Now the old testament’s further `historical books`. How will we feed on these – and why?
Well, first, to understand God’s purposes! The flow of history: how God established His people in the promised land (completing the exodus), then led them to build a house where He could live among them, a temple revealing His amazing glory to the nations. But then how and why, despite all His blessing, still they rebelled, and split into two nations, northern `Israel` and southern Judah; and eventually they ended up back in exile and slavery in Babylon; tragically, we people can do this….
But God has much more to feed us with. Here’s one overarching theme: Maybe we’re in leadership, and are wondering what makes good, godly leaders. (Especially if that’s in the sometimes murky `secular` world!- or as parents??) Well: the Bible’s first eight books seem to be setting out the fundamentals of faith; one way to look at these next nine – Samuel, Kings, etc – is as a leadership manual building on that. (In fact the early Latin old testament actually calls 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings the `four books of Kings’; `Kings`, of course, means `leaders`!) God uses them to help us learn from many leaders, good and bad: Eli, Samuel, Saul, Jonathan, David, Solomon, Rehoboam, Jeroboam, Elijah, Elisha, Hezekiah, Josiah, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther… And many others that are less well known: Ahab’s son Joram in 2 Kings is particularly complex and interesting; Joash, Uzziah, Manasseh and Josiah are all teenage leaders (younger still in Joash’s case), and Josiah is one of the nation’s best leaders ever, Manasseh one of the most catastrophic. There’s the whole interplay of natural gifting and spiritual leadership; not to mention (quoting Rob Parsons) how as leaders to handle love affairs, commando raids, incest, and the occult! (And even what can happen if you pick the wrong public toilet, 1 Samuel 24…!)
All this can help us so much. `I’m not a leader`, you may think? Well, if we say that, let’s remember that in God’s kingdom a `leader’ is just someone who can serve some others by helping them move forward with God. That can be each of us; indeed, in this sense God will probably call most of us to lead sometime, particularly as we grow in Him! But then we have questions: How can I do this well? How can I be a person God can really use to serve others and make things happen?
These books can really help us. They give us a whole series of lessons, worked examples, for anyone serious about knowing what marks the people God uses – and those He can’t. So in each case we should ask as we (speed-?)read these stories: What did this leader do right? What did they do wrong?
1 SAMUEL
In 1 SAMUEL the lessons are straightforward and striking. Predictably, the starting point of these books is God’s grace triumphant even in our weakness. Why is the story of Hannah – whose very name means grace – the one chosen for the book’s opening? Why does this book begin by recording the miraculous power of grace breaking into a despised woman’s despair – and this, indeed, for a woman from an area (1:1-2) linked to the horrors of Israel’s earlier history in Judges 19? A key theme in this and the following stories – and what a huge encouragement for us – is that God’s grace isn’t limited by our weaknesses; His creative goodness always has ways of starting afresh… So then in 1 Samuel 4 Israel suffer the ultimate humiliation of losing God’s holy Ark to the pagan Philistines, who put it in their temple to honour their own god; but the following chapters show that God’s power is amply able to take care of that, whatever Israel’s vast failures, and He sorts it out spectacularly. Similarly, Saul sends his elite thugs after David in 19:18-24 – and he and they learn that in the presence of God’s Holy Spirit human weakness and strength are simply irrelevant. God chooses normal, `weak’ people, damaged people, even (as we’ll see) dysfunctional people, and trains and uses us for purposes glorious beyond our imaginations. The books of Samuel will show us more of this, step by step by God-overseen step. (Let’s share it, preach it!)
Then it’s interesting that the first two stories in this book of leadership training have to do with leaders’ families. (So does David’s story, and it isn’t pretty.) After all, the family is often where a leader’s training begins. (What will we learn from Eli (chs 2-4)? Surely a case of a good man whose life and leadership were ultimately fruitless because of his failure to apply holiness in his closest relationships.) Then comes Samuel, in whose part of our `leadership manual` we learn key aspects of how to lead God’s people back into repentance (ch7). Then follow chapters 8 and 12, key passages for grasping leadership in principle; because they mark the Israelites’ unfortunate transition from servant-hearted `judges` to (too often) dominating `kings’, and so help us understand two types of leaders (or parents, teachers, managers) we can be. And we see with amazement and worship how God respects the people’s freewill and works creatively within what they’ve chosen; even though their choice was explicitly to ignore His clear warnings through Samuel of what a king can be like – warnings that start to be justified in their very first king Saul, and come all too disastrously true in the later part of Solomon’s reign. Then there’s Jonathan, a great example of adventurous courage rooted in faith: what kind of person is this whom God can use so strikingly? Ch14 gives us some ideas. (See the series on 1 Samuel on this site in Bible intros #2.)
