esther comes back to that question with which we begin, why God is not mentioned? The message of this Book seems to be that when God seems absent, when His people are exile, when they are unfaithful to the Torah, does this mean that God is done with Israel? Has God abandoned His promises? The Book of Esther says, no. It invites us to see that God can & does work in the real mess & moral ambiguity of human history. He uses the faithfulness of even morally compromised people to accomplish His purposes. The Book of Esther asks us to be willing to trust God’s providence even when we can’t see it working, & to hope that no matter how bad things get God is committed to redeeming His world. And that’s what the book of Esther is all about. In most modern Bibles these books are separate, but that division happened long after it was written. It was originally a unified work written by a single author. The story is set after the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem & it’s temple & took many of the people into exile. This book picks up about 50 years later & tells the return of some Israelites to Jerusalem, & then what happened when they rebuilt the city & their lives there. Specifically, the book focuses on three key leaders who led the rebuilding efforts. You have Zerubbabel, then Ezra, & then Nehemiah. The book’s design focuses on the efforts of each leader. Zerubbabel leads a large group of people back to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple. Then about 60 years later, Ezra arrives in Jerusalem to teach the Torah & rebuild the community. Then he’s followed by Nehemiah, who leads the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s walls. These three stories are designed to be parallel. Each begins with the king of Persia prompted by God to send the leader to Jerusalem, & he offers resources & support. Then each leader encounters opposition in their efforts, which they then overcome, but in a way that leads to a strange anti-climax in each of the three parts. Let’s back up & see how it fits together.
The story begins with a decree from Cyrus, the king of Persia. He’s moved by God to allow the exiles to return to Jerusalem & rebuild the temple. The author says this fulfills a promise made by the prophet Jeremiah, that the exiles would one day return to Jerusalem. This fulfillment should trigger our hopes in the many other prophetic promises that exile was not the end of the story. We have hope for a future Messianic King from the line of David. We have hope for a rebuilt temple where God’s presence will dwell with His people, hope for God’s Kingdom to come over all the nations & bring His blessing, just like He promised to Abraham. So it’s with all these hopes in mind that we read on into the story of Zerubbabel. His name means planted in Babylon. He represents the generation born in Babylonian captivity. He leads a wave of Israelites returning to Jerusalem. After they settle there, they rebuild the altar for offering sacrifices & later the temple itself. The foundation laying ceremony & then the temple’s final dedication, these are key moments. The past stories of the tabernacle & temple’s dedication should be in our minds. This is when the fiery cloud of God’s presence is supposed to descend. He’s dwelling with His people & it doesn’t happen. So while some people are happy about this new temple, the elders who had seen the previous temple of Solomon, they cry out in grief. It is nothing like their glorious past or their hopes for the future. It’s right here that we get the first story of opposition. It’s very odd. So the grandchildren of the Israelites who were not taken into exile, they had been living in Jerusalem all along, they come to offer help with the temple rebuilding. Zerubbabel refuses. He says, you have no part in our temple. This of course generates a conflict, which Zerubbabel overcomes. But it’s very strange, because the prophets had envisioned that the tribes of Israel would all come together, along with all of the nations, to participate in the worship of the God of Israel when the Kingdom finally comes. So this is an anti-climatic moment, to say the least. In the next section, we zoom forward about 60 years & we’re introduced to Ezra. He’s a leader among the exiled Israelites in Babylon. He’s a Torah scholar & a teacher, so he gets appointed by Artaxerxes, king of Persia, to lead another wave of people back to Jerusalem. Ezra wants to bring about spiritual & social renewal among the people. Our hopes are high & again we come to another anti-climatic moment in the story. Ezra learns that many of the exiled Israelites that had come back, they had married non-exiles who had been living around Jerusalem. Some of them were non-Israelites, & almost certainly some of them were. Ezra then appeals to the commands of the Torah, that Israel was supposed to be holy & separate from the ancient Canaanites & he then says that the people living around Jerusalem are like the Canaanites, they are going to corrupt the exiles. So Ezra offers a prayer of repentance & it’s very heartfelt. But then he rallies all of