Medicine Hat Joe

Week 23  2 Chronicles 36

In 2023 I looked at the kings of Judah and ranked them according to their character qualities: Top-to-Bottom. Best-to-Worst. I posted my final list – one-to-fifteen – on May 31 2023.
I admitted last year that I was cheating on my King List by making Josiah  the last king. The fact is that there were four more kings after Josiah but I didn’t count them because they were basically puppets controlled by foreign countries.
The four kings not on my 2023 list were: Jehoahaz Jehoiakim Jehoiachin & Zedekiah. I decided to take a look at them this year.
The stories of all four are in 2 Chronicles 36. Short accounts – averaging about 5.5 verses each. Luckily I remember from last year to double-check the Kings versions of the stories. They’re in 2 Kings 23-25.
Key facts about the Jehoahaz the fourth last king:
He was 23 years old when he became king
He reigned for three months
He was deposed & exiled by the king of Egypt (he died in an Egyptian prison)
He did what was evil in the Lord’s sight.
One thing I’d completely forgotten about was that Jeremiah prophesied during the exact time of these last four kings. In fact Jeremiah’s long career went from the thirteenth year of King Josiah’s reign in Judah…until the eleventh year of King Zedekiah’s reign.
I figured Jeremiah might add some details. But in the end he didn’t have much to say about Jehoahaz.

Note: quotes from 2 Kings 23:32 & Jeremiah 1:2-3 (NLT)

 

Week 23  Proverbs 5

The last couple of days I’ve been thinking about what Solomon calls The Way. I picture a fork in the road – or maybe a highway on-ramp – where I get to choose. Do I choose the Way-of-Life? Or the Way-of-Death?
So anyway in chapter five Solomon talks about a woman who’s trying to sexually seduce a young guy and what Solomon says about her makes me rethink my fork-in-the-road idea:
a) she gives no thought to the way of life
b) her paths are crooked
c) but she knows it not.
The woman isn’t concerned about the Way-of-Life. She’s already on the Way-of-Death . I get that. But the surprising thing is that it looks like she doesn’t even know it.
If the woman decided to take the crooked path and knew it and couldn’t care less – that would be one thing. But the thing is: she knows it not – doesn’t seem to have any conception of her predicament. I’d think that if she had stood at an intersection and thought and decided to go the Way-of-Death then she’d at least recall the decision. But it looks like she didn’t.
Which makes me wonder: was there no fork in the road? Was the woman on the Way-of-Death from the very beginning. Maybe she didn’t need to turn her back on The Way. Maybe it was turned from the start. Which makes even locating the Way-of-Life a worrying problem.

Note: quote from Proverbs 5:6 NLT

Week 22  Proverbs 4

The Way is called the path of the righteous (person). The Way is progressive & developmental & evolutionary. It starts in half-light. But gradually things get brighter & clearer over time. The early stages of The Way are a bit like sunrise: the path of the righteous is like the first gleam of the dawn. Shadowy and opaque at first but as I move forward it gets ever brighter till the full light of day.
By contrast the way of the wicked is like deep darkness. In one way it’s kind of similar to how The Way is at the beginning – dark. The big difference is that The Anti-Way stays dark. It doesn’t get lighter over time. There’s no point in waiting for the dawn’s-early-light since morning will never ever come. It’s perpetually dark. Permanently dark. Still…since it’s the only way that an evil person’s got he walks the dark path. He can’t just stand there inertly so he walks. He trips and falls over something in the path. Tripping & falling is going to be a pretty major component of an evil person’s journey along The Anti-Way. Going by feel. Trial-and-error. Hit-and-miss. But he figures that anything’s better than The Way.

Note: quotes from Proverbs 4:18 19 (NIV). End-of-month reading report: the 563 chapters I’ve read are about 47% of the bible…and as of today that’s roughly 42% of the year.

