Christmas Story: Thomas Part 2

Listen, and I will tell you a story of the Earthen King who ruled in the garden when the world was young. Those were the green days, when Dawn grew like the grass, and the voice of archangels, far off and as beautiful, as silver horns blew in the east, remained in the skies of the world.

The unconquerable armies of Alexander the Great could not silence this word, nor the fastidious masons of Babylon fashion a stone curtain to keep it out. It has survived deluge and famine, persecution like a fierce corona from the sun, and scrutiny by the finest lens, and it whispers to you now a most holy dare.

Go, and look.

Come, and see.

The days of King Saul left much to be desired. The nation of Israel was like a runaway child. Arrogant. Disrespectful. And lost in a minefield of identity. Their king, the first king, disobeyed God on several occasions. And like an impressionable child, the nation of God’s chosen people was following suit. And so they found themselves pressed in on all sides.

Here we find ourselves looking at battle lines. At muddy ruts in famished country, grasses trampled to dust. Wheat threshed and crushed to fuel the furnace which drives the greatest danger to natural order. Man. And War. Saul had his armies drawn up as a bulwark against the invading armies of the Philistines. They were only thing that stood between them and the cities and settlements of Israel. God’s country.

The men had been camped in this soggy, waterlogged land for so long, the season had begun to change, and a soldier waking to his morning constitutional hummed in melancholy resignation as he pictured his wife at home, left to harvest the orchard and stock his vintnery with his 6 year old son without him, regardless of his fate.

Across the battlements, the Phillistine champion was chanting again. A mighty belting chorus quick like arrow-fire and flat like the end of a oxen hoof. His challenges echoed over the swampy battleground and filtered into the tents like corpse-gas. It repeated the same barbaric dare. “Send a man to fight, are there no men left in Israel?”

Now, David came to the battlefield on an errand. Doing a chore, really. Delivering, like, CHEESE and corn, and bread. He was no soldier. He had no armor, no training. No keen edge on which to balance the fate of men. He was a shepherd, lowly and humble. He had tempered his courage fighting off lions, sure, but nothing like this absolute unit of a man standing before him.

But as he deviated from his errand, he beheld Goliath. A leftover from the tribe of Gath, whom Joshua failed to eliminate. Consequences. Danger.

And what’s a humble shepherd boy see in this spectacle? Time to run? Head for the hills?

No.

He asks “What will be done for the one who kills this man?”

And just like that, it was settled. David was scolded by his brothers, had King Saul clutching his head in frustration, and soon was on his way to face Goliath. He didn’t see consequences or danger. He saw an opportunity.

At first, Goliath didn’t even register David as he approached. And when he did, he asked “Am I a dog, that you come at me with sticks?” David discarded his shepherds crook and his face probably went a bit red. He had been armed in Sauls best armor, with the best weapons, both of which he promptly took off because they were too heavy and he hadn’t practiced in them. But the crux of this showdown was resting in a sack at his hip.

This upset Goliath.

He raged “Do you like birds? They’ll pick the flesh from your bones!”

David replied cooly “I like that sword o’ Yours. And that Javelin. Lets see how they stack up against the name of Yahweh of the Armies of Israel, whom you have defied”

The mention of Yahweh caused the Israelites to leap and shout, and the Philistines to roar. David shouted over the din “You want a feast for the ravens? I’ll give them your whole army! And the world will know that there is a God in Israel!”

That was enough. Goliath charged, his shield bearer trying to keep up. His visor was low, obstructing his vision. His every thought was on impaling that pathetic mono-theistic prattling boy onto the dank ground so he could sit at his arched and broken back and feast over the sound of a fleeing, weeping Israel.

As his Javelin arm arched back, practiced muscles tensing and tendons screaming with anticipation, Goliath suddenly went limp, like a marionette with its strings cut. A hole in his forehead bearing lone witness to the intrusion of a single stone, artfully flung from a sling, as David had done a hundred times before to an encroaching wolf or terrorizing lion. His flock was behind him, wide eyed and afraid. Ahead was a beast that needed to be put down. And David did what God led him to do.

Goliath dropped, and the ravens cawed in delight.

David got everything he was told he would have. Status. Power. His body was ripe and the wind was a kiss no matter how strong it blew. All was light and honeycomb. His success was Saul’s undoing, and a “King” David DID become, to the unbridled Joy of his people.

