The Chronicler's Story

“Adam, Seth, Enosh.” – 1 Chronicles 1:1

“No story lives unless someone wants to listen. The stories we love best do live in us forever.” – J.K. Rowling

Let’s face it: the first nine chapters of 1 Chronicles are tough reading. For us modern-day readers, not the most gripping of hooks. We have short attention spans. We aren’t related to these people. We’ve just finished reading through the Samuel’s and the Kings’ and aren’t anticipating much fresh material here. But in fact, it’s exactly by reading Chronicles (1 and 2 Chronicles were originally one book) synoptically with Samuel and Kings that we see what is so amazing about it. 

Chronicles is the retelling of a story. Why would anyone retell a story? Because stories tell us who we are, why we are here, and what our hope is for the future. And right then, the Israelites needed a new story. The monarchy and the temple of their people had been destroyed. They had been taken into exile. Now, they had returned and rebuilt their temple, but everything had been upset. They were reduced in strength and numbers, occupying only a fraction of the land they had before, subject to foreign overlords, living in the midst of a mixed and sometimes antagonistic population. They had lost their context, their purpose, and their hope.

And so, the Chronicler spins a tale. The story doesn’t start in chapter 10. It starts right here from the first word, Adam, with which he says: I am going to tell you a story of names, a story about who you are, and it starts from the very beginning, not with Abraham, but with Adam. God is telling through you his story for all mankind, for all creation. The Chronicler then traces names forward through history, and we can see what he emphasizes by noticing which people have all their children named; which people are mentioned last (usually indicating they are more important); which family lines are traced not just linearly but horizontally. He highlights Noah, then Abraham, then Jacob. Despite the fact that most of the later narrative will focus on Judah’s tribe, the Chronicler highlights all twelve tribes here in the genealogy, again emphasizing their collective identity as the people of God.

But he does spend more time on David’s line, and also on Aaron: and in these two threads we see the themes of this new story, the kingship and the temple. This story paints, in a more positive light than Samuel and Kings, a picture of David as messianic king, and Aaron and his descendants as priests, and the people in worship and song, all of it the expression of God’s covenant with David. We will see that he leaves out some of the negative stories, and adds new ones related to these themes, all of it to say: you are not lost. Things seem different. This is not how you pictured it. But God has made a covenant with you. It has been lived out in this king and this temple, and one day it will be lived out in the ultimate King and Temple and become a story that lives forever. As the ESV Study Bible puts it, “The Chronicler wrote to commend a positive prescription for the spiritual and social renewal of his community.” This is a story we all need to hear.

Hope

From the Heidelberg Catechism:

What is your only hope in life and death?

That I am not my own,

but belong with body and soul,

both in life and in death,

to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.

He has fully paid for all my sins

with his precious blood,

and has set me free

from all the power of the devil.

He also preserves me in such a way

that without the will of my heavenly Father

not a hair can fall from my head;

indeed, all things must work together

for my salvation.

Therefore, by his Holy Spirit

he also assures me

of eternal life

and makes me heartily willing and ready

from now on to live for him.

The Church's Response

“But I, through the abundance of your steadfast love, will enter your house.” – Psalm 5:7

“We need to redirect social energy from anxiety and panic to love and preparation. This crisis presents an extraordinary opportunity to fortify small communities of love and care for our neighbors. That will only happen if we lead in a way that reduces fear, increases faith, and reorients all of us from self-protection to serving others.” – Andy Crouch, Love In The Time Of Coronavirus

What is the response of the church during this time?

As Dave and I were dialoguing about this, we discussed three main reactions we see in people around us: first, the urge to acquire information. We’re all sitting around trying to read everything we can, and with this comes the confusion of sorting through various levels of accuracy and being affected, consciously or not, by the tone of what we are reading in the news or social media. Secondly, there is a polarization of opinions, the tendency to judge what others are doing or not. It’s easy to judge the policies being made, testing being done, personal choices being taken, organizational changes happening, without understanding the broader social factors, deeper personal histories, or contextual stories behind them. It’s easy to judge someone else, or feel myself judged, for having a different threshold of risk. Lastly, people have reacted in self-protection, as the rush to buy out paper products from Costco these days attests to. 

The church’s response, Dave argued, should be the opposite of these reactions. Rather than relying primarily on the latest information, we should be people led by the Holy Spirit. We need to be soaked in prayer and contemplation, to start and end each day as beloved children of our Father, even more at this time than any other. It’s good to stay informed, but our wisdom comes ultimately from walking in step each day with the Spirit who is alive and in us. Rather than becoming polarized in our opinions, we ought to be people marked by humility. We should feel okay admitting we don’t know everything. We should be more willing to listen and understand than to complain or air our views. 

