Two of my kids went off to college this month, one to his senior
year, and one to his freshman year. Over their last two weeks at home, I
keenly felt, not stress, exactly, but pressure to make the most
of the rapidly dwindling time. So we took walks, played board games,
watched movies, went to church, got into discussions about software
development and politics and literature and video games and theology.
I’m not certain to what extent my sons felt the same about their
impending departure. (As Michael
Gerson observed about sending his eldest to college, “He is
experiencing the adjustments that come with beginnings. His life is
starting for real. I have begun the long letting go. Put another way: He
has a wonderful future in which my part naturally diminishes. I have no
possible future that is better without him close.”) But we immensely
enjoyed the family time together.
However, I’m not sure if the pressure of those last two weeks is
entirely rational. Eighteen years times fifty-two-point-something weeks
per year makes 938 weeks, if your child leaves for college on their
eighteenth birthday. Who’s to say that the last two weeks are
more valuable than, say, week 537? In reality, all time with
people whom we love and who bring us joy is a gift from God; that just
may not be at the forefront of your mind when you’re on week 537 and
college seems so far off.
In reality, even 938 weeks is less than it may seem. Paul Graham writes,
Life actually is short. Having kids showed me how to convert a
continuous quantity, time, into discrete quantities. You only get 52
weekends with your 2 year old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages
3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times. And
while it’s impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous
quantity like time, 8 is not a lot of something. If you had a handful of
8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would
definitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was.
And that’s without invoking the countless clichés about telling
people you love them now because tomorrow may be too late, people can be
gone before you know it, treasure your moments because you never know
what the future may bring, etc.; these are no less true for being
clichés.
If I’m not careful, these trains of thought can produce, not just
pressure, but stress. Time is slipping away! Don’t waste it!
Optimize, organize, plan, develop habits and routines and life hacks!
Make the most of every week, day, hour! Make sure you have no
regrets!
There’s wisdom here - we should be good stewards of all the blessings
that God has given us, including time - but I’m not sure that this
attitude of carefully scrimping and spending a finite resource is
intended to be how we live as children of God. It’s a scarcity mindset -
what we have is all we have, so use it carefully, because when it’s
gone, it’s gone - but we serve a God of abundance, who loves us and
chooses to abundantly shower blessings upon us. The Bible has plenty to
say about the wisdom of recognizing our limited time in this life (Ps
90:10-12, James 4:14, Eph 5:16), but it also talks about spending our
time richly enjoying the blessings of family (Eccl 9:9), food (Eccl
9:7), work (Eccl 2:24-25), and worship (Ps 84:10). I should prefer to
drink deeply of God’s blessings now than worry about when they’ll
pass.
And, ultimately, our time isn’t so limited after all. As C.S.
Lewis observes,
[We] hope finally to emerge, if not altogether from time (that might
not suit our humanity) at any rate from the tyranny, the unilinear
poverty, of time, to ride it not to be ridden by it, and so to cure that
always aching wound (‘the wound man was born for’)… For we are so little
reconciled to time that we are even astonished at it. ‘How he’s grown!’
we exclaim, ‘How time flies!’ as though the universal form of our
experience were again and again a novelty. It is as strange as if a fish
were repeatedly surprised at the very wetness of water. And that would
be strange indeed: unless of course the fish were destined to become,
one day, a land animal.
God “will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes, and death will not
exist any more—or mourning, or crying, or pain, for the former things
have ceased to exist” (Rev. 21:4), because he has arranged all eternity
with us in order to have enough time to show us his love (Eph.
2:6-7).
I don’t often write about specific works of fiction. It’s hard to
analyze a book or movie in a way that’s compelling to someone who hasn’t
read or seen it, and the find-your-audience blogging experts would say
that reducing your audience from “people who are interested in an
amateur theologian and software developer’s wandering thoughts” to
“people who are interested in those wandering thoughts and have any idea
about what novel he’s referencing” is perhaps a mistake. But the nice
thing about having a blog is that I’m free to occasionally wander
wherever I like, and I’ve been reading some good books lately, so here
we go.
Spoilers for the first two Mistborn books and “Neon Genesis
Evanglion” follow.
I recently finished the second Mistborn book, The Well
of Ascension, by Brandon Sanderson. Although he’s not extremely
well known in broader culture, Sanderson is one of the biggest fantasy
authors in the world and a prolific author, with over thirty novels to
his name. The Mistborn series follows Vin, a young thief who
grew up on the streets, as she falls in with a group of rebels, helps
overthrow a tyrannical ruler, and discovers her own magical powers. As a
fantasy series, it has many of the standard fantasy tropes: an immortal
evil overlord, a carefully explained system of magical abilities,
mysterious prophecies, centuries of backstory, and unearthly
creatures.
It’s all fun and well-written, but the fantasy tropes aren’t what
kept me thinking once the book was done - rather, it’s Vin’s
relationship with a young nobleman, Elend, with whom she falls in love.
Vin and Elend could hardly be more different. She grew up on the
streets; he’s the son of the most powerful noble family in the empire.
He’s an academic; she acts on instinct. Her life forced her to focus on
practicality and survival; he’s an amateur philosopher and an idealist.
Vin can use her magical abilities to become absolutely deadly in a
fight; Elend can barely hold a sword. As the plot develops, they become
responsible for a fledgling kingdom; Vin puts her talents to use at
night, spying, keeping watch, and eliminating threats, while Elend
spends his time politicking, drafting laws, and making speeches.
As their relationship progresses, neither of them think they’re right
for the other. Elend contrasts his ivory tower philosophies with Vin’s
resourcefulness and growing magical abilities and thinks she doesn’t
need him; Vin thinks that Elend should have someone who can more
properly fit into society and that she deserves to be alone in the
shadows. The various mundane and supernatural threats that they face
continually pressure them and force them to deal with them individually,
and since neither can manage to talk openly about their concerns, the
stresses and gaps and unknowns are filled in with insecurities and
fears.
In spite of this, they come to love each other; toward the end of the
book, they’re married in a brief, spur-of-the-moment ceremony, as Vin is
getting stitched up after being wounded in her latest magic-empowered
fight. When Elend asks a mutual friend, Sazed, for advice, Sazed tells
him how to think about their differences:
At first glance, the key and the lock it fits may seem very
different. Different in shape, different in function, different in
design. The man who looks at them without knowledge of their true nature
might think them opposites, for one is meant to open, and the other to
keep closed. Yet, upon closer examination, he might see that without
one, the other becomes useless. The wise man then sees that both lock
and key were created for the same purpose. (p. 427)
Vin has serious trust issues. Her mentally ill mother killed her
sister. Vin’s brother taught her life on the streets by telling her that
everyone, even him, would eventually leave her - and he did. To survive,
she fell in with various thieves’ gangs, where stronger members would
frequently beat, assault, or steal from weaker members such as her. (The
fact that Vin can have any kind of healthy emotional life is
perhaps as fantastical as the book’s magic, especially when centuries of
rule by an immortal evil overlord did not allow for the development of
trauma-informed therapy.) Much of her relationship with Elend, then,
involves learning to trust him, and much of the reason she falls in love
with him is that he’s unwavering in his trust of her. It’s impossible
for her to guarantee that he would never betray her - yet she finally
concludes that “she’d rather trust him and be wrong than deal with the
worry of mistrust.”
While Vin’s and Elend’s relationship progresses (and armies invade
and conspiracies transpire and omens portend and so forth - this is a
fantasy novel, after all), their friend Sazed goes through struggles of
his own. He’s a Keeper - a member of an order of scholars who’ve
dedicated themselves to preserving the world’s lore during the dark age
of the evil overlord’s reign. Sazed’s specialty is religions; he’s
memorized three hundred of them, because he believes that these beliefs
and stories have value. When questioned as to how he can promote these
religions, despite their mutual contradictions, he explains that they
represent hope - hope that there is something greater than humanity,
hope that better times will come in the future. However, despite his
scholarship and wisdom, his quiet strength, and the support he offers
his friends, events in the book leave him shattered; although he
believed in hope as an abstract concept, there was nothing concrete in
any of the three hundred religions that could give him comfort.