But on Davids mind was something much older. The garden of Eden, like a whisper in a dream, so real you could touch it, but when you awaken, the harder you grasp its memory, the more fleeting it becomes.

It was as if David could hear Father God whispering to Adam at the dawn of creation. “Come away son, the rain is over. Flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come. The figs are ripe, and the vines are blooming.”

David sought God always, first and foremost. His joy at the exaltation of the Lord was boundless. So, he wanted to build the Temple. God said no, this task isn’t for you. But David’s heart was in the right place. A man after God’s heart. And he did many great things for the lord.

How I wish we could stop right there. But sin is a slobbering creature.

The good times seemed like a flash of lightning, illuminative and appalling. But gone and snuffed out like a whisper into a chasm without walls, a senseless void we would dare not tread under the revealing lamp of hindsight. Hindsight, the only gift you can only gain by treading on its thread and unraveling the garment of its wisdom.

We have to step back, really, REALLY far back, to the garden. Because what is about to happen to David has happened before.

It came like a seraph into Eden, not on wings of glory and duty, but over the wall as a thief and burglar. It saw, faintly ahead, the two trees. And the humans were there as well. The seraph saw them and snarled. Then he put on his loveliness and advanced.

The enemy came through the trees, and saw the royal pair, Adam and Eve. It hissed, for dust they were. He had seen the stars that made them blaze and die, and he had seen the dust gathered together and brought to life again, yet THEY WOULD RULE?

The seraph composed itself. Deception and falsehood clung to it like poisonous vapor. “Did God indeed say ‘you shall not eat of ANY tree in the garden?” It was the woman the serpent addressed.

To which the woman replied “No, he said you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, or you will surely die.

The seraph shook despite itself. “No. NO. NO NO. You won’t die. Not certainly. Though that is a risk. The devil lowered its voice. “God knows that when you eat of it, you’ll be like Him. You’ll know. You’ll know Good and Evil. You’ll see things as they really are. Trust no one but yourself, hold to your own counsel, and mine.”

Sin, is a SLOBBERING creature.

The forbidden fruit is sweetest to the sinful heart of mankind. And David beheld the fruit in Bathsheba. The saccharine scent of sin, like honey and lavender on the air, drew David in. He ordered her husband to his doom, slept with her, and in doing so, sinned greatly.

And like Adam, he did not own the sin and repent, but hid in his shame.

And so God sought his son once more, not in the cool of the garden this time, but in whatever chamber David felt most comfortable in. And though David did repent, it cost him his son. Later, he would have another son, who we all know as Solomon, the wise.

But David, redeemed as he was by God, is another chapter in a book that characterizes just how deeply we need our father. Every step Adam walked east of the garden, he needed his Father. Every heartbeat that drove Abraham out of the promised land in doubt and fear, took him farther from his Father. And every step he took back was to a covenant that God never reneged on. When Moses, unsure and thoroughly out of his league, was told the seas would part, that preposterous malarky was made manifest by our Father. When Joshua was told the walls of Jericho, which had stood for ages, would fall to a battlecry, had any power in the universe short of Yahweh declared it, it would have been their undoing.

But he trusted his father. And when David stood over Saul, who had hunted and persecuted him across the desert, and had him dead to rights, he trusted in his father, declined to harm one anointed by him.

And when David slipped, and worse, hid from God in the cool of the day? And god came looking? David apologized to his Father, and God kept his promise.

Ya-ho-radta et saybah-tow be dam Sheol.

Those are David’s last recorded words. “Bring his grey head in blood to the grave.” Not a good omen. Time yawned forward like an old wooden ship through tranquil water. David’s son Solomon built the temple, and it was GRAND. Tall as a palace, hard as a fortress. And splendid beyond imagination. It took 7 years to build the temple. But to build the PALACE, it took thirteen. And therein lies the problem.

So God promised his eyes and heart would be in the temple, but you notice he didn’t unpack his bags.

He knew he wasn’t staying long.

Solomon liked women. And not just any women, but women from all the tribes God commanded Israel NOT to touch, because they would lead them to other- lower-case g- gods. Solomon didn’t listen. Why would he? He lived in a gilded cage, silver was as common as rocks in Israel.

And these women, with gentle touch and soothing whisper, took pieces of Solomons integrity. You know how it happened in the garden of Eden. Eve took the fruit. But as she reached out her hand, Adam was there.