the leaders & enacts this divorce decree that says all these marriages should be annulled, the women & the children sent away. Then the decree is only partially carried out. We’re given a list of some of the men who divorced their wives. The story is very strange for a number of reasons. First of all, God never commanded Ezra to do any of this. It was the leaders of Jerusalem who led Ezra to make the decree. Second, the contemporary prophet Malachi, he did say that the exile should care about purity. But he also said that God was opposed to divorce. So the mixed results of the decree, this all fits into this pattern of a strange concluding anti-climax. Which leads us to the next section about Nehemiah. He’s an Israelite official serving in the Persian government. When he hears about the ruined state of Jerusalem’s walls he prays & then gets permission from the Persian king Artaxerxes to go & rebuild the walls. The king even gives them an armed escort & all these resources. So after arriving in Jerusalem, he begins the building project, & he too faces opposition from the people who had already been living around Jerusalem. Once again, we face a tension in the story. The contemporary prophet, Zechariah, said that the new Jerusalem of God’s Kingdom would be a city without walls. That God’s presence would surround it, that people from all nations would come & join the covenant people. But Nehemiah seems to operate with the opposite vision. He informs the people surrounding Jerusalem that they have no part in Jerusalem. This of course provokes them to hostility. So while Nehemiah carries out his vision for the city with integrity & courage they have to build the city with armed guards to protect them, we keep wondering, could this whole conflict have been handled differently. This all leads to the conclusion of the Book, in two movements, first positive & then negative. Ezra & Nehemiah combine forces to bring about a spiritual renewal among the people. They gather all the exiles together for a festival. They read & teach the Torah to all the people for seven days. Then they celebrate the ancient Feast of Tabernacles to remember God’s faithfulness from the exodus & the wilderness journeys. Then they offer a confession of their sins, they vow themselves to renew the covenant, follow all the commands of the Torah. They finish with a great celebration over the temple, the walls of Jerusalem. We’re thinking, this could be the turning point...but it’s not. The book ends on a huge downer. Nehemiah tours around the city & he finds that the people have not been fulfilling their covenant vows. So Zerubbabel’s work is undone as he finds the temple being neglected & staffed by all these unqualified people. He then discovers that Ezra’s work is being compromised. He finds everyone violating the Torah, people are working on the Sabbath. Even his own work on the walls is involved because people are setting up markets around the walls of Jerusalem & working on the Sabbath. Nehemiah, he goes on a rampage, he’s beating people up, he’s pulling out their hair, & he’s yelling, “Obey the commands of the Torah!” His final words are a prayer that God would remember him, that at least he tried, & the book ends. It’s very strange, but we’ve been prepared for it, right? These anti-climatic moments have been woven into the Book’s design intentionally. So it raises the question, what on earth does this Book contribute to the story line of the Bible. Remember, the Book started by raising our hopes in the prophetic promises about the Messiah, the temple, the Kingdom of God, & then none of it happens. So even though Israel is now back in the land, their spiritual state seems unchanged from before the exile. While Ezra & Nehemiah do their best, but their political & social reforms among the people don’t address the core issues of their heart. So what the Book is pointing out is the same need highlighted by the prophets Jeremiah & Ezekiel. What God’s people need is a holistic transformation of their hearts if they are ever going to love & obey their God. So the Book ends on a downer, yes, but it forces you to keep reading on into the wisdom & prophetic Books to find out what is God going to do to fulfill His great covenant promises but for now, that’s the book of Ezra-Nehemiah. While they are two separate books in our Bibles, that division is not original. Due to scroll lengths, the Book was divided in two, but it was written as one Book with one coherent story line. In our English Bibles, Chronicles comes after the Books of Samuel & Kings. Most of Chronicles is actually repeat content from those Books. So most modern readers, when they come to Chronicles they think, wait a minute, I just read all of this. So they skip it. That’s a shame, because this Book is really unique & important in the Bible. In the traditional Jewish ordering of the Bible, Chronicles is actually the last Book, because it summarizes all of the Jewish Scriptures. The first word in the Book is Adam, the first character at the beginning of the story. Then the last paragraph announces the return of Israel from exile.