Love, marriage, trust, hope - none of these are new topics, and all
have been dealt with by numerous philosophers, theologians, ethicists,
and self-help books. So, from one perspective, we don’t really need a
popular fantasy novel presenting its take on things. But God has given
us both emotion and reason. (As Blaise Pascal said, “The heart has its
reasons which reason knows nothing of.”) And art and stories can touch
emotions in a way that propositional truths may not; art is art because
it shows something true about life, and sometimes showing is worth more
than telling. (This may be part of the reason that God himself so often
communicates through stories
and parables.)
During The Well of Ascension, Vin has the opportunity to
pursue a relationship with someone more like her, another
magic-empowered outsider, but she eventually decides to place her trust
in her key-and-lock relationship with Elend. And it is a relationship of
trust - she has to accept that, however much the street-scarred survivor
in her wants to ensure that she will never be hurt again, she cannot
guarantee that, and she loves him anyway. The trust that Vin and Elend
place in each other allows them to find strength when the abstract
belief of Sazed fails.
This all has me thinking about our relationship with God.
Christianity is, at its heart, a relationship with a Person, not a
system of belief in abstract concepts. Christians often talk about the
God-shaped hole in each of us. Blaise Pascal, again:
What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that
there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is
the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything
around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find
in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can
be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by
God himself. (Pensées VII (425))
We may try to fill this hole with things on earth - for example, with
relationships with those just like us - rather than looking toward the
lock-and-key relationship with the Creator who seeks to relate to us.
(This of course stretches the metaphor - a key and lock are created for
each other, but God in no way depends upon us. I appreciate the poetry
of the image regardless.)
It also illustrates something of the nature of faith. We talk at
length about the importance of faith, what it means to have faith that’s
accompanied by works, the relationship between faith and doubt, why God
allows for faith rather than arranging for certainty, and so on. All of
these are good and valuable discussions, but at the simplest level,
faith is trust in a Person. Faith and doubt coexist because sin-scarred
survivors such as ourselves can never guarantee that another person
won’t hurt us - many of our doubts are fundamentally relational rather
than intellectual. (If God is real and loves me, why doesn’t he act as I
expect him to? Why am I still hurting? Why is the world still hurting?)
Faith comes when, in spite of this, we choose to trust in One who is
unwavering in his love toward us.
Thinking about Pascal’s “empty print and trace,” the God-shaped hole
that we attempt to fill with shallow relationships with each other,
reminds me of “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” a 1990s Japanese anime. One of
the most popular anime ever, it tells the story of Shinji Ikari, an
asocial Japanese 14-year-old, who’s drafted along with other teenagers
to pilot giant robots in defense of Earth against invading alien
monstrosities, dubbed “angels.” He does so as a member of Nerv, a
UN-backed paramilitary group led by Shinji’s absentee father, Gendo.
“Neon Genesis Evangelion” is a short series (26 episodes, 24 minutes
each - anime is more likely than American television to tell a story and
wrap up) but dense, with psychological drama, conspiracies within
conspiracies, Jewish Kabbalah references, and critical elements of
backstory and motivation that are merely hinted at. For example, Nerv’s
motto (which is never directly referenced in the show but is visible
onscreen as part of their logo) is “God’s in his heaven, all’s right
with the world.” This quote from the 19th century poem “Pippa’s Song”
sounds inspiring, but as the series unfolds, it becomes clear that Nerv
considers God to have abandoned humanity, just as Nerv’s leader Gendo
has abandoned his son, Shinji, leaving Nerv to play God on its own.
Early in the series, Shinji is introduced to the concept of “the
hedgehog’s dilemma” - porcupines want to be close to each other, but
when they try to do so, they only hurt each other. This becomes a
recurring metaphor - humans seek to fill their emptiness with each
other, desperately seeking the approval of others, yet they repeatedly
hurt each other in the process.
Despite the show’s at times bizarre religious references, this theme
ends up sounding quite Christian. Without our Father (in Christian
terms, in rebellion against God), yet created for relationship and
needing love, we try to fill our emptiness with each other. In the
science-fiction anime world of “Evangelion,” this takes the form of a
conspiratorial project to psychically meld humanity’s minds together; in
real life, it can take the form of the distractions of entertainment,
pleasure, work, or it can take the form of seeking relationships with
others just like us, longing for someone we can trust and yet hurting
each other like hedgehogs, instead of trusting in our relationship with
our Father and accepting his love.
It’s the longest book of the Bible (by word count - Psalms has more
chapters, but they’re shorter - and if you split Samuel, Kings, and
Chronicles into two books each, as our English Bibles do). Jeremiah’s
ministry was long, hard, and discouraging - he began prophesying while
he was perhaps still a teenager, during the reign of King Josiah of
Judah, and prophesied through the next four kings. He saw the collapse
of the Assyrian empire, the victory of the Babylonian empire over Egypt
that cemented its status as the dominant power in the Near East, the
fall of Jerusalem, and the exile of the Jews to Babylon. According to my
Old Testament professor in college, he preached for forty years and
never saw a single convert. This is perhaps hyperbole - the book of
Jeremiah talks about a handful of connections in the priesthood and
royal court who supported him, plus his scribe Baruch - but his impact
on Judah within his day was seemingly negligible. After the fall of
Jerusalem to Babylon, he couldn’t even keep his countrymen from taking
him against his will to Egypt, in an attempt to avoid Babylonian
reprisals. He repeatedly clashed with prophets and priests and suffered
repeatedly for it - betrayed by his own family (Jer 12:6), flogged and
thrown in the stocks (Jer 20:1-2), put on trial after being nearly
killed by a mob (Jer 26:1-24), banned from visiting the temple (Jer 36:5),
falsely accused of defecting to Babylon (Jer 37:12-14), flogged and
imprisoned (Jer 37:15), thrown in a dry well to die (Jer 38:1-6),
rescued, and re-imprisoned, and only freed after the Babylonians
conquered Jerusalem.
The book of Jeremiah is also quite intimate in describing Jeremiah’s
own relationship with God. Several times throughout the book, he
complains to the Lord (Jer 11:18-20; 12:1-4; 15:10-21; 17:12-18;
18:18-23, 20:7-18). The book is complex to read; it’s a mixture of
prophecies, prayers, and narratives of Jeremiah’s life, often not in
chronological order, forcing the reader to keep the various Judahite
kings straight in their head as prophecies and stories jump back and
forth.
It contains several striking, even shocking, passages. Jeremiah’s
complaints to God. (“Lord, you coerced me into being a prophet, and I
allowed you to do it. You overcame my resistance and prevailed over me.
Now I have become a constant laughingstock… Sometimes I think, ‘I will
make no mention of his message. I will not speak as his messenger
anymore.’ But then his message becomes like a fire locked up inside of
me, burning in my heart and soul. I grow weary of trying to hold it in;
I cannot contain it… Cursed be the day I was born!… Why did I ever come
forth from my mother’s womb? All I experience is trouble and grief, and
I spend my days in shame” (Jer 20:7,9,14,18)). God’s denying Jeremiah of
the normal (and socially expected) activities of marriage, mourning, and
celebrating (Jer 16:1-9), as a lived parable of the desolation that was
coming to Judah. God’s instruction to Jeremiah to not intercede for his
fellow Judahites (Jer 7:16, 11:14, 14:11, 15:1), because of the depths
of their sin - when would we expect God to not want us to pray
for someone? One of the most shocking, though, is Jeremiah’s instruction
to surrender to Babylon.
Let’s put this in historical context. Israel and Judah were small
countries, positioned between the Mediterranean Sea to the west and
desert to the east, and so they formed a major trade route between the
north and south. The golden age of David and Solomon, when they were
militarily ascendant over their neighbors, enriched by trade, and
internationally esteemed, were long past; instead, they were a pawn in
struggles between Egypt to the south and Assyria and Babylon to the
north. By Jeremiah’s day, the kingdom of Israel had already fallen to
the Assyrians, who also very nearly conquered Judah during the reign of
Hezekiah, the great-grandfather of Josiah, and now the kingdom of Judah
feared imminent destruction from Babylon.
