We have been journeying the Garden of Eden to the Garden city envisioned in Revelation for just under a year now. It has all been leading up to this: The death of Jesus on the cross. The crucifixion is the pivotal moment in which God finally provides an answer to the promise he hinted at in Genesis 3 – that one day one would come who would defeat sin. The crucifixion is bridges the separation that has existed ever since sin entered the world. The crucifixion is what finally opens up the way for God and man to be together. Today I want to focus on Jesus’ triumphal death cry “Tetelestai” – a Greek phrase which means “It is finished”. What did Jesus mean when he said this and what does it mean for us?

Fulfillment of the Law

The first "it" that was finished on the cross is the need to fulfill the law, to live a perfect life. All throughout scripture there is a distinction between living a righteous and pleasing life for God, or living an unrighteous life which ultimately lead to rejection by God. Even though many people in the Old Testament strove to live righteous lives, none of them could live perfectly righteously. So even though there were people who were righteous by human standards, even a single wrong thought proves that humanity is indelibly stained with sin. For anyone to be truly righteous, to truly live a life that reflects the moral perfection of God, they had to live a life that completely fulfilled and kept the law God gave Israel. When Jesus died, he died being the only person ever to accomplish this massive task. By His life, death, and resurrection he completed the righteous requirements of the law on behalf of humanity. This is how Jesus himself understood his life. In Matthew 5:17, Jesus points out that His purpose to fulfill the law, not to abolish it. When he died, he had successfully lived a truly righteous life.

When we think about this as part of the grand story of the Bible, this becomes incredibly important. In living a perfect life, Jesus replaces Adam as the firstborn of the new creation. What do I mean by that? Adam was the firstborn of creation, the first human God created. God put the world under Adam’s care and authority and all of humanity fall under Adam’s federal headship. The reason we are all sinful is because we are all born of Adam. As we have been following the garden to garden city story we have seen various ways in which people have tried and failed to deal with this. When sin reigned, God washed the earth clean through a flood by saving a “righteous man” in Noah. But Noah soon proved to be an unrighteous man himself – the flood didn’t wipe away sin. Then God chose for himself a faithful man, Abraham – the father of faith. But he proved to be unrighteous too, lying about his wife. Jacob his grandson was a betrayer. Moses killed a man. David committed adultery and then had the woman’s husband killed. Solomon, the wisest king ever, fell to idol worship. The list goes on and on. Every righteous person, had that same fatal, sinful flaw, inherited from our first ancestor: Adam.

So we need a new ancestor, a new family head. A family head that is truly righteous. Jesus lived the perfect life so that he could be our new, perfectly righteous, family head. And when Jesus said “It is finished”, he was in part declaring that he had done it.

Atonement for Sin

The second "it" that Jesus finished on the cross is the need for atonement. In the Old Testament God had given Israel an entire priestly system to represent the forgiveness of sin. This sacrificial system, centred around the annual Day of Atonement, where sacrifices were made on behalf of the people every year. However, the problem with the entire priestly system is that forgiveness of sin didn’t stick. It was a temporary measure for covering sins. These sacrifices had to be repeated year after year, highlighting the continuous and unending cycle of sin and the need for purification.

However, when Jesus dies on the cross, this almost endless cycle finally ends. He is the ultimate sin offering to which the Old Testament sacrificial system ultimately pointed. He fulfilled and surpassed the sacrificial system because he permanently atoned for the sins of his people. His once-for-all sacrifice not only satisfies the debt of sin but also takes away the need for any further offerings to atone for wrongdoing. The key however is that we need to be covered by Jesus’ blood. As with the Passover lamb, way back in Egypt, His sacrifice is only effective if you are covered by him. We need to accept this gift of purification through faith for it to apply to us. But when we do, we are adopted into God’s family, and we come under the headship of Jesus.

Restoration of Relationship with God

The final "it" that was finished on the cross is the separation from God caused by sin. Since the fall in Eden, we have been cut off from God, unable to bridge the gap created by our sin. The Old Testament has lots of examples of God's holiness and the need to for him to be separate from his people as a result. Perhaps the best example of this is the curtain that separated the Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle and the Temple from people. In the way these buildings were constructed, God’s presence resided in the Holy of Holies, and the temple curtain, physically cut humanity off from God. Only the High Priest was allowed to enter into God’s presence in the Holy of Holies, and he was only allowed to do so once a year on the Day of Atonement, and only after he had been ritualistically purified himself. If you entered into God’s presence without qualification and without purification, you would be consumed and burnt up.

However, this radically changes when Jesus goes to the cross. When he cries "It is finished" and dies, the curtain that separated God from humanity is torn up. Or rather I should say it was torn down – it rips from top to bottom as God himself tears up the thing that separated him from his people. It is finished, the separation has ended, and all who would come to God through faith in Jesus are now welcome. We get free and unfettered access to God the Father, something that has not happened since the days of the Garden of Eden, when humanity used to walk and talk with God in the cool of the day. Incredible!

The crucifixion of Jesus Christ is the turning point in the Bible story. Until now the story has been all about how we need to get back to God, how God promised to restore us to him, but for every solution to fall short in some way. But this is no longer the case.

When Jesus says "Tetelestai," it is finished, he declares that he has successfully completed the law’s demands. He has atoned for our sin, once for all. And he has done everything that is necessary for full restoration in our relationship with God. His declaration invites us into a new family, with a new family head, one where our identity and purpose are defined not by our failures but by the victorious work of Jesus.

And that changes everything… but more on that, next time.

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Over the last several weeks we have been looking at Jesus’ life and we saw how he lived a radically different life to the rest of the world. We saw that he declared himself as the promised Messiah, that when he started his ministry he gave Satan his marching orders, and how his ministry on earth undid all the consequences of sin on the earth. In our last chapter we looked at how Jesus spent the last night before he went to the cross with his disciples training them in how to live radically like this.

If Jesus was such a great teacher, lived such a pure and holy life, the question we need to wrestle with today is why did the people of Jesus’ day actually kill him? If he was so good, why was he murdered?

The answer, as is often the case, is “It depends”. Let’s look at a couple of groups who had a role to play.

The Sanhedrin

The Sanhedrin, the Jewish religious council, perceived Jesus as a threat to their theological and social authority. His teachings, which often contradicted their legalistic interpretations, attracted large followings, inciting envy and fear within these leaders. This fear, compounded by the potential loss of status and control, propelled them towards plotting His demise. In fact when we read the gospels we see that the religious leaders move from curiosity, to anger, to outright murderous plotting. This from people who were supposed to represent God to the people. Jesus was killed as a religious upstart challenging the religious authorities of the day. The church today really needs to reflect on this – we need to remember that we represent the Christ who was rejected by the religious authorities of the day. The church at times can act more like the religious authorities of the day, then the Christ whom they are to represent. If Jesus was born today, would the religious authorities of today have done the same to him?

The Roman Governor

Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, despite finding no fault in Jesus, handed him over to crucified. While the Sanhedrin wanted to get rid of Jesus for religious reasons, Pilate wanted to get rid of Jesus for political reasons. When Jesus was taken before Pilate, a crowd had gathered calling for Jesus’ head. Pilate was faced with a potential uprising, and like so many political leaders before (and after), Pilate chose to preserve his political standing over justice. It is so often easier to bow to political or social pressure than it is to be just and to do the right thing. We human beings all suffer from this same affliction. We tend to prioritise ourselves and our standing with others, over God and his justice. Every time we look the other way when the wrong thing is done, every time we join in with doing the wrong thing just to fit in, we join with Pilate. Pilate serves as a very real reminder that we have a responsibility to Christ, and that following him is often costly. Pilate ended up washing his hands to say that he personally bore no guilt for Jesus’ death. But as Christians today we don’t have that luxury. In fact we do bear personal guilt for Jesus’ death, and when we deny him, or join in with those around us in doing what we know is wrong, we spit in the face of him who died in our place.

The Crowd

In the gospels, the crowd is a fickle and changing beast. Only a week before, the crowd was shouting “Hosanna” when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. A week ago they were praising him as promised Messiah, welcoming him as the new King David. Now, but a week later they are crying out for Jesus’ death. Influenced by the religious leaders and the priests, their cry has turned from praise to “Crucify”. This fickleness highlights our susceptibility to being swayed by persuasive leaders and the prevailing sentiment of the masses, even to the point of condemning the innocent. We need to be on the lookout and guard against this tendency in ourselves. This is why an external source of truth is so important to the Christian, this is why we need the Bible. Whenever we feel tempted to change our views, especially on matters “the whole world” seems to disagree with us on, we always have an unchanging source of truth we can turn to. We are to be people of the book, not people who are swayed by every wind of doctrine that comes blowing along in the wind.

The Divine Purpose in Human Actions

While the Sanhedrin’s actions led to Jesus’ crucifixion because he threatened their religious power, and while Pilate handed Jesus over for political reasons, and while the crowd killed Jesus because they were swayed by others, Jesus did not die unwillingly. His death was planned all along. The actions of the people in the story, paint a pretty grim picture of humanity's fallen nature, but they paradoxically align with God's redemptive plan. Notice, that when Pilate washed his hands clean, he said “I am innocent of this man’s blood”. How did the crowd respond? “Let his blood be upon us and our children.” (Matthew 27:25). The crowd was unknowingly praying for their own spiritual cleansing. Jesus’ death and crucifixion happened during the Passover, a time when the people were supposed to remember how smearing the blood of a lamb caused God’s judgement and death to pass over them. In the Levitical priestly system, it was the sprinkling of blood on the people and on the altar that represented people being washed clean from their sin.

When the crowd calls for Jesus’ blood to be upon them, they are unknowingly praying for salvation. God was answering a prayer they did not even know they were praying. But Jesus’ blood did flow for them, and by his wounds they were in fact healed.

The question for us is, what do we do with Jesus? Do we want to reject him as someone who threatens our beliefs? That is a very Sanhedrin-y thing to do. Do we want to silence him because he threatens our way of life? That’s a very Pilate-y thing to do. Do we want to jettison his influence over our lives, because the Bible’s teachings aren’t in step with what the world tells us? That’s a very crowd-y thing to do. Or will we cry out for his blood to be upon us, washing us clean of our sin, and then living for him?

As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

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The Deep Longing

In the heart of every human being, there is a profound longing, a yearning for a place of true belonging. This yearning goes beyond our physical needs for shelter, or our social need for community. This desire to belong is a deep existential ache for our spiritual home.

In some ways the story that spans from Garden to Garden city is about how humanity has  sought to fulfil this longing and still this ache. The ache and longing comes from our desire to be reunited with God. Ever since the fall of sin, we have been separated from our creator because of that sin, and the story of the Bible is really the story of how people have tried to bridge this gap. Some, like the people of Babel tried to fix this by building a big tower. Others, like the writer of Ecclesiastes tried to fulfil this longing through engaging in every pleasure and pursuit the world offered him. In their song “Roll away your stone”, Mumford and Sons describe it this way:

“You told me that I would find a home,
Within the fragile substance of my soul
And I have filled this void with things unreal
And all the while my character it steals.”

This is the essence of the human condition: the search for meaning, purpose, and a place where one’s soul finds rest. So how do we fill it?

The Futility of Earthly Pursuits

Our world offers us a whole range of ways to fill the void with “unreal” things. There is the alure of a successful career. Or the pursuit of romantic love. Perhaps it is the  promise of TikTok fame, or the accumulation of wealth. Most of us who have pursued these things have either failed to attain them, and so we keep trying harder or harder, or we actually got what we wanted, only to realise that the initial rush and dopamine hit we get fades all too soon. Time and again, these pursuits prove to be mirages. The corporate ladder climber, upon reaching the peak, finds the view unfulfilling. The lover, after the initial euphoria fades, discovers that no human relationship can fully satiate the soul’s thirst. The wealthy find that riches cannot purchase peace of mind. None of these earthly pursuits satisfy the deep longing for home.

Jesus steps into this world and offers us a completely different path. What if the home we search for doesn’t exist in wealth, or fame, or romantic relationships. What if the home we have been searching for ever since the fall of sin, is a person. A person in whom we can “live and move and have our being?” (Acts 17:28). As part of his ministry, Jesus shows us that he is exactly that person. That he is the way, the truth, and the life.

The Way, the Truth, and the Life

In John 14:1-6, Jesus doesn’t just tell his disciples that he is a signpost to help guide them on their spiritual journey as they seek to fill the deep longing inside. He isn’t just a temporary shelter where people can rest for a little while, on their way to somewhere else. Now Jesus says that he himself is the destination. As "the way," Jesus is the road back to God. That desire to be reconnected to God that has existed in our hearts since the fall, can only be walked through Jesus.

As "the truth," He is the embodiment of God’s reality. This means that he provides true meaning and purpose and what he offers far outweighs the futility of the earthly pursuits mentioned above.

As "the life," Jesus is the source of eternal life, a life that begins not after death but at the very moment we believe and put our trust in him. Believing in Jesus fills the void Mumford and Sons talk about, not with “things unreal” that steal your character. Rather living in him fills the void with the most real, most meaningful, most lifegiving thing there is: the source of life himself!

This relationship with Jesus is more than just thinking right, or saying you belong to him. Having a saving relationship with Jesus is a journey that will transform you. It is being transferred out of a life that is governed by a pursuit of unreal things, into a life that lives for others as a way of loving the one who lived for you. True belief is also not flimsy – it cannot be taken from the believer. It is solid and sure for every believer. It gives us an anchor in this world, even when things go wrong. But belonging to the way, the truth and the life, so changes us that we start fulfilling the work God made us for.

The Work of those who belong to Jesus

You may remember that humanity was given a task to fulfill when God made us. To fill the earth and to subdue it. When we find our home in Jesus, this work is restored to the believer. When we are saved from our sins, we are commissioned into this work once more. To fill the earth and subdue it in Jesus name. Subjugation here is not through force or power – it is by love. Every act of love, every word of truth, every deed of kindness done in His name is part of this greater work. It is through these acts that the kingdom of God breaks into the world, transforming it bit by bit.

And strangely, we find that as we partake of this work, as we fill the earth and bring Jesus’ kingdom to bear on it, we no longer have that gnawing ache in our soul. We find ourselves, suddenly at home in his body. And in Christ, we find that we actually, and eternally, do belong.

Over the last few chapters we have been focusing on how Jesus radically alters the game when he came to earth. He gave us his mission statement showing us that he came to earth to undo the curse of sin. As his ministry progressed we saw how he undid death, disease, demon possession, and dearth (a lack of what is needed). We then saw how Jesus radically alters the status quo when it comes to our personal lives too. Last week we saw that this starts with the need to be born again and we explored what that means for us. You can read all about that here.

This week we continue looking at how Jesus changes the lives of those who seek to follow him. We see that to follow Jesus means that we need to love like him by radically serving those around us, even at the cost of our own dignity.

The best example of this is found in John 13:1-10 where Jesus washes his disciple’s feet.

