JY: Welcome to GearTalk, a podcast on biblical theology. Today, Jason and Tom talk about similarities and differences between Kings and Chronicles based on the fact these books cover similar time periods and events. These books often are blended together, but the books on close examination are very different. What were these two authors doing when they put their books together? The authors intentionally tell their stories in very different ways. What were they thinking?

TK: Welcome to Gear Talk. I’m Tom Kelby. And I am—I don’t know how many miles away from you am I right now, Jason?

JD: I have no idea. 8 hours or so, whatever that would be.

TK: Yeah, 8 hours and 10°, something like that. So today we are doing episode 4000 of the text or event topic. Actually, when we originally talked we said that would be a one episode thing and it’s turned into three episodes because we just never got to the Book of Chronicles. And Jason, that was something we talked about right from the beginning.

JD: It was. That was—It’s one of the clearest places in the Old Testament where we can clearly see that event is different from text because the story we get in Samuel-Kings is of the same events as in Chronicles, but the two portrayals of Israel’s history are so drastically different. What it does is it shows us how, in very identifiable ways, that when God gives us his book, he is portraying the events from a certain perspective and both the Book of Kings and the Book of Chronicles are two different sermons in story form.

We can often miss it if we’re in a Bible reading program and we read the Book of Kings and then we think in our English Bibles, “What comes next? Chronicles.” So that’s where I’ve got to go. And it can be—there can be a sense in which, “OK, I know there’s differences, but it’s the same story. And what’s the point? Why do I need to read all this again?” But in Jesus’s Bible the two books are in very different places and it just becomes very clear that they have two very different purposes in Scripture.

TK: So in my English Bible, I have First and Second Samuel, First and Second Kings, First and Second Chronicles all packaged together and like you said, if I was reading through a Bible reading program, something like that, I would read them in order. I might even if I was preaching just say, “Hey, we’re going to work through this.” But what you’re saying and we’ve talked about it on a previous podcast is Jesus’s Bible wasn’t arranged in that order.

JD: Same books, different arrangement and these collections first and second Samuel, first and second Kings, first and Second Chronicles—six books in our English Bible, but actually three books in Jesus’s Bible. And Samuel-Kings is together, portraying the history of the rise and fall of Israel’s monarchy. And because we—the last thing we read about in Kings is the destruction of the temple, it suggests that the whole history from Joshua through Kings was finalized during the period of the exile because we don’t hear anything about the return and about the rebuilding of the temple, for example.

But in Chronicles, we know that it was written after the initial return to the land because Chronicles does mention Cyrus’s decree in 538 that Israel could go back. And as we look at these two books, they seem to be addressing very different issues, targeting responses to very different questions. The people living in exile versus the people who have already returned, they are living with different questions and need different pastoral guidance. And just comparing Kings and Chronicles shows us some of those different concerns that the prophetic preachers—whoever put these books together, we don’t have their names, we can have some ideas, but we don’t know who it is that finalized these books. But we know that they had very different agendas as led by the spirit of God.

TK: And so something we’ve been saying is preaching text versus event or reading, thinking about talking about is if I was in Samuel and King saying “OK, what are they going after?” I want to watch—read the queues there, but also in Chronicles, I’m thinking of something we talked about earlier, but it would help us right now. Chronicles, we’re suggesting, is the last book in Jesus’s Bible. His—we would call it the Old Testament. Jason, tell us why we would think that from the New Testament, what evidence you put out there beforehand because that that’s a help.

JD: Yeah. So the Gospel of Luke is perhaps the clearest book for giving us a sense of how Jesus’s Bible was structured. Many people point to Luke 24, right after Jesus’s resurrection. He’s met the guys on the road to Emmaus and then he shows up in the room and freaks his disciples out and declares to them in Luke 24:44, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” So when Jesus thinks about his scriptures, he thinks about them in a three-part structure.