In the midst of this, Jeremiah sent messages to the surrounding
countries:
The Lord of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says to give your
masters this message: “I made the earth and the people and animals on it
by my mighty power and great strength, and I give it to whomever I see
fit. I have at this time placed all these nations of yours under the
power of my servant, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. I have even made
all the wild animals subject to him. All nations must serve him and his
son and grandson until the time comes for his own nation to fall. Then
many nations and great kings will in turn subjugate Babylon… Things will
go better for the nation that submits to the yoke of servitude to the
king of Babylon and is subject to him. I will leave that nation in its
native land. Its people can continue to farm it and live in it. I, the
Lord, affirm it!” (Jer. 27:4-7, 11)
And to the king and people of Judah:
Submit to the yoke of servitude to the king of Babylon. Be subject to
him and his people. Then you will continue to live. There is no reason
why you and your people should die in war or from starvation or disease.
That’s what the Lord says will happen to any nation that will not be
subject to the king of Babylon. ‘Do not listen to the prophets who are
telling you that you do not need to serve the king of Babylon. For they
are prophesying lies to you. For I, the Lord, affirm that I did not send
them.’ (Jer. 27:12-15)
From a human perspective - this doesn’t sound good. It’d be like
Franklin Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor, or George W. Bush after 9/11,
saying, “Welp, they got us good; we shouldn’t suffer war or hardship or
disease in trying to fight back.” Except that analogy probably still
misses the force of Jeremiah’s words, because our independence and
existence as a nation hadn’t been meaningfully threatened since 1865.
Perhaps it would be more like a preacher in Kyiv standing up and
declaring that Vladimir Putin is God’s servant and Ukraine needed to
peacefully surrender to him, but that’s okay, because God would later
judge Putin, too. Or William Joyce, aka
Lord Haw-Haw, a fascist, Nazi propagandist, and former British
soldier who broadcast to the UK during World War 2 and was executed for
treason after its end.
It’s no wonder the authorities in Jeremiah’s day didn’t like him.
While Jeremiah was telling those in Judah and resisted Babylon that
God was going to judge them, he wrote to those Jews who had already been
carried into exile to tell them that God would take care of them:
’Build houses and settle down. Plant gardens and eat what they
produce. Marry and have sons and daughters. Find wives for your sons and
allow your daughters to get married so that they too can have sons and
daughters. Grow in number; do not dwindle away. Work to see that the
city where I sent you as exiles enjoys peace and prosperity. Pray to the
Lord for it. For as it prospers you will prosper…
‘Only when the seventy years of Babylonian rule are over will I again
take up consideration for you. Then I will fulfill my gracious promise
to you and restore you to your homeland. For I know what I have planned
for you,’ says the Lord. ‘I have plans to prosper you, not to harm you.
I have plans to give you a future filled with hope.’ (Jer 29:5-7,
10-11)
How do we interpret such passages? Is this just an interesting bit of
Old Testament history, yet another instance of God judging a faithless
people, or is there more that we can learn? Jeremiah 29:11 is a
wonderful promise to those in exile, and God’s faithfulness to those in
exile gives us reason to trust that he has a plan to care for us today,
but yanking that verse out of context as if it were given verbatim to us
fails to do justice to how challenging Jeremiah’s instruction to his
contemporaries was and how starkly it went against the religious
understanding of his day. As we look at the political, social,
and cultural struggles of the 21st century American church, is there
anything we can apply from Jeremiah’s instruction to surrender to the
pagan forces of his day and seek their prosperity, rather than
fight?
Many evangelical churches are currently struggling with questions of
whether, and to what extent, we should get involved and fight in the
political, social, and cultural issues that are dividing America. Full
disclosure: I have definite opinions - and definite concerns - about how
we’re engaging here. So there may be a temptation for me to take these
passages from Jeremiah and use them as proof texts to support my side of
the debate. But I’m no prophet - it would be as big a mistake for me to
use Jeremiah’s history as evidence that I’m right as it was for the
false prophets of Jeremiah’s day to use the history of God protecting
Israel as evidence that Jeremiah was wrong. Instead, I’d like to list
some things that we can learn from Jeremiah and encourage us to
work through how they can help us in our current challenges.
God
is often less concerned with external religion and political power than
we are.
Solomon’s temple was a magnificent structure, the culmination of the
preparatory work of the exodus and tabernacle, the fulfillment of
prophecies and plans of David and Solomon, the manifestation of his
presence among his people (1 Ki 8:27-29), and a place to make God’s
glory and fame known to the surrounding nations (1 Ki 8:41-43) - yet
Nebuchadnezzar, acting as God’s servant, burned it down and looted all
of its furnishings. In fact, God was willing to quite literally burn the
entire political, national, and religious system of his people to the
ground if it allowed him to reform his people into a remnant that was
faithful to him.
True
religion needs to touch every aspect of our lives.
Josiah, who was king when Jeremiah started his ministry, started
numerous reforms to remove idolatry and refocus Judah’s religious
practices on the Lord. He removed idols, desecrated and tore down pagan
altars, repaired the temple, renewed the covenant, and organized a
national Passover celebration. Kings and Chronicles speak very highly of
him (2 Ki 22-23, 2 Chron 34-35). However, Jeremiah’s struggles suggest
that these reforms were often merely surface-level - the people followed
the structures and practices of their religion without it changing their
behavior and hearts.
The Lord said to Jeremiah: “Stand in the gate of the Lord’s temple
and proclaim this message: ’Listen to the Lord’s message, all you people
of Judah who have passed through these gates to worship the Lord. The
Lord of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says: Change the way you
have been living and do what is right. If you do, I will allow you to
continue to live in this land. Stop putting your confidence in the false
belief that says, “We are safe! The temple of the Lord is here! The
temple of the Lord is here! The temple of the Lord is here!” You must
change the way you have been living and do what is right. You must treat
one another fairly. Stop oppressing resident foreigners who live in your
land, children who have lost their fathers, and women who have lost
their husbands. Stop killing innocent people in this land. Stop paying
allegiance to other gods. That will only bring about your ruin. If you
stop doing these things, I will allow you to continue to live in this
land that I gave to your ancestors as a lasting possession.
“’But just look at you! You are putting your confidence in a false
belief that will not deliver you. You steal. You murder. You commit
adultery. You lie when you swear on oath. You sacrifice to the god Baal.
You pay allegiance to other gods whom you have not previously known.
Then you come and stand in my presence in this temple I have claimed as
my own and say, “We are safe!” You think you are so safe that you go on
doing all those hateful sins! 11 Do you think this temple I have claimed
as my own is to be a hideout for robbers? You had better take note! I
have seen for myself what you have done! says the Lord. (Jer 7:1-11)
(This kind of preaching no doubt explains why Jeremiah was eventually
prohibited from going to the temple.)
This passage is well-known to Christians because Jesus quoted it when
he cleansed the temple during the week leading up to his arrest. We
typically understand “a den of robbers” to mean simply that the people
inside the temple were robbing others, but Jeremiah’s charge is more
pointed than that: the religious practitioners were treating the temple
as a hideout or refuge in between their forays into immorality, a place
where they could find security and comfort while they lived their daily
lives however they wanted. They tried to follow the Lord and worship him
- but they also didn’t want to give up pursuing other gods.
As followers of God, our beliefs and formal religious practices are
important - but so are our choices to act with integrity, seek justice,
and avoid any idol that’s put alongside God.
Faithfulness
- successfully following God - may not look like what we think of as
success.
Contrary to the expectations of Jeremiah’s contemporaries, it was the
exiles, not those who remained in the Promised Land, whom God was using
to reform his people. Jeremiah’s own ministry was long, hard, and
disappointing, with little to show for it in his day. In the view of the
religious leaders, he was dangerous and opposed to God. And yet, looking
back now, “Bible students consider Jeremiah to be one of the foremost OT
prophets. With good reason he has been called a sublime figure… Highest
praise has been given him; in fact, he has been credited with the
survival of his people after the Fall of Jerusalem in 586 B.C., a
veritable savior of the Jews” (Charles L. Feinberg, Expositor’s Bible
Commentary). More importantly, God loved him, challenged him,
encouraged him, and took care of him, even in the midst of his
complaints (Jer 15:19-21).