John 13:1-10

Before the Passover Festival, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. Now when it was time for supper, the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas, Simon Iscariot’s son, to betray him. Jesus knew that the Father had given everything into his hands, that he had come from God, and that he was going back to God. So he got up from supper, laid aside his outer clothing, took a towel, and tied it around himself. Next, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet and to dry them with the towel tied around him. He came to Simon Peter, who asked him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” Jesus answered him, “What I’m doing you don’t realize now, but afterward you will understand.” “You will never wash my feet,” Peter said. Jesus replied, “If I don’t wash you, you have no part with me.” Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not only my feet, but also my hands and my head.” “One who has bathed,” Jesus told him, “doesn’t need to wash anything except his feet, but he is completely clean. You are clean, but not all of you.” For he knew who would betray him. This is why he said, “Not all of you are clean.”

What is radical service built on?

In this account we learn that if we are to follow in Jesus’ footsteps, radically serving others, we need to serve from a foundation of unconditional love. The event of Jesus washing his disciple’s feet is set against the backdrop of the Passover Festival. As we have seen previously, this festival was an annual celebrate of how God saved Israel out of slavery in Egypt. To be safe from the Angel of Death, the Israelites had to sacrifice a Passover lamb, smearing it’s blood over their doorposts in a visceral reminder that blood was needed for salvation. The fact that the foot washing happens in the middle of the Passover feast gives us a powerful hint of the extent of Jesus’ love. He knew that at the conclusion of this Passover, he would ultimately be crucified and sacrifices on behalf of his people. His blood would cover his chosen people, in the same way the Passover lamb’s blood covered the people.

This profound love of Jesus shows us what we are called to. To serve radically we need to consider the breadth and depth of our love for other people. A crucial element for us to realise is that our service of other people does not depend on the other person… Notice whose feet Jesus washed: Simon Peter, sure, that makes sense – he was going to build the church. John, the disciple Jesus loved – well that makes sense too. But also Judas – the betrayer. Jesus knew that Judas would betray him, and yet even here Jesus shows his radical love for the betrayer. If we are going to follow in Jesus’ footsteps and loving radically like he did, we need to love unconditionally. Jesus’ example calls us into a kind of love the world at the time would not have understood. It is a kind of radical love the world still doesn’t understand. Yet it is the kind of love God’s kingdom is built on.

What was Jesus’ Identity?

How did Jesus see himself? Jesus knew who he was and what he came to do. He understood his purpose. Notice what John says in v1.  “Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”

Jesus was fully aware that his time was up and that he would soon be crucified. His mission was almost at an end. He was the Son of God, destined to return to the Father. His identity was securely rooted in his relationship with God. Knowing who he was, he continued pursuing his mission to its fullest extent.

This is crucial for us to understand as believers. Who we are in Jesus is the core of our identity. It is the central thing that should shape our actions and interactions. Our world today is especially interested in this concept of identity. Our world tells us that we are our gender identity, we are our cultural identity, we are our racial identity, we are our socioeconomic status, and we are our political ideology. Even our hobbies and interests can be the things by which people define themselves. Part of the reason our world is so divided today is because we have bought into the lie that if someone else isn’t part of our identity group, we cannot agree or get along.

What we need to realize is that as Christians we are first and foremost “little-Christs”. This is our core identity, everything else is subject to and formed by that core identity. There is no such thing as a white-male-middle-class-Christian. There is just a Jesus follower who happens to be white, and male and middle class. There is no such thing as a conservative-republican-Christian. There is just a Jesus follower who happens to be conservative and republican. Our core identity is not our political ideology, racial background, socioeconomic status or anything else. As Christians, our core identity is Christ and him crucified.

When we recognize this, we are radically freed to serve people from vastly different groups. Because our identity anchor is in Jesus, we no longer need to be externally validated by our group. We don’t need to play the same identity games the world plays, because we are not of this world. We can just as happily serve people we vehemently disagree with as we can people who look like us and think like us, precisely because we see them in terms of their relationship to Jesus rather than the identity markers they have chosen for themselves. Every human being is but a lost sheep in need of a shepherd. Every human being’s identity is fundamentally and primarily defined by whether or not they have been found by the chief shepherd.

So where to from here?

This image of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet call all who would follow him into a life of radical service. This life of service points us toward the Garden City, where we see a beautiful picture of the day when we will join all others who follow Jesus from every nation, tribe and tongue, living in perfect unity with God himself. All who believe will one day walk into that Garden City, but will you be there?

As we continue our journey from Garden to Garden City, it is important for us to now turn our attention to Jesus and how he fulfils his mission. Last time we saw that Jesus proclaimed his mission statement and you can read that here:

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Today we turn our attention to the teachings of Jesus as we see him living out that mission statement. The first teaching we are going to look at is Jesus’ teaching on being born again.

Near the start of Jesus’ ministry there is a wonderful story in John 3 about how Jesus meets with Nicodemus. Nicodemus approaches Jesus and tells him that he (Nicodemus) recognises that Jesus must be from God, because Nicodemus has seen Jesus’ miracles and no one can do miracles unless God is with him. What is interesting about this is that Nicodemus was a Pharisee, and a ruler of the Jews. Being a Pharisee meant that he had dedicated his life to obeying the Jewish law in order to live a life pleasing to God. Being a ruler meant that he was a powerful person who had a lot of sway and influence in his community.

Jesus meets this powerful man and this is what happens:

John 3:3-7

“Truly I tell you, unless someone is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” “How can anyone be born when he is old?” Nicodemus asked him. “Can he enter his mother’s womb a second time and be born?” Jesus answered, “Truly I tell you, unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. Whatever is born of the flesh is flesh, and whatever is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed that I told you that you must be born again. The wind blows where it pleases, and you hear its sound, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

This is where the whole idea of being born again comes from. It really has nothing to do with a supernatural spiritual experience of the Holy Spirit which sets some people aside to be especially “Christian”. Nor does it have to do with some Christians who want to particularly be discipled in contrast to other Christians who are happy to just have a “simple faith”.

No, being born again is what is required for someone to become a Christian in the first place. It is to change your ancestry, your parentage. To be born again is to move from the lineage of Adam to the lineage of Christ. The reason this is needed is precisely because of what you inherit as a child of Adam and Eve - a sinful, broken, heart. The problem, as we have seen as we have travelled from the Garden of Eden, is that no matter what we do, human beings always end up reverting back to living out the sin that lives in our hearts. We cannot do anything with our sinful hearts, we can’t regenerate them or change them, or get rid of them. We need to be adopted into a different family. In short we need to be born again.

Nicodemus was a religious leader and a pharisee. As he approaches Jesus here, he comes with a worldview that says Israel is God’s special chosen people. That he is in the covenant community because he is a descendent of Abraham. Father Abraham had many sons and Nicodemus was one of them!

But Jesus cuts through that and tells him that that doesn’t ultimately mean anything now that Jesus has come. In fact Nicodemus’ heritage as a child of Abraham, and of Adam condemns him before God. The very thing that made Nicodemus who he was, is the very same thing that means he will not inherit eternal life.

This is a concept that is difficult for Nicodemus to understand, and he goes on questioning Jesus. “How can this be?” he asks. Jesus goes on to explain that in order to be accepted by God, in order to have eternal life, people have to put their trust in him. It is in this context that that perhaps the most famous verse in the whole Bible is found:

John 3:16

For God loved the world in this way: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.

This is the only thing required of people - they need to believe and trust in Jesus. Unlike all the other ways in which the people of our story have tried to save themselves, justify themselves or make themselves acceptable to God, Jesus here gives us the only requirement: Don’t trust yourself - you come with a sinful broken heart. Trust in Jesus to deal with that, and you will be saved.

This breaks every religious narrative that has ever existed and stands contrary to every religion that exists today.

Nicodemus was a Pharisee, a group of Israelites who strictly adhered to the Torah - the law given to them by Moses and then expanded on through the teachings of the rabbis. They focused on being morally and ethically pure and performed all the rituals and cleansing to be ritualistically clean. They were deeply religious.

But now Jesus breaks into this religion and proclaims that the Torah won’t save them. The Torah didn’t deal with their deeper heart problem. No matter how strictly they observed it, they could never do enough to be saved. They needed a new heart, they needed to be born again. This could only happen when they “laid their deadly doing down, down at Jesus feet.” They needed to stop trusting in their religion, and start trusting in Jesus.

The thing is, we shouldn’t be too hard on the Pharisees. They were stuck in the same pattern that humanity has always been stuck in. Every religion follows the same basic pattern: Earn your way into the salvation.

Buddhism says if you understand the four noble truths and follow the eightfold path, then you will work your way into Nirvana. In Islam you need to follow the commandments of Allah as revealed in the Quran and proclaimed by the Prophet Muhammed, and if do this diligently then you will earn salvation. In Hinduism to achieve salvation (Moksha), you need to break free from the cycle of reincarnation. To do this you have to follow one of several paths that will ultimately lead you to salvation should you devote yourself to that path sufficiently. I could go on, but in each and every case the religion says “Do this, and you will be saved”. What the “this” is changes each time, but in essence all religions follow the same pattern: Earn your way into salvation.

What Jesus says here is radically different. Trust in him instead of your religion and you will be saved. Jesus reveals that this is what is required for us to be born again. This is still a challenge to us today: will we give up trying to save ourselves, or will we trust in him instead?

So how does it work, how does trusting and believing in Jesus actually save us? Well, that is a story for next time…

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The words “Mission Statement” conjure up pictures of a boardroom a whiteboard with a half formed sentence on it, and a room full of people arguing over the precise meaning of words so they can make sure the company’s mission statement precisely reflects what the company wants to accomplish. We do the same thing in churches when we want to “revision” the church and give it a new direction. One of the reasons we do this is because a carefully crafted mission statement helps us to evaluate whether a good thing is worth doing. For example, in my church, our guiding statement is “Helping people take the next step toward Jesus”. Theoretically at least, this helps us decide whether a new venture, a new ministry or some project is worth doing. If a new ministry helps us help people take their next step, then we want to support it. However, if something is a good idea, but doesn’t help us achieve our mission, we won’t pursue it.

Jesus had a mission statement too. He makes his mission statement clear in Luke 4 and it is the first thing Jesus did in his ministry. Jesus too, it seems, had a mission statement that would guide his ministry. His mission statement comes directly from the prophet Isaiah and he declared it to the world in Luke 4:16-21

Luke 4:16–21 CSB

16 He came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. As usual, he entered the synagogue on the Sabbath day and stood up to read. 17 The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him, and unrolling the scroll, he found the place where it was written: 18 The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free the oppressed, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. 20 He then rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. And the eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fixed on him. 21 He began by saying to them, “Today as you listen, this Scripture has been fulfilled.”

This is the very first time Jesus speaks in the book of Luke and he makes a massive claim, quoting from Isaiah chapters 58 and 61. The thing Jesus wanted his hearers to understand is that he here claims to be the Messiah – the one who would come to set the captives free. He was telling everyone in the synagogue, that he would break the chains of the oppressed and heal people’s blindness (both physical and spiritual).

We should not miss how significant this is. This is the moment when the battle for dominion over the world,  between Jesus and Satan starts coming to a head. We have been waiting for this moment, ever since God’s promise to one day send someone to fix the sin problem, way back in Genesis 3.

When sin entered the world, the world broke in four very specific ways, that conveniently all start with the letter D. Death entered the world, disease started to spread, demonic oppression filled the Earth and dearth was the status quo. (Dearth, by the way, means to not have enough of something. I tried finding another D word to work with and this is the best I could do). As long as sin was around, you would have death, disease, dearth and demonic oppression.

So for Jesus to step out and say I am going to undo that, using the words of the prophet Isaiah is a massive thing! In effect he is declaring that he himself is the solution to the sin problem that started way back with Adam and Eve. This is his mission statement: I am going to undo these four things – Demonic Oppression, Disease, Dearth and Death. In Luke’s gospel, everything that Jesus does is guided by this mission statement.

Demonic Oppression

Right after declaring that he was here to undo the effects of sin, Jesus starts his ministry. How? By undoing the effects of sin, starting with demonic oppression. The very first captive Jesus sets free is a man possessed of a demon. We read this in Luke 4:31-37.

There we read of a man who has been possess by a demon who was part of the worshippers in the Synagogue. In those days there were people who made a living as exorcists, and this particular man may have been in the synagogue looking to be healed. The exorcists who lived at the time would use elaborate rituals to cast out demons, but in this passage Jesus proves that he has the power to set the captives free. Not by engaging in some elaborate ritual, but simply with the authority he had as God. As Jesus commands the demon to come out, the demon completely capitulates and Luke makes a point of showing us that the man was not harmed in any way.

Jesus freed the captives from demonic oppression.

Disease

The very next thing Jesus does, is he heals Simon’s mother in law. In this story Jesus enters Simon’s house, stands over the sick woman and rebukes the fever. She is instantly and completely healed. When the word about this miracle spreads, people from all around come to Jesus and he heals them all. The same power Jesus uses to cast out the demon is the same power that empowers him to cast out the sickness. Jesus shows us here that he ushers in freedom from demon possession and from sickness.

Dearth

One of the consequences of sin God gave Adam is that he would have to work hard. Work itself became cursed and God tells Adam: “You will eat bread by the sweat of your brow”. As a result the world turns from an abundant garden, into a dustbowl that needs cultivation to provide food. Famine and food shortages have existed ever since.

Jesus’ miracles start undoing this problem. Perhaps the most famous of these is the feeding of the 5000 where he feeds thousands from a few fish and a few loaves of bread. He makes gallons of wine out of water. Again and again he provides abundance for people, completely undoing the curse of sin in that regard. Perhaps it is for this reason that Jesus himself says in John 10:10 “A thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come so that they may have life and have it in abundance”.

Jesus ushers in freedom from dearth.

Death

Throughout his ministry, Jesus brought several people back from the dead. There is the young girl in Matthew 9:18-26. The dead son of the Widow of Nain in Luke 7:11-17 and of course Lazarus in John 11:1-37. Each of these was another reminder of the power that Jesus had. He could even undo death – the very thing God had warned Adam and Eve of, should they eat the fruit.

Jesus had the power even to free people from death.

In each of these cases, Jesus showed us what his ministry was going to be about. He followed his own mission statement. But, there was more work to be done. Those he healed would get sick again, those he fed would get hungry again, and all three people he raised from the dead died again. Jesus’ miracles point us to his ultimate work. That work would still need to be done for the undoing of the curse of sin to “stick”. How would that happen? That is a story for next time…

As we transition from the genealogy of Jesus to his life, we move from Matthew’s gospel to Luke’s. Luke is the only one of the gospel writers to give us a glimpse into Jesus’ early life as a boy. The story he tells us is about when Jesus turned 12 and travelled with his parents to Jerusalem. Allow me to quote the story in full because I think it is fascinating.

Luke 2:41-52

Every year his parents travelled to Jerusalem for the Passover Festival. When he was twelve years old, they went up according to the custom of the festival. After those days were over, as they were returning, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents did not know it. Assuming he was in the traveling party, they went a day’s journey. Then they began looking for him among their relatives and friends. When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him. After three days, they found him in the temple sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all those who heard him were astounded at his understanding and his answers. When his parents saw him, they were astonished, and his mother said to him, “Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.” “Why were you searching for me?” he asked them. “Didn’t you know that it was necessary for me to be in my Father’s house?” But they did not understand what he said to them. Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth and was obedient to them. His mother kept all these things in her heart. And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and with people.

