Week 22 — Table of Contents
May 28, 2026
2 Samuel 15:13–16:14
The conspiracy moves fast. A messenger arrives in Jerusalem with the report — "The hearts of the men of Israel have gone after Absalom" — and David, who once stood his ground against a giant, says to his servants, "Arise, and let us flee, or else there will be no escape for us from Absalom." The king walks out of his own capital on foot, weeping, his head covered, climbing the Mount of Olives barefoot. The narrator lingers over the procession: the Cherethites and Pelethites, the six hundred Gittites under Ittai, the priests carrying the ark. David refuses to let Ittai bind himself to a doomed king and refuses to let the ark go with him into exile. "If I find favor in the eyes of the Lord, he will bring me back and let me see both it and his dwelling place. But if he says, ‘I have no pleasure in you,’ behold, here I am, let him do to me what seems good to him." It is one of the most theologically composed sentences David ever speaks — a man at the lowest moment of his reign refusing to use God’s symbols as good-luck charms.
On the road David hears that Ahithophel, his trusted counselor, has defected to Absalom, and prays the single-sentence prayer that will shape everything that follows: "O Lord, please turn the counsel of Ahithophel into foolishness." He sends Hushai back to Jerusalem to be his eyes and his counterweight. Then Ziba meets him with provisions and a slander against Mephibosheth, which David accepts too quickly. And then comes Shimei of the house of Saul, walking along the ridge throwing stones and curses at the fleeing king. "Get out, get out, you man of blood, you worthless man!" Abishai wants to take the head off "this dead dog," but David stops him with a sentence that recalls the heart of the man God chose: "Let him alone, and let him curse, for the Lord has told him to… It may be that the Lord will look on the wrong done to me, and that the Lord will repay me with good for his cursing today." The king who once danced before the ark is now walking weeping up a mountain, and he is more himself in this exile than he was on his palace roof.
John 18:1–24
John’s passion narrative begins in the garden. Jesus crosses the Kidron Valley with his disciples and enters a garden Judas knew well, "for Jesus often met there with his disciples." When the band of soldiers and officers arrives with lanterns and torches and weapons, Jesus does not wait to be found. He goes out and asks them, "Whom do you seek?" When they answer "Jesus of Nazareth," he says, "I am he" — the I-am of John echoing through the moment — and they draw back and fall to the ground. He asks the question a second time, and a second time he gives the same answer, and then he negotiates with his own arresters: "If you seek me, let these men go." John tells us this fulfilled the saying, "Of those whom you gave me I have lost not one." Even at his arrest, Jesus is shepherding his sheep.
Peter, all impulse, draws a sword and severs the ear of the high priest’s servant, Malchus — and Jesus stops him with the only sentence necessary: "Shall I not drink the cup that the Father has given me?" The arrest moves to Annas’s house, where Jesus is questioned about his disciples and his teaching, and answers with quiet confidence — he has spoken openly, in synagogues and the temple, and his hearers can be asked. A nearby officer slaps him, and Jesus does not retaliate. Meanwhile, outside the door, Peter is asked three times whether he is one of Jesus’s disciples, and three times he answers, "I am not." It is the exact inverse of Jesus’s "I am he." The Shepherd is identifying himself even as the sheep is denying him.
Proverbs 13:10–19
This cluster of proverbs reflects on the connection between humility, hope, and the long road of formation. "By insolence comes nothing but strife, but with those who take advice is wisdom." The proud cannot be counseled, and people who cannot be counseled cannot grow. "Wealth gained hastily will dwindle, but whoever gathers little by little will increase it" — a quiet rebuke to every shortcut. And then the well-known line: "Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life." Proverbs does not pretend that waiting is painless.
The passage continues with observations that read like field notes from a long life of watching people. "Whoever despises the word brings destruction on himself, but he who reveres the commandment will be rewarded." A good messenger brings healing; a faithful envoy refreshes the soul of his master. "The teaching of the wise is a fountain of life, that one may turn away from the snares of death." Wisdom, in Proverbs, is not first about being clever. It is about being teachable — and the teachable life is the one that ends in fruit, even when the road there is longer than we wanted.
David walking up the Mount of Olives barefoot and Jesus crossing the Kidron toward another garden — the two scenes mirror each other in ways the church has noticed for centuries. Both kings leave their cities on the way to suffering; both submit themselves to the cup the Father has given them; both refuse to use power to save themselves; both, in their different ways, intercede for those traveling with them. David sends the ark back. Jesus says, "Let these men go." The crown comes by way of the descent.