Week 22  Proverbs 1

Proverbs is a manual – a guide – for living in a wise way.
It’s safe to say that Solomon figures I shouldn’t just live a spontaneous undirected random casual self-directed crowd-influenced easy-going devil-may-care life. His view is that I need to find The Way. The Way informs & directs & focuses me. Walking The Way is what Solomon says is walking the path of wisdom.
So – broadly-speaking – there are two possible roads:
1) I can decide to do what I decide to do for whatever personal or group reasons that go into making my decisions (Solomon thinks this kind of action-taking is foolish. He doesn’t exactly name it The Fool’s Way…but that’s the implication).
2) I can decide to do what I decide to do based on the code of The Way (Solomon doesn’t call it The Wise Way…just The Way).
Choosing which way to follow isn’t a purely neutral choice. Solomon says foolish people have already decided to despise wisdom and discipline. They reject the Lord. Ignore his advice. Love their own way. Hate knowledge. So when a foolish person decides not to choose The Way it’s really hardly even a choice. It’s more like just carrying on as usual (if my default is to hate The Way then why-in-the-world would I consider choosing it?)
Anyway…Solomon begins by mapping out my options: a) I can try to start following The Way or b) I can keep disregarding it.

Note: quote from Proverbs 1:7 (NIV). And see 1:22 24 25 29.

Week 22  Psalms 146-150

Yesterday I searched through psalms 146-150 looking for qualities of the Lord. I found eight.
Today I dropped a couple off the list (they didn’t quite fit the bill…they seemed like action-qualities…doing as much as being). So I had six things that described the Lord:
great is our Lord (one psalm said surpassingly great)
he is mighty in power
his understanding has no limits
he reigns forever
his splendor is above the earth and the heavens
his name alone is exalted.
I tried streamlining the list – reducing the phrases to a single word. That worked at first. I shortened the first three to Great & Powerful & Brilliant. But the second three traits were too complex to describe in a single word (and for all I know I was just kidding myself with the first three). And I noticed that modifiers helped to make the point:
• How great is the Lord? Stupendously great
• How powerful? Powerfully powerful
• Limitlessly smart
• Permanently in-charge
• Incandescently above everyone & everything everywhere
• Peerlessly superior
But really the main point in these psalms isn’t to get the Lord’s qualities out on-the-table – even though that helps. The writer’s aim was to show what qualities the Lord could be praised for.
You’re the greatest
You’re the strongest
You’re the smartest
You always take care of things
You’re everywhere
You’re the very best.
Praise the Lord!

Note: quotes from Psalm 147:5 (& 150:2) 146:10 147:5 148:13 148:13 (NIV)

Week 22  Psalms 146-150

146 147 148 149 and 150 all have the same opening line: Praise the Lord.
Each time the expression is used my bible has a footnote that says “Praise the Lord” (in the Hebrew language) is Hallelu Yah. I looked up hallelujah in an English language dictionary and it said: praise the Lord.
Praise means approval. Affirmation. Commendation. Applause. If I go to a concert and it’s terrific I stand up and clap. I approve. I praise the performers.
When it comes to praising the Lord it seems like the same general idea applies. The Lord acts…and I can approve of the performance by Hallelujah-ing the Lord. If I wanted to I could stand. Shout. Applaud. Raise my hands in salute.
I did a quick re-reading exercise…scanning these five psalms and counting-up things that the Lord did (what his praiseworthy actions were). There were quite a few of them. In 59-verses there were 41 actions the Lord could be commended for (for instance he determines the number of stars).
But in the process I also found something I wasn’t looking for: praiseworthy things that weren’t performance-related. They were praise-approvals of the Lord for what he was like…his qualities…his character-traits. I found 8-items describing what the Lord was like (for instance praise him for his surpassing greatness).
Anyway it was a pure numbers exercise. A follow-up idea might be to create two lists: a) the Lord’s actions and b) the Lord’s qualities.

Note: quotes from Psalms 145:21 147:4 150:2 (NIV)

Week 21  2 Chronicles 14-16

I noticed a couple of time-stamps that marked events during king Asa’s reign.
1) when Asa became king there was peace in the land for ten years
2) then an Ethiopian named Zerah attacked Judah. That ended the decade of peace but Asa still depended on the Lord. Later (it was in late spring, during the fifteenth year of Asa’s reign) a big public event reconfirmed Asa & Judah’s covenant loyalty to the Lord
3) after that there was no more war until the thirty-sixth year of Asa’s reign (an impressive twenty-year span of peace)
4) then a war in the 36th year was started by Baasha (Israel). Asa’s bad & inexplicable decision was to hire mercenaries from Damascus. A prophet – Hanani – told Asa from now on, you will be at war. That forecast came in Asa’s thirty-sixth year and he died in the forty-first year of his reign.
So summing up:
Years 1-10: peace (devoted to the Lord)
Years 11-15: conflict (devoted to the Lord)
Years 16-36: peace (devoted to the Lord)
Years 37-41: conflict (not devoted to the Lord)
41-years as king. 36-years devoted to the Lord. But during those last 5-6 years something went wrong.
Hanani’s diagnosis was that the eyes of the Lord search the whole earth…to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him.
By that he meant that the Lord had searched the earth and would have helped Asa if he’d stayed fully committed to him.
But Asa had tailed off on that last lap.