We don’t know who wrote this Book, but we can tell from details within it, it was produced by somebody who lived a couple of hundred years after the Israelites returned from the Babylonian exile. For this author, Jerusalem & the temple were rebuilt sometime ago & as we learn from Ezra & Nehemiah, things were not going well. The great prophetic hope was that the city & the temple would be rebuilt, that God would come to live among His people, the Messianic King would come, & all the nations would come live under His peaceful rule. And none of that has happened. So the author of Chronicles has reshaped these stories of David & Solomon & the kings of the past, in order to provide a message of hope for the future. We’ll see that he’s designed this Book to emphasize two clear themes: First, the hope of the coming Messianic King, & second, the hope for a new temple. Let’s just dive in & you’ll see these themes all over the Book. 1 Chronicles begins with nine Chapters of genealogies, long lists of names. You’ll read these & think that this is kind of boring. That may be true for you, but actually they are very, very important. The author is summarizing here the whole story line of the Old Testament by naming all of the key characters in the stories. As he does so, he shapes the genealogies to emphasize two key lineages. First is the line of the promised Messianic King. So lots of space is dedicated to tracing the line of Judah that led all the way to king David, to whom the Messianic promise was given. Then from David, the author traces that line up into his own day. The other family line that receives lots of attention here is that of the priesthood, the descendants of Aaron, who of course served in the temple. So right from the start you can see the two main themes, the author’s hope of the Messiah coming to build a new temple, & it’s rooted in these ancient genealogies. After that the author moves into the stories about David. Most of these are going to be familiar to you from the Book of Samuel. But again, they are some really important differences. First of all the author leaves out all of the negative stories about David, where he’s portrayed as weak or immoral. So, Saul chasing David around the desert & persecuting him, the story of David’s adulatory with Bathsheba & then murdering her husband all of that is gone. And what’s left are the stories that portray David as a good guy. And not only that, there’s also new additional material that you won’t find in the Book of Samuel that shows David in a very positive light. So there’s a large block of Chapters where David makes preparations for the temple. He arranges resources & builders & Levites & choirs. Not only that, the author also portrays David as a Moses-like figure. God gives David plans for building the temple, just as he gave plans to Moses for building the tabernacle. So why all this new material about David? The author’s not trying to hide David’s flaws. He knows that anybody can go read about them in the Book of Samuel. Rather, he’s trying to portray David as the ideal king, in order to make him an image or a type of the future Messiah from the line of David. It’s very similar to how Jeremiah or Ezekiel spoke of the coming Messiah as a new David. This is most clear in how the author retells the story of God’s covenant promise to David in 1 Chronicles 17. When you compare the story with its parallel in 2 Samuel 7, you’ll see that the author of Chronicles is highlighting that neither David, nor Solomon, nor any of the kings from his line were the Messianic King & that when the Messiah does come, He’ll be a King like David. So for this author these stories about David from the past are what sustain his hope for the future. After David dies we move into 2 Chronicles, which focuses on the kings that lived in Jerusalem. Again, there’s lots of overlap with 1 & 2 Kings, but there are many key differences. The author has left out all of the stories about the kings of northern Israel, so he can just focus on the line of David. There’s lots of new material about these kings from David’s line. He highlights the kings that were obedient to God, & he adds new stories about how their obedience led to success & God’s blessing. But he also adds new stories about kings who were unfaithful to God. They didn’t follow the Torah, they led Israel to worship idols. These kings face horrible consequences, all leading up to Israel’s exile, a mess of their own making. So this whole section becomes a series of character studies, where the author wants later generations of Israelites to learn from their family history & so become faithful to their God & the Torah. The Book’s conclusion is really unique too. At the very end of the Book the king of the Persians, his name’s Cyrus, he tells the Israelites that they can go back home, return from exile, rebuild the city & the temple. He says, the last line of the book, “...whoever there is among you, of all His people, may the Lord his God be with him & let him go up...” & that’s how the book ends with an incomplete sentence. Now of course the author knows about the first return from exile & the stories of Ezra & Nehemiah. But clearly in his view, the prophetic hopes of Israel were not fulfilled in those events. So this incomplete ending shows that the author’s hope is set on yet another return from exile – when the Messiah will finally come to rebuild the temple & restore God’s people. So the Book of Chronicles, the final Book of the Jewish Scriptures, it ends by pointing forward. It calls God’s people to look back in order to look ahead, because the past has become the source of hope for the future. So Chronicles concludes the OT as a story in search of an ending & that’s what this book is all about. Although 1 & 2 Kings are two separate books in our Bibles, they were originally written as one book telling a unified story that continues on from the book of Samuel that came before it. So David has unified the tribes of Israel into a kingdom. God promised that from his line would come a Messianic King who would establish God’s Kingdom over the nations & fulfill the promises made to Abraham. The book of Kings tells the story of the long line of kings that came after David & none of them lived up to that promise. In fact, they run the nation of Israel right into the ground.