What is remarkable about David in this section is not that he is innocent — he plainly is not — but that he has at last learned what to do with his guilt. He does not protest Shimei’s curses. He does not assume God owes him rescue. He prays a single sentence about Ahithophel and otherwise holds his hands open. The king on his way down the mountain looks more like the shepherd God called from the sheepfold than the king on the palace roof did. Affliction has done its work. And Jesus, walking the same kind of road for very different reasons, is doing the work that makes our own descents salvageable — drinking the cup, identifying himself when his disciples will not, losing not one of those the Father gave him.
The Proverbs reading sets the soundtrack for the day. The hope deferred, the wealth gained slowly, the teaching of the wise as a fountain of life. The kingdom does not come by the shortcut. It comes by the long obedience of teachable people walking with God up whatever Olivet is in front of them, trusting that the King who once walked it weeping is the same King who walked it for us, drinking the cup so that we might one day come home.
May 29, 2026
2 Samuel 16:15–18:18
The fate of David’s kingdom now hinges on a contest of counselors. Absalom enters Jerusalem with Ahithophel at his side, and Hushai meets him with feigned loyalty: "Long live the king! Long live the king!" Absalom, suspicious, presses him, and Hushai gives the answer he has prepared — that he will serve whomever the Lord and the people of Israel have chosen. Ahithophel’s first piece of counsel is brutal and shrewd: take David’s concubines publicly on the roof of the palace, in the sight of all Israel, to make the breach with David irrevocable. Absalom does it, and the narrator notes with grim precision that this fulfilled Nathan’s prophecy — what David had done in secret with Bathsheba would be done in broad daylight to him. Ahithophel’s second piece of counsel is just as shrewd: let him take twelve thousand men and strike David that very night while he is weary and discouraged, before he can regroup. The plan is sound and it would have worked.
But David’s prayer has been at work. Absalom asks for Hushai’s opinion, and Hushai unfolds a slow, vivid alternative — David is a seasoned warrior, his men are like a bear robbed of her cubs, the wise thing is to gather all Israel from Dan to Beersheba and march in overwhelming numbers with Absalom himself at the head. The speech flatters Absalom’s vanity, and the narrator gives us the theological commentary: "For the Lord had ordained to defeat the good counsel of Ahithophel, so that the Lord might bring harm upon Absalom." Ahithophel sees what has happened, goes home, sets his house in order, and hangs himself. The battle, when it comes, is fought in the forest of Ephraim — and the forest devours more than the sword. Absalom, riding under the great oaks, is caught by his head in the branches and left hanging there while his mule runs on. Joab, against David’s express command, drives three javelins into Absalom’s heart, and the troops finish the work. The chapter closes with a pillar Absalom had set up for himself in his lifetime, "for he said, ‘I have no son to keep my name in remembrance.’" The would-be king becomes a heap of stones in a pit in the forest.
John 18:25–40
The denial scene comes to its terrible completion outside in the courtyard. A relative of the man whose ear Peter cut off asks, "Did I not see you in the garden with him?" Peter denies it a third time, and immediately a rooster crows. John does not show us Peter weeping. He simply lets the rooster’s cry hang in the air and turns his camera to the trial of Jesus before Pilate. The Jewish authorities will not enter the praetorium, lest they be defiled and unable to eat the Passover — and John lets the irony stand. They are guarding their ceremonial purity while handing the Lamb of God over to be slaughtered.
Pilate’s interview with Jesus is one of the most layered scenes in the gospel. "Are you the King of the Jews?" Pilate asks, and Jesus answers with a question of his own: "Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about me?" Pilate denies he is a Jew and demands an answer, and Jesus speaks the key sentence of the trial: "My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting." His kingship is real, but it is not the kind Pilate fears or hopes for. Pilate, sensing the air shift, asks, "What is truth?" — and walks out without waiting for the answer. He tells the crowd he finds no guilt in Jesus and offers them the Passover release, expecting them to choose Jesus. They choose Barabbas. The robber is freed and the King is condemned. John adds the briefest note about Barabbas: he was a robber. The contrast is the point.
Psalm 68:15–20
The middle of Psalm 68 turns toward Zion. The high mountains of Bashan look on the mountain God has chosen, and the psalm imagines them in jealousy: "Why do you look with hatred, O many-peaked mountain, at the mount that God desired for his abode? Yes, where the Lord will dwell forever." God has come down to a particular hill, and the lofty peaks of the world cannot match what humble Zion has been given. Chariots of God by the thousands surround him, and the Lord is in their midst, the Sinai now relocated to the sanctuary.
