Bible Reading Challenge Blog

We find ourselves away from a story of the return to Israel and Jerusalem back to poetry in both Proverbs and these two Psalms.  Proverbs read like an instruction manual for those who want to be wise and live a life of safety and security.  This how-to booklet gives us things we ought to do: “a friend loves at all times”, and things we ought not to do: “one who is slack in his work is brother to one who destroys.”

The chapters we read are filled with this kind of advice without any real scheme or reason.  There is no real clear theme that is followed, just a bunch of advice.  When we read these two Psalms we find king David grateful for the faithfulness of the Lord even in the midst of times when things don’t seem so great.  David is able to say consistently and without hesitation: “Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, from everlasting to everlasting.  Amen and Amen.”

The story of Nehemiah continues but there is an underlying theme that is a bit troublesome to me.  As he tells the story we see interjected throughout this request by Nehemiah: “Remember me with favor, O my God.”  He tells of this story not so much to historically account for it, but rather to build up a repertoire of good deeds that he can show to God that he has been faithful and has done the right thing before the eyes of God so that God can reward him.  Not such an innocent account as maybe we had originally thought.  

But this is where we find ourselves.  The walls have been built up, the people are gathered to gether and the temple is rededicated again as the law is being read day and night.  What a great image.  One time we read the Bible I think for 3 days straight and it was quite a feat and the people who were involved were grateful for the opportunity.  I’m thinking we should do it again.  

Nehemiah does return to Babylon, as he promised the king that he would, and then he returns again as we read in chapter 13.  On his return he finds he has to tweak a few things that were out of order.  Someone had taken up shop in the temple, so he had to kick him out.  And the Levites who served the temple were not being taken care of  and so were not able to survive so they had left the temple and gone to some outer towns in order to farm and survive.  Nehemiah remedied that and brought them back in and made sure that the people took care of them while they took care of the temple.

The story read well.  Nehemiah who was the cupbearer of the king, but also a prophet of God, heard about the renmant that managed to survive somehow in Israel.  Remember the Babylonians had taken everyone into captivity except a few people to tend the fields.  That remnant was telling the tale that the walls were broken down and the gates were shattered so they were completely subject to the whims and fancies of their surrounding neighbors.  There was zero protection for them which meant that all of their sons and daughters would be taken off as slaves and they were constantly under the risk of death.

This made Nehemiah sad and the king, who loved him, noticed that he was sad and it was the first time ever that he was sad in the king’s presence.  What’s wrong?  I’m sad because my people are living this way.  Would you give me permission to go back to Israel, to Jerusalem specifically, and rebuild the walls and the gates?  He is given permission and he goes and rebuilds.  He faces constant pressure from those nations surrounding Jerusalem but he perserveres in a way that is exceptional.  He finishes the walls and the gates and takes a census which gives us close to 50,000 people which is amazing.  Now the story is really ready to begin as things are fixed up and they can look toward the future.

The thematic verse for these Scriptures has to be found in Proverbs 16:18-19 where we read: “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”  While the Psalms that we read are much more comples than this simple verse, there is a truth to this simplicity which is carried out in what we read for today.  While David extols the steadfast love of the Lord in Psalm 36 he still warns the evildoers that they will receive their recompense.  

David says something curious that should strike us as not really reflecting the reality in which we live.  Look at Psalm 37:25 and you read: “I have been young, and now am old, yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread.”  Well, that would assume that those who beg for bread are not righteous, I’m not a huge fan of this type of thinking.

Fascinating part of the story of Israel here.  Ezra is given the power by the king to go back to Jerusalem and set shop back up.  He is given the power to gather as many Israelites who would want to go with him along with offerings and the elements of the temple that would be used to make sacrifices.  That is quite a bit of valuable material that the king allows Ezra to take with him to a foreign land as a foreigner.  The motivation on the part of the king one can only guess, but I’m guessing that the king respected the power of the Lord and knew that if he fell in God’s good graces that couldn’t hurt him.

So Ezra gathers the people who volunteer to go and notices that none of the Levites are accounted for.  He remedies that and then gets set to set out.  Once he is on his journey it comes to his attention the sinfulness of Israel can be found primarily in the fact that daughters and sons have married foreign spouses and have turned from God to the gods of their spouses.  As a result he requires that all of those who are married to foreign spouses must kick out the spouses along with the children created with those spouses.  Sounds pretty drastic and draconian but that is how we finish Ezra.  The people of God are now pure without any foreign influence.  Wow.

Psalms 33 and 35 reflect the trust that the people have in God and that he will turn away all those who seek the harm of the people of Israel.

We find ourselves quite a few years later than when we found ourselves in II Chronicles.  The people of Israel are still in captivity and the king of Babylon, Cyrus, tells the people of Israel that they are able to return back to their homeland and they can rebuild the temple once again.  But there is a problem.  There are people within the Babylonian kingdom who see the Jews as a threat and reach out to the king and encourage him to change his mind.  They tell him to look at past history and they can see how dangerous the Jews have been over history.

As a result he does and he stops the building of Jerusalem and the temple.  But then the Jews respond and encourage him to look at the past and see how he decreed that the Jews could and should rebuild and that Babylon would actually help in the rebuilding process.  As a result the rebuilding begins once again and we read in 6:16 – “The people of Israel, the priests and the Levites, and the rest of teh returned exiles, celebrated the dedication of this house of God with joy.”  That’s a fitting ending, but we are in the middle of the book of Ezra in the Bible, not the end.