All it would have taken is a word, one glance would’ve sent the serpent slithering away in the grass. But Adam failed her in that moment. They ate the fruit together. And they knew. They knew everything at once. Adam saw Eve’s eyes, queenly as ever, but frightened and wild like a winter wolf far afield of its den, his own ravenous hunger reflected in her eyes, maddening and acute, reactive and red as a forewarning sunrise over the sea.

So they ran. And the devil CELEBRATED.

Like forbidden fruit, Solomon lapped up the sweet words of his wives, learned about their gods. How reasonable was the god of the Moabites, how malleable the god of the Edomites. He could barter with these gods and more besides.

And Uppercase G- Uppercase Y as in Yahweh said “If that’s your attitude…”

And for centuries the line of Kings in Israel would continue to deteriorate. The people took on false gods, pagan worship, terrible things.

Their bodies were tuned to their forerunners ruined pitch, their minds ill-tempered in the headwaters of panicked haste, their souls crying out for the Lord their god, but caged in a song of misery and doubt. Giants rang discordant arias of clanging metal and chortled in lecherous verse -of the pleasures of the flesh. Idols went up in GOD’S country to Molech. MOLECH.

First MOLOCH, horrid King besmear’d with blood

Of human sacrifice, and parents tears,

Though the noise of Drums and Timbrels loud

Their children’s cries unheard, that passed through fire to his grim Idol. Not content with such audacious neighborhood, the wisest heart Of SOLOMON he led by fraud

to build His Temple right against the Temple of our God.

I can’t think of a darker time. Yet a prophecy remained. The gloaming fog that had settled over Israel was suffocating, and tasted like iron, coated your lips with blood. But like a purifying corona from the sun that parted the murk, a prophecy remained. Judah was prophesied to be cleansed by the house of David.

Three centuries later, (JOE-ZAIA)Josaiah inherited a kingdom in ruins. A kingdom in dire need of a good cleansing. And he did his best to rule this lawless nation, being agreeable and straight- not deceitful. And in a perfectly ordinary show of Bureaucracy, Josaiah was collecting the taxes so he could pay the workers who were maintaining the temple to Yahweh, situated as it was right alongside idols to the most despicable spirits imaginable.

And in this process, his steward brings him nothing less than the Law of God as spoken by Moses. And I’ll bet the scrolls creaked and a cloud of dust filled the room, because the LAW hadn’t been active in Gods nation for a long time. And Josiah sat and read the Law, his breath stilled to perfect, rhythmic whispering. Through his window he could see his nation in the starless night. Pinpricks of flame cast ghoulish glows on the hilltops. Wailing basked over the windowsill, the faint jingle of money changing hands could be heard, distinct from the cicadas and crickets. Somewhere near a pinprick of flame upon a hill, an infant screamed.

This land was lawless indeed.

Josiahs orders were a clear as crystal. Everyone meets in the Temple. Elders, priests, women, children, everyone. Now, this priests of other gods held their ritual daggers in their cloaks, everyone was nervous because it wasn’t unusual for a mad king to fill a temple and kill everyone inside. But the people trusted Josiah, so they filed into the temple to await their fates.

And standing before the people of Jerusalem, Josiah swore to restore the covenant between his people and Yahweh.

Absolute madness must have erupted then. Elders leaping up, priests who followed the real uppercase G God shouting fervently. But still, plenty of holdouts with daggers in their robes muttering “we already have a lord”. To which Josiah might have replied “very well then go to him!”

And out into Jerusalem the tidal wave of righteous fury washed down the streets. Tables stacked with incense and clay gods were knocked over and shattered, Josiah with something in his hands that would be really good for smashing stuff shouting “OUT! OUT OF THE HOUSE OF YAWEH!” The king burned the tents of prostitutes and witches, demolished altars to Baal “DOWN WITH BAAL!”

Annihilated the Asherah poles “OUT WITH ASHERAH”!

Until at last he came upon the hill, crowned with a huge, humped stone, upon which many horns were hung. Around it, stone bull heads arranged in a circle. The Topeth stone, it was called, had a shelf halfway up the side, fashioned to look like arms. And in the arms, a bronze dish , a fire pit close below. Josiah didn’t need there to be priests in attendance to light the fires and beat the drums. He didn’t need to see the horrors that took place there. The way the dirt under his feet was caked with grey ash told the tale. The smell on the night air, perverse and twisted, told the tale. The way Josiahs followers stood enraptured by the charms of the altar told the tale.