Then verse 18 ascends: "You ascended on high, leading a host of captives in your train and receiving gifts among men, even among the rebellious, that the Lord God may dwell there." Paul will pick up this verse in Ephesians 4 and apply it to the ascending Christ who gives gifts to his church. The psalm itself moves toward a doxology that is one of the most pastoral lines in the Psalter: "Blessed be the Lord, who daily bears us up; God is our salvation. Our God is a God of salvation, and to God, the Lord, belong deliverances from death." Every day, the burden borne; every day, the salvation given.
Three texts, three kings, three crowns. Absalom builds himself a monument and dies hanging in a tree because he had no son. Jesus, the true Son, is on his way to die on a tree so that he might have many sons and daughters. And Psalm 68 lifts both stories into a higher register: the God who chose Zion is the God who daily bears us up, the God who ascended on high leading captives and giving gifts to even the rebellious.
The collision between Ahithophel’s shrewd advice and Hushai’s slower, theatrical counsel is one of the great vindications of prayer in Scripture. David, on the way up the Mount of Olives, prayed one sentence: turn Ahithophel’s counsel into foolishness. That sentence was answered through a man’s flattering speech, through a young king’s vanity, through a forest full of low branches. The means were ordinary. The result was the survival of the line that would eventually produce Jesus. We rarely see in our own lives how God answers our prayers — but we are right to keep praying them.
And what of Pilate’s question? "What is truth?" — asked of the One who said, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life." The tragedy of the trial is not Jesus’s silence; it is Pilate walking out before the answer. Truth was standing in front of him. Absalom died in a forest because he chose his vanity over his father; Pilate handed Jesus over because he chose his career over the King. The invitation today is to refuse both moves. To stay in the room. To let the King who daily bears us up bear today’s burdens too. And to wait, like David, for the slow answer to the prayer we cannot yet see being answered.
May 30, 2026
2 Samuel 18:19–19:43
The news of Absalom’s death has to make its way back to David, and the narrator turns the journey of the messengers into a small drama all its own. Ahimaaz wants to run; Joab, knowing the news will not be welcomed, sends a Cushite first. Ahimaaz runs anyway and outruns the Cushite, arriving with a careful half-message — "I saw a great commotion, but I did not know what it was." When the Cushite arrives and confirms Absalom’s death, David’s response is one of the most famous laments in Scripture: "O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!" The king who survived the rebellion grieves as a father, not a victor. Joab, ever the political realist, has to confront him with a hard word: by mourning Absalom publicly, David is shaming the men who risked their lives for him, and the army is melting away in grief. David, chastened, rises and sits in the gate, and the troops come before him.
The rest of the long passage is the slow, awkward business of reunification. The northern tribes are humiliated and dragging their feet; Judah is invited home first; Shimei comes hurrying with a thousand Benjaminites to beg pardon, and David swears not to put him to death; Mephibosheth meets him with unkempt beard and dirty clothes, and the truth of Ziba’s slander comes out, though David, perhaps weary, simply divides the land between them. Barzillai, the old man who provisioned David in exile, refuses the king’s offer to come live at court — he is eighty, his palate is dulled, he wants to die in his own town — and sends his servant Chimham in his place. And then, predictably, the tribes begin arguing about who has more right to the king. The kingdom is back, but it is fractured, and the fractures will not stay quiet for long.
John 19:1–27
Pilate’s last attempts to release Jesus give way to the crucifixion. He has Jesus flogged, the soldiers crown him with thorns and clothe him in a purple robe, and Pilate brings him out to the crowd with the words, "Behold the man!" The crowd answers, "Crucify him, crucify him." Pilate, troubled by the report that Jesus has called himself the Son of God, takes him back inside and asks, "Where are you from?" Jesus does not answer, and when Pilate threatens him with his authority, Jesus says quietly, "You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above." From this point on, John says, Pilate seeks to release him — but the crowd plays its political trump card: "If you release this man, you are not Caesar’s friend." Pilate brings Jesus out one more time, and the chief priests speak the line that defines the whole trial: "We have no king but Caesar." The covenant people have just denied their covenant God.
The crucifixion itself is told without melodrama. Jesus carries his cross to the place called the Skull. They crucify him there with two others, one on either side, and Pilate writes the inscription in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek: "Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews." The chief priests object; Pilate refuses to change it. The soldiers divide his garments and cast lots for his seamless tunic, and John notes the fulfillment of Psalm 22. And then John gives us the scene at the foot of the cross — Mary the mother, Mary’s sister, Mary Magdalene, and the disciple Jesus loved. With his last reserves of breath, Jesus arranges for his mother’s care: "Woman, behold, your son… Behold, your mother." The dying King is still keeping covenant with his family. From that hour, the disciple took her to his own home.