There’s the Law, which is Moses’s stuff. There’s the Prophets, which is actually more than just Jeremiah and Ezekiel. It also includes storybooks like Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. Those are the former prophets that tell us what happened in Israel’s history after the covenant was established and after they entered the land. And then we get Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, and the twelve Minor Prophets that clarify why Israel’s history went the way it did. We hear the sermons that were being preached to them during the days of their rebellion. So most of Israel in the old covenant is rebelling, and the prophets are giving that clarity.

But the Prophets are not the end of Jesus’s Bible. The end of Jesus’s Bible is this third group. In Luke, it’s called the Psalms, which is the largest of the books in this third group. Outside of the Bible, it’s called the Writings or the Other Scriptures. And in this unit, the last book that we know about is the Book of Chronicles. So Psalms is right up there toward the front introducing the Writings. Chronicles is the last, and in the book of Luke we get a hint toward this in Luke 11 where Jesus is speaking about how the Pharisees always reject the prophets. Jesus said from the foundation of the world, the blood of the prophets has been charged against you, and then he says from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah. Well, Abel, we know was the very first martyr in the Book of Genesis, but who is this Zechariah guy?

JD: We know that he wasn’t the last of the Old Testament martyrs because we read about that in a different book. In Jeremiah, it tells us about who the last of the martyrs was, and it’s way later than the Zechariah guy. But Zechariah was one of the God followers, the last of the God followers who we read about in the Book of Chronicles who dies. And so Abel is counted as a prophet, Zechariah is counted as a prophet, and Jesus appears to be talking about from the beginning of the Old Testament to the end of the Old Testament you have been going against God’s prophets. So he’s talking from a literary perspective.

TK: I’m standing in my office and I’m looking at books. And it’s almost like these stacks of books, and there’s one book that’s one shape at the far left, one that’s a different color, different shape at the far right. And he’s saying from this book on the far left spanning all these other books to this book on the far right, this is what you’ve done. All these crimes are going to be charged to you.

JD: Everything that has been testified to from the beginning of the Old Testament to the end of the Old Testament has been about your standing against God’s messengers. And the first one he mentions is Abel, the last one he mentions is Zechariah. And because he’s not the last chronological prophet, it suggests Jesus is talking about his canonical, his canon, what we call his authoritative Scriptures, and when he thought about that, he thought about them in an order, an arrangement that had three parts. And the last part ending with Chronicles, the first part beginning with Genesis. So that’s the testimony in Scripture that we have. And when we think about Chronicles, often we’re not thinking about it as the last book of Jesus’s Bible because in most of our Bible reading programs it comes right where it does in our English Bible ordering, right after Kings.

TK: So let—I have two thoughts here. One, if I was preaching in the Samuel-Kings section, how would you suggest I do it? What is the author there—what are the authors there doing that are different than the chronicler is doing? So let’s start with start with the Samuel-Kings section and what we are saying here though is in our preaching, we shouldn’t make it our goal to marry the two—marry Chronicles to Samuel-Kings.

JD: That’s right, because what the editor or authors of Samuel-Kings intended us to know, guided by the spirit of God, is what we’re supposed to know. It’s not that we—and they assume that we’re going to learn more as God reveals more about his Word, about the history, we’re gonna learn more about the history. They assume that we know previous Bible, that we understand the covenant, for example given in the Book of Deuteronomy. They want us to read the history of the C=covenant in light of the covenant, and there’s many clues that they’re doing that in the Book of Kings. But the intention of the author of Kings is different from the intention of Chronicles. Let’s just consider some differences.

Those that are receiving the Book of Kings first are those who are in exile due to their sin and Kings seems to be telling a story of why it is that Israel ended up where they did. You can anticipate that there is an audience that is wondering why are we here?

TK: If we’re Yahweh’s people.