More centrally, there’s Saul. Saul is a great tragic figure. (What does he do right? What does he do wrong?) He starts out well (chs9,11), but deep down he doesn’t have a gut-level, passionate concern for careful obedience to the Word of God (chs 13,15; the fear, awe, of the Lord being again the beginning of wisdom); and in the end (ch15) he loses his destiny, has to be set permanently aside. (Lord, please keep us, please keep me, from that…) Yet that wasn’t the end of Saul’s story; maybe some repentance was still possible, and partnership with David; but instead we watch this leader’s jealousy of David slowly flowering, step by step, into murder (chs 18-20), step by step downward till finally Saul gets what he wants in ch27, and David is driven in exhaustion out of Israel and over to the Philistine side. (There, indeed, he becomes armour-bearer for the Philistine king (28:2), the role he had earlier played for Saul (16:21), but that now someone far less skilful would have to play for Saul in the disastrous final battle (31:4).) And Saul himself now faces the ultimate horror of God’s silence, and turns catastrophically to the occult (ch28). The book closes with the tragic death of this king who started out so well; the death of Saul, his sons, the cream of his army, and the subjugation of Israel by the godless Philistines.…. It’s a stark progression of a man living increasingly in the sphere of tragedy, not in the sphere of God’s `kingdom’ where God is both obeyed and reigns. (Again, see the series on 1 Samuel on this site.)
And then comes David: a man whose leadership is marked both by huge success and huge disaster, both by passion for God, courageously doing His will, and by failing disastrously to do so. How should we think of young David? A blue-eyed, curly-haired boy sweetly playing his harp? Not quite. And seeing what God can do through someone like that can really encourage us…
David grew up where? In Bethlehem. (His great grandma Ruth came there as an immigrant.) Possibly not the greatest place to grow up: Judges’ end has a horrible story of a Bethlehem girl who gets gang-raped and cut into pieces. That was David’s home. (And his great-grandma had been a prostitute, Matt 1:5.) What about the family he grew up in? If we look carefully we find it was a highly dysfunctional family. (One which seems to have been struggling with issues arising from remarriage, perhaps illegitimacy, and all sorts; put 2 Chron 2:13-16 alongside 2 Sam 17:25; note too how the sons of his sister Zeruiah are always recorded as hers, there’s no dad in the picture.) When there’s a big celebration such that Samuel himself is coming, this family leave little brother David out on the hills (where we know there are lions and bears), even though they’ve been explicitly instructed to the contrary (1 Sam 16). And look at how viciously he gets bad-mouthed by his oldest brother (1 Sam 17:28; see also Psalm 69:8).
(I suspect all this may be why in his lament for Jonathan (2 Sam 1) David cries out, `I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother; you were very dear to me. Your love for me was wonderful, more wonderful than that of women.` This isn’t saying Jonathan and David were gay – hardly likely when David’s scriptures contained a death penalty for homosexual practice; but growing up in such a family, he had just never experienced the generous affection that crown prince Jonathan demonstrated in his willingness to share everything with his low-born friend, right up to and including Jonathan’s right to the throne (`You shall be king over Israel, and I will be second to you`, 1 Sam 23:17).)