Psalm 68:21–27
The psalm gathers itself into a procession of praise. God will strike his enemies, and the picture of victory is given in the imagery of a triumphal march. Then the scene shifts to the temple: "Your procession is seen, O God, the procession of my God, my King, into the sanctuary." Singers go in front, musicians follow, and in the middle of the parade are young women playing tambourines. "Bless God in the great congregation, O you who are of Israel’s fountain!" The worship is corporate, vivid, and joyful.
The verses then list the tribes by name as they come into the sanctuary: "There is Benjamin, the least of them, in the lead, the princes of Judah in their throng, the princes of Zebulun, the princes of Naphtali." Tribes from the south and tribes from the north walk together into the presence of God. The mention of Benjamin in the lead — the tribe of Saul, the tribe that produced David’s bitter enemies — and Judah, the tribe of David himself, walking together, is the psalm’s quiet picture of what reconciled worship looks like. The northern tribes and the southern tribes, in the same parade, behind the same King.
The juxtaposition today is almost unbearable. David weeps for the son who betrayed him and would have killed him: "Would I had died instead of you." And Jesus, on the cross, is dying instead of the sons and daughters who have betrayed him. The cry David could only utter as a wish, Jesus turns into the central act of history. Absalom’s death is a tragedy. The death of God’s Son is a substitution.
The political maneuvering of 2 Samuel 19 is sobering in its own way. David comes back to a kingdom whose unity has to be patched together from grievance, suspicion, and faded loyalty. Shimei is pardoned but not transformed. Mephibosheth’s case is dispatched too quickly. The tribes are already arguing about whose king he is. The kingdom of Israel can be reassembled, but it cannot really be healed. Only the King who keeps covenant from the cross — who arranges for his mother’s care while gasping for breath — can produce the kind of new family the psalm anticipates, where Benjamin and Judah walk in the same procession into the same sanctuary behind the same King.
What John 19 calls us to is the foot of the cross. To stand where Mary stood, where the beloved disciple stood, where we are given to one another in a new family forged in dying love. What Psalm 68 calls us to is the procession that runs through history toward the city where the Lamb is the lamp. And what 2 Samuel 19 reminds us is that political restoration without spiritual transformation will always come undone. May the King who said "Behold your son… Behold your mother" form us into the household his death has made possible, and may our singing today join the great congregation of those who were once enemies and are now walking together behind the same King.
May 31, 2026
2 Samuel 20:1–21:22
The unity of the kingdom is still threadbare, and Sheba the Benjaminite seizes the moment with a slogan: "We have no portion in David and no inheritance in the son of Jesse; every man to his tents, O Israel!" The men of Israel withdraw from David and follow Sheba; only Judah sticks. David sends Amasa to muster the men of Judah, but when Amasa is slow, he sends Abishai and Joab in pursuit. Joab, with his usual mix of competence and cruelty, ambushes Amasa under the cover of a kiss and runs him through with a sword. The chase continues to a city called Abel of Beth-maacah, where Sheba has taken refuge. Joab besieges it, and a wise woman of the city negotiates with him from the wall: she will deliver Sheba’s head over the wall if Joab will spare the city. The deal is struck, Sheba’s head is thrown out, the army goes home, and the chapter ends with a list of David’s officers — including, ominously, Joab still over the army.
Chapter 21 records two narrative appendices that do not follow strict chronology. The first is a three-year famine, which an oracle attributes to Saul’s broken covenant with the Gibeonites — Saul had violated the oath Joshua had sworn centuries earlier. The Gibeonites ask for seven of Saul’s male descendants to be hanged, and David grants the request, sparing only Mephibosheth for Jonathan’s sake. The bodies are exposed on the mountain, and Rizpah, the mother of two of the dead, keeps vigil over them through the harvest season — spreading sackcloth on a rock, driving away the birds by day and the wild animals by night. Her devotion moves David to gather the bones of Saul and Jonathan from Jabesh-gilead and bury them in the family tomb in Zela. The chapter closes with a series of Philistine skirmishes and the names of the giants David’s men felled, including Ishbi-benob, the brother of Goliath. The giants are not gone; but the men around David are now strong enough to bring them down.
John 19:28–20:9
John tells us that Jesus, "knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), ‘I thirst.’" A jar of sour wine is there; a sponge full of it is held to his mouth on a hyssop branch — the same hyssop that brushed the doorposts of Israel at the first Passover. And then the great word: "It is finished." He bowed his head and gave up his spirit. John insists on the bodily reality of the death. The soldiers come to break the legs of the crucified to hasten the end, but seeing that Jesus is already dead, they pierce his side instead, and out come blood and water. The Lamb’s bones are not broken, and the blood and water — sacrifice and cleansing — flow from his side. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, the secret disciple and the night visitor, come into the open at last to bury him with seventy-five pounds of myrrh and aloes, more spices than any king ever received.
