Most of the Time

David was a man after God’s own heart … most of the time. His desire to obey and glorify God was the motivating force for his actions throughout the vast majority of his tumultuous life. The obvious exceptions to this are unambiguously called out by the writer of Samuel in words like “But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord” or “God was displeased with this thing, and he struck Israel.”

If you miss those sorts of editorial comments, you are not reading with great care.

When Is a Priest Not a Priest?

“... and David’s sons were priests.”

Hmm. That would seem to require an explanation, no?

God had chosen the tribe of Levi to serve him as a priestly caste. Even then, not all Levites qualified to serve as priests. Service at the altar was limited to the sons of Aaron, Moses’ brother, who were ordained in an elaborate ceremony and served in that capacity thereafter.

Livestock and Loved Ones

There are still a few wonderful things in this increasingly weird world. A good number of them are covered in fur, and occasionally wool.

You do not find many pets in the Bible. Life thousands of years ago was generally harder, and people were poorer, hungrier and more pragmatic. Most verses that mention animals have to do with wildlife and livestock, not domesticated creatures living indoors.

The Ironic Ending

Not all friendships get off on the right foot.

One of my best buddies in high school was a skinny longhair with similar tastes in pop music. But Terry and I met under less than ideal circumstances. Another student had a serious grudge against me and was determined to make my early high school life as miserable as possible; however, he wasn’t quite sure he had it in him to handle a six foot 200 pounder on his own. So, one day after school, he and his hulking sidekick chased me into the nearby woods. On the way, they drafted Terry to help out.

Stricken Sheep

“Then David spoke to the Lord when he saw the angel who was striking the people, and said, ‘Behold, I have sinned, and I have done wickedly. But these sheep, what have they done?’ ”

People who are characteristically righteous always have an outsized sense of their own relative culpability. That is probably a good thing. A tender conscience toward sin and a heart which always looks to get right with God are qualities to be valued and pursued. God is often more generous with his assessment of righteous men and women than they are with themselves.

But a preoccupation with our own personal responsibility can also be a bit like wearing blinders.

Not An Idiot

The books of Chronicles cover much of the same historical material we find in the books of Samuel and Kings, sometimes in near-identical wording. This provokes legitimate questions: Do we need both? Our Bibles are bulky enough already without including a whole lot of duplicated material. What do the books of Chronicles offer us that Samuel and Kings do not?

There are several possible responses to those questions, but the short answers are “Yes” and “Quite a bit.” I am working on a comparative study of the two sets of narratives and hope to get into that subject more extensively later this year in this space if time permits. Though more or less the same time periods are covered, there are numerous variations in content and wording that make each account useful to readers in different ways.

Semi-Random Musings (18)

There are no wasted words in scripture. At least, I’m not having much luck finding any.

The apostle John says that if everything Jesus did were written down, the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. Sanctified hyperbole? Maybe. But what is certain is that we’d need tractor trailers to carry our Bibles to church and bigger doors on our buildings. Much bigger. Add a few more unnecessary details to our Old Testaments, and we’d have to leave them at home. Except of course that our homes would not be big enough, and we couldn’t afford to own all the volumes.

The Holy Spirit is not just the world’s greatest-ever writer, he is also the world’s greatest-ever editor. We get exactly what we need and no more. No detail is frivolous.

Two Wrongs

I was sure I had written at length some time recently about King Saul’s attempted ethnic cleansing of the Gibeonites and the grisly complications it produced during the reign of his successor, but I see no evidence of such an exercise on the blog.

2,223 posts, and no significant exploration of the subject.* I promise I wasn’t intentionally dodging a bullet.

Well, let’s rectify that.

Women in the Old Testament

Why were the lives of Old Testament women so wildly different from those of women today?

If you have never studied history in any serious depth, you might be forgiven for thinking that some of things that went on ancient Israelite households were absolutely barbaric, that wives and daughters were horribly oppressed, lacked agency, were regarded as mere chattel, and lived lives of virtual slavery.