Lastly, the church should be people who respond not from self-protection or fear, but from love and sacrificial courage. Andy Crouch talks in his article about how times of scarcity and threat can bring about exploitative, ethical, or redemptive modes of action. Exploitative action occurs when someone takes advantage of situations to protect themselves at any cost. Ethical action is doing what is right and trusting others to do the same. But Christians, he says, are called beyond that to redemptive action, “which is characterized by creative restoration through sacrifice… [making] courageous, creative, sacrificial choices that restore what has been broken.” We as the church ought to ask, how is this an extraordinary opportunity to be the hands and feet of Christ? One of our younger neighbors sent out an email offering to make grocery runs for any elderly folks on the street. Dave worked extra shifts doing video visits with people who may require testing for coronavirus. I see in all of that courage, and creativity, and sacrifice. The reality is, we are people who enter every day into an abundance of steadfast love from our God. He loves us more than is necessary, and his love does not change, no matter what else does. We should be the faces of that love to the people around us.

Ministry Of Presence

“Then he gave orders to the centurion that he should be kept in custody but have some liberty, and that none of his friends should be prevented from attending to his needs.” – Acts 24:23

Some of us are probably feeling closer now to being able to empathize with Paul in his period of interminable imprisonment. One person wrote in a New York Times article: “Quarantine is one of the many waiting rooms of life, and its own special circle of hell for people raised with the illusion that we control our destinies. We prefer to believe that anything can be overcome if we just try hard enough. But there is no trying in quarantine. There is only the sitting, and, if you wish to retain your hold on your sanity, the letting go. What comes next? No one knows.”

Paul certainly didn’t know. He was shipped from one Roman politician to the next, from motives and for periods of time entirely out of his control. One of the hardest things about the recent changes is the not-knowing: not knowing what will be canceled next when, how things will now look, how long it will all last. I find myself refreshing news feeds, wanting to know and predict and control, but we can’t know. We are in a situation where we don’t know. And we have less to distract ourselves from anything other than just being. 

I’m finding that, ironically, all this social distancing is making me ask, what does it mean to be present? What does it mean to be present with and for each other? We’re used to presence occurring within the framework of various external structures, like school drop-offs, work routines, church services—but now we’re having to reexamine what it actually means to connect meaningfully with another person. To “be” with them, not “do” with them, or fit the being in-between the doing. This is a time that can expose the underlying loneliness and isolation we feel. That makes us rethink our habits of connecting with others. And that is not necessarily a bad thing. It can be a chance to reflect and even to experiment. Instead of seeing faces pass by during a Sunday morning service, perhaps we stop to think about those people and send one of them a text. Instead of getting ready for one activity after another, perhaps we sit on the couch with our kids and read a new book to them all afternoon. 

Last night, our small group decided to still meet. We typically meet in the church building, which has never felt anything more than functional, but last night was different. We washed our hands, served the food, ate outside, lingered and talked and laughed and prayed: and there was something symbolic somehow, about us sitting in this space that was now otherwise empty. The conversation wasn’t always profound. We didn’t follow an agenda or study. But I felt the ministry of everyone’s presence. There is something powerful, and powerfully Christ-like, in the simple determination to be present. There is something valuable offered in that presence alone. All the activities and services in the world can’t necessarily bring it: but it can be found in the simple intention of a few people connecting with each other. It gave me hope, that we’ll continue to find ways to do this, even if it can’t keep being in person.

A Time For Selah

“Selah.” – Psalm 3:2, 4, 8

This feels like a time of disorientation and isolation, with event cancellations happening to unprecedented degrees and in unprecedented ways. It feels destabilizing having things that I thought for sure would happen just disappear, not knowing what to expect next week or three months down the line.

We’re cycling back through the Psalms, and it struck me on this reading that Psalm 3 has the highest density of selah’s of any chapter in the book (the next three runner-ups are Psalms 32 and 46, which have 3 in 11 verses, and Psalm 67, which has 2 in 7 verses). No one knows for sure what selah means, though scholars guess “pause, silence.” It is a word that occurs not in the text itself, but as a notation in the margin. In a way, this entire time is like one big selah in our lives: a pause, a stop, an interruption from some force outside of the script of our lives.

Why are there more selah’s in this psalm than any other? David wrote it during an unexpectedly disruptive time in his life, when he was forced to abandon all routine in the face of a rebellion led by his son. Perhaps in this time of uncertainty, David felt an even greater need to stop and meditate on words like these: “But you, O Lord, are a shield about me, my glory, and the lifter of my head… I lay down and slept; I woke again, for the Lord sustained me. I will not be afraid” (verses 3, 5-6). The word “sustain” here means “to lean upon, for rest and support.” David also says, “Arise, O Lord! Save me, O my God!” (verse 7). Times of instability can bring into greater relief both what we lean upon in our lives, and what the cry and longing of our souls are before God. 