Then comes the first day of the week, while it is still dark. Mary Magdalene arrives at the tomb, sees the stone rolled away, and runs to tell Peter and the beloved disciple. The two race to the tomb — John gives us the small detail that the other disciple outran Peter — and find the linen cloths lying there, and the face cloth that had been on Jesus’s head folded up in a place by itself. The graveclothes are not in disarray. They are arranged like the bedding of someone who has gotten up unhurried. The beloved disciple sees and believes. John adds the honest acknowledgment that they did not yet understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Faith arrives ahead of full understanding.
Psalm 68:28–35
The psalm rises to its climax. "Summon your power, O God, the power, O God, by which you have worked for us." The kings of the earth are pictured bringing gifts to Jerusalem — Egypt and Cush stretching out their hands to God — and the psalmist calls all the kingdoms of the earth to sing praises to the Lord, "to him who rides in the heavens, the ancient heavens." This is a missional vision again, but with a wider sweep: not just Israel’s neighbors but the great empires brought into the procession.
The closing verses turn into pure doxology. "Ascribe power to God, whose majesty is over Israel, and whose power is in the skies. Awesome is God from his sanctuary; the God of Israel — he is the one who gives power and strength to his people. Blessed be God!" The same God who is awesome in the heavens gives power and strength to his people on the ground. The transcendent God is not distant from the people who walk through the wilderness, fight the giants, keep vigil over the dead, and run to empty tombs.
Joab’s cynical kiss, Rizpah’s faithful vigil, the soldier’s spear, and the folded face cloth — today’s readings press us toward the question of what kind of fidelity outlasts death. Joab kisses Amasa and kills him. Judas kisses Jesus and betrays him. Rizpah kisses no one but watches over her dead through every dawn and dusk, refusing to let them be forgotten. And Jesus, faithful to the end, says, "It is finished" — every covenant promise honored, every prophetic word fulfilled, every debt paid.
The death and resurrection of Jesus answers Rizpah’s vigil in the deepest possible way. She kept watch over her sons because there was nothing else she could do. Joseph and Nicodemus came out of the shadows to bury Jesus because there was nothing else they could do. And then, on the third day, what no one could do became what God had done. The empty tomb is the answer to every Rizpah-vigil ever kept, every parent who has buried a child, every mourner who has spread sackcloth on a rock. The God who gives power and strength to his people is the God who raises the dead.
The folded face cloth is one of the most pastorally tender details in the New Testament. The risen Christ took the time to tidy up. He did not flee the grave; he left it like a guest leaves a room that has been kindly used. The bedding of death has been put away. The invitation today is to live as those who have seen the linen folded — to refuse Joab’s cynicism, to honor Rizpah’s love, to step out of the shadows like Joseph and Nicodemus, and to ascribe power to the God whose ancient heavens still ride above us and whose risen Son still gives power and strength to his people.
June 1, 2026
2 Samuel 22:1–23:7
Second Samuel 22 is essentially Psalm 18, sung by David late in his life as a comprehensive thanksgiving for the way the Lord has delivered him from all his enemies and from the hand of Saul. It begins with one of the great avalanches of metaphor in the Hebrew Bible: "The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold and my refuge, my savior; you save me from violence." Then the great theophany — the earth reels, smoke goes up from God’s nostrils, he parts the heavens and comes down, he rides on a cherub, he flies on the wings of the wind, he thunders from heaven. The deliverance of David is told as a cosmic event. The God who carried Israel through the Sea bends the same arm to pull one shepherd-king out of the pit.
The middle of the song is its theological heart: "He brought me out into a broad place; he rescued me, because he delighted in me." David, the man whose sins we have just read in detail, dares to say that the Lord delighted in him — not because his record was clean but because the Lord’s covenant love had marked him from the beginning. He recites his obedience in the language of covenant integrity, knowing this is the side of the ledger he is not always able to keep clean, but knowing also that "with the merciful you show yourself merciful." The song closes with a confession that the Lord is the one who gives victory to his anointed and shows steadfast love forever — "to David and his offspring forever." Then chapter 23 opens with David’s last words: a final oracle in which he names himself "the sweet psalmist of Israel" and rests his entire legacy on God’s everlasting covenant, "ordered in all things and secure."