Careful attention to the text of the Old Testament shows this was rarely the case.

The Other Side of the Story

One thing you will likely notice as you read through the Bible’s books of history is that they are not saturated with editorial comments. That is to say the Holy Spirit did not prompt the writers of scripture’s various histories to pass moral judgment on many, even most, of the events they recounted.

There are several notable instances in which he did.

The Perils of Family Ties

Most books of the Bible have themes. Commentators generally do a decent job of teasing out the more blatant ones and turning them into book titles or pithy summaries. Thus Psalms is “the hymnbook of the remnant”, Hebrews is concerned with “an unshakeable kingdom” and Mark’s is said to be the “gospel of the Servant King”. To their credit, in many cases these diligent students of God’s word also identify and share with us less obvious recurring patterns that could easily be missed by first, second and even third time readers.

In the books of Samuel, one of these recurring patterns is nepotism. It might not rate the subtitle of a commentary, but it’s there all the same, threading its way through the stories of Samuel, Saul and David, chronicling the perils of family ties that are just a wee bit too tight, and their potentially injurious effects on the people of God.

Once you see it, you can’t stop seeing it.

Evil in Unexpected Places

“No one gives up on something until it turns on them.”

― Thomas Ligotti

Ligotti’s statement may or may not be true, but there is something to be said for people who live consistently.

Those who have become disillusioned by the behavior of Christians are among the most intensely disillusioned people I have ever met. How do you initiate any kind of dialogue with someone completely convinced he has taken the measure of your faith and found it wanting?

Forgiven and Forgotten?

A couple of fairly old quotes raise important issues about forgiveness:

“The confession should be real and full, and at once forgiveness and cleansing follow, though not often realised to the full at once. David was forgiven the instant he confessed his sin in the presence of Nathan, but later he wrote the 51st Psalm.”

“David confessed his sin and was straightway forgiven, but the Lord dealt with him governmentally in three ways: ‘the sword would never depart from his house,’ the child would die, and he would receive the same treatment he had meted out to others (2 Sam. 12). So that though sins are forgiven and forgotten in one sense, they are not in another.”

— William Hoste, Bible Problems and Answers (1957)

That Wacky Old Testament (7)

How would you like to be publicly executed for the sins of your grandfather? Any takers?

There’s nothing particularly “wacky” about the events of 2 Samuel 21, which involve the capital punishment of seven Israelites for nothing more offensive than being blood relatives of the former King Saul. A story like this may raise questions in our minds about the fairness of Israel’s law, and thus the fairness of God himself.

I had two major goals in mind in introducing our irregular but ongoing “Wacky Old Testament” series: (1) to set some of the more perplexing commands and events of the Old Testament in their historical context, thus making them more comprehensible to the modern reader; and (2) to demonstrate the consistency of God’s character from Testament to Testament. It may be trendy to portray Jesus as gentle and loving, and Jehovah (or YHWH) as barbaric and bloody, but neither portrayal is exactly on the nose.

Let’s see if for once I’ve bitten off more than I can chew.

Getting What We Deserve

Poor leaders. First we put them on pedestals. Then we have a go at the pedestals with sledgehammers.

Leaders ride waves of popularity and drown in waves of rejection. Often the trends of public opinion are neither predictable nor rational. I know of exactly three people who, months beforehand, accurately forecast the rise of Donald J. Trump to the presidency. Everybody else just hoped — or much more frequently, snickered.

But when things go wrong, it is not always just bad leadership that is to blame.

Confounding Expectations

Running gag on conservative social media: “Aaaaaaand ... it’s Muslims.”