But the damage, the wounds, from this stuff never quite healed. Scratch David when he’s drifted and needs reminding of God’s ways (as in ch25) and you can meet an unreconstructed thug; read his gross overreaction in the Nabal incident of ch25; the brutal raids after he’s moved away to Philistia (ch27); what his (then-)unrepented guilt makes him do to Uriah the Hittite; or what he does, just before dying, to his old comrade and nephew Joab (1 Kings 2) – maybe he’s senile then, but he’s clearly slipped back (as senile people can) into the bad mindset of his childhood. It’s vital to remember we are pre-Pentecost here; the Spirit isn’t yet come in the way we know Him now, with His colossal power to interrupt the evil in us, transforming us so it doesn’t just rebound down family lines from generation to generation. The Spirit stops that now. Instead, as we look at 2 Samuel we see David’s family’s dysfunctionality replayed in the next generations (chs13,15), showing all too clearly what they’d learned from their family background about how to treat each other. One of David’s sons rapes his half-sister, then his half-brother Absalom kills him. That should be enough bloodshed? No, Absalom then goes after his dad David to kill him, and rapes his concubines in public. Civil war results, during which Absalom is stabbed through the heart by Joab David’s (illegitimate?) nephew. David’s not pleased about that, takes away the army command from Joab, gives it to another nephew (Amasa), the two meet in the street and one stabs the other; for which, just before dying, David leaves orders for his nephew the murderer to be rubbed out. It’s a wonderful family. (By now you may be thinking about moving to a religious website where they talk about bunny rabbits!) But let’s note: the horrible, solid realism of all this, rather than nice airbrushed legends, is one reason why we know it’s true. There is chaos sometimes even in the lives & immediate families of those on the right side; this is how things are, not how we’d like them to be…
2 SAMUEL
It’s not surprising, then, that 2 SAMUEL should set out how David the leader had to be trained – and that, in God’s goodness, those lessons can be significant leadership training for us. (See also the series on 2 Samuel on this site in Bible intros #2.) Some of us have to find our path of leadership in murky areas – through the politics that crop up in management, in education, even, alas, in church life; much of 2 Samuel, eg chs 1>4, records David doing the same. Then in ch6 (= 1 Chron 13) he musters a whole army to bring God’s ark into God’s city, and abandons himself wonderfully to worship – but also has to learn the hard way that he must be very careful to do things the way God wants. David, and Uzzah, are worshipping joyously but not taking God’s commands quite seriously enough; and God has to sort that casualness out so that His presence can dwell among them. (How serious are we about ensuring our worship-life reflects God’s desires as expressed in His Word?- eg in the seriousness with which we explore and implement the Bible’s guidelines on the use of spiritual gifts?) Then from ch7 onwards grace seems – not surprisingly – to become a major theme – preached to David in ch7, modelled in ch9 and in a very different way in ch12.
But meanwhile chs 11 and 12 show us how easily a leader (and we too) can fall, and why. David repents, and God accepts that (ch12); but still his sin has big consequences. The following chapters (13 to 20) show disastrously how the huge results of David’s one-off moral failure rebound for years, to the destruction of his own kids (chs 13>18); how what his sons had learnt from their family background was disastrously released, once David lost the moral authority to discipline them. Like we’ve said, there’s Amnon raping his sister, Absalom killing him then setting out to see his father dead and rape his concubines; and even Solomon – son of Bathsheba, who also was in no position to take the moral high ground with her son on sexual issues – finally destroyed by a sex-drive way out of control. (1 Kings 11 records how Solomon amassed an astonishing 700 wives and 300 concubines [sexual playthings], and they `led his heart astray’, with permanently disastrous effects on Israel…)
So as we move through 2 Samuel, what do we learn from all this? It’s clear what a bad background David came from, and what the results of that were. He did wonderful things; yet the consequences of his moral failure were catastrophic, for his family and, ultimately, the whole nation. But here’s the point: the wonder of the gospel is God quietly doing something glorious out of all this: God CHOSE David! God doesn’t just choose a well-adjusted kid from a nice background; nor was David naturally impressive like Saul (1 Sam 10:23-24), or giant Goliath, or even big brother Eliab (1 Sam 16:6). David was indeed gifted, but damaged too, and that didn’t stop God. As 1 Cor 1:27 says, God deliberately chooses the weak things, the lowly things, the despised things, of the world; God the craftsman (Eph 2:10) takes this gifted but damaged kid and turns him into the greatest King Israel ever had, one who created something massive for His glory, a worshipper passionate for God who writes half the book of Psalms; things that would last.
Think of the wonderful Psalm 23, `The Lord’s my Shepherd.` Do you love that psalm? David quite possibly started it while left alone on the hillside where the lions & bears were; in those times he learned that he had an invisible but almighty Shepherd. Or Psalm 27:10: When my father & mother forsake me, the Lord looks after me: he’d apparently had that happen too, and God did look after him. God uses the weak, mixedup things of the world (isn’t this great?); He is brilliantly loving & creative. His strength is made perfect in our weakness. (2 Cor 12:7-10; a vital lesson for leaders, that you will come back to over & over again!) God chooses and uses people like this, `real` people, ordinary, mixed-up, even dysfunctional people, and sorts us out bit by bit and brings us into purposes glorious beyond our imagination. Never underestimate what God’s creative power can do with you. This is the great news of the gospel; let’s believe it, let’s share it!