John 20:10–31
Mary Magdalene stays at the tomb after the disciples go home. She is weeping when she stoops to look in, and there are two angels where the body of Jesus had lain. They ask her why she is weeping; she gives the only answer she has — "They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him." She turns and sees Jesus standing there but does not recognize him. He asks her the same question and adds another: "Whom are you seeking?" She supposes him to be the gardener — and at one level he is exactly that, a new Adam in a new garden — and asks where he has put the body. Then Jesus says one word: "Mary." Everything turns on that one word. "Rabboni!" she cries, and reaches for him. He sends her with the news: "I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God." She runs to the disciples with the first apostolic announcement: "I have seen the Lord."
That evening, the disciples are gathered behind locked doors for fear, and Jesus comes and stands among them. "Peace be with you." He shows them his hands and his side, sends them as the Father sent him, and breathes on them: "Receive the Holy Spirit." Thomas is not there, and refuses to believe on the witness of the others — "Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails… I will never believe." A week later Jesus comes again and invites him to do exactly that. "Do not disbelieve, but believe." Thomas’s confession is the climactic confession of the gospel: "My Lord and my God!" Jesus blesses those who have not seen and yet have believed — the readers John is writing for, including us. John ends the chapter with the explicit purpose of his book: "These are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name."
Proverbs 13:20–14:4
The proverbs in this section continue to map the contours of a wise life. "Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm." Disaster pursues sinners, but the righteous are rewarded with good. A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children — not merely material wealth but the formation of a household that holds together across generations. "Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him." Proverbs is unsentimental about the way real love works, and unsentimental about the way real life tends to repay carelessness.
The early verses of chapter 14 contrast the wise woman who builds her house with the folly that tears it down with her own hands, and the upright life with the perverse. "Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean, but abundant crops come by the strength of the ox" — a quiet line in praise of the productive mess of actual work. Tidy is not the same as fruitful. The proverbs do not want us to confuse the absence of trouble with the presence of life.
David’s psalm and Thomas’s confession together form one of the richest pairings in the Bible. "The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer" — David’s piled-up nouns reach for a God whose deliverance is many-sided and many-faceted. "My Lord and my God!" — Thomas’s confession reaches for the same God now made visible, scarred, and present. The two together are the long story of how the God of David becomes the God of Thomas: the rock who delivered shepherds from lions becomes the risen Lord who lets a doubter touch his side.
The proverbs at the center remind us that the household of faith is built one wise choice at a time. Walking with the wise, leaving an inheritance to your children’s children, the diligent discipline of love, the productive mess of real work — these are the quiet bricks of a life God’s covenant love can move into. The grand theophany of 2 Samuel 22 and the locked-room appearance of John 20 are not the everyday. The everyday is Proverbs — Monday choices, Tuesday conversations, Wednesday habits — but the everyday is real because the Lord who delights in his people is at work in it.
May we, like David, look back across our years and recognize that we have been delivered more often than we knew. May we, like Mary, hear the Lord call our name and turn and recognize him. May we, like Thomas, be honest about our doubts and willing to be shown. And may we, by walking with the wise and refusing the company of fools, leave the kind of inheritance that outlives us — confident that the covenant the Lord made with David is the same covenant now sealed by Christ’s wounds and held open to "everyone who has not seen and yet believed."
June 2, 2026
2 Samuel 23:8–24:25
The second half of 2 Samuel 23 is a roll call of David’s mighty men — a list that does not so much glorify David as honor the people whose courage made his kingdom possible. There is Josheb-basshebeth, who killed eight hundred at one time; Eleazar, who fought until his hand grew weary and clung to his sword; Shammah, who took his stand alone in a field of lentils and defeated the Philistines there. There is the famous story of the three who broke through the Philistine garrison at Bethlehem to bring David water from the well at the gate — and David, refusing to drink what was won at such cost, pours it out to the Lord. Abishai, Benaiah who struck down two lions of Moab and went down into a pit to kill a real lion on a snowy day, and the long list of the Thirty, including, at the end, "Uriah the Hittite." The narrator’s quiet inclusion of Uriah at the end of the list is a small dagger of remembrance, and we are meant to feel it.
Chapter 24 is the strange and sobering account of David’s census. The opening is theologically dense — "Again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, ‘Go, number Israel and Judah’" — and the Chronicler will later attribute the incitement to Satan, leaving the mystery of divine sovereignty and human responsibility intact. Joab objects, but the order stands. The census, when finished, troubles David’s heart, and he confesses, "I have sinned greatly in what I have done. But now, O Lord, please take away the iniquity of your servant." The prophet Gad gives him three options for judgment — three years of famine, three months of fleeing, three days of pestilence — and David, refusing to fall into the hand of man, chooses to fall into the hand of the Lord. Seventy thousand die. When the angel of death stretches out his hand toward Jerusalem, the Lord relents. Then Gad tells David to build an altar at the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite. Araunah offers everything for free; David insists on paying full price: "I will not offer burnt offerings to the Lord my God that cost me nothing." On that spot — the future site of the temple — the plague is stayed and the offerings are accepted.
