Thoughts on 2 Chronicles 24

Today’s reading: 2 Chronicles 24; Revelation 9

One person’s choice to be faithful to the Lord can have much a much broader impact than we tend to give it credit for.

It’s easy to excuse sin and unfaithfulness in our lives as being not all that important or impactful. We tell ourselves, “This only affects me, and sure, maybe it’ll make me feel a little less close to God, but it’s really not that big of a deal,” and so we excuse our sin and choose to indulge in it. On the one hand, we don’t honestly know how even our “small sins” may/will impact other people, but on the other hand, we don’t know how broad of an impact our choice to stay faithful to the Lord might have.

In 2 Chronicles 24, Jehoiada stands as a bulwark, protecting the faith of an entire nation of people, as long as he is alive. What’s worth noting though is that Jehoiada doesn’t keep people anchored in faithfulness to God by preaching moving sermons on a weekly basis that keep people running on a continual spiritual high, nor does he do it by force, but seemingly by the influence of a faithful life. Jehoiada put his faith into practice when he protected Joash and ultimately raised him to the throne, and that exercise of his faith gave him influence with the king. The result was that, even though Jehoiada didn’t always live perfectly faithfully himself, he kept the king, and thus the people, faithfully serving Yahweh until his death at 130 years old.

It might be easy to write off Jehoiada’s influence as superficial because, as soon as he died, Joash was influenced by others and led the people after other gods, meaning Jehoiada clearly was unable to instill sufficient personal conviction in Joash to continue in faithfulness on his own, but that misses an important point. The Chronicler even says directly that, “Joash did what was right in the eyes of the Lord all the days of Jehoiada the priest.” While Joash’s faith may not have been sufficiently anchored to keep him moving in the right direction without Jehoiada, his faith was by no means false.

Could Jehoiada have done a better job instilling personal conviction about his faith in Joash? Maybe. That is probably a great question and line of reasoning for another day, but it also betrays a very individualistic view of following the Lord.

Christians today, especially in Evangelical circles, tend to focus a lot on “personal faith.” I think a lot of Christians today would dismiss Joash’s initial faith as invalid or insufficient because it didn’t stay strong without the external force of Jehoiada keeping it in check. But since when did faith in Yahweh become an individual sport? Faith was a community effort in the Old Testament, and the church Jesus instated was a community effort as well. How many times do we read, in the New Testament, about how essential the Body of Christ is, with its individual members performing various individual functions? But if our faith is supposed to be lived out in community, why would that same faith wavering in isolation from that community lead us to question the genuineness of that faith?

Now, let’s be clear, we should certainly be seeking to grow in personal faith and love such that we can be these kinds of influences for others, but not being at that point in no way means that our personal faith is invalid. I remember, earlier on in my Christian life, meeting a young woman from another country who was trying to start a house church movement in her city, and who really had no consistent community around her at the time. I remember thinking how impossible it would be for me to follow God in that context. Without the support of people to challenge me, encourage me, guide me, help me, and a thousand other things, I would not have continued to follow the Lord for very long. But that doesn't mean the faith I had at the time was illegitimate, just younger and less mature (though, if I'm being honest, I would struggle in that situation even now...). The life of faith is intended to be a communal effort.

Ultimately, we don't know whether God wants to use us as a Jehoiada for someone (or someones) else. Jehoiada was a priest, yes, but he was just a normal guy. He was no one special that the faith of the nation of Judah should ebb and flow by his influence, but, special or not, that's exactly how God used him. And God may very well desire to use us in the same ways. So you're not in a position of leadership in the church? Neither was Jehoiada the leader of the nation, but he could strengthen and encourage the leader who kept things moving in the right direction. How many leaders, pastors, teachers, missionaries, etc. are keeping the course and leading their people well because they have someone, or a couple someones, in their lives, playing the role of Jehoiada, helping them to keep moving in the right direction?

I guess my overall point is that you may see your own spiritual life as relatively insignificant, and/or your choices to remain faithful as having little real impact, but you have no way of know how God may be using, or wanting to use, your faithfulness as an anchor that protects, strengthens, and emboldens the faith of many many others.