But selah is also a reminder of the importance of community. Eugene Peterson writes in his book Answering God, “Like detectives sifting through the clues we find Selah; from it we deduce not a crime but a community… Some of [these psalms] most certainly originated in solitude, and all of them have been continued in solitude. But in the form in which they come to us, the only form in which they come to us, and therefore in the way they serve as our school of prayer, they are the prayers of a community before God in worship… Selah directed people who were together in prayer to do something or other together. Our prayer book, by the time we get our hands on it, has all these liturgical scribbles in the margins. Biblically, we are not provided with a single prayer for private devotions. The community in prayer, not the individuals in prayer, is basic and primary.”

David was not in a time of life when he could gather as he was accustomed to with his community. But nevertheless, they walk alongside him together (2 Samuel 15), and this little word in the margin is a reminder that, especially in times of disorientation and instability, our existence as a community has not changed. When we cannot meet as we usually do, how can we still pray in chorus together? How is this all an opportunity to rediscover what community truly means, what our faith truly means together? The time when David walked the unexpected path was the time he remembered more than any other that he was not really alone.

Turning And Seeing

“And as Josiah turned, he saw the tombs there on the mount. And he sent and took the bones out of the tombs and burned them on the altar.” – 2 Kings 23:16

I love the verbs in this verse: Josiah turned, and he saw. And as he turns, we see. We learn more about the details of the Israelites’ disobedience during Josiah’s repentance than we did during the reigns of the two evil kings that came before him, which is interesting, isn’t it? We learn that in God’s temple, there were kept vessels and altars for idols, houses for male cult prostitutes, and women who wove hangings for idols. We learn they worshipped not just false gods but the sun, moon, and stars. We learn of places made specifically for parents to burn their children as offerings. We learn of the geographical prominence of idolatrous altars and statues. We learn about the timeline of it all: in fact, this section reads like a reverse history lesson, with Josiah undoing the work of predecessors like Solomon and Jeroboam. It must not have been easy to uproot traditions, habits and job descriptions that ran back for generations.

But that is what Josiah does. Before restoring the practices of God’s law, he removes anything that stands against or could distract from God’s truth, and there is something to be relished in how ruthlessly thorough he is. Just when we think he’s done, he turns and unearths more bones in these tombs on the mount. 

Sometimes I too find that the more I turn to God, the more I see what I’m turning from. There is something about sin that blinds us. It numbs and habituates, rendering it difficult by nature to see how much we are in the grip of anger, greed, gossip, lust, anxiety, grumbling, selfishness, or any number of things. The more the light that is God’s law (Psalm 119:105) shines into those places, the more we see all the layers of the lure, grip and power of sin in our lives. We don’t see these things by staring straight at the sin itself. We see them by staring at God in his Word, and then turning back from that to see. 

The Bible says of Josiah, “Before him there was no king like him, who turned to the Lord with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might, according to all the Law of Moses, nor did any like him arise after him” (2 Kings 23:25). Wow. Yet even Josiah’s repentance was not enough to undo the sin of his forefathers, as we read in the very next verse: “Still the Lord did not turn from the burning of his great wrath.” It would take one from Josiah’s line, Jesus, to turn away God’s wrath from his people, to restore us who were dead, as dead as those bones in the tomb, to life in Christ. 

Selfies And Psalms

“Praise the Lord! Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him in his mighty heavens!” – Psalm 150:1

The selfie camera on my old phone was broken for the better part of a year, which I considered theologically profound, so I didn’t bother to fix it. Eventually I upgraded my phone, though, and rediscovered how positively odd and revolutionary it is to not only be completely aware of how I look to others, but be able to manipulate that image. No wonder people get so obsessed over their best selfie angle. No wonder an entire generation has been ushered into the “selfie age,” where we broadcast ourselves, desire personal fame, and have what David Brooks has termed “an unusual level of self-interest” and an “enlarged sense of self.” 