Jesus Is the Passover Lamb

There are two things about this account that are confusing for us modern readers. The first is this: How could Jesus’ parents forget him in Jerusalem? Imagine the news headlines if this were to happen today: “Social services have been called in to support the parents of a 12-year-old boy after leaving him behind in their holiday to the Holy Land.” How could Jesus’ parents forget him? They knew that he was the special child. They had experienced the miracle of his birth. Both parents had miraculous visions from God; they had been whisked off to Egypt to protect Jesus. They knew how special he was, and yet here they were, heading home from the Passover feast and forgetting about Jesus. How could they do this?

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The second thing that confuses modern readers is how much freedom children like Jesus had in those days. His parents trusted him so much that they didn't check on him before they left Jerusalem to go home, just assuming that he would be where he had to be. What child has this kind of autonomy today? Did Jesus' parents neglect him? Was he simply left to his devices? Did they lose him?

Well, to make sense of this, we need to understand the text in terms of its culture.

Firstly, what was the Passover? You will remember from our chapter on the Passover that this was the festival that celebrated God rescuing Israel from slavery in Egypt. It literally celebrates God passing over the houses of the Israelites, the houses where a lamb had been slain to pay for the sin of the household. By Jewish law, Israelites were required to attend three festivals in Jerusalem each year: the festival of Passover, the festival of Weeks, and the festival of Tabernacles. As devout Jews, Mary and Joseph kept these traditions, and so for Jesus to visit Jerusalem with his family isn't that unusual – his parents were probably in the city at least three times a year, for a week or more each time. So they, and Jesus included, would have known the city pretty well. Mary, Joseph, and Jesus would also have travelled in a great company of others who were also attending Passover at the same time.

Secondly, we have to consider Jesus’ age. He was 12 at the time. In Jewish culture, a child was considered a responsible member of the religious community at the age of 13. Luke makes it clear that Jesus was a child on the cusp of religious adulthood. This explains the weird situation where his parents could have lost him for a whole day. Most likely, when the time came for everyone to return home after the festival, the women and smaller children would go first. Then the men and older boys would follow afterward. In the evening, they would all come back together as a whole community and join up again.

So it would be easy for Jesus, a bigger boy but not yet a bigger boy, to be lost. His mother probably thought, "Okay, I've got to let him walk with the older boys. He is just about to get to that age." His dad probably thought, "The boy must be walking with his mum since he is still really just a boy." The end result is that we have a situation most parents will have encountered before…

Mary: "Joseph dear… Where is Jesus?" Joseph: "I thought he was with you."

Now we have to understand that Luke very specifically included the detail that Jesus was 12. This is around the time when a father would take his son and apprentice him, show him and teach him what his life would be all about. This would be the time when Joseph would take Jesus under his wing and start teaching him the carpentry ways, how to cut, how to join, how to build.

However, instead of Jesus being apprenticed into carpentry by his earthly father, Jesus was being apprenticed into Passover lamb-ing by his heavenly father. In some way, Jesus was learning what it would mean for him to be the sacrificial lamb. He was being shown – look at the sacrifice, look at how the blood causes death to pass over, look at how the lamb saves the people. This is what his life was going to be all about. Jesus was going to be the Passover Lamb.

Perhaps this is why Jesus’s first-ever recorded words in the Bible are in response to his mother asking where he was: "Why were you looking for me? Didn't you know that I must be in my Father's house?” Jesus knew that he was being apprenticed – he knew that he answered to a higher Father than his earthly father. Jesus knew who he was. He knew he was God the Son. He knew the job he came to do; he knew that he was to be about his Father's business, not his parents' business. Jesus knew what he came to be. He came to be the Passover Lamb so that God’s wrath could pass over us when the time came.

How would that work? That is a story for next time…

How do you know if a church is declining or turning away from true Christianity? One of the surest signs is that the church has started to waver on the doctrine of the immaculate conception of Jesus. Since the earliest days of the church, Christians have confessed their faith together with the words of the Apostle’s Creed, and one of the key statements in that creed is that Jesus was “Born of the Virgin Mary.” However, sadly, many so-called Christian leaders have begun to question the virgin birth. Perhaps the most surprising but influential of these came from David Jenkins, the Anglican Bishop of Durham from 1984-1994. He once announced on a BBC radio show that “I wouldn’t put it past God to arrange a virgin birth if he wanted. But I don’t think he did.”[1]

But the virgin birth is a central doctrine in the Christian faith, and once we understand that the Bible has been telling a single story from start to finish, we can easily see why Jesus had to be born from a virginal mother. Let’s examine these together:

If Jesus was born by human descent, he would be born sinful

When Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s command not to eat from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, sin entered the world. As we saw, the effects of this were far-reaching, and every aspect of creation has been affected by it.

Remember that God had appointed Adam as the ruler over the earth when he made him. He gave Adam authority over the world and commissioned him to bring the world into order. This authority was not just physical in nature but also spiritual. We see this especially in the effects of Adam’s sin. Yes, it is true, physical death enters into the world through sin, but also the spiritual nature of humanity that gets corrupted through sin. As a result of Adam’s sin, humanity’s nature becomes sinful, and in fact, we inherit this sinful nature from our universal Father Adam. In a very real sense, you and I inherit our sinful nature from our fathers, and they from their fathers, all the way back to Adam.

This is what Paul refers to in the book of Romans:

Romans 5:12

Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, in this way death spread to all people, because all sinned.

The point is this: a massive part of the problem humans have is that we cannot be saved by someone who is just a normal human being. Because every human being conceived in the normal way inherits sin. We need someone who is born “abnormally,” with a spiritual father that is different from Adam. That is why the immaculate conception is so important. Immaculate means perfectly clean, unstained, and spotless. Jesus’ conception had to be perfectly clean and free from the stain of sin. How can this happen? Mary asked the same question:

Luke 1:34-35

Mary asked the angel, “How can this be since I have not had sexual relations with a man?” The angel replied to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore, the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.

Fulfillment of Prophecy

The second aspect we need to consider is that Jesus had to be born of the virgin is that God himself promised that this would happen – as a sign that God was enacting his promise of salvation. This entire book has been about tracking God’s promise that he would deal with the problem of sin. It stretches right back to Genesis 3, where we get the first hint that one day someone would come who would destroy the serpent – the tempter and, in so doing, undo the problem of sin. As we have seen, this promise is progressively developed over the course of the Bible and all throughout we get hints and pointers about who this person would be and how we can know for sure that he is going to be the one to fix the problem.

One of the most important signs we have ultimately come from the writing of the prophet Isaiah who tells us specifically that the savior would be born to a virgin.

Isaiah 7:14:

Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign: See, the virgin will conceive, have a son, and name him Immanuel.

In his gospel account, Matthew links Jesus’ birth directly to this prophecy given by Isaiah:

Matthew 1:22-23

Now all this took place to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet: See, the virgin will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and they will name him Immanuel, which is translated “God is with us.”

If Jesus was not born of the Virgin Mary, he would not be the promised and prophesied Messiah.

The incarnation of God

The final but vital aspect of why Jesus had to be born of the virgin Mary is that it was the means by which the 2nd person of the Trinity, God the Son, became a human being – something that is of vital importance for our salvation.

A virgin birth is obviously a miracle of God, but this is not just that God allowed a virgin to conceive a child with another human being. No, this is God the Son becoming fully human in order to be the new Adam, the new spiritual head of all those who would believe. This has two important facets:

Firstly, Jesus had to be fully human which is why he had to be born of a woman, in order to live a perfect life as a human being. Paul makes this clear in the book of Galatians

Galatians 4:4-5

“…God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.”

Jesus had to come and live a fully sinless life as someone under the law. As we saw, all of humanity ever, who were born of Adam, are guilty of breaking God’s law and sinning. But to be a perfect sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins, Jesus had to be a perfect human. Therefore, Jesus had to be fully human.

But secondly, he also had to be fully God.

For Jesus to be able to bear the weight of our sin on the cross he also had to be fully God. For no mere human could withstand the full wrath of God poured out on one person for the sins of all believers. Someone who was only human would be obliterated and so he would not be able to suffer to the full extent our sin requires, bear it and survive. But because Jesus is fully God, he does have that ability. When Jesus finally dies on the cross he doesn’t die until Jesus had completed his work. Notice his words in John 19:30.

John 19:30

When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, “It is finished.” Then bowing his head, he gave up his spirit.

It was not until he had fully borne the wrath of God, that he could say it is finished. He would not be able to do that unless he was both fully human and fully God. And it was not until he did that, that he gave up his spirit and died. Only someone who is both fully God and fully human could do that.

So the doctrine of the virgin birth is not just a nice-to-have doctrine. It is an essential and foundational doctrine that has far-reaching implications. It speaks to how God constructed the spiritual world, with sin being inherited through the male line. It shows and authenticates the prophecies about Jesus given by the Old Testament prophets. It is essential for Jesus to have been both the right type of sacrifice, while simultaneously giving him the power to go through the wrath of God on our behalf. Jesus had to be born of the Virgin Mary for us to be saved.

Exactly how does this salvation work, and how does Jesus actually live a perfect life to stand in our place? Well, that is a story for next time…

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/04/david-jenkins-obituary, accessed 20/11/2023.

Jesus is the Promised Davidic King

In the Jewish ordering of the books of the Bible, the Old Testament closes with the book of 1 and 2 Chronicles. As we saw last time, this makes a lot of sense, and in fact, if I had great sway in the world, I would reorder our Bibles to print them with Chronicles at the end of the Old Testament! The book of Chronicles is a theological reflection on why Israel has failed as the means by which God would bring about His promises to one day do something about the curse of sin. The book Chronicles how all the kings of Israel had failed to fulfill the promise of a Messianic King, who would come to fulfill God’s promises to Adam, Abraham, and David.

God had promised to Adam that one day a snake stomper would come to undo the curse of sin. He had promised Abraham that all the nations would be blessed through his offspring. He had promised David that one of his descendants would reign on the throne forever. As the Old Testament closes, these promises are unfulfilled. The Messianic King, from David’s line, who would bless the world by undoing the curse of sin had not appeared. The Old Testament ends as a story without an end.

That is where Matthew’s Gospel begins.

When you flip over the page from the Old Testament, into the first page of the New Testament, the first thing you are confronted with is the Genealogy of Jesus. We have finally reached the point in our story where we actually meet Jesus. As Matthew opens his Gospel, he starts by establishing the fact that Jesus is the promised Messiah, the promised Davidic King, the promised one who would undo the curse of sin. So, the first thing Matthew does is to outline Jesus’ genealogy so that his readers can see how Jesus fits into the story of Israel.

He arranges a selection of Jesus’ ancestry into this list of three sets of 14 people. There are 14 generations between Abraham and David, 14 between David and Jeconiah (the descendant around at the time of the exile), and 14 generations between Jeconiah and when Jesus was born. This seems very convenient and clean-cut: I mean it is possible that God could have arranged things that there would be exactly 14 people between Abraham and David, but in fact he didn’t. If you read Luke’s genealogy you will see that it is different from Matthew’s. That’s not because either of them was wrong - it is because they were writing with different purposes in mind. Luke is writing from more of a Greek world-view, a historical account of Jesus’ life. Matthew is writing to prove Jesus is the Davidic Messiah-King Israel has been waiting for. He, therefore, chooses a select genealogy to prove that Jesus comes from David’s line.

The way Matthew does this is through a pretty neat trick in this genealogy, called gematria. Gematria is the system of assigning numerical values to the letters and characters in an alphabet. It is often used to associate words and phrases with specific numeric meanings. When you add up the values of David’s name, you get the number 14. So what Matthew does is not only to write a western-thinker’s list of ancestors. He is using a gematria to link Jesus to David. If you are playing along at home, you will also notice that there are a “David” amount of people in each of the three lists, and actually David himself is the 14th person in the list.

So Matthew opens his Gospel by saying in effect: Do you want to know who Jesus is? David, David, David. He was clearly linking Jesus to David in a way only an accountant could appreciate! Nonetheless, there it is: The New Testament is the story of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

The Blood of the King

We should also pay attention to who makes the cut into Matthew’s list, who did he choose to include, who made the cut?

We have the obvious people: Abraham - Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham that the whole world would be blessed through him and his offspring. Isaac is there - the baby born by a miracle to a barren woman in her later years. Jesus too would be born by a miracle. Jacob - the first Israelite. Jesus is the true Israelite, the only one who truly lived as God intended. Judah is there - the tribe of Israel who stayed true to the worship of God when the rest of Israel abandoned God. Jesus is the true one who never worships idols. Boaz is there, the kinsman redeemer, who looked after the widow Ruth and became the ancestor of David. Jesus too would one day become a redeemer of everyone, and he would look after the widows, the orphans, and the abandoned people of this world. Of course, we have the kings, David and Solomon, the greatest king and the wisest king. Jesus would be greater and wiser than both put together.

However, that is really about it in terms of good stuff. There are a good deal of hopeless bad people in the list too. Rehoboam - instrumental in the civil war that split Israel apart. Ahaz, who, according to my Bible dictionary, “has the dubious distinction of being one of the worst apostate kings in Jewish history.” He set up pagan shrines all over Jerusalem and offered sacrifices to the pagan gods of Syria. He also led Israel into political, moral, and religious chaos. After him comes Manasseh - probably the worst of Israel’s kings. He heavily promoted the idol worship of the Assyrians, but he also instituted human sacrifices, necromancy, consulting dead spirits, magic, and divination. He did more evil than the nations who inhabited Israel’s land before him. And in fact, his reign is summed up in 2 Kings 21:16 as follows:

2 Kings 21:16 CSB

16 Manasseh also shed so much innocent blood that he filled Jerusalem with it from one end to another. This was in addition to his sin that he caused Judah to commit, so that they did what was evil in the Lord’s sight.

All throughout the Bible, God often describes idol worship as adultery, as sexual promiscuity on behalf of his people, so it is not surprising that the women listed in Jesus' genealogy remind us of this too. The first is Tamar - a woman who had an incestuous relationship with Judah, her father-in-law, and bore the twins Perez (also found here in the genealogy) and Zerah. There is Rahab, the prostitute. We have Ruth, the Moabitess. Moabites were known by Israelites as people of sexual immorality, and she did spend a “rather shady night at Boaz’s feet" which many interpret as a euphemism for something else entirely. Then there is Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, included in this genealogy because of David’s adultery.

So what should we learn from this?

The list we end up with here is very different from similar lists of superheroes in mythological accounts. Unlike a character that secretly has the undiluted pure blood of royals flowing through his veins, Jesus’s bloodline leaves much to be desired. So why did God sovereignly include them in the list? Why did they make the cut?

Because Jesus came to redeem these kinds of people.

Sinful, immoral outcasts like Tamar and Rahab and David and Manasseh. People like you and like me. Jesus’ heritage makes him someone who can actually be a blessing to all nations. His heritage makes him one of all of us. He has human heritage. He has divine heritage. He has Jewish heritage. He has gentile heritage. He has royal heritage. He has common heritage. He has a perfect heavenly father, and he has an imperfect human father. He has mortal heritage. He has immortal heritage. He owns the cattle on a thousand hills, and he was born poor in a stable. He is someone to whom every person on earth can relate, and yet he came to save those who realize that he is both their Lord and friend.