The meme tweaks the Powers That Be for their persistent unwillingness to attribute terror attacks throughout the West to their actual cause — Islamic jihad. As each new incident breaks, TradMedia, Lefty virtue signalers and our designated Elected Obscurantists one-up each other in cheerful speculation that THIS TIME it’s one of those dreaded neo-Nazis they’re always carping on about. And each time, greater numbers of perfectly normal news buffs with working memories and the ability to process reality without the aid of a PC filter respond with bemused mockery: “Aaaaaaand ... it’s Muslims.” Which to date it is.

During the reign of King David of Israel, there was probably a similar chorus: “Aaaaaaand ... it’s the Benjaminites.” Because it always was.

Sometimes we develop expectations about others for very good reasons.

Not a Fairy Tale

Comedian Linda Beatty has a weekly atheist comedy web show called The Bible and Other Fairy Tales, from which we may safely conclude Linda, like many other atheists, has never actually read the Old Testament.

The real Bible is full of people displaying contradictory, often self-defeating behavior. There are few squeaky-clean Cinderella types, and few transparently evil stepsisters. Rarely are its characters utterly and irredeemably wicked. Rarely are they entirely faithful, wise and obedient. They are real, flawed human beings, driven by their passions, often displaying surprising decency or brutal inhumanity within a few paragraphs of each other.

Fairy tales these are not.

Lies That Sound Like Truth

It’s getting harder and harder to figure out what’s really going on, isn’t it? This week, I’ve tried to navigate my way through two very different propaganda minefields.

The first is a brief speech from President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin in which he lectures the West on its departure from Christian morality. Pure, ironic gold.

The second is an uncharacteristic opinion piece from the pen of Lefty billionaire and master manipulator George Soros, who usually lurks in the shadows behind paid political operatives when trying to tip the scales of American public opinion. But nobody flushed more money down the drain in November’s election than George Soros, and in this op-ed he purports to tell us why.

Both Putin and Soros assure us they are determined to save Western civilization — by precisely opposite means.

God Helps Those …

One strategy ...

... or another?

Does he? Really? Does God help those who help themselves? Is the key to spiritual victory simply staying in motion at all times?

Some Christians recoil at the notion. “They that wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,” they reply. Sit tight, pray hard, and all will be well. Or at very least, it will be as God wills it.

Maybe.

At the other end of the spectrum lie those who quote the same adage to justify a flurry of activity for its own sake, with or without God’s involvement. They just can’t bring themselves to sit still, and need a sufficiently spiritual rationalization for their own impatience.

Perhaps neither extreme is quite correct.

No Guarantees

For the Christian, winning is not guaranteed.

Oh, of course it’s guaranteed in the long-term. We’ve read the ending of a story that has already been written, edited and published to the world. It is a done deal. All is to be summed up in Christ, and those of us who belong to him are destined to be glorified with him and united with him for eternity.

That’s definitely what you’d call a win. Might not happen in your lifetime or mine, but our long-term prospects are guaranteed.

Short-term is another story. Today may hold what appears to be a resounding loss.

Yes, They Both Start With ‘D’

It occurs to me that — very occasionally, of course — I may have been the tiniest bit more dismissive of other believers than I ought.

Christian X’s wife runs the show, my youthful self noted. Scratch him from my list of potential spiritual advisors. Christian W has three kids who are off the rails, IMHO. Or at least they’re not very friendly in youth group. Christian Y’s car is awfully expensive: obviously too worldly. And Christian Z? Sure, he and his new wife use that cottage for the Lord, but wouldn’t that money be better invested in missions? Not to mention that divorce. Can you even be saved and do that?

Scratch, scratch, scratch.

Falling Down Together

The Battle of Gibeon is a perplexing episode in Israel’s history.

Let me set the stage: Saul, the first king of Israel, is dead. The nation has not formally acknowledged a new king but instead is slipping back into tribalism. David has the anointing of God, but lacks a unanimous mandate from the people. His kinsmen in Judah formally recognize David as rightful king, but that probably says less about their spirituality than it does about their sense of family loyalty.

Of course you’d want your guy at the top of the heap. Everybody does.