Jehoash, pounding on the ground only three times, lacks the zeal to see the Lord’s wars through to their conclusion. He’s content with three victories over Aram, and is not willing to pound them until they are pulverized. He’s willing to leave the balance of power comparatively even. He doesn’t care to fight long enough or energetically enough to ensure that the Arameans are put down for good. (more…) Read more
Elisha’s anger toward Jehoash seems unfair (2 Kings 13). He tells him to shoot arrows, and then pound them on the ground. How was Jehoash to know that pounding on the ground symbolized victory over Aram? Well, for one thing, Elisha told him that the arrow is the arrow of victory over Aram. And for another, Elisha expects the king to be able to unravel the sign that he gives him. This incident reminds us of the anger of Jesus... Read more
Joash of Judah is called “Jehoash” throughout much of his reign, but his name returns to Joash at the end of the account (12:19). Jehoash contains the name of Yahweh, and means “fire of Yah,” the fire of Yah’s wrath but also Yah’s fire of cleansing. Jehoash of Judah is the agent for the purification of Israel and the repair of the temple. But the name Joash means “he burns” or in some translations “he despairs.” So it is appropriate... Read more
2 Kings 13:23: But Yahweh was gracious to them and had compassion on them and turned to them because of His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and would not destroy them or cast them from His presence until now. As we say in the sermon this morning, this is a striking, an amazing statement of the Lord’s grace. The Lord had compassion on Israel because of the covenant with Abraham, even though Israel had ignored that covenant, disobeyed the... Read more
The church calendar is essentially a calendar of feast days, preceded by days of preparation for feasting. Advent is a time of preparation for the feast of Christmas, when we celebrate the Father’s gift of His Son; Lent is a time of preparation for the feast of Easter, when we celebrate the Son’s resurrection in the Spirit; the Sundays after Easter prepare us for the climactic festival of Pentecost, when the Father and Son poured out the gift of the... Read more
Kumar argues that postmodernism is characterized by a contempt for the past, and by an embrace of the “depthless present.” The result is an obsession with space: “The plane of the timeless present is the spatial. If things do not get their significance from their place in history, they can receive it only from their distribution in space. Post-modernity traffics in the contemporaneous and the simultaneous, in synchronic rather than diachronic time. Relations of nearness and distance in space, rather... Read more
Ulrich Beck suggests that the contemporary world is less post-modern than radicalized modernity, a modernity that has become self-conscious and self-reflexive. He writes: “Just as modernization dissolved the structure of feudal society in the nineteenth century and produced the industrial society, modernization today is dissolving industrial society and another modernity is coming into being . . . Todaty, at the threshold of the twenty-first century, in the developed western world, modernization has consumed and lost its other and now undermines... Read more
Though not altogether obvious in English, the names Jehoahaz and Ahaziah are variations of the same name (cf. 2 Kings 13). Jeho = iah, both references to Yahweh’s name, and the verb “ahaz” is common to both. “Ahaz” means “to seize, to lay hold,” and the name “Yah lays hold” is particularly appropriate to the Israelite king Jehoahaz. Yahweh has laid hold of His people, and in spite of all their idolatries, he refuses to turn away from them, but... Read more
Many Christians observe the last few Sundays before Lent as “pre-Lenten” Sundays. This might look slightly daft: After all, Lent is itself a period of preparation for Easter, and if we need a time of preparation for the time of preparation, perhaps we also need a pre-pre-Lent to prepare for pre-Lent. It threatens to become an infinite regression. (more…) Read more
Ihab Hassan contrasted modernism and postmodernism by reference to Authority and Anarchy. He suggested, in Kumar’s summary, that postmodernism “involved a tendency toward ‘Indeterminacy,’ a compound of pluralism, eclecticism, randomness and revolt. Indeterminacy also connoted ‘deformation,’ a stress on decreation, difference, discontinuity and ‘detotalization’ which together add up to a ‘vast will to unmaking, affecting the body politic, the body cognitive, the erotic body, the psyche of each individual – affecting in short the entire realm of human discourse in... Read more
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