John 21:1–25
The fishermen have gone back to Galilee. Peter says, "I am going fishing," and six others go with him. They catch nothing through the night. At dawn a figure on the shore asks if they have any fish and tells them to cast on the right side of the boat. The catch is so large they cannot haul it in. The beloved disciple recognizes him first — "It is the Lord!" — and Peter, characteristically impulsive, throws on his outer garment and jumps into the sea. On the shore is a charcoal fire — only the second one mentioned in John’s gospel; the first was the one Peter warmed himself at while denying Jesus. The disciples eat breakfast in silence, knowing it is the Lord. The risen Christ cooks for his disciples on a beach.
After breakfast comes the slow, gentle restoration of Peter. Three times Jesus asks, "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" — three questions to match three denials, three commissions to match three failures: "Feed my lambs." "Tend my sheep." "Feed my sheep." Peter is grieved the third time, but the grief is the path back. Jesus then tells him plainly that he will die a martyr’s death, "to glorify God," and gives him the simple imperative that runs through the whole gospel: "Follow me." Peter, ever curious about other people’s stories, points at the beloved disciple and asks, "What about this man?" Jesus answers, "If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? You follow me." The gospel ends with the disciple’s testimony and the breathtaking last sentence: the world itself, John says, could not contain the books that might be written if everything Jesus did were recorded.
Psalm 69:1–12
Psalm 69 is one of the most heart-wrenching laments in the Psalter, and the New Testament quotes it repeatedly with reference to Christ. It opens with the cry, "Save me, O God! For the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold." The psalmist is exhausted from weeping; his eyes grow dim with waiting for his God. He is hated without cause by more than the hairs of his head, charged with crimes he did not commit, forced to restore what he did not steal.
The middle verses are the heart of the lament: "For it is for your sake that I have borne reproach, that dishonor has covered my face. I have become a stranger to my brothers, an alien to my mother’s sons. For zeal for your house has consumed me, and the reproaches of those who reproach you have fallen on me." The New Testament will apply that "zeal for your house" line to Jesus cleansing the temple. The faithful sufferer’s reproach is, in the deepest sense, the Father’s reproach. The drunkards make him the subject of their songs; he is the byword of those who sit at the gate. The psalmist’s only refuge is the steadfast love of God.
Three readings, three pictures of restoration and reckoning. David ends his life with a census, a plague, and an altar — and the altar is built on the very ground where the temple will one day stand. Peter ends his weeks of grief and disorientation with breakfast on a beach and the threefold restoration of his calling. And the psalmist, drowning in reproach, holds on by the steadfast love of God. Each story is about a way home that runs through honest reckoning with what we have done and gentle reception of what God has done for us.
The altar of Araunah is one of the great quiet hinges in biblical geography. The plague stops where the future temple will rise, and the temple, in turn, will become the place where sacrifices for sin are offered for centuries until they find their fulfillment in the One whose body is the true temple. David insists on paying full price: "I will not offer burnt offerings to the Lord my God that cost me nothing." It is one of the great pastoral lines in the Old Testament. We are not invited to a discount discipleship. The God who would not let David’s offering be cheap is the God who paid the highest price for ours, and who asks for our whole hearts in return.
Peter’s restoration on the beach is, in some ways, the gospel’s last and gentlest word. The risen Christ does not lecture him. He cooks him breakfast. He asks the same question three times, not to wound, but to give Peter the chance to say with his mouth what his eyes had denied. And then he gives him work — feed my sheep, tend my lambs, follow me. The way back from our worst failures is not self-improvement but commissioning. Whatever charcoal fire we are still warming our hands at today in shame, the risen Lord has prepared another one for us, with bread and fish and a question we are now ready to answer.
June 3, 2026
1 Kings 1:1–2:12
The book of Kings opens on an old David — cold, frail, unable to keep warm — and the political vacuum his weakness creates. Adonijah, David’s oldest surviving son, decides the throne is his by default and begins acting like a king without an anointing: chariots, horsemen, fifty runners, and a sacrificial feast at En-rogel with most of the king’s sons and the chief priests Joab and Abiathar. Nathan, who once confronted David about Bathsheba and now serves him in old age, sees the moment for what it is and works with Bathsheba to remind the dying king of the promise he made that her son Solomon would succeed him. David rouses himself for one last decisive act: Solomon is anointed by Zadok and Nathan at Gihon, mounted on David’s own mule, and the trumpet is blown. "Long live King Solomon!" The sound reaches the rival feast at En-rogel, and Adonijah’s coronation banquet collapses in panic. Adonijah flees to the horns of the altar, and Solomon, with diplomatic mercy, says, "If he will show himself a worthy man, not one of his hairs shall fall to the earth, but if wickedness is found in him, he shall die."