So that is who Jesus is. How is he going to save the world? How is he going to be the blessing to all the nations? That is a story for next time…

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We have reached the end of the Old Testament, and just like the Old Testament does, we need to recap and review the story before delving into the New Testament. We will do this by following the outline of the books of 1 and 2 Chronicles. But doesn't our Old Testament end with the book of Malachi? Yes, however, that wasn't always the case. In the Jewish Canon, the Old Testament ends with the book Chronicles. When the order of the books in the Bible was under debate, what happened is that the Christians at the time grouped the books by type, so the minor prophets were all grouped together, and since Malachi was the last of these books, it became the final book in the Old Testament. The books of Chronicles were bundled together with the books of Kings since they seem at first glance to deal with the same subject matter.

However, the reason Chronicles was written was very different from the books of Kings. Kings was written as a history book of the reign of the different kings of Israel and Judah. Chronicles was written as a theological reflection on the history of Israel. It is more interested in the overall story God is writing through the people of Israel, than in describing the events as history. Part of the reason it is the last book in the Jewish Canon is that it summarizes and reflects on the entire story of Israel. It also lays the foundation for the New Testament to begin. So what is it all about?

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Genealogy:

Chronicles starts with Adam and lays out the genealogy of Israel. The opening chapters of the book detail the family tree of Adam, through Abraham, to Jacob and the twelve tribes of Israel. From here the author zooms in on the descendants of Judah and especially on the family line of King David. This is deliberate. Remember the covenant God made with Abraham: That the whole world would be blessed through his offspring. Later God clarifies that this would happen through a king from the tribe of Judah, one of David’s descendants who would sit on the throne eternally. The author of Chronicles is hinting that this book is going to focus on the fulfillment of this promise.

From here the genealogy zooms out and surveys the rest of the tribes of Israel, noting the land and locations where they were living. This section concludes in 1 Chronicles 9:1, where the author sums up, saying:

“All Israel was registered in the genealogies that are written in the Book of the Kings of Israel.”

However, more important is the second half of that verse, where he reminds his readers:

“But Judah was exiled to Babylon because of their unfaithfulness.”

The genealogy continues by recounting the people who came back to Jerusalem after the exile. This concludes the genealogy section: it is a stark reminder of the thousands of Israelites who had turned their back on God, following after other gods, with the result being destruction and exile. The story now moves from the failure of the people to the failure of the kings.

The returned exiles need a righteous king like David.

The story now focuses on the history of Israel’s kings. Starting with King Saul in chapter 10, where Saul’s reign is summarized in v13 as follows:

Saul died for his unfaithfulness to the LORD because he did not keep the LORD’s word. He even consulted a medium for guidance, but he did not inquire of the LORD. So the LORD put him to death and turned the kingdom over to David, son of Jesse.

The author spends the next several chapters describing the rule of David. However, when you read David’s story it becomes pretty obvious that he is being held in extremely high esteem and a number of his failures were glossed over. Chapters 11-21 describe David’s successes as a king, noting his great military successes, the strength of his armies, his spiritual victories, and the way he was blessed by God. They also describe how David arranged for the Ark of the Covenant to be brought to Jerusalem, and the close relationship David had with God. The only negative note the author makes about David’s reign is that David took a military census of his people to determine how strong his army was. This was a sign that David started trusting in the strength of his army, rather than in the Lord. However, there is no mention of David’s sin with Bathsheba, arguably his most famous error.

The reason for this is not that the author is trying to hide David’s sins. Indeed, anyone who wanted to would be able to read of David’s great sins in the books of Kings. What the author is doing is laying the foundation that a new king like David, but better, would one day come to deliver Israel. The rest of 1 Chronicles continues in much the same theme: David is exalted as a great king and makes arrangements for Solomon, his son, to become king after him. He lays the foundation for the Lord’s Temple to be built, and in the final analysis, David’s life is summarized as follows:

1 Chronicles 29:26-28.

David son of Jesse was king over all Israel. The length of his reign over Israel was forty years; he reigned in Hebron for seven years and in Jerusalem for thirty-three. He died at a good old age, full of days, riches, and honor, and his son Solomon became king in his place.

The theological point the author is making is that when Israel is ruled by a righteous king, a king like David, then things go well. If Israel is to be the blessing to the nations, then Israel needs a new king like this.

The returned exiles need a priestly, interceding king like Solomon.

The story now shifts to Solomon and the building of the Temple. As with David, Solomon’s life story is largely edited to take the bad stuff out. Again this is not to hide Solomon’s significant flaws, but rather to highlight the type of king that was needed. 2 Chronicles starts with Solomon’s famous prayer for wisdom. The chapters that follow describe the arrangements Solomon made for the Temple to be built, the completion and dedication of the Temple, and Solomon’s prayer to the Lord at the dedication of the Temple. The prayer is recorded in full, and in his prayer, Solomon prays that the Lord will forgive the sins of his people, that He would restore them spiritually and that the Lord would forgive their sins. The type of king the returned exiles now need is a king who would pray for them, who would intercede for them before God.

The returned exiles need a king from Judah.

From here the story focuses on the split between the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. As the author works through the various kings, he pauses at and highlights the spiritually significant rulers. We are told about the great spiritual revival that happened under King Asa; however, Asa ended up making an alliance with the king of Aram instead of trusting in the Lord. We hear about how King Jehoshaphat arranged for all the towns in Judah to be educated in the law of the Lord and the miraculous ways the Lord supported Jehoshaphat when battle was being waged against Judah. However, Jehoshaphat was also castigated by one of the Lord’s prophets because he “helped the wicked and loved those who hate the Lord” (2 Chronicles 19:2). We learn about Joash, the boy king who served the Lord and repaired the temple. Unfortunately, Joash gave up serving the Lord toward the end of his life. We read of Uzziah, who sought the Lord and whom God gave great success. However, Uzziah became proud and violated the sanctity of the Temple and was struck down with a terrible skin disease. Hezekiah is the greatest of the kings of Judah, who cleansed the Temple and revived temple worship and reinstituted the Passover. He trusted the Lord when Jerusalem was under attack and ended his reign having served God his entire life. Unfortunately, the worst of Judah’s kings, Manasseh, followed, and because of his sin, Jerusalem is ultimately destroyed with her people being carried off into exile.

As we read this section of Chronicles, the author is making the point that the Messianic King will come from Judah; however, by showing the failures of several even good kings, he reminds the readers that none of the kings who had yet come from David’s line was that Messianic king.

The books of Chronicles end with King Cyrus’ decree that the exiles could return home. In fact, the book ends halfway through Cyrus’ decree – the book actually ends halfway through Cyrus’ sentence.

This is highly significant. The point is, the promised messiah is coming from the line of David, but he hasn't come yet. For that, the exiles had to wait… God was still committed to his promises to Adam, to Abraham and to David. Who will this messianic king be? This person who comes from the line of David, who was a righteous king, a priestly interceding king like Solomon, a king like the kings of Judah, but without flaw? Who will this be? We need to turn the page to the first page of the New Testament to find out...

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So, the situation is this: the northern kingdom of Israel has been destroyed. The southern kingdom of Judah has been carried off into exile in Babylon. The promises God made seem to have fallen away – at least from a human perspective. How was God going to deal with the problem of sin as he promised to Adam? How was God going to fulfil his promise to Abraham that the whole world would be blessed through his offspring? How was God going to fulfil his promise to David, that one of his descendants would sit on the throne forever, especially now that there was no throne in Jerusalem on which David’s descendent could sit? At this point in the story, it seems as if God has given up on Israel as the nation through which he would bring about his promises. However, as we will see, God was not yet done with his promises, and the books of Ezra and Nehemiah tell us the story of how God restores Judah as a nation.

The books of Ezra and Nehemiah should really be combined into one book, and in fact in the Jewish writings they have always been considered one book. The book tells a single story of how God restores Jerusalem and follows three main story acts.

Act 1: Rebuilding the Temple

Ezra opens with a new emperor on the throne, King Cyrus, the king of Persia. Babylon, who had defeated Israel, had in turn been defeated by Persia, and the Persian empire now controlled the territory Jerusalem was in. Ezra 1:1 makes it clear that the Lord worked in the heart of Cyrus and made him well disposed toward the Jewish people. As a result, he makes a proclamation throughout his kingdom that God had appointed him to build a new temple for him in Jerusalem. As such, any Jews who wanted to, could go back to Jerusalem. The family heads of the remaining tribes of Judah and Benjamin organise those who wanted to go back and so along with the Levites and priests who were left, they return to Israel.

Seven months after returning from exile, Joshua son of Jozadak and Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel begin rebuilding the altar on which the sacrifices were offered. The importance of this cannot be overstated. Remember that the altar was the central part of the priestly system. It is on the altar that all the offerings to God were made, the most important of which were the sin offerings that cleansed the people from their sin. The Jewish people had been living in exile for 70 years without having a way to deal with their sin. So the people begin offering offerings on this altar almost as soon as it was finished, even before the foundations of the temple were laid. Soon after the altar’s completion, Joshua and Zerubbabel begin the work of rebuilding the temple. It is clear that the Jewish people have a zeal and a passion for God. As people who had been following the story for a while, we the readers wonder: could this be a sign that the people’s hearts had finally be turned back to God? They certainly seem to be very keen on returning Judah to the pure worship of God. Will it last?

The temple rebuilding project is fraught with issues. Judah’s neighboring states bribe the Persian officials to frustrate the building plans. When Persia gets a new king, they write to him to tell him that Jerusalem will cause trouble for Persia if he allows the Jews to rebuild. In response the new king commands the people to stop rebuilding and so the temple rebuilding efforts come to a complete halt. This in turn causes the Jews to write to the king to say “Look, King Cyrus made a proclamation to say we are allowed to rebuild the temple, go and look in your archives and you will see the law is on our side.” (my paraphrase).

After a careful search is made, the king discovers that it is exactly as the Jews claimed, and so he issues a new decree, commanding everyone to leave the Jews alone so that they can rebuild the temple. Moreover, he provides funds out of the royal treasury so that the rebuilding project can be completed. Never before has the gift of administration and good record keeping come in so handy!

Finally the temple is completed, and the first thing Zerubbabel and Joshua do is appoint priests according to the laws of Moses, and for the first time in over 70 years they celebrate the Passover. Act 1 concludes with this wonderful statement:

Ezra 6:20-21

“²⁰ All of the priests and Levites were ceremonially clean, because they had purified themselves. They killed the Passover lamb for themselves, their priestly brothers, and all the exiles. ²¹ The Israelites who had returned from exile ate it, together with all who had separated themselves from the uncleanness of the Gentiles of the land in order to worship the Lord, the God of Israel.”

The temple had successfully been rebuilt, and once again Israel was ceremonially clean. The exile from God’s presence was over.

Act 2: Rebuilding the Spiritual Life

About 60 years after the temple was rebuilt the second act of rebuilding begins. By now Persia had yet another king, Artaxerxes. As with King Cyrus, God moves the king to restore Israel. Artaxerxes issues a decree that Ezra to restore the priestly system and enforce God’s law in Jerusalem. Ezra was well qualified for this job, since he “had determined in his heart to study the law of the Lord, obey it, and teach its statutes and ordinances in Israel”. (Ezra 7:10). So Artaxerxes tells Ezra to go to Jerusalem and to assess it according to God’s law and to do whatever was necessary to get the people spiritually back on track. Remember that the point of the Exile was to turn God’s people’s hearts back to him and to turn their hearts away from the idolatry of the previous generations. Ezra is now tasked with ensuring that that process has happened, and if not to do everything in his power to complete it.

When Ezra gets back to Jerusalem, he discovers something shocking. The very thing that God had instructed Israel not to do as they entered the promised land, is the very thing that Judah had now done upon their return to Jerusalem. From the leaders of the people, to the Levites to the average Jew, they had intermarried with the people from the surrounding nations. We need to understand that this wasn’t a racial issue, this was a spiritual issue. Remember the pattern that Israel showed again and again: when they intermarry with the people around them, they bring their foreign idols into the land and invariably end up bowing down and worshipping them. The same idolatry issue that has plagued Israel for centuries is present here in the returned exiles. God’s people had not learnt their lesson after all!

Ezra is devastated. He prays one of the most heart-rending prayers recorded in the Bible and he concludes his prayer with these words:

Ezra 9:13-15

¹³ After all that has happened to us because of our evil deeds and terrible guilt—though you, our God, have punished us less than our iniquities deserve and have allowed us to survive— ¹⁴ should we break your commands again and intermarry with the peoples who commit these detestable practices? Wouldn’t you become so angry with us that you would destroy us, leaving neither remnant nor survivor? ¹⁵ Lord God of Israel, you are righteous, for we survive as a remnant today. Here we are before you with our guilt, though no one can stand in your presence because of this.

In response Ezra and the leaders of Judah get everyone in Judah together in Jerusalem, confront them with the issue and the people agree to renew their covenant with God. They promise to send away all the foreign wives and their children so that Israel could once again be a spiritually pure nation. This was a terribly sad day, and we should feel for the women and children who were sent away. The result of sin is always heartache. It has to be said, that God did not command the Jews to divorce their wives and send them away. That was the plan the people themselves came up with, with a sincere heart trying to follow God’s law. Good Christian scholar disagree on whether this was actually God’s will for that time. Either way, the end result is the same: Israel now had both a temple in which to offer sacrifices, and a ”pure” Israel for whom the sacrifices could be offered. All that was left to restore and rebuild was the city wall.

Act 3: Rebuilding the Wall

The story now shifts to Nehemiah, who was a cup bearer to king Artaxerxes. A cup bearer was one of the king’s most trusted people. Nehemiah serving in Persia receives a report from Jerusalem that the city wall has been broken down. He prays and his prayer is answered. God once again stirs the heart of the King of Persia and he gives Nehemiah permission to go back to Judah to rebuild the wall of Jerusalem. Not only that, he also provides Nehemiah with a security detail and all the resources he needs to rebuild the city walls.

A few days after arriving in Jerusalem, he meets with the officials ruling Jerusalem and they agree to start rebuilding. When the people living in neighboring states realise that the rebuilding work is going well, they start plotting to attack Jerusalem to prevent them from completing the repairs. They knew that if Jerusalem could repair its walls, it would once again be a strongly defended city making Judah a strong nation again. Nehemiah and the officials devise a system whereby some of the builders would keep watch for enemy attack while the others built, and unlike normal builders all the wall builders had a sword at their side ready to defend themselves. Despite the setbacks, miraculously the wall of Jerusalem is rebuilt in 52 days!

Thus, the great rebuilding task was completed. The temple was complete, the spiritual life of Israel was back on track, and the city of Jerusalem was once again safe and secure. As with all the momentous occasions in Israel’s history, the people of God all come together again, and God’s law is read to them all. They celebrate the festival of booths, which was a festival that commemorates God bringing Israel out of the dessert after their 40-year journey. At the conclusion of the festival there is a national confession of sin, where the people of Judah confess how they had abandoned God in the past and again the people make a promise to God that they would uphold his law, that they would keep themselves pure, that they would do all their religious duties.