JD: If we’re Yahweh’s people, we had the temple. We had the promises given to David. Why are we here? And this—the point of Kings is to say not that God went a different direction, but that Israel left Yahweh and this whole story in the Book of Kings is filled with covenant rebellion. And if you’ve read the Book of Kings, you know that after you read the stories of the rise of Saul and the rebellion of Saul, the rise of David and the rebellion of David, the Book of Kings focuses on David’s son Solomon, who builds the temple but then rebels. He goes after women and they lead him astray—multiple wives and they lead him into idolatry.

And so God declares for the sake of David, “I’m going to preserve a tribe and a city. I’m going to preserve Judah, and I’m going to preserve Jerusalem, but I’m going to give 10 tribes to the northern Kingdom and they’re going to be ripped apart.” So all of a sudden the dynasty of David is not going to control all of Israel. The dynasty of David is only going to get control of a small part of the original people and 10 tribes are going to be in the north. It’s going to be called the Northern Kingdom.

And so right after Solomon, you see this splitting apart of the kingdom. Rehoboam, Solomon’s son is in the South continuing the dynasty of David. And there from that point forward we see 20 kings from Solomon until Judah is destroyed in 586 and all of them are in the line of David—one dynasty, 20 kings, all reigning in Jerusalem. But then as you know, in the Book of Kings, there’s a northern Kingdom. Northern Kingdom is called Israel. Southern Kingdom is called Judah and there are 20 kings in the northern Kingdom and we read about them all and the story is set up the way that the narrator gives it to us is it goes back and forth between the kings of Judah and the Kings of Israel, kings of Judah, kings of Israel. And over and over again, it evaluates these kings in accordance with the covenant and the kings in the South focus principally on: Do they reign like David reigned, honoring God and staying focused on worship in Jerusalem? The kings in the north over and over again, what we’re told is they all followed in the ways of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who was the very first of the Northern kings, who separated worship from Jerusalem and built worship centers in the north, in Dan and built a golden calf up there and in the South in Bethel and built a golden calf worship center there. So do the kings follow in the lines of Jeroboam, or do the kings follow in the lines of David?

So there’s this repetitive stylistic structuring in the book that goes back and forth, back and forth. There’s an interesting—and the focus is principally on rebellion in the North, rebellion in the South and over and over again. The covenant with Moses, which is the standard of weighing out whether someone is honoring God or dishonoring God. The covenant with Moses comes to the fore, and the kings in the north and the kings in the South are evaluated in alignment with Moses and in the whole book in the Northern Kingdom, there’s 20 Kings, 10 different dynasties, and not one of them is given a good record. In the Southern Kingdom, 20 Kings only one dynasty in the line of David. But of those 20 kings, there’s only two kings in the Book of Kings that are given a standing ovation: King Hezekiah and King Josiah. All the rest of the kings are given bad reports, and then the kings in the book that are the worst get the most space, the worst on the basis of the covenant and the kings that were the best get the most space.

So we mentioned in our previous podcast about Jeroboam II. From the world’s standards, he was one of the great Kings of Israel, but he only gets 10 verses in the book because from a covenantal perspective he wasn’t the most disloyal. He wasn’t the worst of the kings, who led Israel in the worst of ways, but he certainly wasn’t the best either. He doesn’t get a lot of space. Ahab, though, gets lots of space, because he was following his wife Jezebel and he was one of the most wicked kings in the north, and then we read about in the South we read about… Oh, what’s his name? It is Hezekiah’s son. Starts with an M. Manasseh. There we go. One of the most wicked kings in the South. He gets a full chapter devoted to him and it is because of him that we learned Judah in the South is going to, regardless of what happens, is going to be destroyed.

TK: So Jason, what would you—as we think about this—as I’m reading Kings, end of Samuel-Kings, what do you do with it if you were, if you were preaching through this, if you were going to use it, what’s the point? Why do I need to know these things?