David’s final charge to Solomon in chapter 2 is one of the most morally complicated passages in the books of Samuel-Kings. He begins with the great covenant exhortation: "Be strong, and show yourself a man, and keep the charge of the Lord your God, walking in his ways and keeping his statutes." The covenant promise to David’s house, he tells his son, is conditional on Solomon’s faithfulness. Then the charge turns dark. David instructs Solomon to deal with Joab — whose blood-guilt for Abner and Amasa David had never settled — and with Shimei, who had cursed him during the flight from Absalom. The king who once spared his enemies in life now hands his unfinished business to his son in death. The chapter closes with the death of David, "and he was buried in the city of David. And the time that David reigned over Israel was forty years." The shepherd-king who began the book of Samuel is now gone, and the kingdom is in the hands of the wisest of his sons.
Acts 1:1–22
Luke begins his second volume with a brief recap of the first — "the first book I have written, O Theophilus, about all that Jesus began to do and teach" — and the implication is hard to miss: the rest of the Bible is the story of what Jesus continues to do through his Spirit and his church. For forty days the risen Jesus appears to the apostles, speaking of the kingdom of God and giving them instructions. He commands them not to leave Jerusalem but to wait for the Father’s promise: "You will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now." When they ask the predictable question — is now the time you will restore the kingdom to Israel? — Jesus redirects them from chronology to mission: "You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth." Then, as he blesses them, he is lifted up, and a cloud takes him out of their sight. Two men in white stand by and promise that this same Jesus will return in the same way.
The apostles return to Jerusalem and gather in the upper room — the Eleven, the women, Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers. They devote themselves to prayer. Peter, finding his voice as the leader of the group, stands up to address the matter of Judas, recounting his betrayal and death and citing two psalms that he reads as prophetic of the situation. They need a twelfth witness to the resurrection; the criteria are clear — someone who has been with them from John’s baptism until the ascension. Two men are nominated, Joseph called Barsabbas and Matthias. The community prays, casts lots, and the lot falls on Matthias. The Twelve are reconstituted, waiting for the promise.
Psalm 69:13–28
The middle of Psalm 69 sharpens into pleading and imprecation. The psalmist asks God to answer in the time of his favor, to deliver him from sinking in the mire, to rescue him from his enemies and from the deep waters. "Let not the flood sweep over me, or the deep swallow me up, or the pit close its mouth over me." He calls on God’s steadfast love, the abundance of his mercy, and asks God not to hide his face from his servant. Then the famous line: "They gave me poison for food, and for my thirst they gave me sour wine to drink" — a verse the gospels apply directly to the crucifixion.
The imprecatory section that follows — calling down judgment on those who have despised the sufferer — is unsettling to modern ears, but it is the prayer of someone handing his enemies over to God rather than taking matters into his own hands. "Let their own table before them become a snare; and when they are at peace, let it become a trap." The psalmist is not asking to retaliate. He is asking God to be the just judge that the world needs. The honesty of the lament gives us permission to bring our own wounds to the same throne — to ask God to judge, while refusing to be the judge ourselves.
A throne is changing hands, the apostles are waiting in an upper room, and a sufferer is begging God to rise. Together the three readings sit at one of the great hinges of redemptive history — between the kingdom Israel had and the kingdom God was about to break open through his Spirit. David’s last words to Solomon look backward: keep the law of Moses, settle old scores, watch your back. Jesus’s last words to the apostles look forward: wait for the Spirit, you will be my witnesses to the ends of the earth.
What makes Acts 1 so important is the way it reframes the question of when. The disciples want a date for the restoration; Jesus gives them a vocation instead. The kingdom is restored, but it is not restored as they imagined. It is being restored through their witness, in the power of the Spirit, in concentric circles outward from Jerusalem until the gospel reaches the end of the earth. The right response to the ascension is not stargazing — the angels practically rebuke them for it — but prayer, community, and faithful preparation for what God is about to do.
The psalm, with its sour wine and its drowning man, ties the two scenes together. The sufferer of Psalm 69 is, in the deepest sense, the One the disciples are now waiting for to send his Spirit. His thirst was answered with vinegar; ours is answered with the living water of the Spirit he gives. Whatever waiting we are in today — for a promise to come, for a season to turn, for an enemy to be brought low, for a calling to clarify — the invitation is to wait in the upper room, devoting ourselves to prayer with the rest of God’s people, trusting that the same Lord who lifted himself up will pour himself out, in his own time and in his own way.