We find ourselves in the waning days of Judah before the entire land and people are taken into captivity, first in Egypt and then to Babylon, pretty much definitively.  Before that  we find the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah mentioned.  We look at the kings and the back and forth between righteous and unrighteous.

Hezekiah comes along and is a super king, not only does what is right in the eyes of the Lord, but encourages the people to do what is right in the eyes of the Lord.  They do and there is peace in the land.  Again, we see this correlation between obeying God and peace.  One of the more exciting places to go in Israel is Hezekiah’s tunnel which is a feat of astounding engineering.  

Manasseh takes over and was a bad egg.  Josiah takes over and everything changes once again.  The change is seen primarily in the discovery of the law of the Lord which is brought out to the people and the people are able to obey and follow the Lord as a result.  Josiah also kept the passover and the people came to Jerusalem to celebrate it with him.  This is the last hurrah, as after Josiah things change and go from very, very good, to the worst it has ever been.  

Jehoahaz takes over and only last three months and then the Babylonians come and carry the people into captivity.  Thus ends the time that Israel was in the land.  From there we see the Israelites live in diaspora until 1948 when Israel became a nation once again.

The flip-flopping from kings who love and serve God and those who do not follow his ways finds its extreme in these chapters.  Ahaz was one of those kings who not only did not serve the Lord but aligned himself so completely with other nations that they invaded Jerusalem and took people captive to the tune of hundreds of thousands.  Judah was becoming a wasteland.  Ahaz at one point says: “Because the gods of the kings of Aram helped them, I will sacrifice to them so that they may help me.”  We also read in 28:3 that Ahaz “made his sons pass through fire”, which is a euphemism for child sacrifice.  This was the most abonimable thing that one could think of if you were an Israelite.  As you should expect.  God was not happy.

Then along comes Hezekiah.  Not only did he do what was right in the eyes of the Lord, but he tried to rally all the other Israelites that were spread out across the land to do what was right in the eyes of the Lord.  A type of diaspora had already taken place, Jews were spread out as a result of being conquered under Ahaz all over the region and beyond.  So Hezekiah sends out notice that passover will be celebrated, even though it was the wrong month and the people were unclean, we will celebrate Passover regardless.  

It reminds me a bit of when we were locked down under covid and one of the first things we missed was Easter and I said when this is finally over we will come back and celebrate Easter together.  I don’t care what time of the year it is, we will declare it to be Easter.  Well, that never happened because instead of ending all at once, Covid just kind of kept on going and going and going.  But this is what Hezekiah did.  When he sent out notice most of the Jews spread out mocked him and made fun of him.  

But they did Passover and it was a glorious thing and the Lord was with them and that began another detente with the Lord and His people.  In the Psalms that we look at for today they are both Psalms of ascent which means that they are Psalms for those who were rising up, like pilgrims as they made their way up to Jerusalem, as if Hezekiah had called the people and they were rising up to make their way into Jerusalem which is at the top of the hill.  Very appropritae.

We continue along in the sons who take over after their father’s die as kings of Judah, the southern kingdom.  Remember, this is the nation where Jerusalem is located and so it makes sense that this is where the attention is given.  The temple is located in Jerusalem and God promised that David’s progeny would rule and this is a listing of David’s progeny and how faithful, or unfaithful, these kings were to God.

After the unfortunate rule of Jehoram we read: “He departed with no one’s regret.”  That is an unfortunate truth, but at least the person who comes next, Ahaziah, has a good chance to do better.  But that doesn’t happen.  Ahaziah takes over and only rules for one year and then his mother, Athaliah, takes over and things go downhill.  

Joash then begins to reign when he is 7 years old thanks to the planning and the strategy of Jehoiada who was the chief priest at that time.  Things move in the right direction with Joash and he rules as he should have, obeying the Lord.  But once Jehoiada dies, Joash and his rule go south as they turn away from the Lord.  Amaziah takes over then and he also did what was right in the eyes of the Lord.  We are on a bit of a streak here of kings doing God’s will.

We can’t skip over Psalm 121.  It is a Psalm of hope as pilgrims who made their way to Jerusalem would see the city on the hill and be able to say out loud: “I lift up mine eyes to the hills, from whence should my help come?”  

Once Asa dies his son takes over, Jehoshaphat and we see that he continues along in the way of his father, that is in the way of the Lord.  That is good news, for now.  As a result of his love for God there is peace in the land.  It always amazes me in Scripture that there is a correlation between the love of a king for God and the amount of peace that is in the land.  It seems as if the ruler loves God then there is a corresponding dose of peace that is given out.  The more love for God, the more peace is present in that person’s reign.  

He makes an alliance with the northern kingdom, that would be Israel, that in itself is not negative.  Together they are about to go into battle as a unified force but Micah tells them that they will be defeated.  The two kings don’t listen to Micah and go into battle anyway and the king of Israel is king.  Jehoshaphat makes it out alive and continues in his reign.  God continues to show him favor in defeating his enemies in battle.  

Once Jehoshaphat dies then things start to go south, I mean in a bad way.  Jehoram takes over and starts the downward slide toward apostasy.  Elijah warns him and tells him that because he walked away from God and is ruling apart from God that his death would be a painful one with his bowels coming out of his body.  Yeah, that sounds terrible and that is what happens.

In Proverbs we see the result of what happens when someone fears the Lord.  It is a fountain of life.  That is advice that seems to be eternal and something upon which we can rely.