Readings:
2 Chronicles 6-7
Sirach 14
1 John 4

2 Chronicles 6-7

Solomon dedicated the temple and offers massive amounts of sacrifice during this seven day feast. He prays for God to always keep the people of this land in his heart, and to forgive them when they stumble. God agrees and renews his promises made to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, also to Moses and Solomon’s father David, he promises to give them this land and to bless the world through their descendants.

After agreeing to all the requests of renewal of these promises by God, he finishes by reminding them of what was essentially the one dealbreaker. He told them in no uncertain terms that if they fell into idolatry and persisted in worshipping false gods, that he’d pluck them out of the land and destroy this beautiful temple and city.

¹⁹ “But if you turn aside and forsake my statutes and my commandments which I have set before you, and go and serve other gods and worship them, ²⁰ then I will pluck you up from the land which I have given you; and this house, which I have consecrated for my name, I will cast out of my sight, and will make it a proverb and a byword among all peoples. ²¹ And at this house, which is exalted, every one passing by will be astonished, and say, ‘Why has the Lord done thus to this land and to this house?’ ²² Then they will say, ‘Because they forsook the Lord the God of their fathers who brought them out of the land of Egypt, and laid hold on other gods, and worshiped them and served them; therefore he has brought all this evil upon them.’”

2 Chronicles 7:19-22

Having already read through 1 & 2 Kings, we already know that this is exactly what happens.

1 John 4

John tells us that we have to have discernment when it comes to prophets and apparitions, and this was even more so true back then when his original audience received this letter. For us to “test the spirits” we have the benefit of the Bible and 2000 years of church teachings that are fairly easily accessible, but back then it was a lot easier to be led down the road to heresy by false teachers. I guess it’s still easy enough today based on how many false teachers and heretical groups are out there, but if you diligently match things you hear up against things you can verify then it’s a little better for us today.

The one test he mentions here is the denial of Christ’s humanity, often characterized by what’s now called Gnosticism. This is a heretical movement that is alive today in various forms, but was one of the earliest heresies battled by the church. They denied Jesus was incarnated because they believed matter itself was evil, but John reminds us that the Word didn’t just look like a man, he was a man and anyone that said otherwise was of the devil.

The first heresies denied not so much Christ’s divinity as his true humanity (Gnostic Docetism). From apostolic times the Christian faith has insisted on the true incarnation of God’s Son “come in the flesh”. But already in the third century, the Church in a council at Antioch had to affirm against Paul of Samosata that Jesus Christ is Son of God by nature and not by adoption. The first ecumenical council of Nicaea in confessed in its Creed that the Son of God is “begotten, not made, of the same substance (homoousios) as the Father”, and condemned Arius, who had affirmed that the Son of God “came to be from things that were not” and that he was “from another substance” than that of the Father.

CCC 465

John closes out this chapter with his favorite topic: love. God is love, not that God loves us which he does, but he is love itself and this is shown perfectly on the cross. There with his arms outstretched he embraced everyone who was ever born or will be born. He showed us a perfect glimpse of what love is.

Tomorrow’s Readings:
2 Chronicles 8
Sirach 15
1 John 5