If this sounds familiar – it should. This is what has happened at every major movement in Israel’s history. Before Israel entered the promised land, Moses read the law and instructed the people to follow God only, and they agreed. Before Joshua died, the same thing happened. When Israel moved to a Monarchy, the kings of Israel were appointed to make sure Israel obeyed their vows. When Israel was destroyed, and Judah was carried off into slavery it was because they had not kept their side of the covenant with God. They had worshiped other Gods. Every time Israel made a promise to worship God alone and to follow him faithfully, they failed.

Would this time be different? After all, God had clearly been behind the rebuilding of Jerusalem with the way he softened the hearts of the kings and provided all the materials for the work that needed to be done. Surely Judah had learnt her lesson after 70 years in exile?

Well after Nehemiah finishes his work in Jerusalem he turns to the king of Persia. Some time later Nehemiah returns to Jerusalem. When he gets there, he discovers three things:

1.       The temple is in disarray – the people had not been bringing their offerings and donations to the temples in order to support the work of the priests. As a result, the priests abandoned their posts to go work in the fields in order to support themselves.

2.       The spiritual life of the people was in disarray – as Nehemiah goes through the city, he sees the people working on the Sabbath day as if nothing is wrong. This was a major violation of God’s law.

3.       The people the wall was supposed to keep out, were living in the city. Nehemiah tells of how he saw the Jews who married women from Ashdod, Ammon and Moab living in the city. Their children could not speak Hebrew.

The rebuilding of the temple failed, the rebuilding of the spiritual life of the people failed, and the rebuilding of the wall failed. In other words, even the Exile itself failed to change God’s people’s hearts and turn them back to him. So now what?

That is a story for next time…

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Now, on with the show!

In the big picture story of the Bible we find ourselves in a really difficult position. If this was a movie, this would be where the hero of the story finds himself beaten by his enemy. He is battered and bruised, and he slinks off into some hole to lick his wounds and reassess his life. Is he really the hero of the story? Will he really defeat the enemy he thought he was going to destroy? It is at this point in the story that the emotional music starts playing, and the hero’s trusted confidant appears on screen. She tells him about how there is some deep inner reservoir of strength, or some aspect of the situation he hasn’t considered. As we watch the scene, swelling emotional music stars playing in the background. This is the moment of deep inner transformation that we have been waiting for. The hero finally lifts his head up, steels himself, gets up and as a transformed person, sets his eyes on the enemy once more. The situation hasn’t changed, but he has changed. Now he is ready for the next phase of his story.

This is where Israel finds itself. Israel had been the bearer of the promise that God would bless the whole world through Israel. However, as we have seen, the hero got beaten down. Israel has been destroyed and dispersed by the kingdom of Assyria. As this happens the promise of God passed to the southern kingdom of Judah, where there were some extraordinarily good kings who promoted the pure worship of God. But even in Judah, things did not go well. In the end, Judah too is handed over to her enemies, and the kingdom of Babylon defeats Judah, and God’s people are carried off into exile. Where is God’s promise now? How would all the nations now be blessed through Abraham’s offspring? What happened to God’s promise that one of King David’s offspring would sit on the throne forever? God’s people are that hero, beaten, bruised, and licking his wounds.

Who would play the part of the trusted confidant, who could frame this tragic defeat and encourage God’s people to keep going? This is where the prophets come in.

Now we need to pause for a moment to think about what prophets were in the Old Testament. Often people mistake prophets as fortune tellers – as people who through some gift or special communication from God mostly foretold the future. It is true that in some places God did tell his prophets to tell kings or nations what was going to happen if they didn’t change their evil ways, foretelling the future really wasn’t the main job of a prophet. A prophet’s task was to give God’s message to people. They often gave their messages to the kings of Israel and Judah as warnings about the direction the nation was going in. Sometimes the kings listened, often they ignored God’s warnings and bore the consequences.

However, the prophetic writings during the time of exile also had another function. They gave the people in exile hope. The prophets functioned as those special friends, who could help the hero, in this case the people in exile, reframe their experience with God’s promises and helps them lift up their heads and look with hope to a future when God’s promises will be fulfilled. There are three specific promises we need to look at.

Future Davidic King

Probably the biggest question the people of Judah had is what had become of God’s promise that one of David’s descendants would forever sit on the throne? If Israel is destroyed and Judah is in exile how was this going to happen? To help answer this question, God sends the prophets with a consistent message, that the Davidic line has not been snuffed out. This promise resonates throughout the prophetic writings.

Isaiah 9:6-7 (CSB):

For a child will be born for us, a son will be given to us, and the government will be on his shoulders. He will be named Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace. The dominion will be vast, and its prosperity will never end. He will reign on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish and sustain it with justice and righteousness from now on and forever.

Isaiah 11:1–5 (CSB)

Then a shoot will grow from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots will bear fruit. The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—a Spirit of wisdom and understanding, a Spirit of counsel and strength, a Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord. His delight will be in the fear of the Lord. He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, he will not execute justice by what he hears with his ears, but he will judge the poor righteously and execute justice for the oppressed of the land. He will strike the land  with a scepter from his mouth, and he will kill the wicked with a command from his lips. Righteousness will be a belt around his hips; faithfulness will be a belt around his waist.

Hosea 3:4–5 (CSB)

For the Israelites must live many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or sacred pillar, and without ephod or household idols. Afterward, the people of Israel will return and seek the Lord their God and David their king. They will come with awe to the Lord and to his goodness in the last days.

Jeremiah 23:5-6 (CSB):

Look, the days are coming​—​​this is the Lord's declaration—​​when I will raise up a Righteous Branch for David. He will reign wisely as king and administer justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely. This is the name he will be called: The Lord Is Our Righteousness.

Ezekiel 34:23-24 (CSB):

I will appoint over them a single shepherd, My servant David, and he will shepherd them. He will tend them himself and will be their shepherd. I, the Lord, will be their God, and My servant David will be a prince among them. I, the Lord, have spoken.

In each case God promises that after the exile he will one day restore the Davidic kingly line. He will give Israel back their king, and when this king comes, he is going to be even greater than David. He will rid the nation of evil, he will promote justice, and unlike David who fell to wickedness, this king will be eternally righteous and faithful.

This is a reminder to God’s people that he is faithful, that his plans cannot be derailed and that he will work out his promises through the remnant of Israel. He will do this through the Davidic line, even though it seemed to everyone that the Davidic line had come to an end. This is a powerful reminder that God continues to work behind the scenes whether we understand it or not. The people of Judah would not have been able to understand how this would come to pass, but the prophets reminded them that even if they could not understand it, God did. The prophets remind us that even though we don’t understand God’s plans even in our lives, we don’t need to, because he knows what he is doing.

God’s presence with his people

One of the constant promises God has made throughout the Old Testament period is that he would make Israel his people, and that he would be with them. He constantly promises that “they will be my people, and I will be their God. But now God’s people had been carried off into exile so was he still with them? Were they still his people? To answer these questions God sends the prophets with the promise that he hasn’t abandoned them and that he will still be with them, even in their exile.

Isaiah 41:10 (CSB):

Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be afraid, for I am your God. I will strengthen you; I will help you; I will hold on to you with my righteous right hand.

Isaiah 43:2 (CSB):

I will be with you when you pass through the waters, and when you pass through the rivers, they will not overwhelm you. You will not be scorched when you walk through the fire, and the flame will not burn you.

Isaiah 43:5 (CSB):

Do not fear, for I am with you; I will bring your descendants from the east, and gather you from the west.

Jeremiah 1:8 (CSB):

Do not be afraid of anyone, for I will be with you to rescue you. This is the Lord’s declaration.

Jeremiah 29:11-13 (CSB):

"For I know the plans I have for you"—this is the Lord's declaration—"plans for your well-being, not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope. You will call to me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you search for me with all your heart."

Zephaniah 3:17 (CSB):

The Lord your God is among you, a warrior who saves. He will rejoice over you with gladness. He will be quiet in his love. He will delight in you with singing.

Haggai 1:13 (CSB):

Then Haggai, the Lord’s messenger, delivered the Lord’s message to the people, 'I am with you'—this is the Lord’s declaration.

In each case God reminds his people that he has not abandoned them, his plans haven’t come to nothing and he will still be with them, even in their distress. Passages like these have come to comfort believers over many centuries because, like Israel, we too go through times when we feel as if God is far away, especially in times extreme trial.

God will still bring about a blessing to all nations through the people of Judah

Remember God’s promise to Adam and Eve, that one day someone would come to fix the problem of sin in the world? We saw how this promise is developed into God’s threefold promise to Abraham: that he would make him into a great nation, that he would give him and his descendants a land to call their own, and that he would bless the whole world through his offspring. The first two parts of this promise to Abraham were completed when Israel finally entered the promised land: they were a great nation, and they had a land of their own. But as we have seen Israel failed to be the blessing to the nations they were supposed to be, and Judah had now been carried off into exile. How was this promise now going to come to fruition? Who would deal with the ultimate problem of sin, as the blessing to the world? The prophets also answer this question:

Zechariah 8:6-8 & 13

The Lord of Armies says this: “Though it may seem impossible to the remnant of this people in those days, should it also seem impossible to me?”—this is the declaration of the Lord of Armies. The Lord of Armies says this: “I will save my people from the land of the east and the land of the west. I will bring them back to live in Jerusalem. They will be my people, and I will be their faithful and righteous God.” As you have been a curse among the nations, house of Judah and house of Israel, so I will save you, and you will be a blessing. Don’t be afraid; let your hands be strong.

Isaiah 2:1-5

The vision that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem:

In the last days the mountain of the Lord’s house will be established at the top of the mountains and will be raised above the hills. All nations will stream to it,
and many peoples will come and say, “Come, let’s go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us about his ways so that we may walk in his paths.” For instruction will go out of Zion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He will settle disputes among the nations and provide arbitration for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plows and their spears into pruning knives. Nation will not take up the sword against nation, and they will never again train for war.

Notice that in both cases Judah is a blessing to all the nations (bolded sections above). It is the nations who stream into Jerusalem, coming to worship God. It is in Jerusalem that the Lord will save people from the east and from the west. It is through Judah that God will bless the whole world and the people of Judah, stuck in Babylon needed to understand that he was still faithful and still had a plan.

A new direction

There is one other aspect of what the prophets do in the big picture story: they introduce a new direction. It is in the prophets that we first start reading that the blessing to all nations might not be the nation of Israel or Judah, but the blessing would come in the form of a miraculous person.

He would be a blessing not by bringing a physical kingdom, but he would bring salvation in the form of dealing with sin. What is different about this person is that he deals with the deeper issues in the human heart, rather than just political problems. What is interesting about this person is that instead of winning physical victories, he actually dies to win. Even though he himself is righteous and perfect (bolded below), yet the Lord was pleased to crush him. It is by his wounds that we are healed. He took the punishment of our sins on himself and through his death he justifies the wicked. To the ancient Israelites this would have been a very strange prophecy. So how would that happen? How could this new figure justify people through death? How would that heal the deeper core issues of sin in the human heart? That is a story for next time… for now, I leave you with these words from Isaiah 53. Meditate on the significance of this person who would finally deal with the issue of sin that has been plaguing humanity since the Garden of Eden. It is my hope that you will appreciate just how significant this prophecy from Isaiah is in the context of the bigger story. May this bless your heart dear reader, as it has mine.

Isaiah 53 (CSB)

Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?

He grew up before him like a young plant and like a root out of dry ground. He didn’t have an impressive form or majesty that we should look at him, no appearance that we should desire him.

He was despised and rejected by men, a man of suffering who knew what sickness was.

He was like someone people turned away from; he was despised, and we didn’t value him.

Yet he himself bore our sicknesses, and he carried our pains; but we in turn regarded him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted.

But he was pierced because of our rebellion, crushed because of our iniquities; punishment for our peace was on him, and we are healed by his wounds.

We all went astray like sheep; we all have turned to our own way; and the Lord has punished him for the iniquity of us all.

He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth. Like a lamb led to the slaughter and like a sheep silent before her shearers, he did not open his mouth.

He was taken away because of oppression and judgment, and who considered his fate? For he was cut off from the land of the living; he was struck because of my people’s rebellion.

He was assigned a grave with the wicked, but he was with a rich man at his death, because he had done no violence and had not spoken deceitfully.

Yet the Lord was pleased to crush him severely. When you make him a guilt offering, he will see his seed, he will prolong his days, and by his hand, the Lord’s pleasure will be accomplished.

After his anguish, he will see light and be satisfied. By his knowledge, my righteous servant will justify many, and he will carry their iniquities.

Therefore I will give him the many as a portion, and he will receive the mighty as spoil, because he willingly submitted to death, and was counted among the rebels; yet he bore the sin of many and interceded for the rebels.

The story of Israel is the story of God working out His threefold promise to Abram: to give him a land, to make him into a great people, and to bless the whole world through him and his descendants. This promise is the outworking of God’s earlier promise to Adam and Eve that He would one day send someone who would crush the head of the serpent – a promise that the effect of the curse of sin would one day be undone.

As we have travelled with Israel through this story, we have seen time and again how God has remained faithful and has consistently worked out His promise. Out of Abram, He brought about the people of Israel. Israel then became the bearer of the promise – one day the whole world would be blessed through them as a nation. As Israel inhabits the promised land, they are to be a light to the nations around them, shining forth the glory of God to their neighbours.

Eventually, Israel gets kings to rule her as a nation, and as we have seen, the kings themselves reject God in various ways, with Solomon turning away from God and rejecting God’s rules for how kings are to rule. As we saw in the previous chapter, as a result of this sin, Israel is split in two. The northern kingdom retains the name Israel but remains steadfastly rebellious against God. Not a single one of Israel’s kings uses their authority to promote the true worship of God. At last, God’s patience with Israel runs out, and He sends the Assyrian empire to conquer Israel. This showed once and for all that God rejected the nation of Israel, and the promise that God would bless the whole world through Abraham’s offspring now passes to the southern kingdom of Judah. So can Judah be a kingdom good enough to be God’s blessing to the world? Let’s have a look at some of Judah’s kings to help us find out. We jump into the story at the third of Judah’s kings, Asa, the first king who is regarded as good.

Asa: He banished the pagan priests from the land and removed false idols from the land. He also deposed his grandmother, Maacah, and destroyed the idol she made for the false god Asherah, and burned it. The Bible says his “heart was entirely with the Lord as long as he lived,” and yet, we also read that the “high places did not disappear.” (1 Kings 15:14) This was a way of saying Asa could not completely rid Judah of idolatry.

Jehoshaphat: He was the son of Asa, and he too followed the Lord “Unceasingly” (1 Kings 22:43). But he too failed to turn people’s hearts back to God, and the people continued to offer sacrifices on the high places – the places where other gods were worshipped.

Joash: Even though Joash was only 7 years old when he became king, he wholeheartedly served the Lord. The Bible tells us that this was because the priest Jehoiada guided him. (There is a lesson here about the influence godly adults have on the faith formation of children.) He also enacted reforms to make sure that the temple priests did not abuse their positions of power and ensured that the temple in Jerusalem would be repaired. But even during his reign, the high places did not disappear, and people continued to offer sacrifices to false gods.