The book is designed to have five main movements. The story begins & ends focused on Jerusalem: First with Solomon’s reign & the construction of the temple, & then in this last section ending with Jerusalem’s destruction & Israel’s exile to Babylon. The story leading up to this tragedy is what makes up the center three sections, which explains how Israel split into two rival kingdoms, how God tried to prevent the corruption of Israel by sending the prophets, & how exile became the unavoidable consequence of Israel’s sin. The book opens with two Chapters about the kingdom passing from the aging David to his son Solomon. David’s final words to Solomon, they are very similar to those of Moses & Joshua & Samuel to the people. It’s a call to remain faithful to the commands of the covenant & to give allegiance to the God of Israel alone. But David’s words ring somewhat hollow here because David & Solomon then go on to conspire how they’re going to consolidate this new kingdom through a whole series of political assassinations. It’s not off to a great start. Solomon’s brightest moment comes when he asks God for wisdom to lead Israel. He even completes David’s dream to make a temple for the God of Israel. Here the story actually stops & describes the design of this temple in detail, just like the tabernacle design in the Torah. There are all these gold & jewels & depictions of angels & fruit trees. It’s all symbolism echoing back to the Garden of Eden. It’s the place where Heaven & earth meet, where God’s presence dwells with His people. But no sooner does Solomon finish the temple but he makes some really horrible choices & the kingdom falls apart. He starts marrying the daughters of other kings, hundreds of them for political alliances. Then he adopts their gods & introduces the worship of those gods into Israel. Solomon then accumulates huge amounts of wealth, he builds a huge army, he even institutes slave labor for all of his building projects. If you go back to the Torah & look at God’s guidelines for Israel’s kings in Deuteronomy 17, Solomon is breaking every one. So by the time that he dies, Solomon resembles Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, more than he does his father David. The next section of the book opens with Solomon’s son, Rehoboam, acting just like his father. It’s a very sad story of greed & lust for power. He tries to increase taxes for slave labor & under the leadership of Jeroboam the northern tribes reject this, they rebel & secede & form their own rival kingdom. Now in this story you have the southern kingdom, Judah, centered in Jerusalem with kings from the line of David. And now this new northern kingdom called Israel, whose capital will be Samaria eventually. Jeroboam also goes on to build two new temples to complete with Solomon’s temple in the south. He puts a golden calf in each one to represent the God of Israel. The connection to Exodus 32 & the golden calf, it’s all quite explicit. From this point on the story goes back & forth from north to south, tracing the fate of both kingdoms. Each one had about 20 successive kings. As the author introduces each king he evaluates their reign by a few criteria: Did they worship the God of Israel alone, or did they promote the worship of other gods? Did they deal with idolatry among the people? And, did they remain faithful to the covenant like David, or do they become corrupt & unjust? According to these criteria, the author finds no good kings in northern Israel, zero for 20. In southern Judah only 8 out of 20 get a positive rating. Which connects to another huge purpose in this book & that’s to introduce the role of the prophets—key figures in Israel’s history. In the Bible, prophets were not fortune tellers, rather they spoke on behalf of the God of Israel, & they played the role of covenant watchdogs, which means they called out idolatry & injustice among the kings & the people. They were constantly reminding Israel of their calling to be a light to the nations, that they should obey the commands of the Torah. So the prophets challenged Israel to repent & follow their God. In these center sections, for each king, God then raises up prophets to hold them accountable. The most prominent prophets were the northern ones, Elijah & his disciple Elisha, right here in the center of the book. Elijah was a wild man of a