And even more astonishingly- Jesus chose to define Himself as the `son of David’. This makes me want to worship. Jesus chooses to identify Himself, to name Himself, after this deeply damaged guy; and to call Himself by this name throughout history! Indeed in 1 Samuel we see ways in which David foreshadows his far greater `son’, even though David (like us!) remains only a very incomplete picture of Jesus: the rejected king biding his time while the `natural’ (indeed God-ordained) power-system works out its history of futility – but meanwhile building (and again from the most unpromising material) an `alternative community’, malcontents (22:1-2) turned into `mighty men’, with whom he will share his kingdom when its time is finally come. And meanwhile he teaches them the ways, the tactics, of the new kingdom, tactics quite reminiscent of the sermon on the mount (ch24). But still: as you read David’s story in these books, keep asking, prayerfully: What can I learn from David? What does he do right, and why? What does he do wrong, and why?
KINGS AND CHRONICLES
With 1 KINGS and 2 CHRONICLES we come to Solomon, and the old testament’s central climax of the old testament. God uses Solomon to do something David couldn’t because (1 Chron 22:8) of all the bloodshed he’d been involved in. That `something` is the completion of God’s whole purpose since the Exodus, the building of a glorious temple where God could live among His people, a temple that would also reveal His amazing glory to the nations. (This is how old testament mission works, see 1 Kings 8:41ff, or Isaiah 2:2-4; and it’s why the Queen of Sheba’s story is so significant. In the NT, of course, God’s glorious `house` is not in just one place but spreads across the earth, embodied in His Church, in everyone who has God’s Spirit: 1 Cor 3:16, Eph 2:19-22, 1 Peter 2:4-6.) 1 Kings 8 is the key chapter for grasping how God’s government on earth, particularly through answered prayer, was to be embodied in this temple. These chapters show us how Solomon builds it, showing too how he’s the wisest man who has ever lived (1 Kings 3:12). Nevertheless it all goes wrong with this king, exceptional though he is – just as God had warned Israel in 1 Samuel 8. In defiance of Deuteronomy 10 Solomon acquires large numbers of battle-horses, and an enormous harem, and slowly becomes a tyrant (1 Kings 12:4). In short, tragically, what Solomon does is to become Pharoah: effectively he takes Israel back onto the wrong side of the exodus.
We’ll think more about Solomon in the next post in this survey, but we must ask as we read through to 1 Kings 11: What can I learn from Solomon? What does he do right, and why? What does he do wrong that I should pray to be kept from, and why? Then we must ask the same about his son Rehoboam, and about Jeroboam (see especially chs 12 and 14). Because these three between them make mistakes which split the nation into two, the northern kingdom Israel which Jeroboam takes over, and the southern kingdom Judah which stays with Rehoboam and David’s line, but from which neither ever really recovered. What did Rehoboam do wrong as a leader that had such disastrous consequences? And Jeroboam, whose sin is referred to repeatedly throughout the following chapters: What was it he did that was so wrong; and what might the parallel be for me?
For convenience we may perhaps think of Saul and David as Phase One of what these books record, and Solomon, Rehoboam and Jeroboam as Phase Two. In that case, Phase Three shows us how just three more generations brought the northern kingdom Israel irrevocably to ruin (1 Kings 16:25 to 2 Kings 9). And these chapters raise another question about leadership: How do you live and work in such a time, in a culture going away from God as fast as possible?? Through what kinds of people does God respond?
We can learn a huge amount by carefully reading about the two great prophets God raises up in this situation, Elijah and Elisha. How is Elijah trained in faith in 1 Kings 17? And what do we learn from when it all becomes too much for him, from how he survives burnout in 1 Kings 19:1-16? What does God give him? (Here’s a list I’ve gleaned from hearing this preached, because this is something often needing unpacking for leaders: proper food and sleep (vv5-8); a break, a long walk (v8); a new meeting with God, personal honesty with God (vv9-14); new input from God, new objectives, delegation (v16). What many leaders need to hear! There’s a great sermon on this in the superb archive of Nigel Lee’s talks in https://www.livingleadership.org/nigel-lee-archive . ) And then there’s Elijah’s successor Elisha, who rather curiously – given the parallels between Elijah and John the Baptist that Christ talks about – seems to be a `type` of Jesus; not merely in his name (Jeshua means `Yahweh saves`, Elisha `God saves`), but in the way his ministry foreshadows that of Christ; Elisha, like Jesus, feeds the hungry miraculously, and heals a leper, and raises a dead son (Shunem, 2 Kings 2, is less than two miles from Nain, Luke 7). Can we conclude that, in the darkest and most rebellious times, what God will do is raise up especially Christlike people as His representatives? Shall we make it our passion to be one?