Amaziah: Amaziah was the son of Joash, and he too is regarded as a good king in Judah. However, when Amaziah is introduced in 2 Kings 14:3, the author adds this note “He did what was right in the Lord’s eyes, though not like David his father did.” Here we see that there is a decline even in the good kings of Judah. Amaziah seems to have been an arrogant king, and sadly, the only thing Amaziah seems to be known for in 2 Kings 14 is that he made war with the king of Israel (confusingly called Joash). Amaziah lost the battle and as a result Jerusalem’s defensive wall was torn down, and the treasures held in the palace and in the Temple were taken away.

Uzziah (also known as Azariah): He followed his father Amaziah as king and he too did right in the Lord’s eyes, just like his father. However, 2 Kings 15:4 tells us that the people still continued to sacrifice to other gods. Uzziah had the notable distinction that the Lord afflicted him with leprosy and as a result for much of his reign his son Jotham served as regent in his place. This gives us a hint that even though Israel now had 3 good kings in a row, just like the judges before them, they get progressively worse as time goes on.

Jotham: Jotham too worshipped the Lord, but still the high places were not destroyed. The author of Kings adds this haunting note toward the end of Jotham’s story: “It was at that time that the Lord began to unleash Rezin, the king of Aram, and Pekah, son of Remaliah, against Judah.” This foreshadows that the “good times” in Judah were about to end, trouble was on the horizon and things were about to change.

Ahaz: Ahaz was Jotham’s son and he was an evil king. He did everything that God’s kings were not to do. The first thing we learn about him is that he offered his own child as a burnt offering to the gods of the land. This is exactly the practice the people of Canaan were guilty of that led to the Lord using Israel to drive them out. Even the king of Judah now looked no different from the people of Canaan. Ahaz also used the offerings given to God in the temple to pay the king of Assyria to protect Judah during a war against Israel. Thankfully, Ahaz’ reign was short and his son Hezekiah replaced him as king.

Hezekiah: Hezekiah was a standout king. He returned to the pure worship of the Lord in the same way David did. (2 Kings 18:3). What made Hezekiah different from the previous good kings is that he removed the high places, he shattered the idols, and cut down the idolatrous Asherah poles. Interestingly, he also destroyed the bronze snake Moses made (see chapter 15). This snake had become an idol in Judah, and people started offering incense to it as a god. Hezekiah worshipped God and trusted God, and we are told that there was no one like him among all the kings of Judah (2 Kings 18:5). The most notable thing about Hezekiah is that unlike the kings before him, when Assyria comes to make war against Jerusalem, he does not write to the other kings around him to come to his aid. Instead, he trusts in the Lord. He sees the enemy army, and his immediate response is to pray to God. Remarkably, God answers and declares that He will save Jerusalem, and the angel of the Lord destroys the enemy army in the middle of the night.

Could it be that Hezekiah is the king of promise who would bring blessing to the whole world? Unfortunately not. Because as wonderful as Hezekiah was, as terrible was his son Manasseh.

Manasseh: From a spiritual perspective, Manasseh was by far the worst of Israel’s kings. He not only rebuilt all the high places and altars to Baal that his father had destroyed, but he also built altars and areas of worship inside the temple in Jerusalem. He offered his own child as a burnt offering, reintroduced the practice of divination and consulting spirits with a medium, and put an idol of Asherah in the temple. In 2 Kings 21:9, we are told that Manasseh misled Judah and provoked the Lord’s people into doing even more evil in God’s eyes than the Canaanites that lived there before the Lord. In a few years, Manasseh undid all that made God’s people distinct from the nations. Instead of being a blessing to the nations, Judah became spiritually worse than the nations. The light they were supposed to shine became a shadow instead.

As a result of all this evil, God declares that Judah too will be destroyed, just like Israel was. God delayed in sending this destruction for quite a number of years. After Manasseh, his son Amon reigned for 2 years, and after him, Josiah became king.

Josiah: Josiah is remarkable in that he came to be king as an 8-year-old, but started his reign in a period of extreme spiritual evil. Nevertheless, he did what was right in the Lord’s sight, following after David. As he starts his reign, he organizes for the Temple to be restored, and as the workmen start working, they discover the book of the Law. As the king hears the words of God’s law, he realizes how far Judah has turned from the Lord and institutes a number of religious reforms throughout Judah. He destroys the idols, removes the idolatrous priests, destroys the houses of the temple prostitutes that had used the temple as a place to ply their trade. He destroys all the places where the people worshipped the false gods, has the priests of the evil gods killed, and reinstates the Passover feast in Judah.

We are told:

Neither before nor after Josiah was there a king like him who turned to the Lord as he did – with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his strength, in accordance with the Law of Moses. (2 Kings 23:25).

But even though Judah’s king was dedicated to the Lord, it was, unfortunately, too late for Judah as a whole. In the very next verse, we read:

Nevertheless, the Lord did not turn away from the heat of his fierce anger, which burned against Judah because of all that Manasseh had done to arouse his anger. So the Lord said, ‘I will remove Judah also from my presence, as I removed Israel, and I will reject Jerusalem, the city I chose, and this temple about which I said, “My name shall be there.”’

After Josiah, the next four kings end up being bad kings, and in the end, Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, invades Jerusalem, defeats Judah, and carries off Jerusalem’s people into exile. During the battle, the temple is destroyed, the city wall is torn down, and Jerusalem is left in ruins. In the end, Judah, just like Israel, failed to be the vehicle of God’s blessing.

At this point, it is worth remembering the promise God made to Abraham: He promised to make Abraham into a great nation – the nation of Israel, he promised to give Israel the promised land of Canaan, and he promised to bless the whole world through Abraham’s offspring. God specifies that this would one day happen through someone from David’s line, a king who would sit forever on Israel’s throne. Now the nation of Israel had been carried off and displaced by Assyria, and the nation of Judah had been exiled and carried off into Babylon. The people had been ejected from the promised land, and there was no king on Israel’s throne.

How could God possibly fulfill his promises now? Had he changed his mind about blessing the whole world and undoing the curse of sin? Is he done with the line of David?

That is a story for next time.

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Last time we ended our story with God informing King Solomon that the nation of Israel will be split in two because of Solomon’s apostasy. We pick up the story in 1 Kings 11.

Towards the end of Solomon’s reign, one of his officials called Jeroboam receives a visit from one of God’s prophets named Ahijah. Ahijah tells Jeroboam that he will become king of 10 of the 12 tribes of Israel after Solomon dies and so when Solomon dies and his son Rehoboam becomes king, the scene is set for a civil war.

As Rehoboam takes the throne, his first act as king is to make life for his servants more difficult. Solomon had conscripted people and forced them into labour, but life was still relatively good for them. These same people now come to Rehoboam to ask him to lighten their load, but instead of listening to wise advisors who tell him to acquiesce, Rehoboam listens to his young friends and makes life for the labourers even more difficult. In response, the ten tribes in the north rebelled against Rehoboam, aligned themselves with Jeroboam and broke away to form a new northern nation (still called Israel). The two tribes who remained became the southern kingdom of Judah. So, after only 4 kings, Israel as a nation was broken in two.

The first thing Jeroboam does as the king in the north is to build two new altars in the northern kingdom to prevent people from going back down south to Jerusalem to worship God in the temple. In each of these places he installs a golden calf as a statue of the “God of Israel” and he tells the people “Here are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt”. (1 Kings 12:28). Alert readers will immediately recognize that this precisely what happened in Exodus 32, while Israel was waiting for Moses to come back down the mountain of God. This shows us how far Israel had fallen spiritually and sets the scene for Israel’s eventual destruction.

Up until this point, the story we have been following is the story of how God is going to rescue the world from the curse of sin. We saw that it was going to happen through Abraham’s offspring, that it was going to happen through the nation of Israel. We saw that it was going to happen through one of Israel’s kings. Saul, David and Solomon were all found wanting. Which king then would it be?

The rest of the two books of Kings goes about answering this question. These books cover the span of several hundred years of Israel and Judah’s history. As you read these books you see a repeated pattern: a king is introduced, we are told how old he was when he became king, how long he reigned for, and whether he was a good king or not. The test to see whether a king was a good king or a bad king depended entirely on whether the king was true to God or not. If a king promoted the worship of God by getting rid of the places of idol worship, and if he remained faithful to God, then he was seen as a good king. If, however, he promoted the worship of idols, then the king would be rated as bad.

One example that shows this pattern clearly is the 1 Kings 15:9-15.

⁹ In the twentieth year of Jeroboam king of Israel, Asa became king of Judah, ¹⁰ and he reigned in Jerusalem forty-one years. His grandmother’s name was Maakah daughter of Abishalom.

¹¹ Asa did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, as his father David had done. ¹² He expelled the male shrine prostitutes from the land and got rid of all the idols his ancestors had made. ¹³ He even deposed his grandmother Maakah from her position as queen mother, because she had made a repulsive image for the worship of Asherah. Asa cut it down and burned it in the Kidron Valley. ¹⁴ Although he did not remove the high places, Asa’s heart was fully committed to the Lord all his life. ¹⁵ He brought into the temple of the Lord the silver and gold and the articles that he and his father had dedicated.

The interesting thing is that in the northern kingdom of Israel, not a single king gets a good score. Every single king in Israel does evil in the eyes of the Lord and promotes the worship of idols in Israel. In the southern kingdom of Judah things are better, but still only eight kings get a good score. Of those eight, half are sort of a mixture between good and evil. The point is this, both Israel and Judah are on a downward trajectory, although Judah is doing somewhat better overall.

At this point it is important to remember what it is that Israel agreed to in their Covenant with God at Mt Sinai. They agreed that they would follow God, would worship him only and that would not turn to the gods of the land they inhabited. As part of this agreement, God told them, that if they break the covenant and follow after other gods, they would be cast out from the promised land and would be conquered by a foreign nation. You can read the full extent of the damage that would be caused to Israel if they rebelled against God in Deuteronomy 28 and 29. What the books of 1 and 2 Kings shows us is that the northern kingdom of Israel had in fact fully abandoned God. As they get worse and worse, the scene is set for the destruction of Israel. After hundreds of years of patience, God finally allows Israel to be conquered by the the kingdom of Assyria in 2 Kings 17:1-6.

The key part of the story though is the theological reflection that the author of kings offers right after Israel is destroyed (2 Kings 17:7ff). The author gives an extended reflection on why it is that Israel was destroyed and he highlights the fact that Israel rejected God, worshipped foreign idols, and continued to do so despite repeated warnings by God through his prophets that they should turn back to him. Since Israel heeded none of God’s warnings, and stubbornly refused to turn back to him, God finally allowed them to be conquered. Assyria not only conquers Israel, they relocate Israel’s people and replace the population of Israel with people from other parts of the world. After this point, the norther kingdom of Israel drops out of the story, and Israel as a nation would never again be restored. No longer is Israel the bearer of the promise that one day God would rescue the world. The promise now falls squarely in the lap of the southern kingdom of Judah.

With so few good kings in Judah, how will that work? That is a story for next time…

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We might need a quick refresher on where we are in the big picture story the Bible tells. The Bible starts in the Garden of Eden. We saw how God made Adam and Eve to be in a perfect relationship with Him. However, they chose to ignore God’s rule to not eat from the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and as such, they brought sin into the world. This resulted in a broken relationship between humanity and God, and as a result, people could no longer be in God’s presence without being consumed by His wrath against sin. As God cast Adam and Eve out of His presence in the garden, He promised that one day, one would come who would crush the head of the serpent, a symbolic way of promising that one day someone would come who would undo the curse of sin.

As the story progresses, the Bible progressively answers the question of who this person will be. In Abraham’s story, we learn that this person will be a man of faith. In the story of Jacob, we learn that this will be a man from the nation of Israel. In the story of Israel’s escape from Egypt, we learn that this man will be a person who delivers Israel out of slavery. In Israel’s wanderings in the desert, we learn that this man will bring God’s people into a new land of abundance, like a restored Eden. In the Tabernacle, we see that this man will be God’s presence living among His people. In the priestly sacrificial system, we see that this person will reconcile people to God through sacrifice. In the book of Judges, we see that this man needs to be a king who can lead his people to do what is right in God’s own eyes. In the book of 1 Samuel, we see that this man needs to be a king, quite unlike the nations have. In 2 Samuel, we see that this man needs to be a king after God’s own heart.

When we meet King David, at first, he seems to be exactly the kind of king to bring about God’s plan for restoration. However, as we saw, David still had the same problem all of us have: he had a heart that was corrupted by sin. He himself was sinful, and so he could not be the kind of king that was needed to fulfill God’s rescue plan. However, God did promise David that one of his descendants would reign forever on Israel’s throne (2 Samuel 7:16). We learn then that God’s rescue plan would be fulfilled through David’s offspring.

The story continues in the books of 1 and 2 Kings, which chronicle the life and times of the kings that succeed David.

1 Kings opens with David passing on the mantle of kingship to Solomon. As David meets with Solomon, he charges Solomon with these words:

1 Kings 2:2-4

2 “As for me, I am going the way of all the earth. Be strong and be a man, 3 and keep your obligation to the LORD your God to walk in His ways and to keep His statutes, commands, ordinances, and decrees. This is written in the law of Moses, so that you will have success in everything you do and wherever you turn, 4 and so that the LORD will fulfill His promise that He made to me: ‘If your sons take care to walk faithfully before me with all their heart and all their soul, you will never fail to have a man on the throne of Israel.’”

This kind of instruction should by now be familiar to us because we have seen it a few times before. On the border of the promised land, just before Moses died, Moses gave a similar charge to Israel – to obey everything that was written in the law. (Deuteronomy 31). In the same way, when Joshua, Moses’ successor, was about to die, he too called Israel together and gave them the same warning:

Joshua 23:6-8

6 “Be very strong and continue obeying all that is written in the book of the law of Moses, so that you do not turn from it to the right or left 7 and so that you do not associate with these nations remaining among you. Do not call on the names of their gods or make an oath to them; do not serve them or bow in worship to them. 8 Instead, be loyal to the LORD your God, as you have been to this day.”

Then later, when the people of Israel transitioned to being ruled by a king, Samuel the prophet gave them the same warning: “Above all, fear the Lord and worship Him faithfully with all your heart; consider the great things He has done for you. However, if you continue to do what is evil, both you and your king will be swept away.” (2 Samuel 12:14ff)

Sadly, Israel ignored every one of these warnings: they worshiped the gods of the Canaanites, they turned away from God, and they did not worship Him faithfully. So, will Solomon listen to David’s charge to stay true to God?

Israel didn’t have a good track record when it came to staying true to God, and as Solomon’s reign starts, we get a hint that it might not go well for him either. Solomon’s first act as an established king is to make an alliance with Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, by marrying his daughter.

The problem with this is that in every case in Israel, when an Israelite married people from other nations, they invariably ended up worshiping the gods of the other nations. For Solomon to marry an Egyptian hinted at serious problems in the future, since the very thing that set Israel apart as a nation is that they had been delivered out of Egypt! So, Solomon’s reign starts with a number of questions hanging in the air. Will he be a godly king?

The second thing Solomon does as the newly established king is to ask God for wisdom. God appears to Solomon in a dream, and God offers Solomon anything he wants, and he asks God to give him godly wisdom – a request that pleases God. God responds by telling Solomon that since he didn’t ask for riches or for a long life, but for wisdom, he would grant him a long life and riches nonetheless. In fact, God promises that Solomon would be the greatest of all the kings alive during his lifetime!