prophet, living out in the desert. His arch nemesis was the northern king Ahab, & his Canaanite wife, Jezebel. Together these two had instituted the worship of the Canaanite god Baal over Israel. So in a famous story Elijah challenged 450 prophets of Baal to a contest to see which their god was real or his God was real. So they both built altars & the Baal prophets prayed to their gods & Elijah to his God. But only the God of Israel answers with fire. After this Ahab uses his royal power to murder an Israelite farmer & then steal his family’s vineyard. Elijah again confronts Ahab’s injustice & he announces the downfall of his house. Elijah eventually passes the mantle of his prophetic leadership to a young disciple named Elisha, who asks for two times the authority of Elijah. What’s fascinating here is how the author, he’s recounted seven miraculous feats for Elijah, & then he offers stories of 14 acts of power from Elisha. Both prophets were clearly remarkable men & they played the same role, confronting Israel’s kings for idolatry & injustice, & ultimately they were unsuccessful in turning Israel back from apostasy. In the next section, the northern kingdom is rocked by a bloody revolution started by a king named Jehu, who destroys Ahab’s family. Although Jehu was at first commissioned by God, his violence just gets out of control, & it creates this spiral of political assassinations & rebellions from which Israel never recovered. Coup follows coup after Jehu, & each king follows other gods, allows horrible injustice. It all leads up to 2 Kings Chapter 17. The big, bad empire of Assyria swoops down & takes out the northern kingdom altogether. The capital city of Samaria, it’s conquered & the Israelites are exiled & scattered throughout the ancient world. Chapter 17 is key. The author stops the story & offers this prophetic reflection on what’s just happened. He blames the downfall of the northern kingdom on the idolatry & covenant unfaithfulness of Israel & its kings. And so, God has allowed them to face the consequences of their decisions. The final movement of the Book tells the story of the lone southern kingdom. Here we meet some very heroic kings like Hezekiah, who trust God when the armies of Assyria come knocking on Jerusalem’s door. Or Josiah, who discovers this lost scroll of the Torah in the temple, so he starts reading it. He’s convicted & he institutes religious reforms to remove idolatry & Canaanite influences from the land. But Judah is just too far gone. The king right in between these two, Manasseh, he’s the worst by far. He not only introduces the worship of idol statues into the Jerusalem temple, he also institutes child sacrifice. God sends prophets to say, the time is up. Israel has reached the point of no return. The final Chapters tell the story of the Babylonian Empire coming to invade Jerusalem, destroy the temple, & carry the people & the royal line of David off into exile. The story ends leaving us wondering is God done with Israel, is He done with a line of David? The final paragraph zooms about 40 years forward into the exile. It tells a very odd story. It’s about Jehoiachin, a descendant from David, who would have been king if he was back in Jerusalem. The king of Babylon releases him from prison & invites him to eat at the royal table for the rest of his life, & the book ends. So it’s not much, but it’s a story that gives a glimmer of hope, that God has not abandoned the line of David. So the question now is, how is God going to fulfill His promises to Abraham & to David? How’s He going to bless the nations & bring the Messianic kingdom? To answer those questions you have to read on into the wisdom & the prophetic books. But for now, that’s the book of Kings. If you haven’t read the 1 Samuel post please do so as we were introduced to the book’s three main characters: Samuel, Saul & David. Then also to the book’s literary design, which first introduced Samuel, & then traced the rise & fall of King Saul in contrast to the rise of King David. 2 Samuel tells the story of David as Israel’s king, in two movements. There’s a season of success & blessing, followed by a huge moral failure & then its sad consequences. The Book ends with this well crafted conclusion that reflects back on the good & the bad in David’s life, generating hope for a future King to come from his line.