Then comes what we may call the northern kingdom’s Phase Four: the time of four stable kings of the house of Jehu, ruling as God promised till the fourth generation (2 Kings 10:30>14:29). And afterwards (was Phase Four Israel’s last chance?) we see 41 years of final disintegration, coups and anarchy (Phase Five if you like): then the northern tribes are carried into exile and more or less vanish from Scripture. (That’s until they reappear in Revelation 7, as prophesied in Ezekiel 37 for example.) The same development occurs in the southern kingdom of Judah, though more slowly. Perhaps we see here a basic gospel lesson: even though these people had the `best religion ever`, with the law God Himself had given and the temple where God Himself was present, these externals were not enough: what is essential is to be born again, internally, of God’s Spirit. And that could only happen when the barrier to God’s presence had been removed at Calvary.
Nevertheless in 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles we can learn from great revivals catalyzed by three godly kings who found themselves in leadership in this collapsing culture: Joash (2 Kings 12, 2 Chron 24), Hezekiah (2 Kings 18-20, 2 Chron 29-32), and Josiah (2 Kings 22-23, 2 Chron 34-35). And again we can ask, what are the crucial issues in each one’s story? What did they do right, what did they do wrong? Hezekiah seems particularly significant, since the great prophetic book of Isaiah contains very little history, except that, right at its heart, four whole chapters (36 to 39) are devoted to this king’s actions. (For two explorations of what’s involved, please see the Isaiah section of this site, in Bible intros #2.)
Let’s notice too how God blesses us by showing us these things from more than one angle, as He does with the four gospels. Chronicles – which was apparently put together to help those returning from exile understand their situation (see how 2 Chronicles ends) – seems more selective, focused (unlike Kings) less on the prophets’ perspective than on the equally valid perspectives of the priests; and also much more on the southern kingdom Judah and its temple, moving as 2 Chronicles does from the building of the temple to the burning of the temple. As with the gospels, we’re blessed here by being shown what happens from more than one angle. (And these books are complementary: it’s interesting for example how in 2 Chronicles 10:2,4,13 it’s obvious that something has gone wrong with Solomon, but no overt explanation is given. The Chronicler assumes we know about this from elsewhere.)
(And if you want excellent, edifying commentaries on these historical books, here’s an enthusiastic recommendation for those by Dale Ralph Davis!)
EZRA AND NEHEMIAH
But of course the story doesn’t end there. There are these times of revival, and they are utterly worthwhile for those who are around then. But in the end both Israel and Judah are destroyed, Israel by Assyria, Judah by Babylon, and taken into captivity far from God’s promised land. Yet with God we can always start afresh. Sin has consequences, and the Jews never got back the divine kingdom of David. But nonetheless God moves in the secular politics of the middle east: a third empire, the Persian empire, conquers Babylon, and as a result the Jews are allowed back home.
And so God gives us three more books about leaders. First we can read Ezra and Nehemiah, which tell how God’s temple, and then the city of Jerusalem, were rebuilt. In Ezra 1-7 especially we see – just as in Daniel – how, although God has allowed the secular powers to capture and destroy Jerusalem, yet in the end the hearts of those powers’ leaders are firmly in His control. So here we watch how God uses two friends to rebuild His city and temple after a time of utter defeat; especially (probably read 3-4 chapters at a time to get this?) we can look out for what they do right, or are led to emphasize, so that the people’s hands are `strengthened` and the rebuilding happens. I notice emphases on the joy of the Lord rooted in praise; on the Word, prayer, response in holiness and separation from what’s unclean; and a consciousness of the `hand of God` at work, even in a `de-supernaturalized` phase of history, and even in the hearts of emperors. But read Nehemiah alongside John White’s superb Excellence in Leadership; he draws out brilliantly what God has to say here about the leader and prayer (ch1), motivation and organization (ch2), commitment and delegation (chs 3 & 4), opposition (chs 4 & 5), personal attack (ch6), renewal (ch8), and endurance (ch13). (Also helpful is ch20 of Oswald Sanders’ classic Spiritual Leadership.)