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Thoughts on 2 Chronicles 16

Today’s reading: 2 Chronicles 16-17; Revelation 1

It doesn’t matter how faithful you’ve been in the past, if you don’t continuously choose to remain faithful, sin will creep in and lead you astray from the Lord.

King Asa started out so well. 2 Chronicles 14 tells us that, “Asa did what was good and right in the eyes of the Lord his God.” As a result, God gave him and his kingdom peace for 10 years. Then, when the army of Ethiopia came against Judah, Asa tuned to the Lord and He delivered them from the massive and powerful army that had come against them. After this, a prophet came and reminded Asa to stay faithful, and Asa’s response was to pursue even greater faithfulness to Yahweh. As a result, God gave them peace for another 25 years.

But then, in chapter 16, when Baasha, king of Israel, started moving against Judah, rather than trusting in the Lord as he had previously, Asa turned to the king of Syria for help. In fact, more than just seeking help from Syria, Asa took money out of the temple to pay for their help. This means it wasn’t just a thoughtless reaction, but an intentional choice to trust Syria over Yahweh, taking what had been dedicated to Yahweh and giving it instead to the Syrians.

This could have been considered a simple lapse in judgement, but then when God sends a prophet to confront Asa about his breach of faith, rather than admitting his wrong and repenting, Asa throws the prophet in prison and lashes out against his people as well. Then, to show us where his heart remained, when Asa fell sick, a sickness that was evidently severe enough to lead to death, even in that he did not seek help from the Lord.

Asa is an important warning to the faithful Christian, expressly because he started out so well. Not only did Asa do what was right before the Lord when establishing his kingdom and when it was easy, but he also made the difficult decision to trust in the Lord in the face of overwhelming odds, setting him and his people on a course of faithfulness for decades to come. But, evidently, his heart started to drift over those decades. Asa never overtly rejected the Lord during those years, but when he is again confronted with an opportunity to trust in the Lord (and in a lesser way than he had in the past), he didn’t hesitate to trust instead in his own resources, wisdom, and connections. And his response to being confronted about that choice shows us further the disposition of his heart at that point.

We can’t hang our hats on past faithfulness to the Lord and expect we will stay faithful and finish well. The faithful life is one of continued, daily choices toward faithfulness, in the big things as well as the small, that keep our faith rooted and anchored in the Lord, not drifting slowly and gradually from that anchor. 

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Thoughts on 2 Chronicles 7

Today’s reading: 2 Chronicles 7; 1 John 3

2 Chronicles 7 gives us another great reminder of what it is that God is most looking for from His people.

At the end of the chapter, when God is making promises to Solomon, those promises are conditional upon Solomon’s faithfulness. God specifically says, “And as for you, if you will walk before me as David your father walked, doing according to all that I have commanded you and keeping my statutes and my rules, then I will establish your royal throne, as I covenanted with David your father, saying, ‘You shall not lack a man to rule Israel.’” As great as this sounds, hasn’t Solomon already violated those statutes and rules? We saw at the end of 2 Chronicles 1, for example, that Solomon was stockpiling horses and chariots, which God had commanded His kings were not to do, and we’re also told he was getting a lot of them from Egypt despite the fact that God had forbidden them from that as well. So if Solomon is already in violation of God’s statutes and rules, is there any hope of Solomon ending up on the right side of these promises?

The short answer is, “yes,” because God goes on to clarify what He’s looking for from Solomon, saying, “But if you turn aside and forsake my statutes and commandments that I have set before you, and go and serve other gods and worship them, then I will pluck you up from my land that I have given you…” The thing God is most concerned with is not Solomon’s ability to keep the minutiae of laws and instructions without ever faltering or sinning, but that Solomon maintains his faithfulness to Yahweh.

We have seen and talked about this over and over again as we have gone through the Scriptures the last couple years, but I don’t think we can ever be reminded of it enough; what God most wants from us is our faithfulness to, and trust in, Him over all else.