It’s easy for us to think that church growth, compliments from
others, popular support in elections and polls and news media, and the
like are evidence that we’re doing good, but Jeremiah’s life shows that
following God may bring none of that.
Be careful when saying
what God wants.
The book of Jeremiah describes how priests and false prophets
repeatedly opposed Jeremiah, and it names several of them: Pashhur son
of Immer, Hananiah son of Azzur, Ahab son of Kolaiah, Zedekiah son of
Maaseiah. However, it says very little about their motives. Maybe they
were con artists, deliberately lying for prestige or financial gain.
Maybe they were deceived by spiritual forces, like Ahab’s prophets were
(1 Ki 22:20-22). Maybe they started out intending to speak truly but
gradually twisted their message into what people wanted to hear - social
media clickbait and “doing it for the likes” create powerful incentives
today to say whatever will get the desired emotional reactions out of
your friends and followers, but the underlying temptations aren’t
new.
And maybe some of the false prophets truly believed they were
speaking God’s truth. Maybe they said God would deliver Judah from
Babylon because they rightly remembered and retold God’s promises to
take care of his people and God’s deliverance of his people in the past
- but, if so, they were forgetting that promise and protection was only
part of God’s message to his people, that holiness and
accountability also must be included, and that God’s sovereign plan
means he may have purposes and priorities broader than they could
see.
One odd dynamic of the past few years has been the number of
self-proclaimed Christian prophets who’ve confidently declared what God
was doing and would do in American national politics and the 2020
election. Many of these predictions proved false. Even in less
charismatic streams of Christianity, churches and families have been
divided by confident proclamations of which candidates and political
causes God wants us to support. We should seek to understand what God is
doing - but any beliefs about what God intends with current events and
predictions about the future should never contradict or distract from
the simple, hard work of recognizing the holiness that God wants from us
(both individually and as his people), practicing love in unity for each
other, and trusting that God will take of us and protect us through (not
necessarily from) whatever happens.
Leaders’
character matters. The sins of the past matter.
The book of Jeremiah has only one mention of Manasseh, the
grandfather of King Josiah: “I will make all the people in all the
kingdoms of the world horrified at what has happened to them because of
what Hezekiah’s son Manasseh, king of Judah, did in Jerusalem” (Jer
15:4). However, the books of Kings and Chronicles describe his reign at
length:
He did evil in the sight of the Lord and committed the same horrible
sins practiced by the nations whom the Lord drove out before the
Israelites. He rebuilt the high places that his father Hezekiah had
destroyed; he set up altars for Baal and made an Asherah pole just as
King Ahab of Israel had done. He bowed down to all the stars in the sky
and worshiped them. He built altars in the Lord’s temple, about which
the Lord had said, “Jerusalem will be my home.” In the two courtyards of
the Lord’s temple he built altars for all the stars in the sky. He
passed his son through the fire and practiced divination and omen
reading. He set up a ritual pit to conjure up underworld spirits and
appointed magicians to supervise it. He did a great amount of evil in
the sight of the Lord, provoking him to anger. He put an idol of Asherah
he had made in the temple, about which the Lord had said to David and to
his son Solomon, “This temple in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of
all the tribes of Israel, will be my permanent home”… Manasseh misled
[Israel] so that they sinned more than the nations whom the Lord had
destroyed from before the Israelites… Furthermore Manasseh killed so
many innocent people, he stained Jerusalem with their blood from end to
end, in addition to encouraging Judah to sin by doing evil in the sight
of the Lord. (2 Ki 21:2-7, 9, 16)
As narrated by Kings and Chronicles, Manasseh was almost
single-handedly responsible for the Babylonian exile; God announced a
final judgment on Judah through his prophets during Manasseh’s reign,
and he never relented (2 Ki 21:10-15). The reforms of Manasseh’s
grandson Josiah, during Jeremiah’s youth, were valuable but brought only
a temporary reprieve (2 Ki 22:18-10). Jeremiah’s command to surrender
comes because, by then, the fall of Judah was inevitable; all that his
contemporaries could do was influence how hard and how fast the fall
would come.
As American individualists in one of the most prosperous and powerful
countries in history, we like to think ourselves responsible for our own
actions and outcomes and the masters of our own fates. There are deep,
important questions about the interplay between present responsibility
and consequences of the past (compare, for example, Deut 5:9 and Jer
15:4 to Deut 24:16 and Jer 31:29-30). But Jeremiah’s example suggests
that there may be times when, instead of fighting, we may need to accept
current events, consider the sins of our collective past (for example,
American sins of violence, greed, and racism), and repent and grow.
Even
when opposing sin and pronouncing judgment, love others and weep.
Jeremiah gave harsh proclamations against the sin and superficial
religion of Judah - and yet, in spite of that, and in spite of God’s
instruction to Jeremiah to not intercede for Judah in light of the
coming judgment (Jer 7:16, 11:14, 14:11-12), he still prayed for
them:
Lord, we know that people do not control their own destiny. It
is not in their power to determine what will happen to them.
Correct us, Lord, but only in due measure. Do not punish us in
anger, or you will reduce us to nothing. (Jer 10:23-24)
And this is no rote, checklist-style prayer; Jeremiah identifies with
the people he’s proclaiming judgment against and who opposed and
persecuted him, and he weeps over them:
I wish that my head were a well full of water and my eyes were a
fountain full of tears! If they were, I could cry day and night
for those of my dear people who have been killed. (Jer 9:1)
In fact, God himself laments over the people:
I will now purify them in the fires of affliction and test them.
The wickedness of my dear people has left me no choice. What else
can I do? (Jer 9:7)
It’s easy to fall into us-versus-them thinking - any of our
opponents, anyone doing wrong, are first and foremost enemies to be
defeated, agents of evil, rather than fellow humans with whom we live in
community. Jeremiah risked his life opposing evil, but he also
recognized his ties to his people, and he never stopped loving. God
opposes and judges evil, but he never stops loving.
There is always hope.
Late in Jeremiah’s ministry, God instructed him to buy a field in his
hometown of Anathoth. This was just a year or two before Jerusalem fell
to Babylon; Jerusalem was already under siege at the time, and Jeremiah
was under arrest for his conflicts with Judah’s leadership. Jeremiah
explains the reason for buying the field: “For the Lord of Heaven’s
Armies, the God of Israel, says, ‘Houses, fields, and vineyards will
again be bought in this land’” (Jer 32:15).
Investing in real estate at a time like this would seem highly
questionable; it would be like our Kyiv preacher saying that Putin is
God’s servant and that Ukraine should surrender to him, but then while
in prison proceeding to invest in property in the war-ravaged Mariupol
in Russian-controlled eastern Ukraine. After the land purchase, God
speaks to Jeremiah, promising that, in spite of his judgment for
centuries of Israelite sin,
I will bring them back to this place and allow them to live here in
safety. They will be my people, and I will be their God. I will give
them a single-minded purpose to live in a way that always shows respect
for me. They will want to do that for their own good and the good of the
children who descend from them. I will make a lasting covenant with them
that I will never stop doing good to them. I will fill their hearts and
minds with respect for me so that they will never again turn away from
me. I will take delight in doing good to them. I will faithfully and
wholeheartedly plant them firmly in the land. (Jer 32:37-41)
Much of our contemporary rhetoric and dialogue about American
politics and the church in America has an almost apocalyptic flavor: if
this election doesn’t go the way we think it should, or this cultural
trend or that political agenda isn’t reversed, our country and churches
are doomed. This rhetoric seems overblown (it’s not the first time we’ve
feared an outcome of an election), but it may actually be the case; Judah in
Jeremiah’s day was doomed. But God remains faithful to his promises; the
gates of hell will not prevail against his church; he is still our God,
and we are still his people.
God’s
presence and deliverance may not look like we expect.
Everyone in Jerusalem had no doubt grown up hearing of the Lord’s
miraculous deliverance from the Assyrian invasion, during the reign of
King Hezekiah, when God killed 185,000 of their soldiers overnight (1 Ki
19). This may have contributed to their confidence that they should
fight against the Babylonian invasion - but that was not God’s plan.