JD: Well, I remember as a dad with a 5-year-old daughter who got married now last—she’s not five anymore. She got married last November. Yesterday, her husband was ordained into the ministry, and so she’s a pastor’s wife. But when she was five, I remember calling her and her sister up to the couch, and it was time to do Bible reading. And we were in the Book of Kings now for the third week in a row of daddy’s time with his daughters doing devotions. And—third week—and my daughters were always so excited they would have a piece of paper and a marker, and they’d draw some picture and we were just walking through the Old Testament and my daughter said, “Oh, Dad, what are we going to read?” “We’re going to read another story from the Book of Kings” and my daughter’s countenance lowered and said, “Oh, dad, everything that always happens in that book—they rebel and God kills them.”

I thought—that was my five-year-old—third week into the Book of Kings—rebellion, rebellion, rebellion, and God punishes them. And I said she’s getting it. And for the first time in my life, I felt this significant connection with all those who’ve gone before me and have just read the word to their kids and our—and my daughter was getting it. She was feeling it. You said what’s the point? The point is to help our people recognize the holiness of God and the seriousness of sin—that he does not take sin lightly and to feel how desperately in need of Jesus the world is. He let the darkness feel so thick in the books of Samuel-Kings that it makes the readers like my 5-year-old daughter say “Oh is it ever gonna change? What hope is there? Why won’t they listen?”

And Kings is set up focusing on the rebellion, the rebellion, Solomon’s rebellion, Manasseh’s rebellion, before that Jeroboam’s rebellion, the peoples following false prophets, following Ahab worshipping the Baals. All of it is supposed to make us feel, “Uh, this is… This is our history” when we don’t surrender to God as our only hope and our only help, and so I think we’re supposed to just feel the weightiness of sin and feel it getting darker and darker. And when we see light, and it’s very dim in the Book of Chronicles. But we do see hints of light focused on anticipations for the Messiah.

TK: Oh, you’re thinking of Kings. Very—It’s very dim in Kings.

JD: What did I just say?

TK: Chronicles.

JD: Oh, I didn’t mean Chronicles. I meant Kings. Very dim in Kings. And when we see that hope in the Messiah, the hope for light, the testimony that if an obedient king would rise, said Solomon, then God has said we will not lack a man on the throne of Israel ever. And those that are reading this book are reading it in exile, where there’s no more king on the throne of Israel, no more king on the throne of Judah. And Solomon’s testimony is ringing forth. Will he ever come? This obedient king. And so that’s what we’re supposed to read it as—this a testimony of the darkness, and to make us feel the weight of sin and the need for God to act.

TK: You know, I was preaching somewhere on Sunday through actually Psalm 109 and one of the things I mentioned was we have a tendency, as people who know the gospel, know that Christ has come, when we’re in passages like this or like where I was in Psalm 109 to almost kind of hit a relief valve quickly and say, “But it’s not like that now” versus allowing if you want to say the pressure to build and feeling it like Janie felt it as you were reading.

JD: Yeah, I think that’s what—that’s part of our goal as preachers is to help our people feel appropriately and those that were receiving the Book of Kings were supposed to feel the weightiness of sin. That that is what caused the darkness, so that when even those in our congregation who have been saved by grace in Jesus, they should leave a sermon on the Book of Kings feeling so grateful because they can look out and see even today, the destructiveness of a world without Christ, how dark dark can get. The book of Kings portrays it, and we see it around us. And the beauty for us is that we can look backwards at light in the Book of Kings. They were only looking forward to it, and it was so dim. And I think that’s part of the narrator’s intent. You’re right. We can so quickly want to jump into the light that we don’t let our people feel the weightiness of the dark, and that’s part of what God intends.

TK: Right. Before we move into Chronicles, I think the end of Kings is a perfect example of that principle, that good literature shows it doesn’t tell necessarily. So the author is showing us at the end. And so my Bible reads—I’m at 2 Kings 25. And verse 27 the little heading in my Bible reads “Jehoiachin Released from Prison.” And it just says at the end of this, at the end of this certain period, “The King of Babylon in the year that he began to reign graciously freed Jehoiachin, king of Judah from prison. He spoke kindly to him and gave him a seat above the seats of the Kings who were with him in Babylon.” And that idea of—we don’t hear a word from heaven at that moment. This is what God was doing. But as a reader you start saying “Hey, wait a minute. That seems like there’s hope.” He’s showing me something.