It can be so easy to get caught up in all the things we are and aren’t doing for God, and I have met a lot of Christians who, when struggling with sin, start to fear that maybe God doesn’t love them or will cast them out if they can’t “get it together” and stop sinning. But God created us, and He knows us and our weaknesses better than anyone. God knows we will never be able to stop sinning entirely, and He knew Israel could never keep perfectly every law and rule He had set before them, but if they stayed faithful to Him, not running after other gods, that was enough. God is most concerned with the disposition of our hearts toward Him.

I hear so many people with a wrong view of God in the Old Testament, thinking that He judged Israel for not being quite good enough and not keeping His laws faithfully enough, but God tells Solomon what we should think when we see Israel’s judgement, “Then they will say, ‘Because they abandoned the Lord, the God of their fathers who brought them out of the land of Egypt, and laid hold on other gods and worshiped them and served them. Therefore he has brought all this disaster on them.’”

God is not vengeful, watching His people, waiting for them to step a toe out of line, ready to swoop in with judgement and condemnation, but is patient and loving, wanting to bless His people, but also not abiding by His people taking His blessings on the one hand and running off to worship other gods on the other hand. 

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Thoughts on 2 Chronicles 1 & 2 Peter 1

Today’s reading: 2 Chronicles 1; 2 Peter 1

I always feel like Solomon should have finished better than he did, and I think 2 Peter 1 gives us a good indication as to why he didn’t.

Solomon starts out so promising. When God asks him what He shall do for him, Solomon asks for wisdom and knowledge to govern God’s people well, and God answers the request by granting him great wisdom and knowledge. You would think that the king of God's people, having been granted near endless wisdom and great knowledge, would be in the best position to live his life faithfully for God, but then Solomon ends up going completely off the rails spiritually. What we see from Peter today though is that the knowledge and wisdom are only one part of a life lived faithfully for the Lord.

This is what Peter says:

For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. For whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins.

Peter sees knowledge as an indispensable quality of a healthy spiritual life, but it is important to recognize that it is one quality among a handful, and it is the sum total that Peter says will ensure rich entrance into the eternal kingdom of Christ, not any one quality in particular. For Solomon's part, if nothing else, he certainly ended up lacking the self-control to accompany his knowledge. He knew full-well that God had warned the king not to multiply wives, as well as not to marry foreign women who would lead him astray after their gods, but then Solomon did both of these things.

This has been a convicting confluence of Scriptures for me to be thinking about today. I know I've talked about this before, but I very much enjoy learning the Bible and/or learning about the Bible. I have spent years studying it and reading about it, and I couldn't even begin to guess at the number of hours worth of teachings, podcasts, youtube videos, etc. that I have listen to about the Bible over the years. On the one hand, I think I could probably say that my knowledge of the Bible is well above average, especially for a lay Christian, because I really just love it, and I think that's probably a really good thing to enjoy. But on the other hand, it is easy for me to look to how much I know and am learning as something of a substitute for the daily practice of my faith. Yes, I have faith and an abundance of knowledge, but what of virtue, self-control, steadfastness, godliness, brotherly affection, and love? Am I as diligent to pursue these things as I am to pursue knowledge? No, I'm really not...

I want to finish well. I don't just want to be the kind of person who knows a lot about the Bible, I want to be the kind of person whose life is a testament to the grace and goodness of the God who went to His death on a cross in order to redeem me from my sins and bring me into eternal life. I don't want to go the way of Solomon and, despite a wealth of accumulated knowledge, ultimately wander from a life of faithfulness to Him.

Solomon, in all his great wisdom and knowledge, is a very dire warning to me.

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Thoughts on 1 Chronicles 20-21

Today’s reading: 1 Chronicles 20-21; James 1

The omission and inclusion of content in today’s chapters is what first drew my attention, reading through Chronicles in the past, to something being “off” about these books.

In chapter 20, specifically, the author is drawing our attention to the fact that he is purposely omitting important content. He starts the chapter with a very familiar (and damning) formulation, “In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle…” If you are very familiar with the Old Testament, this is exactly how the story of David and Bathsheba starts. The author opens the chapter this way, setting up the expectation that he is going to tell the story of David’s great moral failing in taking the wife of one of his mighty men and then murdering that man to cover it up, but then he instead presents only a positive/victorious picture. Rather than David committing adultery and murder, he conquers a city and his men defeat the remaining descendants of the giant clans. Starting the chapter like he does tells us that the author is not unaware of David’s sin, or trying to hide it, but is, instead, focusing on the positive and not the negative.