Solomon immediately starts his reign displaying his great wisdom. The first case he hears as king is that of two prostitutes who come before him. They both claim that the other’s son had died in the night and that the living child was their own. With his God-given wisdom, Solomon realizes that the true mother would do anything to protect her own child, and so orders one of his guards to cut the child in half and give each mother half. Naturally, the true mother would rather see her son alive, even if it meant giving her child to another, and tells the king to give the baby to the other woman. In this way, Solomon discovers who the true mother is and orders the baby to be given back to her. When the people hear about this episode, they recognize that God had given Solomon great wisdom, and so apart from marrying Pharaoh’s daughter, Solomon is off to a great start.

Solomon’s great reign continues as he starts the construction of the great Temple of Jerusalem. The temple would replace the Tabernacle as the place of worship for Israel. It would serve as the location of God’s presence among his people, and as it was when God gave Moses instructions on how to set up the Tabernacle, so too here the narrative stops to give us a detailed description of what the Temple looked like. It would take too much time to describe the temple in-depth here, and you can read it for yourself in 1 Kings 5-9, but it is worth noting that the temple was decorated with imagery that hinted at a restored Garden of Eden. The Ark of the Covenant, which represented God’s presence, was there. It was surrounded by cherubim, which evoke the heavenly throne room of God. The temple was decorated with depictions of trees and fruits, reminding us of the trees of Eden. The inner parts were covered with pure gold, pointing to the purity and richness of God’s presence among his people. It was a place of immense beauty and spiritual significance, especially when you consider that God’s rescue plan involves returning to an Eden-like existence. The completion of the Temple shows us Solomon at his best.

Again, we are left to wonder: is Solomon the promised king?

Sadly, our suspicions about Solomon quickly prove to be true. After finishing the construction of the temple, we start reading about Solomon’s downfall. 1 Kings 9 mentions three specific things Solomon acquired for himself: an Egyptian wife as co-ruler, a large number of horses and chariots, and a lot of gold. This may seem like an insignificant thing to mention; however, there was only one portion of the Law of Moses that applied specifically to the king (Deuteronomy 17). In this section, God specifically forbade three things: you guessed it! A foreign ruler, lots of horses – especially ones from Egypt, and great wealth. Solomon failed on all three counts.

Solomon continues his moral downward spiral by marrying hundreds of other women, who eventually lead Solomon to start worshiping other gods. Solomon falls for the same trap Israel has fallen for countless times before. He toyed with other gods and eventually became enslaved to them. The result is that 1 Kings 11:6 describes Solomon in this way: He “did evil in the eyes of the Lord; he did not follow the Lord completely, as David his father had done”.

In the end, God tells Solomon that because of his wickedness, Israel will be split in two. How will that happen and which part of the kingdom will produce the king of promise? That is a story for next time…

I want to spend one more week on the life of David before we move to look at the book of Kings. Last week we saw that David was fundamentally different from King Saul. Saul was a king like all the nations had. He trusted in his own power and strength, rather than in God’s power and strength. As the most powerful person in Israel, he thought he could do whatever he wanted, even to the point of disregarding God’s laws. David, however, was different; he was a king after God’s own heart. What made David different was that he trusted in God’s power and in God’s strength rather than his own. He was a king of faith, and as we saw last time, as David rose to power, he is presented as an almost perfect king. Except that David had one flaw: he had a sinful heart. And as perfect as David was, he fell to the temptation so many powerful men have failed for: He committed adultery with Bathsheba, got her pregnant, and to cover up his wrongdoing, he arranged to have her husband killed. David, it turns out, isn’t perfect at all.

However, David was a man after God’s own heart. So how does this work? How can David, murderous, adulterous David, be considered a man after God’s own heart?

Because David, as a man of true faith, practiced true repentance. How does sin and repentance work in the life of a person of true faith? This is so central to the salvation story that I think it is worth dedicating a chapter to it. So what happens in David’s case?

Step 1: Temptation

2 Samuel 11:1-2

1 In the spring when kings march out to war, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel. They destroyed the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah, but David remained in Jerusalem. One evening David got up from his bed and strolled around on the roof of the palace. From the roof, he saw a woman bathing—a very beautiful woman.

David is tempted when he sees a beautiful woman bathing. At this stage in life, David has everything he needs. He is at the height of his power, his rule has been established, and he is living his #bestlifenow. He has power, wealth, and military success, and yet it is precisely here when he falls to temptation. What we are supposed to understand from this is that we don’t just fall to temptation when things are going poorly, or when we are stressed, or when there are troubles at home. The problem we have is that our hearts are so broken that even during the good times, we fall to temptation.

In fact, the New Testament tells us that each person is tempted “when he is drawn away and enticed by his own evil desire. Then after desire is conceived, it gives birth to sin, and when sin is fully grown, it gives birth to death”. (James 1:14-15). This is exactly what happens to David; he sees a woman he cannot have, desires her, and then sins by taking her for himself. In his case, it leads to literal death when he has Bathsheba’s husband killed.

Step 2: Cover Up

After sin, most of us move to the “cover-up” phase. We try to hide ourselves, or hide our sin. This has been the basic human response since the very first sin came into the world. The first thing Adam and Eve did after they fell was to cover themselves up because of their shame. They then went to hide from God. This is pretty much what all of us try to do, and is what David tried to do too.

He wants to cover up his sin by hatching a cunning plan. When David finds out that Bathsheba is pregnant, he brings her husband Uriah home from the battlefront and tries to get him to go home so that Uriah can sleep with Bathsheba. In David’s mind, this erases his sin and covers everything up nicely so he doesn’t have to face the consequences of his wrongdoing. This is often what we do too through lying or deceit, trying to avoid the consequences of our wrongdoing. Except it never works, not fully. We might get away with the sin, but we can never get away from the guilt and shame that goes with it because we can’t escape God’s presence. In David’s case, he also could not get Uriah to go home to sleep with his wife, so his initial plan to cover up his sin fails.

Step 3: Making it worse

Many of us who fail to cover up our sin dig in and make it worse. Maybe the lie we told to avoid the consequences of sin snowballs, and we end up with this massive web of lies we need to maintain to avoid detection. Perhaps one sin leads to another, and before you know it, you are in over your head. This is what happened to David – when he fails to get Uriah to go home, he digs in and makes it worse. Instead of coming clean at this stage, he instead goes the next step – he writes to his army commander Joab and instructs him to put Uriah on the front lines where it is almost certain that Uriah will be struck down. It happens exactly as planned. Uriah dies in battle, David marries Bathsheba, and she gives him a son. And they all lived happily ever after (except for Uriah, of course).

Except they didn’t.

Step 4: Exposure

The problem with covering up sin is that it can only ever hide your wrongdoing from other people. We may well succeed at hiding our wrongdoing from other people forever. The problem is that our sin isn’t primarily sin against other people. Sin is primarily against God, and no matter how good our cover story is, we can never cover up our sin from God. Adam and Eve couldn’t hide from God in the Garden of Eden, we can’t hide from God today, and David couldn’t escape God either. We have to remember that David was the king of Israel. In those days, a king’s word and rule were absolute. He was the law-maker, the judge, the jury, and the executioner too. If David had been the king of any other nation, he would have gotten away with it. But David was Israel’s king; he was the king of God’s representative nation. The nation that was supposed to show the world how good God was. So God has skin in the game, and because God loved his people and loved David, he could not just let David’s sin go unchecked. His sin had to be exposed.

So God sent the prophet Nathan, and Nathan confronts David with the reality of his sin. David is exposed, and this humbles David. This would have been an extremely painful thing for David to go through, but it brought him back to God. It is what David does with this exposure that sets him apart as a man after God’s own heart. He repents.

Step 5: Repentance

We often think of repentance as just being sorry about our sin, but it is much more than that. Repentance isn’t just about being sorry about our sin; it is a heart change that requires us to come face to face with our sin. It requires us to look deep into our hearts and to see the darkness there. To hate the darkness and brokenness and to mourn over it. Then to turn to God, to ask for forgiveness and for a new heart, and then to live out of the reality of the new heart God gives us in response to our faith.

That is what true repentance takes. What makes David a man after God’s own heart is that that is exactly how David responds. You can see his response in Psalm 51, a psalm in which David goes through exactly this process. I recommend you read it in full, but here are a few snippets.

Psalm 51:1-3

Have mercy on me, Oh God, according to your unfailing love, according to your abundant compassion, blot out my rebellion. For I am conscious of my rebellion, and my sin is always before me.

He has seen his sin, and he prays for forgiveness. That is God’s grace at work on display for us all to see.

V5. “Indeed, I was guilty when I was born; I was sinful when my mother conceived me”.

He recognizes that the problem isn’t even so much this individual sin, but the broken heart that beats in his chest.

V7. “Purify me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow…”

V10. “God, create a clean heart for me and renew a steadfast spirit within me”.

He pleads with God to fix his brokenness, to cleanse the darkness that lives inside him, to give him a new heart that beats with purity.

V13-14. “Then I will teach the rebellious your ways, and sinners will return to you. Save me from the guilt of bloodshed, God – God of my salvation – and my tongue will sing of your righteousness”.

He commits himself to a new life in faith and trust that God has forgiven his sin. He commits to teaching others all about God, in response to what God has done for him.

That is what it looks like to truly repent. David could only do it with what he knew about God at the time. David was a man after God’s own heart, but he was just a shadow of the Ultimate King who was to come. David could only repent as an Old Testament believer could – with a prayer that somehow God would blot out his sin. As New Testament believers, we know so much more than David. We know that God will forgive our sin if we repent, ultimately not just by blotting it out but by transferring our sin unto the Ultimate King, Jesus, who stood in our place. But… we are getting ahead of ourselves again.

Israel had asked for a king just like all the nations had, and they appointed a king just like all the nations had. However, what Israel needed was a king quite unlike the kings all the other nations had. You will remember that Israel was supposed to be a beacon to all the nations around them and that they were to show the nations what life was like under God’s rulership. Israel’s first king proved spiritually disastrous, and as we finished part one of our story last week, we saw that the Lord rejected King Saul as Israel’s king because he did not trust in God. Saul answered the first part of a question the Book of Samuel seeks to answer: what kind of king does Israel need? Saul’s story tells us 'not a king like all the nations have.'

The rest of the Book of Samuel chronicles the rise of David. He appears for the first time in chapter 15 of 1 Samuel, which is just after God tells Samuel that he has rejected Saul as king because he is not the right type of king. God instructs Samuel to go and anoint a new king, and so Samuel goes to Bethlehem to find this new king.

When Samuel gets there, a comical story plays out where Samuel is introduced to all the sons of Jesse. The sons are presented to Samuel, with the oldest going first, and each time the candidate gets less and less impressive. Finally, only David, the youngest, is left. When Samuel sees him, the Lord says that he is the one, and as Samuel anoints him, the Spirit of the Lord empowers David, and it is clear that God’s favor now rests on David, no longer on Saul.

As the newly anointed and newly spirit-empowered future king, the first thing David does is defeat Goliath. We all know this famous story. The army of Israel and the army of the Philistines are drawn for battle, except the Philistine force is so overwhelmingly strong that Israel ends up hiding in the caves or cowering behind the bushes. Every day the mighty boss fighter Goliath comes to defy the army of Israel, daring any man to come and fight against him. The agreement is that if Goliath could be defeated, then the Philistines would become the servants of Israel, but if Goliath won, then Israel would be enslaved to the Philistines.

David, still a boy at this stage, goes to the battlefield to bring supplies to his brothers, and he overhears Goliath taunting Israel. He volunteers to fight Goliath and, in a great show of faith in God, rejects any sort of armor or armament, and instead picks up five stones to fit into his sling. Critically, David’s faith is not in his military prowess, but in the Lord. He tells Goliath as much, and with a single stone, brings down the mighty giant. Dismayed by the loss of their mighty warrior, the Philistines are routed, and David’s rise to the throne of Israel begins in earnest.

The rest of the Book of 1 Samuel chronicles Saul’s increasing hatred for David. The more success David has, the more Saul hates him. Several times Saul tries to kill David, and every time David escapes. The author of Samuel wants to make it clear that David was morally superior to Saul in many ways. Several times David had the opportunity to kill Saul, but he refused since Saul was the Lord’s anointed king. David’s rise continues, and as the Book of 1 Samuel ends, Saul dies, and David’s reign of Israel is all but assured.

The Book of 2 Samuel starts with the short civil war that erupts after Saul’s death, but pretty quickly David is enthroned as the king of all Israel. Once this happens, God makes a promise to David that someone from his line will forever be on the throne of Israel and that his house (his family line) will endure forever. In response, David prays an extended prayer of humble thanks, and in the prayer, David references God’s promises to Abraham. Remember how God promised Abraham that He would make him into a great nation, that He would give him the land of Canaan as his special possession, and that He would bless all the nations through his descendants? At the same time, God declared that He would be Israel’s God. In his thanksgiving prayer, David highlights each of those aspects in some way.

The next chapters tell us about how David’s reign is secured, how he subdues Israel’s enemies, and brings peace to the nation. Up to this point, David is presented as an essentially perfect king, and the thing that sets him apart from Saul is that David was a king quite unlike the nations had. He was a king after God’s own heart. The books of 1 and 2 Samuel set out to teach us what kind of king Israel needed. Saul showed us that 'a king like all the other nations have' is insufficient for Israel. David was a different kind of king, a king after God’s own heart. Was David perhaps THE king of promise? The one who would undo the curse of sin?

The answer is unfortunately no. You see, David had a critical flaw: he himself was a sinful human being. While he was a king after God’s own heart, his own heart still had a sin problem. In David’s case, this resulted in David stealing another man’s wife, getting her pregnant, and arranging for her husband to be killed in battle in order to cover it up. As good as David was, he wasn’t good enough. We need a better king, even better than the great king David.

Now the point is not so much that David was so flawed, but that, in fact, all of us are so flawed. We need a king like David, but much better than David. But one day, one would come from David’s line, one who was not only a man after God’s own heart, but also a man with God’s own heart. The perfect King who slayed a Goliath much bigger than the one David slayed: death itself. But more on that, next time.

What the Book of Judges made clear is that Israel needed a king. Without a king, the nation spiraled into chaos and evil. Even though Ruth made it clear that good things could still happen in a chaotic nation because of God’s sovereignty, it is evident – Israel needed a king. The question is: what kind of king is the right kind of king? That is the question the Book of Samuel answers.

The book starts with the story of Hannah. She is barren, a common issue in the redemption story, and her barrenness reminds us that Israel is spiritually barren at this point. They are not bearing any spiritual fruit, just like Hannah can’t bear any physical children. In response to her barrenness, Hannah, whose name means grace, cries out to God to give her a child, and God is gracious to her. He gives her a child, and this child grows up to be Samuel, after whom the book is named.

When Samuel grows up, he becomes both a prophet and the last judge of Israel. The first 7 chapters of the book deal with Samuel’s rulership of Israel, and when Samuel gets old, it is time to appoint a new ruler for Israel. The natural choice is for Samuel’s sons to succeed him, but his sons were wicked, and they did not serve God. So the elders of Israel come to Samuel and tell him, “Appoint us a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have.”