And yet, God remained faithful to his people, preserving and
purifying them and calling them back to him, at a time when many nations
and tribes dissolved and were absorbed into conquering empires. And
countless believers since then have drawn comfort from God’s promise to
the exiles: “I know what I have planned for you… I have plans to prosper
you, not to harm you. I have plans to give you a future filled with
hope” (Jer 29:11).
Jeremiah himself had no doubt grown up hearing of prophets like
Elijah, who opposed idolatry and immorality with fire from heaven and
supernatural strength and miraculous victories, untouchable by any human
opposition - but that was not God’s plan for Jeremiah.
And yet, in spite of the persecution and hardships, God was with
Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in your mother’s womb, I chose you.
Before you were born, I set you apart. I appointed you to be a prophet
to the nations” (Jer 1:5). “I, the Lord, hereby promise to make you as
strong as a fortified city, an iron pillar, and a bronze wall. You will
be able to stand up against all who live in the land, including the
kings of Judah, its officials, its priests, and all the people of the
land. They will attack you but they will not be able to overcome you,
for I will be with you to rescue you” (Jer 1:18-19).
It’s easy, and natural, to look for God in the miraculous, in
clear-cut confrontations of good and evil, in displays of power, in
victory. But God often chooses to act through human circumstances,
through loss, by being with us through defeat rather than guaranteeing
temporal victory, by proving his faithfulness and comfort in spite of
the bad, rather than simply removing the bad.
At Easter, God himself “surrendered” to evil, taking upon himself the
worst evil that humanity could deal out, rather than simply wielding
power against it as he did in the days of Hezekiah and Elijah. And, in
doing so, he defeated evil and death for all time, showing once again
his love and faithfulness.
I was listening to a church discussion of how we relate to culture,
and this perspective was expressed by one of the participants. The
specific example that prompted it, chosen more or less at random, was
Starbucks’ choice to not put “Merry Christmas” on their holiday
cups.
There were - and are - lots of good arguments on both sides, but I’m
more interested in the implication that we haven’t fought, that
we have somehow given inches, that we need to do more or do
different if we don’t want to continue to lose miles. In my lifetime,
I’ve seen the American evangelical church fight abortion, LGBTQ rights,
music with explicit lyrics, music with unintelligible lyrics, Democratic
presidents, drinking, gambling, playing cards because of their
association with gambling, drugs, smoking, Dungeons & Dragons,
Pokémon, Harry Potter, sex in video games, violence in video games,
blasphemous art, R-rated movies, movies that fail to promote “family
values,” the theory of evolution, saying “happy holidays” instead of
“merry Christmas,” universalism, theological liberalism, political
correctness, Satanism, tattoos, child pornography, communism, socialism,
critical race theory, and K-Mart selling Playboy.
And this is nothing new. In the early 20th century, for example,
evangelist Billy Sunday preached his famous “booze”
sermon in Boston, Massachusetts:
It is my opinion that the saloonkeeper is worse than a thief and a
murderer. The ordinary thief steals only your money, but the
saloonkeeper steals your honor and your character. The ordinary murderer
takes your life, but the saloonkeeper murders your soul.
The saloon is an infidel. It has no faith in God; has no religion. It
would close every church in the land. It would hang its beer signs on
the abandoned altars. It would close every public school. It respects
the thief, and it esteems the blasphemer; it fills the prisons and
penitentiaries. It despises heaven, hates love, and scorns virtue. It
tempts the passions. Its music is the song of a siren. Its sermons are a
collection of lewd, vile stories. It wraps a mantle about the hope of
this world to come.
It is the moral clearinghouse for rot, and damnation, and poverty,
and insanity, and it wrecks homes and blights lives today. The saloon is
a liar. It promises health and causes disease. It promises prosperity
and sends adversity. It promises happiness and sends misery.
His preaching was a significant factor in the adoption of the
Eighteenth Amendment, prohibiting alcohol in the United States, in
1917.
In the 1960s, to our shame, we fought against civil rights. Philip
Yancey writes in Soul
Survivor of growing up in Atlanta:
[Martin Luther King, Jr.] was our number-one public enemy, a native
of my own Atlanta, whom the Atlanta Journal regularly accused of
“inciting riot in the name of justice.” Folks in my church had their own
name for him: Martin Lucifer Coon. (p. 17)
During my adolescence I attended two different churches. The first, a
Baptist church with more than a thousand members, took pride in its
identity as a “Bible-loving church where the folks are friendly,” and in
its support of 105 foreign missionaries, whose prayer cards were pinned
to a wall-sized map of the world at the rear of the sanctuary. That
church was one of the main watering holes for famous evangelical
speakers. I learned the Bible there. It had a loose affiliation with the
Southern Baptist Convention, a denomination founded in 1845 when
Northern abolitionists decided that slave owners were unfit to be
missionaries and the Southerners separated in protest. Even Southern
Baptists were too liberal for most of us, though, which is why we
maintained only a loose affiliation…
After the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, our church
founded a private school as a haven for whites, expressly banning all
black students…
The next church I attended was smaller, more fundamentalist, and more
overtly racist… There I learned the theological basis for racism. The
pastor taught that the Hebrew word Ham meant “burnt black,”
making Noah’s son Ham the father of Negro races, and that in a curse
Noah had consigned him to life as a lowly servant (Genesis 9)…
If anyone questioned such racist doctrine, pastors pulled out the
trump card of miscegenation, or mixing of the races, which some
speculated was the sin that had prompted God to destroy the world in
Noah’s day. A single question, “Do you want your daughter bringing home
a black boyfriend?” silenced all arguments about race (p. 21-23).
Many years later, Yancey attended the “burial” of this second church
(“After moving to escape a changing neighborhood, the church found
itself once again surrounded by African-Americans, and attendance had
dwindled. In a sweet irony, it was now selling its building to an
African-American congregation” (p. 4)) and reflected on the poisonous
legacy of the church and how people such as Yancey’s brother turned away
from the faith as a result.
Looking back over this history, it’s hard for me to imagine what “If
you give an inch, they’ll take a mile; you have to fight” should even
look like, because it seems to me that we’ve been fighting non-stop,
with very mixed results.
Sometimes these fights are successful. Crime rates, for example, are
significantly lower than they used to be — 60%
lower in 2020 than in 1980. (However, the fact that this decline in
crime rates can be credibly attributed to the removal
of lead paint, rather than moral renewal led by the church, may
shake our confidence in the church’s ability to bring moral change to
the broader culture.)
Sometimes these fights are still ongoing. The June 2022 Supreme Court
decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization
removed federal protections around abortion rights, a decades-long goal
of pro-life activists, but pro-life activists would be the first to say
that we still have a very long way to go in creating a culture where
abortion is unwanted, where life is consistently valued, where unborn
babies and expectant mothers are protected and provided for.
Sometimes, in hindsight, these fights seem to have been misguided. I
don’t hear anyone too concerned about Pokémon or playing cards nowadays,
and church youth groups enjoy the occasional game of Dungeons &
Dragons.
Sometimes, we may realize, like Philip Yancey, that the
fight was simply wrong, that reading the Bible and professing to follow
Christ is no proof against sin, and that great evil can be rationalized
in the name of following God.
And sometimes, perhaps, we stop fighting too easily. Liquor usage
doesn’t appear to be a front-and-center concern for many contemporary
Christians, as it was in Billy Sunday’s day, but too many people can
still testify to the devastation that alcoholism can cause - over
140,000 deaths in the U.S. per year, not to mention the damage done
to relationships, families, jobs, finance, and health.
What would it mean to not give an inch? Looking over that list, can
we say we haven’t fought enough? Did we somehow fail to let secular
Americans know that we disapprove of what they’re doing? Was there some
tactic or measure that we failed to employ that could have compelled
culture to go our way?
