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Published by
OrthodoxyToday.org, September 4, 2005
The Priority of Principle |
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Fr. Patrick Reardon
King Hezekiah
(716-687), because of the relatively short life
of his hapless father Ahaz, was a young
man--only twenty-five--when he assumed the
throne of Judah (2 Kings 18:2).
The new king,
moreover, inherited a mess. His kingdom was
impoverished by his father's irresponsibility,
and much of the Holy Land lay in ruins from
local wars and a recent invasion from afar. Six
years earlier, in 722, the Assyrians had
destroyed the Kingdom of Israel, to Judah's
north, and then deported the great masses of its
people to regions over in the far end of the
Fertile Crescent.
Furthermore,
Hezekiah well knew that his own father had been
the culprit responsible for earlier inviting the
Assyrians to interfere in the politics of Holy
Land (2 Chronicles 28:16-21). The problem was
part of his father's own legacy, then, and the
new king himself was obliged to pay annual
tribute to Assyria, further impoverishing his
realm.
Over the next
two decades, however, Hezekiah undertook
measures toward resisting that ever-looming
menace from the east. First, he endeavored to
re-unite the remnant of Israelites in the north
with his own throne in Jerusalem, thus enlarging
his realm by restoring the borders of David's
ancient kingdom. In this effort he was somewhat
successful (30:1-11).
Second,
Hezekiah strengthened Jerusalem's defenses by
cutting an underground conduit through solid
rock, so that water could be brought secretly
into the city from the Gihon Spring. This
remarkable feat of technology, unearthed by
modern archeology, is not only recorded twice in
the Bible (23 Kings 20:20; 2 Chronicles 32:30)
but also in the contemporary Siloam Inscription.
In this effort Hezekiah was very successful.
Prior to either
of these efforts, however, Hezekiah initiated a
religious reform, convinced that the nation's
recent apostasy under his father Ahaz was the
root of Judah's unfortunate plight. Thus, he
began his reign by purifying the Temple, lately
defiled by pagan worship (2 Chronicles 29:3-19),
in order to restore the edifice to the proper
service of God (29:20-36).
Unlike the
unbelieving Ahaz, who treated a spiritual
dilemma as merely a political problem, to be
addressed by political means, Hezekiah was
determined to regard the spiritual dilemma for
exactly what it was. Indeed, Hezekiah's
programmatic reform maintained the proper
priority indicated by our Lord's mandate that we
"seek first the Kingdom of Heaven." Nothing else
in Judah's national life, Hezekiah believed,
would be correctly ordered if anything but the
interests of God were put in first place. What
was first must emphatically be put there, not
second or somewhere else down the line.
This priority
of God's Kingdom, for Hezekiah, involved more
than the cleansing of the Temple and the
restoration of its worship. It also meant the
renewal of spiritual wisdom, which explains the
new king's interest in preserving Israel's
ancient wisdom literature (Proverbs 25:1). Such
a pursuit of wisdom also had to do with the
priority of the Kingdom of Heaven.
To Hezekiah,
however, the "first-ness" of God's Kingdom was
not a mere point of sequence but a matter of
principle. The quest of the Kingdom was first,
not only in the sense that it preceded
everything else, but also in the sense that it
laid the basis for everything else.
The foundation
of an edifice, after all, is put down prior to
the rest of the edifice, not simply because that
is the usual and accepted order. It is the usual
and accepted order because it is the only
conceivable order. Indeed, the foundation of
something belongs, in this sense, to a different
order, because the rest of the thing is
impossible without that foundation. It is the
basis that supports the whole enterprise.
And this is
what is meant by the priority of a principle.
Such priority is more than mere succession--of
getting things in the correct order. What is
first pertains to another order--the order of
principle. This is so plain a fact that it
should not even have to be said. Yet, Jesus did
say it, recognizing that some folks tend not to
notice the obvious.
Just as that
man is thought insane who imagines that he can
first build a house and then lay its foundation,
so is he insane to pretends to arrange a
well-ordered life and then later start on the
foundation of it. Seeking God's Kingdom is the
real foundation of the well-ordered life, and
the Lord warns against building on any other.
Fr.
Patrick Reardon is pastor of All Saints
Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Illinois,
and a Senior Editor of
Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity.
He is also the author of Christ in the Psalms,
and Christ in His Saints (both books are
published by Conciliar Press).
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