2 Samuel picks up after Saul’s death & David surprises everyone by composing this long poem where he laments the death of the very man who tried to murder him. Once again the author, he’s presenting David’s humility & compassion. He’s a man who grieves the death even of his own enemies. After this David experiences a season of success & God’s blessing. All of the Israelite tribes, they come to David & they ask him to unify all the tribes as their king. So the first thing David does as king is to go to the city of Jerusalem, he conquers it & he establishes it as Israel’s capital city which he renames as Zion. From there David goes on & he wins many battles & expands Israel’s territory. After making Jerusalem the political capital of Israel he wants to make it their religious capital as well, & so he has the Ark of the Covenant moved into the city. Then in 2 Samuel 7 he tells God now that Israel has a permanent home he thinks that God’s presence should also get a permanent house. So he asks if he can build a temple for the God of Israel. But God says to David, “Thank you for that thought but actually I’m going to build you a house, a dynasty.” Now 2 Samuel 7, this is a key Chapter for understanding the story line of the whole Bible. God here makes a promise to David, that from his royal line will come a future King who’s going to build God’s temple here on earth & set up an Eternal Kingdom. It’s this Messianic promise to David that gets picked up & developed more in the Book of Psalms & also in the books of the prophets. It’s this King that gets connected to God’s promise to Abraham, the future Messianic Kingdom will be how God brings His blessing to all of the nations. It’s right here, in the midst of all this divine blessing that things go horribly wrong. David makes a fatal mistake. Not fatal for him, but for a man named Uriah, one of David’s prized soldiers. From his rooftop David sees Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba, bathing. David finds her, he sleeps with her, gets her pregnant & then he tries to cover the whole thing up by having Uriah assassinated & then marrying her. It’s just horrible. When David’s confronted by the Prophet Nathan about all of this, he immediately owns up to what he’s done. He’s broken, he repents, he asks God to forgive him & God does forgive him. But God doesn’t erase the consequences of David’s decisions. As a result of this horrible choice, David’s family, his kingdom, it all falls apart. It makes this section a tragic story much like Saul’s downfall. David’s sons end up repeating his own mistakes, but in even more tragic ways. Amnon sexually abuses his sister, Tamar. And then their brother, Absalom, finds out about all of this & has Amnon assassinated. Then Absalom goes & he hatches this secret plan to oust his father David from power. He launches this full scale rebellion. For a second time David is forced to flee from his own home & go hide in the wilderness. Except this time he is not an innocent man. The rebellion ends when David’s son is murdered. It breaks David’s heart. So once again he laments over the very man who tried to kill him. David’s last days find him back on his throne, but as a broken man. He’s wounded by the sad consequences of his sin. The Book concludes with a well-crafted epilogue, with stories that are out of chronological order, but they have this really cool symmetrical literary design. The outer pair of stories come from earlier in David’s reign & they compare the failures of Saul & then of David, & how each of them hurt other people through their bad decisions. The next inner pair of stories are about David & his band of mighty men who went about fighting the Philistines. What’s interesting is that both sections have a story of David’s weakness in battle. So in contrast to the victorious David of Chapters 1-9, here we see a vulnerable David who’s dependent on others for help. The center of the epilogue has two poems that act like memoirs. David reflects back on his life. He remembers times when God graciously rescued him from danger. He sees these as moments where God was faithful to His covenant promise to him & to his family. Both poems conclude by looking back on to the hope of God’s promise of a future King who will build that Eternal Kingdom. These poems & then God’s promise, also connect back to Hannah’s poem that opened the Book. So these key passages from the beginning, now the middle & the end of the Book, bring the Book’s themes all together. Despite Saul & David’s evil, God remained at work, moving forward His redemptive purposes. God opposed David & Saul’s arrogance, but He exalted David when he humbled himself. So the future hope of this Book reaches far beyond David himself. It looks to the future, to the Messianic King who will one day bring God’s Kingdom & blessing to all of the nations. And that’s what the Book of Samuel is all about. There are two separate Books in our modern Bibles, but that division is due simply to scroll length. It was originally written as one coherent story. We’re just going to cover the book of 1 Samuel in this post.
