Slow Victory and Sticky Fingers
“Now Rizpah the daughter of Aiah took sackcloth and spread it for herself on the rock, from the beginning of harvest until the late rains poured on them from heaven. And she did not allow the birds of the air to rest on them by day nor the beasts of the field by night.” 2 Samuel 21:10
At the heart of the Bible Matrix is Testing. Although all the major narratives follow the pattern, many of the minor ones do too. If Adam had not failed his initial “qualifying round,” he would have progressed to the next stage of dominion. We know this because we see others later in the Bible move beyond this first round to greater glory. For instance, Daniel’s first challenge mirrors Adam’s challenge exactly. He was offered kingdom food and refused it.
At the centre of the pattern, there are also beasts of the field and sometimes birds of the air. The Covenant curse is to be eaten by them, one’s body left unburied and exposed, left to see corruption. [1] The Covenant blessing is to take dominion over them. The animals willingly submit, which is exactly what we see in Noah, and typologically in Solomon, Jonah, Mordecai and Paul.
God requires us to be faithful in little before we can be faithful in much. He wants to see if we, like Adam, have sticky fingers. Many saints have had millions of dollars pass through their hands into ministry because they showed they could be trusted with kingdom money. The stages, or states, of maturity (sound judgment) through which we pass are necessary.
“So often in the battle we go to the Lord, and pray, and plead, and appeal for victory, for ascendancy, for mastery over the forces of evil and death, and our thought is that in some way the Lord is going to come in with a mighty exercise of power and put us into a place of spiritual maturity as in an act. We must have this mentality corrected. What the Lord does is to enlarge us to possess. He takes us through some exercise, through some experience, takes us by some way which means our spiritual expansion, an increase of spirituality so we occupy the larger place spontaneously because of our growth .” -T. A-S. (Quoted in Miles Standford’s Hungry Heart series, although I doubt Stanford would apply this beyond a pious Christian life to the spread of the gospel.)
‘I will not drive them out from before thee in one year; lest the land become desolate, and the beast of the field multiply against thee. By little and little I will drive them out from before thee, until thou be increased’ (Exodus 23:29, 30)
If God dealt with all our sins, called us to rule over every single fault, at conversion, we would most certainly die of fright. He begins at the exterior and works His way in. As we eat the bread and drink the wine, we are both shown mercy and judged. Or rather, called to judge ourselves wisely. C. S. Lewis said this process of sanctification was like God fixing broken floorboards and leaky downpipes at the beginning, and then proposing major renovations, which move beyond practical to palatial! That means greater testing, greater suffering, more humbling, more curly issues that require sound wisdom—and of course, more glory as we minister out of all this to others.
This also applies to churches, nations and empires. Jesus drove the demons out of Judah. He carried it out gradually over three years. What happened? Many Jews believed, culminating in Pentecost. But those Jews who refused to believe, who blasphemed the Holy Spirit even after the Pentecostal house was filled, were a house left clean, decorated and empty. [2] The beasts of the field, or in this case, seven worse demons, multiplied against Him, and its state was worse than the first. The Revelation shows the Land Beast (the Herodian rulers) manipulating the power of the Sea Beast (Rome) to deceive the Covenant people. The Adamic mediator Herods worked to keep the beast of the field in submission. But it eventually devoured them.
As the Herodian priesthood refused its call to faithful guard duty, the Garden of Judaism, the Temple, was finally overrun with the beasts of the field and the birds of the air. But all the while the number of saints across the empire was growing. The Revelation uses the symbols of the victory of Israel over Jericho to describe their final victory. The apostles were faithful in their witness, and God gave this increase.
What is highly ironic is that the Revelation describes the martyrdom of the firstfruits church and its aftermath with an interesting symbol. Their bodies were left exposed in the streets by those who thought this sect was accursed, those who maintained that they were the Covenant people. But these faithful saints, under the true Covenant, rose and ascended in plain sight. Like their Lord, like the atoning human sacrifices in 2 Samuel 10, they did not see corruption.
Don’t sweat the birds and the beasts, personally or corporately. Although we are called to be watchful witnesses, the unconquered character faults, people and nations will be dealt with in God’s good time. The scaffolding is still up in every area. The church is obviously not yet ready to rule the world and to judge angels. And neither are you. But the day is most certainly coming.
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[1] Notice that God’s purifying judgment upon King Nebuchadnezzar was to make him a kind of Covenant-curse-hybrid: both a beast and a bird. He was being transformed into a guardian for God’s people—a cherubim.
[2] In the Creation week, God formed the house over three days, then filled it over the next three. The filling begins at Day 4, feast 4, Pentecost, Testing.
