And they drew out the staves, that the ends of the staves were seen out in the holy place before the oracle, and they were not seen without: and there they are unto this day.
I’m interested in the reference to the staves being where they were left after moving the ark into the temple—“unto this day.”
Let’s say, as many conservatives do, that Jeremiah was the penman of 1 and 2 Kings. It fits the timeline. He was a contemporary, at least, in the events of the final days recorded in 2 Kings. We know he penned other Old Testament books under inspiration. It is a reasonable position.
If that is the case, then Jeremiah is saying that those staves were still there, right where the priests left them, roughly 350 years later.
May I just say that some things are meant to remain unmoved. There is no need to modernize everything, to update the things of the Lord, or to change them simply for the sake of change. God is immutable—unchangeable. Let the things that speak of God remain the same.
But then I noticed that 2 Chronicles 5:9 (KJV) says:
And they drew out the staves of the ark, that the ends of the staves were seen from the ark before the oracle; but they were not seen without. And there it is unto this day.
Second Chronicles was written over seventy years after 2 Kings, likely by Ezra. He was writing to Jews preparing to return to the Promised Land after the Babylonian captivity—many of whom had never lived in their own land and had very little knowledge of their history or culture. The first wave returned to rebuild the temple, which had been torn down by the Babylonians.
There is no way those staves were still physically there.
And, of course, there are commentaries that claim the passage in 2 Chronicles should be corrected. I beg to differ.
What God did by leaving this verse in the same language as 1 Kings is to show us that the later writer was referring back to the earlier one. It is a quotation. Ezra had a copy of 1 Kings at his disposal.
In the first instance, the thing that remained unmoved was the staves of the ark.
In the second instance, we learn that the Word of God itself had remained unchanged.
Let us keep our hands off the Word of God. It needs no changing, no correcting, and no modern scholarship to improve it.
All it needs is for us to read it, study it, and obey it.
#UntoThisDay #UnmovedTruth #GodIsUnchanging #KeepTheWord #HandsOffTheBible
God Left the Staves—and the Scripture—Unchanged
If this passage made you think, leave a comment below and tell me what the phrase “unto this day” means to you. I’d love to hear how you see God’s unchanging truth at work in Scripture.
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