After Israel was rescued from slavery in Egypt they made a covenant with God at Mount Sinai, & eventually came into the Promised Land. There Israel was supposed to be faithful to God & obey the covenant commands. Before the Book of Samuel Judges showed how Israel failed at that task big time. It was a period of moral chaos & it showed Israel’s need for wise, faithful leaders. The Book of Samuel provides an answer to that need. The Book of Samuel’s story focuses on three main characters: the prophet Samuel, where the Book gets its name; then king Saul; & after that king David. All three of them transitioned Israel from a group of tribes ruled by judges into a unified kingdom ruled by king David in Jerusalem. The Book of Samuel has a fascinating design that weaves the story of these three characters together in four main parts. Samuel, he’s the key leader & prophet in the first section of the Book. But then he also plays a key role in the next section, which is Saul’s story. It’s told in two movements: Saul’s rise to power, & then his failures. And the second part is about his downfall & his tragic death. The drama of Saul’s demise is matched by David’s exciting rise to power. Then David’s story is told in two movements: first he rides the wave of his success, followed by his own tragic failure & the slow self-destruction of his family & then his kingdom. The Book concludes with an epilogue that reflects back over the whole story. So let’s dive in & see how this all unfolds. Part one picks up from the chaos of the Book of Judges. We are introduced to a touching story about a woman named Hannah. She’s grieved because she’s never been able to have children. By God’s grace she finally has a son named Samuel. In joy she sings this amazing poem in Chapter 2. The poem is all about how God opposes the proud & exalts the humble, about how despite tragedies & human evil, God is working out His purposes in history. Also it’s about how God will one day raise up an anointed king for his people. Hannah’s poem has been placed here at the beginning of the Book to introduce these key themes that we’re going to see throughout the whole story, like the next one. Samuel grows up & becomes a great prophet & leader for the people of Israel, at the same time that the Philistines rise to power as Israel’s arch nemesis. In this crucial battle, the Israelites get arrogant & instead of praying & asking God for help, they trot out the Ark of the covenant as this kind of magic trophy that will automatically grant them victory in battle. So because of their arrogant presumption, God allows Israel to lose the battle & the Ark is stolen. The Philistines, they take the Ark, & they place it in the temple of their god Dagon. Then the God of Israel defeats the Philistines & the god Dagon without an army by sending plagues on the people. Then the Philistines don’t want the Ark anymore, obviously, & they send it back to Israel. The point of this little story seems to be this: God is not Israel’s trophy, & He opposes pride among the Philistines, but also among His own people, so Israel needs to remain humble & obedient if they want to experience God’s covenant blessing. Which opens up into the next large section. The Israelites come to Samuel & they say, “Hey we want a king like all the other nations have. Go find one for us”. So Samuel, he’s kind of ticked off & he goes to consult with God. God says, “Yes, their motives are all wrong, but if a king is what they want, give them one”. So we’re introduced to the figure of Saul. Now Saul is a tragic figure because he begins full of promise: he’s tall, he’s good looking, he’s a perfect candidate for a king. But he has deep character flaws. He’s dishonest, he lacks integrity, & he seems incapable of acknowledging his own mistakes. So these flaws become his downfall. He wins some battles at the beginning, but his flaws run so deep he eventually disqualifies himself by blatantly disobeying God’s commands. So the aging Samuel confronts Saul & Israel. He had warned the people that they would only benefit from a king who’s humble & faithful to God. Otherwise, the kings of Israel will bring ruin. He informs Saul that God is going to raise up a new king to replace him. And so Saul’s downfall begins as God at the same time is working behind the scenes to raise up that new king. It’s an insignificant shepherd boy named David. He’s the least likely candidate to be king. But the famous story of David & Goliath shows that God’s choice of David is not based on his family status, but simply on his radical & humble trust in the God of Israel. So this story embodies all of the themes of Hannah’s poem: proud Saul & Goliath are brought low, while humble David is exalted. From here we watch Saul slowly descent into madness, while David rises to power. David starts working for Saul as a general, & he’s winning all of the battles, & he’s also winning all of the fame. Saul gets jealous & he starts chasing David around, hunting him, trying to kill him. David’s done nothing wrong, so David simply runs & waits in the wilderness. Here we see David’s true character. He has multiple opportunities to kill Saul, but he doesn’t. He simply trusts that despite Saul’s evil, God will raise up a king for his people. What’s interesting too is that many of the poems of David that you find in the Book of Psalms are linked to this very period of his life. They all express the same attitude of trust. This section of the Book ends with Saul coming to a grisly death after losing a battle with the Philistines. 1 Samuel tells of some of the most intricate, well-told stories you find anywhere in the Bible. The characters Saul and David, they are portrayed very realistically. The author’s putting them forward as character studies so that you can find yourself in them. In Saul’s story we see a warning. It’s crucial that we reflect on our own character flaws & how they harm us & other people. With God’s help, we need to humble ourselves & deal with our dark side, so that Saul’s story doesn’t become ours. David, on the other hand, is presented as an example of patience & trust in God’s timing in our live. He’s running in the wilderness being chased by Saul, David had every reason to think God had abandoned him. But that’s not what he thinks. So David’s story encourages us to trust that despite human evil, God is working out His purposes, to oppose the proud & to exalt the humble. And that’s what 1 Samuel is all about. |
AuthorThe goal of the blog is to provide interesting, motivational, soul feeding material. All to help remind us that God loves us all and wants a personal relationship with each of us and will take care of us in times of trouble. I aspire to be a force for good by providing you with positive input. I encourage you to share the blog with others. Archives
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