JD: He’s a king in the line of David who’s still alive. Yeah, the world has elevated him. What’s going on here? I need to learn more. And what’s intriguing is that in Jesus’s Bible right after Kings, there’s a pause in the—And so Kings gets us all the way to the exile. And then we learn—We hear from the prophets. And then we hear from the Psalms. And it’s not until we get to the end of Lamentations which recalls for us the ending of Kings, the destruction of Jerusalem, and the question is raised right at the end of the Book of Lamentations. “God, I know you reign, but do you still care?” And we turn the page and the very next book in Jesus’s Bible is Daniel, and Daniel is all about—so it picks us up in Babylon, where Kings left off. The story then picks up right back in Babylon and we see God does care. God is on the throne. His Kingdom purposes are still at work. He has not stopped his intention to raise up a Messiah who will reign over all the kingdoms of the Earth, destroy all the enemies of man. So the story is not over, and Chronicles is going to come at the end of this Old Testament story, setting us up for the New Testament. But—but it still is important to state Kings wants us to feel how dark it is, but it doesn’t leave us there. It reminds us like you were just saying right at the end. You’ve got a Davidic king who’s in exile, but he’s been lifted up out of prison and it leads the reader to say there’s still more of the story.

TK: That’s really good. I like to hear your thoughts about an analogy I sometimes use. I compare these books a little bit like Kings to like an escalator. And you’re like you’re in an airport or place like that. And those really long escalators. And they just start going down and you have brief moments where you get off and walk to a new level. But then you go down, down again. And Chronicles is the opposite. It’s taking us the—the whole section of the writings, taking us a different direction.

JD: Yes, it really is. Chronicles opens—the very first word of Chronicles is Adam. And we have to say, huh, that’s intriguing. Why would this book open with Adam? But if you’ve got a people that are now returned to the land, but they still don’t have a king, there’s no evidence that the spirit’s presence has returned to the new temple. People’s hearts haven’t changed, according to books like Ezra–Nehemiah, and Malachi, and the peoples are still not where they’re supposed to be and to be thinking about history, does God still care for us? And Chronicles comes at the very end of the Old Testament and takes us all the way back to Genesis. And begins with a bunch of genealogies, just like we saw in the Book of Genesis and number of places to remind us that those who are reading this are still part of God’s plan, that he had at the beginning.

But it also reminds them that this is not just a story about them and taking us back to Adam. This is a story about the world. And about how God intended to use Israel, and not only Israel the people, but Israel the person, their representative, their royal king, who would represent them perfectly. Chronicles is setting us up for remembering those promises that God gave. And helping us hope in the coming Messiah. It’s very fascinating. Whereas the Book of Kings parallels well, first of all, let’s start here. This is a book focused a lot on David and on the promises that God gave him. The Book of Chronicles. And it’s focused on Jerusalem, where David reigned and where he oversaw worship at the temple that Solomon would build. The temple is so significant in the Book of Chronicles, because it’s the place where the presence of God is and it’s the place where right worship is happening and where peoples lives are forgiven through substitutionary atonement, which itself points ahead to the coming of Christ and so Chronicles is setting us up for a people who are wondering, where is my place in the world.

God takes him back to Adam and says your place is part of this purpose that I started then. Then it gets us, after 9 chapters of genealogies, it gets us up to David and it tells us about David’s holiness, his pursuit of God, the covenant that God makes with him. And here’s a key difference. Whereas Samuel-Kings tells us about his fall with Bathsheba, the Book of Chronicles never mentions David’s sin with Bathsheba.

TK: So let me jump in right there, Jason. One possibility obviously that some people would say is well, that’s because the chronicler doesn’t know about that and I don’t know of any scholars who would who would say that, but that would certainly be a possibility because it happens with other events in our life, like “Oh, I never heard about that.” Is that a chance? Does the chronicler not know about Bathsheba?

