Around the Year with the Megillot
How the Five Scrolls help us understand our holidays
The Megillot are the “five small scrolls”: Ruth, Esther, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Lamentations. They can help us celebrate some of our major (and one of our minor) holidays and live happily all year round.
Christmas & Ruth
“Every good story has a good back-story.”
In an age when some tell us we can have a Christian faith – and thus Christmas – unhitched from its origins, we need to recover the prequel. It’s in Ruth. Ruth is more than a sweet love story. It’s a prequel of how God brought Himself on earth to be our King and Redeemer.
If you want to know what child is this born in Bethlehem read:
Ruth’s Prequel to the Christmas Story (< click)
Valentine’s Day & Song of Solomon
After New Years, Valentine’s Day beckons, our annual corporate celebration of eros. The Bible has a brief little book, really a song, exalting eros — the Song of Solomon — for the occasion. The Song of Solomon is not an allegory of spiritual love, as the Platonists claim. The Song of Solomon is not a sex manual, as some recent interpreters have tried to make it. It’s about what C. S. Lewis called “eros,” romantic love. In its celebration of eros, it reveals seven truths for your love life.
Learn Seven Secrets of Love from the inspired Song:
Eros Exalted: Secrets of Love from The Song of Solomon (<click on the link to the Warhorn article.)
Good Friday & Lamentations
The temple was destroyed, both the building — destroyed in Jeremiah’s day — and the body of Jesus on the cross. God’s people have to endure the catastrophes of the world. We have to walk a mile with sorrow sometimes, until we cry out,
“Remember my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall” (3:17.)
Then, after 20 verses of lamenting the catastrophe, when it’s gone from the darkest to pitch black, the only glimmer of hope in all of Lamentations:
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
His mercies never come to an end;
They are new every morning;
Great is Your faithfulness!
In the cross we see the true temple of the Lord destroyed. We see that when there is blood everywhere and your premature daughter lay dead before you, when the Son gasps, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me,” you can choke out, “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.”
Read: “When the Therapeutic God is Not Sufficient” (<click the link for the article.)
As Puritans, we celebrate “Easter” (the resurrection of our Lord Jesus) every Lord’s Day at Covenant Reformed Baptist Church.
Workdays & Ecclesiastes
Tired of working day-in, day-out, all for what seems nothing? Is the daily grind getting you down? Are you depressed by the meaninglessness of life in this world? There’s good news for depressed people in Ecclesiastes: you’re right. “What is the use?”
“If vapor could produce a vapor — if the whole universe were vapor and in that vapor universe there was its own vapor — that’s what everything is like, under the sun.”
Read Ecclesiastes’ Cure for Depression (< click on the green title.)
Thanksgiving & Esther
In Thanksgiving, we celebrate that God is in control. That turkey, that over-filled table, that harried wife or distracted husband (eager to get back to the football game), that beating heart in your chest all came from the firm hand of a God who depends on no variables. So, be thankful and eat up.
Read: Esther and the Theology of Thanksgiving (click on the link)
John B. Carpenter, Ph.D., is pastor of Covenant Reformed Baptist Church, in Danville, VA. and the author of Seven Pillars of a Biblical Church (Wipf and Stock, 2022).