Today’s Scripture Reading (August 8,
2016): 2 Chronicles 5
“How to Date
Your Spouse” author Lindsey Rietzsch comments that “If we fail to learn from
our trials and errors then we truly fail.” A while back I was watching the
Canadian Summer Crime T.V. Show “Private Eyes” and in the episode, Matt Shade’s (the main character
played by Jason Priestly) blind daughter Jules (Jordan Negri) is arrested for shoplifting. She was trying to be cool and be liked
by the kids and got caught up in the moment. At the end of the show she is
confessing her sin to her Dad, and wondering how she could ever have made such
a stupid mistake. Shade’s advice to his daughter is that she made “a decision,
not a mistake.” But if she didn’t bother to learn from the decision, then it
would turn into a mistake.
To be
honest, I wondered about the comment for a while. But there is great wisdom in
Shade’s words to his daughter. In the church, we seem to see sin as sin.
Calling a sin a decision or even a mistake seems to be an unforgivable
softening of the blow. Stealing is wrong, it goes against even the Big Ten of
Moses. And yet there is great wisdom in trying to understand why it is we sin.
Often the moment of “sin” is actually the culmination of several smaller
decisions that has carried us to the sin. Not understanding that; not having the ability to carefully
evaluate the situation is actually our biggest sin. And maybe the real one.
David had
wanted to bring the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem. He had a new cart built and carefully had his men place the Ark
on the Cart. And then they started for Jerusalem. The cart hit a bump in the
road, it happens even on the best of roads today, and the Ark toppled over. One
of David’s men (a man named Uzzah) grabbed hold of the Ark and died on the
spot. He was simply not consecrated to touch the holiest possession of Israel. And David got mad at God. From a very
legalistic perspective, Uzzah had committed a sin. He was not a consecrated
Levite and he touched the Ark of the Covenant. But the sin stemmed from a lot
of other decisions, like the decision to carry the Ark in a cart rather than
have the Ark carried by the priests with long poles to Jerusalem, the way that
God had intended for the Ark to be moved.
Matt Shade
would call it a decision. But the bigger question was whether Israel could
learn from the decision, and thus avoid making the bigger mistake – or the
bigger sin. Apparently, at least according to this verse, the answer was yes.
As the Ark is moved into its new home and the carrying poles used to move it could
still be seen, an illustration that they had truly learned from the sin of
David.
It seems
likely that the Book of Chronicles (originally one book) was written by Ezra at
the end of the Babylonian Captivity. Which makes the last phrase of this
passage a bit of a mystery – that the poles were still there today. The reality
is that the poles were not there. As Ezra writes these words, the Temple no
longer stands, the Ark has disappeared and the poles have long ago been
discarded or used to build something else. In the Temple that Ezra would build
(Zerubbabel’s Temple), the Holy of Holies would remain an empty suite. It is
likely that this comment was simply copied from an earlier historical writing
(such as the book of Kings). But it reveals the real disaster of Israel. While
they might have learned from some of their sins, they refused to learn from
most of them – and as a result, the
Temple was taken away from them. And the only one they had to blame was
themselves. They had made the decisions and had never learned from them – and
that was the biggest sin of all.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: 2
Chronicles 6
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