But Josiah just said “I know you, fiend. I saw you on the face of my father, I smelled you in the stench of the fires when the wind was from the east. I feared you when the drum beats and screaming roused me from my sleep and when the silence came, I feared you. I fear you no longer. I have chosen. Lay a hand on the Throne of my God if you can!”

And Josiah demolished the Topeth stone and all the other altars.

That night, for the first time since before all the judges and kings of Israel, Josiah and Jerusalem celebrated Passover.

And again. How I wish I could say it ended there. All is well, remain calm and joyful.

But, Josiah, for all the good he did, did not earn Israel a free pass. “The Lord did not turn away from the heat of his fierce anger.” This was the last century before Babylon would come, raze Jerusalem to the ground, and take its people into captivity. This time of trial fractured the people of God, dividing them after the Persians released them to their old home.

The exiles came back from Babylon to a ruined land. The soil was difficult to farm, the buildings were in ruins and disrepair, their neighbors held long grudges against them and opposed their efforts. And after a short period of guidance to rebuild the temple…

There was silence.

Silence. It cuts like a knife, it hangs in the air like wordless doom. Silence that grips the land and withers it like drought. They say “Hope Deferred” makes the heart sick. And it does. But this period of silence is something worse. There WAS hope. And then it was dead and buried, its headstone forgotten.

Persia declined. Cyrus set the jews free, but Darius was less kind. Xerxes, even less so. You might remember him as the self proclaimed God-King from the battle with the Greeks at THER-MOP-ALEE. He was cruel, but more concerned with Greece than Judea.

Then Alexander the great conquered the land, it fell to the Seleucids, and finally the conquerors not willing to put up with the Jewish faith, the Syrians. They desecrated the holy of holies with a pig sacrifice to Zeus. Well, that was too much for the Jewish people, and they fought tooth and nail, cleansed the temple again, but throughout all of this strife and upheaval, and rivers of blood and generations of grudges and hatred…

Absolute, stagnant silence. No prophets. No divine word. Just a hot furnace, hardening and tempering the Jewish people into a bitter populace.

When Rome and its invincible legions came like hornets to the wheezing beehive of Judea, it was all the people could do to hold their breath and say their prayers to God, hungry for a prophet to rouse the people again. And ohh, the enemies of God noticed. They noticed. God was not in Jerusalem, they said.

For 400 years…. Crushing, crippling, silence. Where was God? So much time, and he did not appear.

And then. Suddenly, like a legend walking out of an old story, speaking the old languages, dressed in colors long forgotten, HE came.

A roman might see thunderbolts, arcing off across the skies at 300 million volts and say “Our god has come” or our god is ANGRY.

An Egyptian might see a thick miasma, smell patchouli and ozone over the body of a dead king and say “Our god has come” or Our god is HUNGRY.

A Canaanite might see a village with an uptick in birth rates, fertility encompassing the land with the defiant cries of new lungs and say “Our god has come!” Or our god THIRSTS.

But in Israel. In the year so impactful on history that to this day our calendars start THERE...

There was a cry. A wailing cry to clear the lungs, small fists punching at the air. Far off there was a prophet, baptizing the masses in the name of who was to come, and how he must have trembled when he saw him for the first time and tripped over his untied sandals, his unkempt hair in his eyes.

There were no thunderbolts, striking thatched roofs and spreading fires, because our God was not ANGRY.

The smell of frankincense and myrrh and the glitter of gold didn’t adorn a gilded coffin to celebrate death like the Egyptians, they were offered to celebrate and end to death. Our god did not HUNGER.

And Yes, there was a cry. A cry only parents and humble livestock heard. But the gods of old Caanan would have no part of this new covenant. Our God did not THIRST, and we would thirst no more for his coming.

Jesus Christ, the son of God was born in Bethlehem to a virgin. He had come to blow away the thick smoke hanging over Israel. It stung the eyes of its priests, it made its people bitter and angry, starved and parched. And like a wind from the garden our Savior was born from up high to put a final end to sin and death.

Michael with a flaming sword flanked by 10,000 angels in gleaming armor couldn’t have made a finer display, it was once again a humble man with the word of God in his sling, ready to stand up against a giant that stood at the door of his people and hurled insults.

The earthen King has arrived with humility and Grace. To end deluge and famine, persecution and cruel scrutiny. To the bellowing armies of sin and death he whispers a most holy dare. Go, and look. Come, and see.