(But here’s another thing, because this is not the end of the story either. As Gooding comments, Ezra’s labours meant that God’s people never slipped back into the idolatry that had trapped them so often. Alas, they did fall into the alternative danger of lifeless legalism, a danger we can sense emerging in the prophecies of Haggai and Zechariah who are prophesying in the same period (Ezra 5:1), and that emerged fully in the worst examples of the Pharisees of Jesus’ day. Another lesson, encouragingly perhaps: There is a limit to what any human leader – any of us (parents included) – can do…)
ESTHER
And yet – that rebuilding of the Jews’ temple and city would have come to a very bitter end, humanly speaking, were it not for the courage and faith (and prayer and fasting) of one woman leader. So finally we can read the story of Esther, being used by God in an appallingly degrading, sexist, sordid (see ch1), powerless and dangerous situation where God might seem to have vanished. There is little of the obviously supernatural in this book: indeed the only `direct’ supernatural event is God’s silent overruling in a stray thought that the emperor has, at a crucial moment (6:1) when much prayer and fasting is going on – a stray thought that nonetheless changes his actions and saves God’s people. In fact God isn’t even named in this book; and yet He settles everything through one `normal` woman’s prayer, fasting, and bravery, and then through one `coincidence`.
(But, coming after Ezra and Nehemiah – is Esther also about the Jews who didn’t go back with Ezra but settled down in comparative ease and affluence, even secrecy (2:10,20 – unlike Daniel, 6:13) in exile in the imperial capital?- rather than returning to the land God had given them to rebuild His temple, in the one place where God had said His presence would be located in that era of human history? Is this why it’s desupernaturalized? But for them too the time will arrive when dangerous faithfulness will finally become unavoidable. Something preachable there…)
There’s more on Esther on this site in Bible intros #2, but here let’s focus two practical things. First, 4:16: even in a time when God seems silent & inactive, Esther keeps up the vital disciplines of prayer and fasting. In the Bible God’s people fast at moments that are particularly crucial, and we should too. Jesus says `when you fast` (Matt 6:16). Do I? If our church faces danger, or a big decision? When we’re starting Christianity Explored or Alpha? (Maybe from food, or maybe from something else – social media, TV?) Or when we hear serious news of persecuted brothers and sisters elsewhere? Might one of the ways God wants you to make a silent difference in your church be to fast for His blessing? Having said that, it’s important that fasting isn’t a way of earning God’s blessing, an especially effective way to twist God’s arm to get what we want. No: fasting is first of all an offering to God, not a way to get things, and it’s a sign that God has established of our seriousness. (God loves us massively anyway, and will give when He is ready and when it’s best for us! Luke 11:12.) Won’t it be a nuisance (I tend to think) to fast and feel weak or constipated that day or the next? Yes, it will! And that’s why we do it. As Roger Forster says, it’s a sign of the importance we place on seeing God’s kingdom come, that we take it this seriously; we’re saying to God, I can do without food but I can’t do without You. I wonder, if more of us fasted from time to time, how we would notice the difference; a greater sense that our church is marked by passion for seriousness for God, His Word and His gospel, that we’re not just people who happen to come on Sundays? Jesus promises that, when we fast, our Father who sees what’s done in secret will reward us. And that’s true. It’s one of God’s key ways forward for tough times. And we all have these!
And then a second thing: Esther’s bold obedience of faith in 4:14-16. Like we’ve seen, Esther has been accustomed to hiding her identity as a member of God’s people (2:10); now God says: step out, stand up, take your chances in open confession of that identity and of the God you worship. And it’s dangerous (`If I perish, I perish`, she says); but she knows Who she belongs to, and what that God is like, and because of that she takes her stand. So at what point, and on what issues, do we need to stand up as Jesus-followers – either on our own or someone else’s behalf? How much, prayerfully, do we think ahead about the best ways of doing so?
(And skip these next four paragraphs if you like, but it’s possible there are lots of other things going on in this book. Here’s one: the problem in the last chapters of Esther is that the king’s law condemning the Jews to death can’t simply be revoked, and the only way to salvage the situation is to bring in a totally separate, new law whereby the Jews can defend themselves (8:8). Strikingly, this is much the same issue as we find in Daniel 6. And if we’re wondering how these particular books relate to the gospel themes, it’s interesting that as two of the last books of old testament history, both raise the question that (we might say) the OT leaves us with: If we’re faced with a situation where unalterable law condemns us to death, and the law itself cannot be changed, can any way be found whereby we can be delivered? (Rom 6:23, 3:19, Gal 3:13.)