Despite how it may sound, it’s not my intention to criticize these
combatants. We are all, I trust, trying to faithfully follow God in a
world with many temptations and snares; for me to say that “I,
unlike these others, know exactly what this should look like” would be
the height of arrogance. Following God sometimes means speaking out
against immorality or error and standing up for the victims of injustice
- in other words, fighting. The issues that we fight over often come out
of a commendable and correct desire to see Christ as Lord over every
aspect of our lives, to leave no activity or item unexamined. God may
call believers to different battlefronts and give them passion about
different causes, and I believe that God can use even misguided zeal of
someone who truly seeks to follow him. Conflicts that seem unnecessary or even silly from
the perspective of our current time period or setting may be more
important than we realize in another. (Paul wrote that idols are nothing
while also recognizing that, in the setting of the Corinthian church,
eating meat offered to idols could cause Corinthian Christians real
spiritual harm.)
But fighting can become a substitute for following - maybe because we
become so convinced of our own rightness that we decide we can judge
others, or maybe because straightforward standards of right and wrong
are easier to understand and control than pursuing an infinite God whose
holiness we can never live up to, or maybe because fighting obvious
immorality that we personally don’t struggle with is easier than facing
our own sin. Or maybe it’s simply that we’re afraid - afraid to see a
society that’s changing and falling away from religion, afraid of
hostility and harassment and losing cultural clout, afraid of whether
our own churches and families and children will be able to remain
faithful - and so we fight in the only way we know how, instead of
trusting Jesus’ promise that the gates of hell will never prevail.
Because, ultimately, we do have to fight - but it’s a fight against
our own sinfulness, vigorously training our own bodies rather than
merely shadow-boxing (1 Cor 9:27), a struggle against spiritual forces
(Eph. 6:12), an assault against the gates of hell (Mt 16:18), a battle
to “snatch others from the fire” (Jude 23), as we’re watched by angels
(Eph. 3:10) and cheered on by those who’ve gone before us (Heb.
12:1).
Not just an argument over Starbucks Christmas cups.
Why do we study Bible stories? We touched on recently in looking at
the lives of David, Saul, and Solomon, but it’s
worth a closer look.
There are a few reasons. First is simply that they’re history, and
(as high school students toiling through AP US History can attest),
we’ve concluded as a society that history is worth studying. It lets us
know the causes and effects that brought us to our current state of
affairs; it gives us understanding and precedent to guide our future
actions (“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
- George Santayana); it helps us understand and appreciate our own
culture and traditions; it broadens our perspectives, giving us a window
into the lives and cultures and perspectives of people, times, and
cultures different than our own; it offers good stories, and as humans,
we enjoy and draw value from good human stories.
Bible stories aren’t just history, but they are history, and
they can help fulfill all of these roles.
Second, we can learn moral lessons from them. There’s biblical
precedent for this; for example, in 1 Cor 10:11, Paul talks about the
Israelites’ rebellion in the desert and writes, “These things happened
to them as examples and were written for our instruction.” In Psalm
95:8, God gives the Israelites in the desert as a negative example. Heb
11 lists numerous biblical characters and holds them up as examples of
faith.
This is where many of our modern Bible studies spend their time.
However, it’s possible to overdo this. In Joseph and the Gospel of Many
Colors, Voddie Bauchum talks about delivering a sermon series
on Genesis and, afterwards, receiving a letter from a Jewish visitor to
his church thanking him for his sermon. He writes,
As I read her letter, my eyes filled with tears. However, these were
not tears of joy because the Lord had used my sermon in the life of a
Jew. On the contrary, these were tears of horror and shame! As I read
her words, all I could think of were Paul’s words: “But we preach Christ
crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those
who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the
wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:23-24). So why wasn’t my message a “stumbling
block” to this Jew? Was it because she was “being saved”? No. It was
because I had not preached Christ! (p. 16)
He goes on to argue that viewing stories through the lens of moralism
misses the gospel - the good news that Christ offers salvation apart
from our moral acts. If we read Bible stories only for moral
lessons, we risk reducing them to the level of one of Aesop’s fables or
moral-of-the-episode pop culture, rather than pointing us to Christ.
Third, and deeper, the stories tell us who we are. Let me illustrate
with an example from the workplace. When I joined a previous company, a
software development consultancy, my knowledge of them was limited to
what I read from their website and a few conversations with them over
the interview and hiring process. And, since it was a fully remote
position, my interactions with them were limited. However, I quickly
heard the story from before I joined of how they had lined up a major
contract, only to have it canceled at the last minute, and how they
navigated the resulting challenges. This was a major event in the life
of the company and became a part of their identity and DNA. This story
told me such a wealth about who they were - the inherent uncertainties
of their line of work, how they sacrificed to take care of their
contractors during this trying time, the frugality and caution with
which they approached finances and negotiations as a result. And, as a
new member of the team, it told me a wealth about who I was expected to
be - and it instilled those values in me far more effectively than any
corporate onboarding training or employee handbook could.
This dynamic applies in personal relationships as well as corporate.
Russell Moore writes,
New friendships are often made from stories. Whenever you meet
someone new, that person may ask you, “So what’s your story?” Even when
it’s not directly said, it’s an unspoken question. We tell pieces of our
life stories to each other and are often happy to find those stories
overlap… When you tell something of your story to a new friend, you are
saying something akin to “Here’s who I am. What about you?”
Children grow up hearing stories of their parents and grandparents
and learn about their family, what their family values, where they came
from, and how they fit in. Growing up in a small town lets you hear
stories of the town’s colorful characters and memorable events, filling
this same role at the level of the community; the stories that we tell
in civics and history classes serve the same role at the national level.
Someone meeting their boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s parents for the first
time likely hears stories from their childhood, learning more about the
person who they’ve chosen to give their affections to.
Bible stories do this for us within the community of faith, because
God isn’t merely saving us individually and honing our individual moral
characters. He’s working throughout history to form a people for
himself, and so the stories help us to see how we fit into this broader
purpose of God, and the stories of God’s people in the past tells us
what it means to be a part of God’s people now, and we recognize that
part of the purpose of the stories of the past is so that we can be a
part of God’s people now.
Sometimes I think of Abraham How one star he saw had been lit for
me
Fourth, and deeper still, the stories help us better know God
himself. In Searching for God Knows What, Donald Miller
describes teaching a Bible college class.
This year I asked the students to list the precepts a person would
need to understand in order to become a Christian. I stood at the white
board and they called out ideas: Man was sinful by nature; sin separates
us from God; Jesus died for our sins; we could accept Jesus into our
hearts… and so on. Then, looking at the board, I began to ask some
questions about these almost universally accepted ideas. I asked if a
person could believe all these ideas were true and yet not be a
Christian… The students conceded that, in fact, a person could know and
even believe all the concepts on the board and yet not be a Christian.
“Then there is something missing, isn’t there?” I said to the class. “It
isn’t watertight just yet. There must be some idea we are leaving out,
some full-proof thing a person has to agree with in order to have a
relationship with Christ.”
We sat together and looked at the board for several minutes until we
conceded that we weren’t going to come up with the missing element. I
then erased the board and asked the class a different question: “What
ideas would a guy need to agree with or what steps would a guy need to
take in order to fall in love with a girl?” The class chuckled a bit,
but I continued, going so far as to begin a list.
A guy would have to get to know her.
I stood back from the board and wondered out loud what the next step
might be. “Any suggestions?” I asked the class. We thought about it for
a second, and then one of the students spoke up and said, “It isn’t
exactly a scientific process.” (p. 153-154)
To fall in love with God, we have to get to know him. And, to get to
know someone, we can spend time with him, and we can listen to him talk,
and we listen to stories about him, because stories tell us what the
person did and what kind of person he is and what’s important to him -
through both the stories themselves and the choice of which sequences of
events were selected and organized and retold. The stories of the Bible
help us fall in love with God by showing us his love, his faithfulness
to his people, his willingness to act on their behalf, his desire to
relate to them, and his anger at sin - at anything that interferes with
this relationship.
This may help explain why so much of the Bible is story, rather than
theology treatise. Because I believe that God, in his omnipotence and
wisdom, and in his inspiration of Scripture, isn’t merely relaying a
sequence of events; he has chosen those events and how they’re told in
order for us to better know him. And, because we’re relational,
story-telling creatures, this may teach us more than a theology treatise
would, just as my coworkers’ story of their canceled contract taught me
more than any corporate training could.
