Today’s Scripture Reading (October 16, 2016): 2 Chronicles 14
Have you ever tried to describe the color red to someone who was blind? Or maybe the smell of a rose to one who has never possessed the ability to smell? I have a friend that struggles with smells. Often smells that I barely notice seem overwhelming to her. I have often wondered what exactly it is that she smells, as compared to my limited ability. Have you ever noticed that beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder? What I find to be beautiful may not be what is beautiful to you. To be honest, beauty pageants have never made a lot of sense to me. We are way too individual in our sense of beauty, and beauty is so much more than what we can see with our eyes. Even our ability to see is different. We see from various perspectives and angles. What I see and what you might see can be entirely different. It is no wonder that eyewitness testimony to a crime is so precarious. We don’t see what we see; we perceive through our own varied sets of experiences and assumptions. We translate what we see into something that makes sense to our individual brains. If you ask my two-year-old grandson Henry his favorite color, he will tell – it is blue. But even I have no idea what it is that he sees when he sees something blue.
The way that we perceive what it is that we see is the reason why it is so easy to have contradictions in eyewitness testimony. A few days ago, in this blog, I wrote on 1 Kings 15 about good King Asa’s reformation of religion during his reign. But I also noted that he didn’t tear down the high places (1 Kings 15:14). In that discussion, we defined the high places as personal worship places often found in the wilderness. To tear down the high places would mean changing the very hearts of the people, and that Asa could not do.
The author of Chronicles says that he did tear down the high places. This is a place of apparent contradiction. Most scholars seem to believe that the difference here is that he destroyed the high places dedicated to idols, but not the ones devoted to the God of Judah. Private worship in the Hebrew Bible is expressly forbidden. Certain elements of worship, especially sacrifice, had to be made in the presence of the priests at the Temple in Jerusalem. There was no other sanctified place for this to happen. So some had adopted the practice of private sacrifice, which was a sin according to the Laws of Moses. And it was these “high place” spots that Asa did not remove, maybe out of ignorance and a lack of understanding.
But it is also important to notice that there is an added phrase here. “He removed the high places and incense altars in every town in Judah.” It is possible that Asa was able to remove the high places in the towns, but not the more private ones that were found in the countryside. According to our definition of the “high places,” we described them as places of private worship in nature, so the ones in the town would not seem to apply. This, then, is more of a problem of definition of the phrase “high place” between Chronicles and Kings then it is a contradiction of what Asa could or could not accomplish during his reign.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: 1 Kings 16
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