The Bible tells a completely different story. As Sally Lloyd-Jones writes in The Jesus Storybook Bible, “The Bible isn’t mainly about me and what I should be doing. It’s about God and what he has done.” And Psalm 150, this last of the psalms, speaks to that story. Take just one word: “heavens.” This is Greek raqiya, which means “to be clear, to be brilliant, to shine,” and it stretches both back to the beginning and forward into all eternity. In Genesis 1, this is the word for the expanse that God made: “And God said, ‘Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters… And God made the expanse… and God called the expanse Heaven.” In Ezekiel 1, this is the word for the expanse that is God’s eternal dwelling and the seat of his throne: “Over the heads of the living creatures there was the likeness of an expanse, shining like awe-inspiring crystal, spread out above their heads… And above the expanse over their heads there was the likeness of a throne, in appearance like sapphire.” In Daniel 12, this is the word for the brilliance of the wise: “And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above.”

This is a story that begins and ends with a God who creates and dwells in expanses that are the very embodiment and shining forth of his glory and power. And the first thing we must do is take our eyes off our screens and ourselves, and look up, at that expanse which calls to us. Because, amazingly, we are in the story. Psalm 150 is really describing our own future, we who will one day shine like the expanse above. As Tim Keller writes, “If we could praise God perfectly, we would love him completely and then our joy would be full. The new heavens and the new earth are perfect because everyone and everything is glorifying God fully and therefore enjoying him forever. Psalm 150 gives us a glimpse of that unimaginable future. So praise him everywhere (verse 1) for everything (verse 2) in every way (verses 3–5). ‘Let everything that has breath praise the Lord’ (verse 6).”

Words That Strike Fear

“Hezekiah received the letter from the hand of the messengers and read it; and Hezekiah went up to the house of the Lord and spread it before the Lord.” – 2 Kings 19:14

What’s going on with coronavirus can be a bit confusing. At the start, it was easy enough to follow developments at the public health department where Dave works. He remained both realistic and calm, giving me the sense that the people who knew what was going on seemed far less worried medically than the people who didn’t. But as the situation evolved, it became clear that there’s a level of generalized anxiety and fear, and all kinds of social, economic, and legal factors playing into various policy decisions, that make it all complex and sometimes confusing, quite aside from a purely medical standpoint. 

I made the mistake of reading one too many news articles the other day, and could suddenly understand the fear and panic I hear from moms at school or people buying out face masks. It’s difficult to face something uncontrollable, potentially (however unlikely) deadly, and essentially invisible. What does one do? How far does one go? Suddenly it’s difficult to sort out precautions coming from real knowledge and care for others, and those driven by fear and anxiety.

When the field commander for the Assyrian army, called the Rabshakeh, attacks Judah, he doesn’t do so with physical weapons. He uses words. The Judean envoy, realizing how dangerous he is, ask him to not speak in the “language of Judah within the hearing of the people who are on the wall” (2 Kings 18:26), but he does, and what he sends over that wall are words to strike fear. You should be afraid of me, he says. You should doubt your king; don’t listen to your king; you are being deceived; I can offer you more; God cannot deliver you; look at the evidence around you! And the Assyrians keep speaking even from a distance, the second time sending a letter to King Hezekiah along the same lines: don’t trust God; He is deceiving you; look at the evidence.

There is one common thing in how Hezekiah reacts both times: he seeks God’s word. And, save for an expression of grief and lament, it is the first thing he does. He does not gather the latest statistics, read the news, consult neighboring nations, or even sit and fret on the words themselves. The first time, he sends for the prophet Isaiah. The second time, he went and spread his troubles before God himself. He talks to God, and before he shares his struggles, which he does, he acknowledges God’s sovereignty and power. And when God ultimately answers, there is no mistaking that power: He sends an angel to strike down 185,000 in the Assyrian camp. The Assyrians woke the next morning surrounded by corpses.

I don’t know why it is so much easier for me to read article after article, than to simply stop and pray to my sovereign God. The recognition of elements beyond my control is but an invitation to go to the God who can both deliver us from fear and give us wisdom. Hezekiah, the king, the person who is supposed to have all the answers, who is surrounded by advisors, does one simple thing. He takes the fearful letter, and he spreads it before the Lord. We too can take our troubles, however frightening or uncontrollable, and spread them before God in prayer. We have a God who answers. As Isaiah reminds us, “Thus says the Lord: Do not be afraid because of the words that you have heard” (2 Kings 19:6).

Revise Our Taking

by Walter Brueggemann

You, you giver!

You have given light and life to the world;

You have given freedom from Pharaoh to your people Israel;

You have given your only Son for the sake of the world;

You have given yourself to us;

You have given and forgiven,

And you remember our sin no more.

And we, in response, are takers:

We take eagerly what you give us;

We take from our neighbors near at hand as is acceptable;

We take from our unseen neighbors greedily and acquisitively;

We take from our weak neighbors thoughtlessly;

We take all that we can lay our hands on.

It dawns on us that our taking does not match your giving.

