The Two Books of the Days of Our Lives, a devotional thought

There’s a simple line in 2 Kings 8:21-29 that’s easy to breeze by, but should give us pause if we stop to notice it.  It's describing the reign of king Joram of Judah, and in verse 23 it says, "all the stuff he did, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?"

You actually see this a lot in 1 & 2 Kings. The author will mention a king, describe a few details about his reign (usually focusing on whether he did right in the eyes of YHWH or not) and then he'll say, basically, "If you want to find out the stuff he did, you can read a different history book."   And like I say, it doesn’t look like such a big deal, unless you stop and ask why. 

Because it suggests to me that there are, in fact, two records of the days of our lives-- the record we keep ourselves, and the record that God keeps. In a way, when you read 1 & 2 Kings, you're reading God's own record of each king's reign; and if you want the world's record of how things went down, you'll have to look elsewhere.  It's sort of a truism that "history is written by the winners," but as far as the author of 2 Kings is concerned, that's bunk. History, in fact, true history, is written by God, and he sifts all the winners and losers through a much different sieve than we do.

And this is where it can, and should, give us pause. Because I know I keep my own "book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah"-- that is to say, I've got my own record of my life story. There are times I failed, and times I accomplished things. I have a list of stuff I've done and gone through that I'm pretty sure "matter," and a million things I've already forgotten about because they seemed so insignificant. Oh, the stories I could tell.

And I don’t think I’m alone in this all-too-human impulse.

But through 2 Kings 8:23, and all the other places in the Book of Kings where you come across that same refrain, God seems to be saying to us:  “Listen.  I will tell the true story of your life, in the end, and you may be surprised by all the plot twists you never noticed while you were living through them. The things you think are so important may only get a footnote, and the things you're embarrassed by or wish you could forget, they may turn out to be key elements of the story in the end. You just keep living it and let me write the history."

May God grant us all the grace to just keep living it and let him tell the story of it, when it's all said and done.