Or here’s another: As we look at the book within the overall sweep of the old testament, other interesting questions arise. For example: Are these events in some strange way a rerun of Saul’s crucial failure to deal with the Amalekites in 1 Samuel 15? For we can’t but notice how we’re told that Esther and Mordecai are, as 2:5 makes plain, from the family of Kish, Saul’s father, a family that otherwise has disappeared completely from Israel’s history; while their adversary Haman is stated to be an Agagite, and Agag was the Amalekite king Saul encountered in 1 Samuel 15. It’s hard to know just what’s going on here, but we do recall from Exodus 17:16 (another chapter whose theme is the crucial nature of prayer in shaping events, as with Esther) that the conflict (spiritual warfare??) between the Lord and the Amalekites will extend right down through history. At the very least we’re dealing with another of Satan’s attempts to exterminate the promised messianic seed before Christ can be born, and seeing the ordinary people through whose faith and obedience God thwarts that…
Or again: in the curious way that the Bible throws up these things, it’s intriguing that the last chapter before Esther, Nehemiah 13, is about the wrongfulness of marriage to spouses outside God’s people, whereas Esther begins precisely by balancing that with the story of a woman who finds herself in just such a marriage by no choice of her own…
Or lastly: if, as some readers feel, it’s legitimate to reason from the fact that bride/bridegroom marriage is one of God’s key pictures of His relationship with us, on to the notion that a divinely-given book like this about a marriage might in some symbolic way contain instructive pictures of our own Godward marriage (like Ruth?): then, passages like 5:2-3 and 5:6 might help us imaginatively to deepen our grasp of our own relationship with God – and perhaps of our responsibility to intercede for His people who are facing persecution, or for the lost who are heading for utter destruction. Maybe, maybe…
Still what matters most is: What did Esther do right, and how should those things appear in my life?)
LEADERSHIP LESSONS
The lessons we learn from these various leaders, as we seek God prayerfully on what they did right and what they did wrong, are compellingly practical today. Let’s feed on them! But let me close by remarking how these books also show us something very different but vital, something else to turn into worship: although God wants His people to have leaders (for example to get the temple built), we see too, over and over again, that ultimately, nothing short of a saviour/leader from heaven will suffice amid humanity’s bentness. In the end, no one else can really be the true Leader we need, except Jesus Himself.
God seems to have designed the shape of several OT books to underline this lesson. In Genesis, Joseph rescues the Israelites from famine; but in the book’s final verse he’s dead, and the Bible’s next book begins with him forgotten and Israel in slavery as a result. Moses rescues Israel even more effectively, but when Deuteronomy ends he’s dead also, unable to bring his people into the promised land. Judges tells of many God-gifted deliverers, but none can arrest the decline and collapse into the degradation of those terrible final chapters. And so it is in these books too. In 1 Samuel, a different solution is tried, the secular model of leadership by a king as with the surrounding nations; and God provides an apparently ideal candidate, Saul, who is, as kings go, not a bad king (eg 11:13,14:47-48). But the book’s last chapter shows him having failed completely and utterly, and Israel is overcome by the Philistines. David is then raised up as Israel’s deliverer in 2 Samuel; but again the book’s last chapter shows him lapsing into conceited folly tragically destructive of the nation. And Solomon, the wisest king Israel would ever have, died leaving a situation where the kingdom would almost inevitably be torn, and permanently, into two pieces. (And though it’s very clear that the transition from `judges` to these `kings` had not been God’s desire, the fact is that Israel’s judges hadn’t done that well either, with a marked decline down to the promiscuous hooligan Samson and total vicious anarchy at that book’s close.) And the following books show that possession of the external law, and the prophets, is not enough to keep Israel out of Babylon; and even after Babylon, the old testament closes with Malachi’s final verse warning that, as things stand, the coming of the Lord is liable to lead to judgment.
The old testament, then, tells us what the world dare not face: it reveals us as an ultimately bankrupt race desperately in need of a saviour/leader from heaven who can `save His people from their sins’, both in atonement and (by being `with us`) lasting, internal empowerment for goodness. And that, of course, is just what is promised in the very first chapter of the new testament; and hallelujah, this is what we have!
So even as we study what godly leadership is, and how it works, we can thank God: there is Someone around in charge who does this far better than me!
(And as a church leader – and parent! – I’ve felt so grateful for that!)