JD: He actually quotes—uses the same verses from Samuel-Kings at a number of different points so that it seems absolutely evident even—even the verb choices, the conjunctions that he’s choosing at points are exactly the same as in the Book of Kings. He is aware as one of his sources, but he is choosing what to include and what not to include.

TK: So he’s—you’re saying you’re saying he’s—he’s reading Kings is what you’re saying.

JD: After Solomon’s fall, you never read that Solomon married lots of women and that they led him into idolatry. Chronicles chooses not to focus on those sins. It’s not—he—he’s not being—he’s not lying. In fact, the fact that he lets Solomon die pursuing the Lord suggests to me that books like Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs—think about Song of Songs. The Solomon who has recognized how foolish he was as a man to do what he did in his life. And think right as an older man who has recommitted his life to the Lord, he has perspective. It’s the same thing with the Book of Ecclesiastes—perspective from a wiser sage who has lived many sins and is trying to help a new generation not follow in his path.

The Book of Chronicles focuses almost solely on the southern kingdom. We don’t know all that’s going on in the northern kingdom, and this is another, another intentional difference. He’s not just trying to shape objective history as if there is such a thing. No, this is history from a perspective. God’s perspective now writing to a people living in what’s often called the post-exile period and he’s writing a different book. We don’t read about all the rebellions of the Northern Kingdom because that’s not his focus. His focus is on the southern Kingdom and how many of the Kings did not honor God, but how a number of them did. Even though they didn’t live as well as Hezekiah and Josiah did, we now read in the Book of Chronicles a number of other kings, the positive elements of their lives, how they did pursue the Lord and a big story like Manasseh’s rebellion.

What’s intriguing in the Book of Chronicles is that we not only read about his rebellion as a Judean king, we find out that after he got exiled, taken to Babylon, he repented and came to the Lord, and then he was returned back to Jerusalem to die in Jerusalem as a God follower. We never read about that in the Book of Kings, and yet the Book of Kings author would have known it. So we begin to see these are two very different books. Chronicles is filled with praises. It’s filled with prayers and that that are so hopeful to the soul and unlike Kings, doesn’t end with Israel being cast off to exile. Instead, in the midst of exile, the Book of Chronicles recalls that God told Jeremiah 70 years is how long they’d be in exile, and after that 70 years, Cyrus, we’re told, told Israel they could return to the land now.

What’s so significant about that at the end of Jesus’s Bible is that long ago, way before Cyrus, 150 years, the Prophet Isaiah had named that a certain Cyrus would return Israel to the land. And then he had told us of a royal servant—didn’t give us his name, but he would represent the people of Israel and through him not only a remnant of Israelites, but Gentiles, some from the nations, would be reconciled to God. Cyrus was the first mover. He was to get Israel back to the land where the Messiah would rise, but the servant would come next, and it seems as though Chronicles ends very intentionally wanting to set us up—well, if Cyrus has declared they could return to the land, what comes next is the Messiah the servant, and we turn the page in Jesus’s Bible and we come to the Gospel of Matthew and we read the book of the Genealogy of Jesus the Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. And it’s like a signal shooting off for those who have eyes to see, who’ve been reading their Old Testaments. We know that after Cyrus’s decree, the servant is supposed to arise. We’ve been waiting for him, longing for him for centuries, and now Matthew declares he’s come.

TK: So thinking of—I have a note written in my Bible—the last statement here. It’s 36:23 and it says, “Thus says Cyrus King of Persia, the Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may the Lord his God be with him. Let him go up.” And I have a note. And it just says, see John Sailhamer’s, The Meaning of the Pentateuch. If you want to look it up, page 237. But the idea that Cyrus was in a lot of ways, echoing the last words of Matthew, where the Lord Jesus says “All authority’s been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples.” He is the ultimate temple builder. And when Cyrus has said, “whoever the Lord is with you, let him go up.” What he was saying is that’s demanding a “who’s the him” who will go up and build this temple?