And the stories themselves become a way of spending time with God -
much the same as a family or old friends spend time swapping stories.
Russell Moore, again:
When we spend time with old friends and tell remembered stories… we
aren’t communicating information; we’re reliving our experiences. We’re
saying things like “Can you believe we got to see that?” or “Can you
believe we survived that?” or “Don’t you miss that?” or “Aren’t you glad
that’s over?”
It’s just another way of knowing one another—and of being known.
And the stories become a way of praising God. By re-reading and
retelling the stories of God’s actions on behalf of his people in the
past, we’re communicating God’s power, his faithful promise-keeping on
behalf of his people, his mercy, and his love.
At the risk of stating the obvious, Nero was not a nice man.
The fifth emperor of Rome, Nero reigned from AD 54 to AD 68. He had a
widespread reputation for being “tyrannical, self-indulgent, and
debauched” (Wikipedia).
He killed his mother and has been suspected or accused of killing his
first wife, second wife (although this is questioned by modern
historians), and step-brother. After his second wife’s death in AD 65,
he had a young man who resembled his second wife castrated, married him,
and started treating him as a woman. He was believed to have started the
Great Fire of Rome in AD 64; after the fire, he rebuilt Rome, including
a new palace complex, the Domus Aurea (“Golden House”), funded by heavy
taxation and devaluing the Roman currency. After the fire, he was said
to have tortured and killed Christians, perhaps blaming them for the
fire, and had some early Christians burned alive. Later tradition said
that Peter was crucified and Paul beheaded during Nero’s persecutions.
When political winds finally turned against Nero (due in part to a
rebellion against his taxation), he fled to a villa outside of Rome. He
planned to commit suicide, lamenting, “What an artist dies in me.” He
ultimately could not go through with the deed and instead forced his
secretary to kill him.
Nero remained infamous after his death; a legend soon arose that he
had survived and would return to conquer his enemies and lead Rome. At
least three impostors, claiming to be Nero, organized rebellions, and
the belief in Nero’s return, called the Nero Revividus legend, persisted
in some places for centuries. Some scholars believe that Revelation’s
beast from the sea, which received a lethal wound but was healed
(Rev. 13:3), is an allusion to Nero Revividus. (John, or the Spirit
through John, could have easily chosen imagery and metaphors that would
be familiar and vivid to John’s first leaders.)
This forms the backdrop for 1 Peter, which evangelical scholars
believe was perhaps written sometime around AD 62-64. In 1 Pe 2:13-17,
Peter writes:
Be subject to every human institution for the Lord’s sake, whether to
a king as supreme or to governors as those he commissions to punish
wrongdoers and praise those who do good. For God wants you to silence
the ignorance of foolish people by doing good. Live as free people, not
using your freedom as a pretext for evil, but as God’s slaves. Honor all
people, love the family of believers, fear God, honor the king.
Notice what Peter does not say: “Honor the king, as long as
he isn’t tyrannical, self-indulgent, or debauched.” “Be subject to the
king, unless he starts fires and blames you for it.” “Honor the king
under normal circumstances, but if he starts killing family members or
burning people alive, feel free to verbally attack him.” 1 Peter may
have been written before Nero’s persecutions started, but even then,
Nero’s character wasn’t the sort that an observant Jewish Christian
would approve of. And, if Nero’s persecutions would have changed things,
it’s hard to imagine Peter’s inspired instruction not including that
caveat.
I think of this sometimes when I see a “Let’s go, Brandon!” sign or
dip my toes in the constant stream of political jokes, memes, and
insults on Facebook or Twitter. Because, if Peter didn’t write, “Be
subject to and honor the king, unless he’s a self-indulgent, debauched
tyrant,” he certainly didn’t write, “Be subject to and honor the ruler,
unless he’s a senile socialist” - or an orange-skinned grifter, or a
closeted Muslim from Kenya, or an American
idiot, to cover a sampling of the insults from the last twenty years
of American presidential politics.
This doesn’t mean that we automatically obey those in power. Peter
earlier said that, if forced to choose between God and humanity, he
would obey God (Acts 5:29). And this doesn’t mean that we can never
criticize those in power. Even in this passage, Peter speaks of “the
ignorance of foolish people,” and John the Baptist and Jesus both have
pointed criticism for political leaders (Mt 14:4, Lk 13:32). And there
may even be a place for vivid or even inflammatory language; both Jesus
and Paul did that if the issues they were addressing are important
enough (e.g., Mt 23:27, Gal 5:12). But I’m not nearly as wise or mature
as Jesus or Paul. And I also notice that the New Testament speakers’
most pointed criticisms are reserved for people claiming to be members
of the religious community - those who claim to share with us a higher
standard, whose actions are causing genuine spiritual danger to fellow
believers. I’m afraid that many of our political memes, jokes,
commentary, and slogans aren’t about offering a moral challenge or
applying God’s standards or protecting fellow believers. They too often
feel like just complaining, venting our spleen about situations we have
limited ability to change, bonding with those who share our views by
tearing down those who don’t.
Does this mean that there’s never a place for political humor? I’m
not sure. Satire is a powerful tool. Humor can be healthy (especially if
we’re poking fun at ourselves or those in our faction), and it can be a
useful coping mechanism. And I certainly have laughed and shared the
occasional critical joke. But, even if it’s not inherently wrong, I’m
not sure that our constant stream of negative political humor and
commentary is spiritually or psychologically healthy. If our fundamental
mentality is to be one of honoring and respecting those in authority,
it’s hard to reconcile that with some of the attitudes I see on Facebook
and Twitter. And I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis’s warning in Mere
Christianity about loving our enemies:
The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities
in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the
story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out.
Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as
that,” or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to
cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies
as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the
first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into
devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little
blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see
grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally, we shall
insist on seeing everything - God and our friends and ourselves included
- as bad, and not be able to stop doing it; we shall be fixed for ever
in a universe of pure hatred. (p. 91)
I’m not a fan of Joe Biden. I have from time to time complained about
him. But this
message from him happened to pop up in my Twitter feed sometime
around Easter last year:
As we reflect today on Christ’s Resurrection, we are reminded that
with faith, hope, and love — even death can be defeated. From our family
to yours, we wish you hope, health, joy, and the peace of God, which
passes all understanding. Happy Easter and may God bless and keep
you.
This was an important reminder to me - regardless of what I think of
the leadership and policies of Biden (or Trump, or Obama, or Bush),
what’s far more important is whether they and I are following Christ.
Paul writes about this in 2 Cor 5:15, in talking about what it means to
live for Christ as ambassadors of reconciliation: “From now on,
therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh” (ESV). Regarding our
political leaders as partisan allies or enemies, as the butts of our
jokes or as a means to the end of punishing our foes, is regarding them
according to the flesh. Instead, let’s give them the same honor and
respect that Peter gave Nero, while continuing to live as ambassadors of
Christ.
I recently saw an ad about an “earthquake bed” - a high-tech bed
whose bedframe is actually a sturdy metal box. It has built-in sensors
so that, if it detects an earthquake, it quickly drops you into the box
and seals shut, protecting you from any falling debris.
There are actually two series of earthquake beds - one from Chinese
inventor Wang Wenxi, and one from Russian company Dahir Insaat. Some of
their iterations include built-in safety gear - food, oxygen, a fire
extinguisher, etc. - to keep you safe while awaiting rescue. I can’t
find the specific ad that I saw, but this CNN video shares Dahir
Insaat’s concept video:
Neither creator’s bed appears to be commercially available; however,
based on their specialized construction, limited development, heavy
steel, and complex safety-critical devices, I’m guessing they’d cost
tens of thousands of dollars if they could be purchased.
I’m sure that the ad I saw was making the rounds because of February
6’s earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. I don’t begrudge the ad or the
inventions - I’m not sure how workable they are, but the goal of saving
lives is commendable, and invention and research involves pursuing ideas
that may or may not pan out, and trying to implement an expensive,
impractical idea is often the first step toward making something cheaper
and practical.