But then, in chapter 21, we do get a story of David’s sin and failure in conducting a census, so what’s going on??

This gets to what I have mentioned previously in this book, that I believe the author’s intent in Chronicles is to track the promise of the eternal king Messiah coming from the line of David.

In this regard David’s sin against other people isn’t nearly as important as his sin against God. If anything is going to derail God’s promise to bring the Messiah through David’s line, it would be David’s overt sin against God, and in choosing to conduct the census despite Joab begging him to reconsider doing this, David really couldn’t be making any more overt choice to disregard the Lord’s commands. This story tracks both David’s repentance and the fact that God, despite David’s direct actions against His instructions, doesn’t revoke his promise to David.

This is why I think the author leaves out the story of David and Bathsheba (despite pointing directly to it with the opening of chapter 20), but includes the story of David performing the census.

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Thoughts on 1 Chronicles 17

Today’s reading: 1 Chronicles 17; Hebrews 12

The life of David presents a few reminders of the importance of prayer, even in our areas of competence and pursuit of the Lord.

It is easy to fall into the habit of turning to the Lord in prayer only for those things which seem beyond our reach or out of our control, and to rely on personal strength/ability for the rest. A couple days ago I intended to write about this when David was going to battle and decided to pray beforehand, and God told him, when he prayed, to go around behind the army and to let the Lord’s army fight for him. If David, in his competence as a military general, had just gone in as he normally would, he very well may have won the battle, but he would have missed the chance to see and experience the Lord’s deliverance.

Then here too, in our reading this morning, what David wants to do for the Lord just seems like a straightforward good thing to do. In fact, it seems so much the obvious choice that when David asks Nathan the prophet about it, Nathan doesn't even hesitate to give the project the thumbs up and walk away. What could possibly be wrong with David wanting to build a temple to honor and glorify God? And yet, this was not what God wanted from David.

To me, this is an important reminder of the importance of stopping to take the time to involve the Lord in even the things which seem straightforward and obvious. God did not intervene to stop David from running after a sinful, selfish, godless pursuit, but rather a good and godly one. The problem was not that what David wanted to do was bad, but that David was not the man who was to accomplish the work.

I so easily fall into a rut of just pushing forward with whatever is in front of me and not actually stopping along the way to seek the Lord. Whether out of personal competence, or whether it's because it just looks/feels like a good or godly things to do, I just assume I see things rightly and press on. But no amount of competence or "obviousness" truly makes a situation worth not involving the Lord in it. 

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Thoughts on 1 Chronicles 15

Today’s reading: 1 Chronicles 15; Hebrews 10

It is not honoring to God to accomplish God-honoring work in a non-God-honoring way.

As David gathers the priests and Levites to bring the ark up to the City of David he says, “Because you did not carry it the first time, the Lord our God broke out against us, because we did not seek him according to the rule.” The fact of that matter is that preparing a place for the tent to be set up and for the ark to rest was a God-honoring desire on David’s part, but putting the ark on a cart pulled by oxen when God had specifically declared that it was only ever to be carried from place to place by Levites carrying it on their shoulders using the poles through the rings set into the base was not a God-honoring means of accomplishing it.

It is easy to fall into a mindset that God is most concerned with outcomes. Clearly success matters in the things we pursue, and how much more true does that seem to be in spiritual matters, where eternities are on the line, than in other, more mundane, areas of life? We can’t lose sight of the fact that we are serving the infinite creator God of all that exists. There is absolutely nothing that He is unable to accomplish fully without our help or influence. God has chosen to include us in His work, but there is nothing we are accomplishing for Him that He could not accomplish for Himself if He so desired. So when, in serving the Lord, we adopt a mindset that the ends are more important than the means, we lose sight of the reality that we are serving the God with power to ordain any ends He desires, and who will most bless the means that are most faithful to Him. Given that reality, the ends that we are able to accomplish by our own means are so much less important than our faithfulness in pursuing the work God has before us according to His means.

The best outcomes will always arise from the greatest faithfulness to the Lord.

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