Note: quotes from 2 Chronicles 14:1 6 8 15:10 19 16:9 13 (NLT)

 

Week 21  Psalm 145

I found eight things that the Lord does. Actions he takes.
But I whittled that eight-item list down to three because a) there were people in that list who practiced three specific behaviours toward the Lord and b) there were specific ways that the Lord responded to those behaviours. I was interested in the Back-&-Forth. The If-X Then-Y connection. I wanted to see a) what the actions were and b) the Lord’s response.
The three specific things that people did were to:
• Call on the Lord
• Fear the Lord
• Love the Lord.
The Lord’s response to them was described this way:
The Lord is near to all who call on him
The Lord fulfils the desires of those who fear him. He hears their cry and saves them
The Lord watches over all who love him.
I personalized it to see what it looked like:
• What if I call on the Lord? He’s nearby
• What if I fear the Lord? He fulfils my desires & hears my appeal & he saves me
• What if I love the Lord? He watches out for me.
My what’s-in-it-for-for-me instinct is to focus on how the Lord will benefit me. But I have a sneaking-suspicion that the benefits are secondary matters. By-products. So it makes better sense to focus on the primaries: appealing to the Lord…loving the Lord…revering the Lord. There’s no point in focusing primarily on the secondaries.

Note: quotes from Psalm 145:18 19 20 (NIV)

Week 21  Psalm 145

If I asked a hundred bible-reading people what specific things they’re looking for in the bible there’d be a bunch of answers. But I think one of them would be: “I want to find out what the Lord is like”.  (Or maybe I just think that because it’s one of the questions I have.)
Psalm 145 is a useful place to find out What the Lord is Like.
While I was reading I wrote down a list of thirteen items. When I re-read the list I saw that there were actually two different types of things: a) what the Lord is like in his character (what the Lord is) and b) what the Lord does (his actions). I was more interested in a) and the psalm said five definitive things about the Lord.
• The Lord is great
• The Lord is gracious
• The Lord is compassionate
• The Lord is good (to everyone & everything)
• The Lord is righteous.
I wondered what results I’d get if I gave an opinion survey to a random audience.
I sketched-out a table. The left-hand column had five rows – the five qualities of God.
Then three more columns – check-boxes:
Do you agree with this statement? (Check “Yes”)
Do you disagree? (Check “No”)
Are you on-the-fence? (Check “Maybe-Maybe Not”)
There’d be some “Yes” & “No” hard-liners. But I wonder if the majority would be uncertain about one or more of the things David claimed about the Lord.

Note: character features are from Psalm 145:3 8 9 17.

Week 20  2 Chronicles

Yesterday I was thinking about Solomon’s Choice.
The Lord: what do you want? Ask and I will give it to you
Solomon: give me wisdom and knowledge.
So when I get to the Queen of Sheba story I realize how exceptional Solomon’s gift was.
His reputation for wisdom had crossed international borders and the queen made a state visit to see him. Why? To test Solomon with hard questions.
The queen asked. And Solomon answered all her questions; nothing was too hard for him to explain to her.
Was she impressed? When (she) realized how wise Solomon was…she was breathless.
Did he live up to his reputation? The queen told him that everything I heard about your achievements and wisdom is true.
How wise was he? Your wisdom is far greater than what I was told.
Yesterday I was questioning Solomon’s Choice. I was thinking that maybe Solomon wouldn’t have turned his back on the Lord if he’d asked for a different gift (I thought Lasting Faith was a better choice).
But the Queen of Sheba story reminds me that wisdom was a genuinely fantastic gift. Maybe Solomon did choose the best possible gift of all. I guess it’s possible that Lasting Faith – permanent loyalty to the Lord – wasn’t even on-the-table.
Maybe being devoted to the Lord is a whole different category. Maybe loyalty and devotion aren’t gifted. Maybe they’re developable qualities I have to work at.

Note: quotes from 2 Chronicles 1:7 10 9:1 2 3-4 5 6