What's CHRONICLES about?

Knowing God through worship effects the entire country

The two books of Chronicles, just like the two books of Kings, describe the events leading up to the capture of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. However, where the books of Kings focus on blaming the injustice carried out by the kings to increase their personal power, the books of Chronicles assigns the disaster to the people having abandoned true worship. Since the purpose of Jewish worship was to enact justice for all, these aren’t two opposite attitudes but are two different perspectives on how the disaster arose.

The two books of Chronicles focus on the importance of the temple in Jerusalem, how David planned for it, and how Solomon built it, and how different kings protected it or didn’t protect it. The various kings are evaluated on how well they preserved the religious practices and upheld the temple worship, but in general the kings did not uphold the temple, thus enabling injustice to rule the land, and bringing on the inevitable destruction of the temple and the country.

The temple was so important because it contained, first, the original two stone slabs with the Ten Commandments, which described how justice was to be put into practice, second, the tent and jar of manna from their time in the wilderness, and,third, was the location where animal sacrifices were made, imitating the lambs’ blood used to mark Jewish homes the night before their escape from Egypt. When the people return from their enslavement in Babylon, they began to re-build the temple, destroyed by the Babylonians seventy years earlier. Chronicles contains highly detailed descriptions of the temple construction to support the work of rebuilding.

How is Chronicles important for us?

In our day we might take the authors' advice and recognize that experiencing the God of love and justice is central to a fulfilled society. Our worship, then, is more than gathering to praise God, but is expected to have practical consequences in how we are bringing God's society into practice in the world around us. Worship is essential in keeping us centred in the deep reality of cosmic love. Otherwise it is too easy to be distracted by the many competing priorities around us which result in selfish policies and destruction of the glorious fulfilled community God intended.