In this Lenten season revise our taking,

That it may be grateful and disciplined,

Even as you give in ways generous and overwhelming.

Amen.

Hands

“You yourselves know that these hands ministered to my necessities and to those who were with me. In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’” – Acts 20:34-35

I have always been struck by the poignance of Paul’s farewell to the Ephesian elders. It’s not hard to imagine him with extended hands here, a laborer’s hands. It’s likely he continued tent-making in Ephesus as he had in Corinth (Acts 18:2), working with leather or cloth made of goat’s hair, using ropes and loops to fashion them into a product that could be sold. His were hands that bore the marks of his profession, work he did not for personal profit, (“I coveted no one’s silver or gold or apparel”) but to serve. One can’t help hearing the words he later penned in a letter to these same people: “…let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need” (Ephesians 4:28).

There is something about this I appreciate as a mostly-stay-at-home mom. This is what we do, isn’t it? We use our hands to take care of necessities and minister to the weak: we wash dishes, load and fold the laundry, wipe butts and noses, dress and feed and tidy. It is an unending stream of manual labor, but it is inseparable from our ministry. The labor is our ministry. The word for “ministry” is Greek hypereteo, from huperetes, which means “rower”: the people hidden unseen in the bottom of the ship, endlessly moving the oars to power the ship forward. It was a job no one wanted, that condemned slaves were consigned to, but Paul says that is the way he has willingly loved and served others.

Not that long before this, another man appeared to friends he would leave soon, and said, “see my hands” (John 20:27). Jesus’ hands too bore the scars of his labors, first as a carpenter who came laboring into this earth in human form, then as one crucified. His hands said it all, bearing the mortal marks of the nails, yet come back to life, able to touch Thomas and the others. Able to stoke a charcoal fire and clean out fish as he continued his labors (John 21:9). He himself lived out the words he spoke, that it is a blessing to be able to labor in our giving, however unseen, whatever the marks they leave on our hands.

King Ahaz

“When King Ahaz went to Damascus to meet Tiglath-pileser king of Assyria, he saw the altar that was at Damascus. And King Ahaz sent to Uriah the priest a model of the altar, and its pattern, exact in all its details.” - 2 Kings 16:10

King Ahaz had a lot going for him. In fact, he’s not unlike someone we would picture meeting in the Bay Area: he was young (reigning in his twenties and thirties), loved innovation and technology (introduced the Babylonian sundial to Jerusalem, 2 Kings 20:11), had access to the latest information (prophets Isaiah and Micah spoke during his reign), and was interested in spirituality (involved himself in sacred spaces and practices). But he had no real relationship with God, and this despite benefiting from God’s deliverance in battle (2 Kings 16:5), having the influence of a godly father (2 Kings 15:34), and being of the line of David.

Instead, he emulates those around him. When the tide turns against him in battle, he looks not to God for help, but makes an alliance with the Assyrian king, just as he sees the Syrians and Israelites doing. But far from it being an equal alliance, Ahaz declares himself their servant, literally slave (2 Kings 16:17), giving the Assyrians treasures from the temple and palace. And when he sees the Assyrian altar in Damascus, he decides to make one exactly like it for himself.

Assyrian altars were quite different from Jewish ones: they were smaller, and had peculiar and unmistakable ornamentation. As one article put it, “Careful instructions would be needed for workmen who had never seen the sort of object which they were required to produce.” In a distorted echo of Exodus 38, Ahaz now puts himself in the place of God, directing the priest in constructing an idolatrous altar which he puts in the place of God’s bronze altar in the temple, and upon which he makes burnt, grain, drink, and peace offerings. It’s a strange and somewhat hideous amalgam of religions: he is in Solomon’s temple, making offerings from Levitical law, but on an Assyrian altar, to Damascene gods. 2 Chronicles 28:23 tells us something of his motivations: “For he… said, ‘Because the gods of the kings of Syria helped them, I will sacrifice to them that they may help me.’” 

The next sentence in 2 Chronicles is compelling: “But they were the ruin of him and of all Israel.” God is not one in a line of many. We cannot keep the convenient or traditional parts of our faith and mix them in with what seems to be working for everyone else. This is not to say we can’t make our faith culturally relevant, but we must always be going back to God’s word as we bring forward His truths to our current day.

Ahaz had auspicious beginnings: but he ended up being one of the worst kings, going on to make idolatrous altars “in every city of Judah” (2 Chronicles 28:25). Perhaps, more than anything else, his story is a warning to us: of how incredibly easy it can be to be so caught up by what others are doing, to trust so much in worldly patterns of success, to care so much about what someone in power thinks of us, that we lose a right view of God in our lives.