JD: Right. And what temple are we talking about? We’re talking about a greater temple than—It’s anticipating, I mean by this time in the Old Testament, we’ve already read the book of Haggai where the people are weeping because the temple that Cyrus said they could build doesn’t compare at all to the Book of Solomon to what Solomon had built. And we’ve already read the Book of Zechariah that foreshadows the coming New Covenant branch. He’s called a branch in Garden of Eden type language. The Messiah is portrayed like a garden of Eden who will build a temple with the help of those who are far off, meaning Gentiles. A new temple will be built. We’ve already seen these texts. We’ve already been told in the book of Ezekiel that in those latter days, the spirit would be poured out, God would take out the heart of stone, put in a heart of flesh, and fill these people with the spirit of God so that they would live. His dwelling place would be among them. It’s as if wherever they go, they’re movable temples and they’re following the leadership of this Davidic ruler.

These are already past anticipations, and so right when we get to this point and we see that Cyrus is envisioning himself as having all authority over the kingdoms: “God has given me all the kingdoms of the earth.” What does Jesus have? He has all authority in heaven and on Earth. He’s got more authority than Cyrus ever did.

TK: More authority. Yep, yep, yep.

JD: The call is to go—to go and “May God be with you.” Well, that’s the whole idea. “Go into all the world. Make disciples. I will be with you even to the end of the age.” Somebody greater than Cyrus has come. He’s the king of Persia. We turn the page and we read about the King of the Jews who will be the king of the world, whose kingdom will start in Jerusalem by building disciples from—building a new house filled with disciples from all the nations. So yes, this is—I think there’s—there is intentional connections but that that then leads us to, how does Matthew write his gospel? Matthew writes his gospel in a way that it ends, recalling how the chronicler ended his book.

And that sets us up for a whole other topic, but very relevant related to how each of the gospel writers have their own distinctive portrait of the Christ that it’s—it’s one gospel message. If we’re talking about that the reigning God will save and satisfy sinners who believe through Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. But the way that they portray that gospel message, the story itself is different depending on whether you’re reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. As you think about it, Tom, think about these Gospels. I mean, just as a introductory statement for maybe future podcast episodes. What are some of the distinctives that you see?

TK: Well, boy, I, I mean just starting where we are, what we just said, we’re saying Matthew was intentionally actually thinking of Chronicles—even the way he starts with the genealogy, just like Chronicles does. He is building on something. So Matthew’s making choices the way he writes and he starts with the genealogy emphasis on Jesus being the son of David and the son of Abraham, the just two massive covenants from the Old Testament. But then he’s going to build that throughout his book. What’s interesting is you get the way Matthew did it and then Mark doesn’t see the need to talk about Jesus’s birth at all. And I think part of the whole point of what we’re talking about same, same with John is—is resisting the—maybe not, resisting is the wrong word—is letting these authors be authors in their own right and saying what was Matthew doing on his own? And if he let something out, just thinking hard, why did he leave it out? And why did he include this?

I think going back to Kings and Chronicles, I grew up correcting both those texts. And because of it, I think I softened both those texts. Like I took the—I took the sharp edges of hope off of Chronicles adding in for instance Bathsheba, maybe to Chronicles that sort of thing. But I also added far more hope probably into Kings. And saying we want to watch what the authors are doing, preaching the text rather than trying to say, “Hey, I can fix the event by adding in what the authors purposefully didn’t add in.”

JD: That’s really good.

TK: Well, Jason, that gets us up to the 45-minute mark. So I think we need to call it.

JD: This one, I agree. It’s been a joy, Tom.

TK: All right. Talk to you all next time.

JY: Thanks for joining us for GearTalk. If you have questions about biblical theology you’d like us to address on future episodes, email us at [email protected]. Also check out handstotheplow.org for resources designed to help you understand the Bible and its teachings.