We should not miss the significance of this: remember the Book of Samuel teaches us what kind of king Israel needed. Is the right kind of a king, a king like the other nations have? Chapter 8 of 1 Samuel starts answering this question. Samuel warns the people that if they are to have a king, they will be subject to that king’s rule: the king will have the power to tax them, and he will take their sons and daughters as servants to work for him. But the people are relentless, they insist, “We must have a king… then we will be like all the other nations.”

This statement was a monumental slap in the face of God. Remember, Israel was saved out of Egypt to be a holy nation, set aside, precisely not to be a nation like all the others. They were supposed to be a beacon of light among the nations next to them, radiating God’s goodness to all around them. Now they had once more turned their back on God, demanding a king like all the other nations had so that they could be a nation like all the other nations were.

God tells Samuel to give the people what they want, and so Samuel is instructed to appoint a king for Israel. The first king of Israel is Saul. Saul comes from the tribe of Benjamin, the weakest of the tribes of Israel. He himself is hardly kingly material. Samuel anoints Saul, and he tells him that God’s Spirit will enter him and empower him. This was important because, as a king, Saul was supposed to lead God’s people so that they would no longer do what was right in their own eyes. However, when Samuel summons Israel to tell them who would be their king, Saul is nowhere to be found. He is hiding behind a pile of supplies. This was the man to whom the task of saving Israel from the hands of their current enemies, the Philistines, was given!

Nevertheless, Saul starts off pretty well. He wins several initial victories against the Philistines. As Saul starts to deliver Israel as an army commander, Samuel’s time as the last judge of Israel comes to an end. Samuel gets ready to hand over the reins to Saul, and he gathers the people together once more to make a farewell speech. He once more warns Israel to obey the commands of the Lord and to stay true to worshiping God. Crucially, as Samuel’s farewell speech ends, Samuel tells the people that if they were to turn from God, both they and their king would perish. As Samuel steps back, Saul’s reign over Israel begins in earnest.

The first thing Saul does as Israel’s king is to make war on the Philistines at a place called Gilgal. He gets an army together, and the Philistines respond by sending their army to fight Saul. Except, the Philistine army so vastly outnumbers Israel that Israel’s army scurries away to hide behind the bushes and in the caves.

While this happens, Saul waits for the prophet Samuel to come and offer an offering before the Lord. As a Benjamite, Saul could not offer the offering himself, but since Samuel took too long to come, Saul took matters into his own hands. He offers the offering himself in direct disobedience to the Lord’s commands. Saul, in self-reliance, refuses to submit to God and trusts in his own strength. In short, Saul acted exactly as you would expect a king to act. At least the kind of king the other nations have.

Samuel rebukes Saul and says, “You have not kept the command the Lord your God gave you; if you had, he would have established your kingdom over Israel for all time. But now your kingdom will not endure; the Lord has sought out a man after his own heart and appointed him ruler of his people because you have not kept the Lord’s command” (1 Sam 13:13-14).

In doing so, Samuel tells us what kind of king Israel needs – one after the Lord’s own heart. This is not King Saul, so who will it be?

It will be the king who comes from the family line of Ruth and Boaz, the grandson of Obed and son of Jesse. You know that family that the Lord so sovereignly provided for during the famine in the time when the judges were judging? It’s almost as if God had a plan, set in place since the beginning of the world… But more on that next time.

The book of Judges ended with the haunting reminder: In those days Israel had no king and everyone did as they saw fit. This shows us the core issue that each human heart has – we need a king to rule our hearts, otherwise we will end up like the people in Israel during that era. As the story of the Levite and his concubine teach us, this is not something we want. So how will Israel get a king? The books of Ruth, 1 Samuel, and 2 Samuel provide the answer.  

The book of Ruth is the prologue, the origin story of the future king.

The book of Ruth is structured in four chapters and tells the story of how God provides for two women: Naomi and Ruth. The situation is that in the days that Israel was ruled by the judges there was a famine in the land. This causes a certain man named Elimelech to move to the country of Moab, where presumably there was more food. One of the features of the book of Ruth is that the names of the people in the book are important. Elimelech means “My God is king”. This hints at the fact that even though these people lived during a period where Israel had no king, God is still sovereignly in control, working behind the scenes to complete the rescue plan he started in the Garden of Eden.

The famine causes Elimelech to move to Moab with his wife Naomi, and his two sons. When they get to Moab, the sons find Moabite wives named Orpah and Ruth. Shortly thereafter tragedy strikes and Elimelech and both his sons die, leaving the women in a serious predicament. In the culture of the day the husband provided for his wife and children, so if a woman was widowed she would have no source of income. To deal with the situation Naomi decides to go back to Israel, where the laws of the land provided ways for the down and out to find food.

As she prepares to go, her two daughters in law tell her they want to come with her. Naomi convinces Orpah to stay and find a new husband in Moab, but Ruth could not be persuaded. She tells Naomi in no uncertain terms: “Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.” In doing so Ruth shows that she has turned from the idols of Moab to worship the true God, and seeing her determination, Naomi agrees to take her back with her to Israel.

We again see hints of God working behind the scenes through coincidence. They leave Moab during a famine to go back to Israel to find a new home. They move back to Bethlehem – a name which literally means “House of Bread”. Coincidence? I think not.

When Naomi and Ruth get back they start collecting food. Now Israel had a law that provided for widows and refugees to walk behind the harvesters in a field and collect all the crops that were dropped or left. Ruth goes to pick up the leftover grain, and she happens to find herself in the field of a man named Boaz. Coincidentally Boaz happens to be a kinsman redeemer. In Leviticus 25 and 27, God had decreed that if an Israelite died and he did not have a male heir to look after his remaining family, then the kinsman of the deceased man was to “redeem” the situation. This happened when the kinsman married the widow and provided a new son for the widow, or bought back any property lost or sold as a result of the husband’s passing. In order to redeem the lost property or person, the kinsman redeemer had to pay the redemption price – whatever the land was worth, or by agreeing to look after the widow as his wife.

As it turns out, Ruth happens to catch Boaz’s eye, and he is impressed with her diligence and loyalty to Naomi. He arranges things so that the harvester drop extra food for Ruth and so she is able to get enough food for both herself and Naomi. As the story progresses Naomi plans and schemes for Ruth to get married to Boaz. They concoct a plan where after Boaz spent a night partying, she would sneak into his room and go and lie down at his feet. She does so and Boaz wakes up startled in the middle of the night. Now scholars disagree on how much impropriety was involved during that night, but at the very least we have to admit that this was a dodgy way for Ruth to get Boaz to redeem her. Nevertheless, when Boaz realises that this is Ruth who he has had his eye on, he is concerned for her “noble character”. So she sneaks out in the morning before anyone could recognise her, but not before Boaz agrees that he would redeem her by marrying her.

After a bit of back and forth between Boaz and a relative who happened to be closer to Ruth and Naomi than he, Boaz finally marries Ruth. As the story draws to a close there is lots of joy – the elders and witnesses to the marriage speak blessings over Boaz and Ruth, the Lord enables Ruth to have a baby and Naomi rejoices because she now has a male heir. ‌The book of Ruth ends with a short genealogy which shows how the newborn baby, who was called Obed, became the father of Jesse, who was the father of David.

So What?

The question is so what? What does this delightfully heartwarming love story have to do with the big story scripture is telling? I can think of at least three things.

Firstly, the book of Ruth reminds us that there are no such things as coincidences. In the story it coincidentally happens to be a man whose name means “My God is King”, who kicks off a story that happens during the period when Israel “had no king and every man did as he saw fit”. It just so happens that the Moabite wife who one of the sons marry ends up being a person who would leave her people, and declare her allegiance to God. It just so happens that these women move back to live in “The House of Bread” at a time when they had no bread. It just so happened that the field they chose to collect food in, belongs to a righteous man who also happens to be their kinsman redeemer. It just so happens that Boaz falls in love with Ruth and agrees to marry her. He just so happens to be the great-great-grandfather of the greatest Old Testament king Israel would ever have: David.

These coincidences are not coincidences at all. In the same way God has been sovereignly working out his rescue plan throughout the rest of the Old Testament, he is still working out his plan in the book of Ruth. God will not let his plan be derailed by the actions of Israelites who leave the promised land in order to pursue the better life in a far-off land. He used this to bring back Ruth who would be a ancestor of David and ultimately Jesus himself. The Lord is and remains in control.

Secondly, this book reminds us that no matter how dark and evil the world around God’s people become, there will always be a remnant who remain true to God. The fact that this delightful love story could happen during a time when Israel had turned evil shows us that God preserves for himself a remnant throughout all the ages who will remain true to him. As the world around us “De-Christianises” we can take comfort in this.

Finally, Boaz is a picture of how a righteous kinsman redeemer acts. He paid the price to rescue a poor widow and took her into his family as his bride. Boaz points us to the other, greater Kinsman-Redeemer, Jesus. He too paid the price to rescue the spiritually poor people who would ultimately become his bride: the Church. As much as Ruth is a true love story, it points us to a deeper and grander love story. Coincidence? I think not.

The book of Joshua closes with Israel having taken possession of the land of Canaan, and throughout that book, we saw the sweeping military success Israel experienced. However, when we flip the page to the book of Judges, we get quite a different picture.

The book of Joshua ends with Joshua gathering the people of Israel together, and laying out God’s law before them and asking Israel to commit to following the Lord God alone. Joshua reminds the people that if they would stray from serving God, or if they follow the gods of the Canaanites, then the Lord will bring disaster on them. In response, the Israelites make a solemn promise that they would serve the Lord only and obey him. In this way, Joshua ends with Israel having promised that they would indeed be the holy, set apart people of God. They would, in fact, fulfill their role in being a blessing to all the nations around them.

As we flip the page into the book of Judges, things turn for the worse. The book itself is structured with a double introduction, the record of Israel’s increasingly useless judges in the middle, and a shocking conclusion.

The first part of the double introduction of the book is a historical introduction, and is found in chapter one. It shows us that the sweeping military success of Joshua wasn't so sweeping after all. In fact, Israel had problems driving out various tribes in Canaan. For example, even though the Lord was with them, the people of Judah could not drive out the people living in the plains because their chariots were too strong. Other tribes also failed to drive out the people living in their sections of the promised land and ended up living among the Canaanites.

The second part of the double introduction is a theological introduction which gives us the reason why Israel was not fully successful. Here we read that the Angel of the Lord appears to Israel and tells Israel that they have disobeyed the Lord, and so the people of the land of Canaan will become a snare for Israel. Their idols will take Israel away from the Lord, and in chapter two, we see that once Joshua’s generation dies out, the following generation doesn't know the Lord. They worship the gods of the people around them. Instead of being a light to the nations and a blessing to those around them, the holy set-apart people of Israel end up being exactly like the nations around them. As a result of Israel’s apostasy, the Lord allows them to be conquered by the people around them.

The middle of the book details a descending spiral of apostasy among Israel. Each time Israel is oppressed by one of the nations around them, Israel remembers the Lord and cries out to him. The Lord then raises up a deliverer, called a judge, to save Israel from her enemies. Once this happens, Israel worships the Lord for a while but invariably returns to worshiping other gods. However, the cycle is actually a downward spiral in that each of the judges themselves becomes a progressively worse character. The first judge is Othniel, of whom Judges has nothing bad to say. Next, you have Ehud, who was left-handed, and he delivers Israel by being a sneaky assassin – hardly the most glorious way of delivering people. They are followed by Deborah and Barak. Barak was supposed to be the judge, but he was too scared to go alone, and so Deborah has to come along to deliver Israel. In the end, the glory goes to her.

Gideon follows, and while it is true that he finally delivered Israel with only 300 men as the Sunday school stories teach us, he was a coward hiding from the Midianites. It took a number of miracles for the Lord to convince him that he was the one to deliver Israel. Hardly the actions of the hero of faith we often make Gideon out to be.

It continues through Tola, Jair, and Jephthah. Jephthah is worth pausing at because it shows us how far Israel had fallen. Jephthah was the son of a prostitute, but he was a mighty warrior. He makes a promise to the Lord that if God would give him victory over the Ammonites, he would offer a thanksgiving sacrifice to the Lord. This would be whomever, or whatever exits his house first when he comes home. Ultimately, Jephthah does defeat the Ammonites, and his daughter comes to meet him. Sad though he was, he sacrificed his daughter to the Lord as a thanksgiving offering. This is all the more shocking when we remember that one of the reasons God instructed Israel to wipe out the Canaanites was because they offered their children in sacrifice to the gods of their land. Now Israel’s leader had committed the very same atrocity.

The downward spiral of judges finds its worst judge in Samson. Most know Samson as the man who had long hair and when his hair was cut off magically lost his strength. But Samson slept around, killed people in anger, married a Philistine who he knew wanted to steal his strength. Ultimately, he gave in to a nagging wife, despite the vow he had made to the Lord, and he was finally captured and blinded. Ultimately, Samson sacrifices himself and kills the entire ruling class of the Philistines with one blow.

The middle section of the book concludes with the story of a man named Micah who set up a kind of false temple in his house and hired himself a private priest. The author of Judges throws in a comment in the middle of this story, “In those days Israel had no king, everyone did as they saw fit.” This transitions us from the middle section to the double conclusion.

The book ends with a shocking conclusion. The first section of the double conclusion is a theological one. We find this in chapter 19, which is one of the darkest and most chilling chapters in the Old Testament. It tells the story of a Levite and his concubine. She runs away from the Levite and goes back to her father’s house in Bethlehem. After a number of months, the Levite decides to go and get her back. He did not really care for her, as is evident by the fact that it took him months before he bothered to do something about the situation.

After a number of delays, he finally leaves with his concubine, but because they left later than expected, they now need somewhere to stay the night. They choose to stay in Gibeah, an Israelite town, and they go to wait in the town square for someone to invite them in. An old man finally invites them in because it is not safe overnight in the square. Soon a party of wicked men surround the house and demand that the Levite be sent out so they could rape him. This is a direct parallel to what happened to Lot in Sodom and Gomorrah (see Genesis 19).

The Levite sends out his concubine, and she is raped and abused all through the night and ultimately collapses at the door of the house where the Levite was staying. As the Levite leaves, he coldly tells the woman to get up so they could leave, but she has died. To add insult to injury, when he gets home, he cuts up her body, limb by limb and sends the pieces to the rest of Israel in order to get them enraged enough for him to take revenge on the Gibeanites for his lost property.

The book ends with that same refrain: In those days, Israel had no king, and everyone did as they saw fit.

Now, what does this all mean in the overarching story? Judges forces us to do a reality check. The point of the book is this: when Israel has no king, they turn very quickly into Sodom and Gomorrah. The Levite, who was from the very priestly tribe of Israel, has become one of the worst people in scripture. The sin which so offended God that he destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah has now become commonplace in Israel, the people who were supposed to be holy and set aside to show the nations the blessing of being God’s people. The reason for this is that human hearts are so wicked and so corrupt that when we are left to our own devices, this is who we become. Without a divine king to rule us, we are no better than that Levite.

Israel needed a king, and a king was coming. But more on that, next time…

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