And yet there’s something so… human… about responding to tragedy by
offering safety through technology, if only you can afford it.
My own response to the earthquakes is a bit closer to this song by
Kimya Dawson, written in response to the 2004
Indian Ocean earthquake tsunami. (Warning: sensitive content.)
The earthquakes lasted 80 seconds. Over 50,000 people were killed.
Since February 6, 9,000 aftershocks have been reported. Over 170,000
buildings - some of them centuries old - have been destroyed or severely
damaged. Millions of people have been affected. As
of Saturday, nearly 240,000 rescue workers continue to dig through
the rubble, looking for victims, so they can at least give them a proper
burial.
What’s an earthquake bed supposed to accomplish? Tens of thousands of
dollars, times tens of thousands of people, just to be buried for weeks
in the rubble of what used to be your home?
We’re quite good at controlling our environment and protecting
against misfortune. Insurance, vaccinations, the Federal Reserve,
building codes, sprinkler systems, irrigation, deep freezers, weather
radar, floodwalls, and - yes - earthquake beds, to protect against
disease, economic loss, famine, drought, fire, flood, storm. But 80
seconds shows the limits of our power.
What can we do? We call earthquakes “acts of God,” and there
are rich resources within the Christian faith for developing our
understanding of when and how God acts, why God allows these things to
happen, and how we should respond. (“Those 50,000 who were killed when
the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria fell on them, do you think they were
worse offenders than all the others who live in the world? No, I tell
you! But unless you repent you will all perish as well!”) But so much of
the tragedy is human. From The
Dispatch:
In 1999 an earthquake in western Turkey killed more than 17,000,
setting off a nationwide push to demolish old construction and rebuild
earthquake resistant buildings. Except many pre-1999 buildings in the
poorer south remained, and many new buildings weren’t built to withstand
the tremor.
[Turkish President] Erdoğan’s political rivals say shoddy new
construction—encouraged by the president and his ruling Justice and
Development Party (AKP)—is in part to blame for the disaster. A recently
resurfaced video from 2019 shows Erdoğan touting new construction in
Kahramanmaraş following the passage of a law allowing contractors to pay
a fee to spare their unlicensed buildings from demolition. “We solved
the problem of 144,156 citizens of Maraş with zoning amnesty,” he said
of the housing projects, some of which were destroyed in the quakes.
In [Erdoğan’s] first public remarks [after the quakes], he threatened
legal action against those who criticized the government… The day after
the disaster, Erdoğan blocked access to Twitter, where criticism of the
government was proliferating. Rescue workers quickly condemned that
decision, because victims trapped under the rubble were using social
media to communicate their locations to rescue teams… Demolition crews
have been dispatched to destroy
public records office buildings that housed building permits, along
with the names and records of contractors and the public officials who
approved such projects… Various aid workers also told press outlets they
were pushed out of the way just as victims were being brought out of
collapsed buildings, then replaced by government-affiliated aid workers
who wanted to take the credit for the rescue in front of television
cameras.
In Syria, the disaster has been complicated by the decade-long civil
war, with the White
Helmets, a volunteer group that operates in opposition-held Syrian
territory, shouldering much of the burden of the rescue work.
The United States Treasury announced a six-month freeze on sanctions
against the Syrian government involving “all transactions related to
earthquake relief.” Though U.S. officials insisted none of their
existing penalties on Damascus targeted humanitarian aid shipments, the
move followed finger-pointing from [Syrian dictator Assad’s] regime
officials who wasted no time in blaming Western sanctions for their own
deficient response to the catastrophe…
While his government complained about sanctions, the dictator of more
than two decades has been stalling the delivery of life-saving relief
for political gain. Until last week, the regime had insisted that all
international assistance be routed through the Damascus government,
delaying aid shipments to some of the hardest-hit areas in the country’s
rebel-held northwest.
80 seconds would be devastating under any circumstances. But it’s
made so much worse when profit-seeking or short-sighted politics leave
infrastructure unprepared; when tyranny and war decimate a region for a
decade; when protecting yourself becomes more important than open,
honest information; when aid becomes a tool in bolstering someone’s
political position.
Human response, therefore, becomes important: people who are willing
to build strong communities and social ties that can be ready to bear
the weight when disaster hits. People who help out, who volunteer their
time and donate their money, even at personal risk and sacrifice. (Over
two hundred White Helmets have died performing their duties over the last
ten years.) People and countries who send aid rather than put their own
country first, who seek to protect the poor and powerless.
We must love each other. And mostly I think we do – or we
live in very close proximity to the idea, because there is barely any
distance between a feeling of neutrality toward the world and a crucial
love for it, barely any distance at all. All that is required to move
from indifference to love is to have our hearts broken. The heart breaks
and the world explodes in front of us as a revelation.
There is no problem of evil. There is only a problem of good. Why
does a world that is so often cruel, insist on being beautiful, of being
good? Why does it take a devastation for the world to reveal its true
spiritual nature? I don’t know the answer to this, but I do know there
exists a kind of potentiality just beyond trauma.
Last month, we looked at David. His life can be viewed as a tragedy.
He was Israel’s “beloved,” a man after God’s own heart, possessed of
military, musical, and poetic skill, with an unbroken stream of success.
However, after a single grievous sin and his further attempts to cover
it up, everything seemed to go wrong for him, and he died a greatly
diminished figure.
How does he fare compared to the other kings of Israel and Judah?
Saul, David’s predecessor, often gets a bad rap. We understandably
focus on his failures as a king: his disobedience to God in battles, his
brooding mental illness / spiritual oppression (1 Sam 16:14), his
jealousy and violence toward David, and his final suicide in battle
against the Philistines. This is an oversimplification, though; Ronald
F. Youngblood notes,
Scholarly studies of Saul, the first king of Israel, have depicted
him as (among other things) villain, tragic figure, flawed ruler, naive
farm-boy, degenerate madman, fate-driven pawn, reluctant king—the list
goes on and on. Such characterizations are at least partially true. Saul
was surely one of the most complex persons described in Scripture…
Although at times moody, impulsive, suspicious, violent, insincerely
remorseful, out of control, and disobedient to God, at other times he
was kind, thoughtful, generous, courageous, very much in control, and
willing to obey God. (Expositor’s Bible Commentary)
He starts out well. From a human perspective, he appears to be an
ideal ruler: handsome, physically imposing, from a wealthy family (1 Sam
9:1-2). He never sought the kingship himself; he acts with humility
throughout his anointing, coronation, and early reign (1 Sam 9:21, 1 Sam
15:17); he demonstrates restraint and mercy when people oppose him (1
Sam 10:27, 11:12-13). God “changed his innermost person” (1 Sam 10:9)
and gives him a spiritual experience of ecstatic prophecy (1 Sam
10:10-11). After his coronation, he goes back to manual labor on his
farm (1 Sam 11:5), rather than seeking to amass power and wealth. When
the city of Jabesh-Gilead is threatened militarily, he zealously rallies
Israel to their defense (1 Sam 11:6-11), in the style of the judges,
thus earning a loyalty from them that lasts even after his death.
Despite the Israelites’ wrong motives in asking for a king, Samuel’s
speech at the beginning of Saul’s reign offers encouragement as well as
warning:
Now look! Here is the king you have chosen—the one that you asked
for! Look, the Lord has given you a king. If you fear the Lord, serving
him and obeying him and not rebelling against what he says, and if both
you and the king who rules over you follow the Lord your God, all will
be well. But if you don’t obey the Lord and rebel against what the Lord
says, the hand of the Lord will be against both you and your king… The
Lord will not abandon his people because he wants to uphold his great
reputation. The Lord was pleased to make you his own people. As far as I
am concerned, far be it from me to sin against the Lord by ceasing to
pray for you! I will instruct you in the way that is good and upright.
However, fear the Lord and serve him faithfully with all your heart.
Just look at the great things he has done for you! But if you continue
to do evil, both you and your king will be swept away.” (1 Sam
12:13-15,22-25)
Saul continues to defend Israel for the rest of his reign (1 Sam
14:47-48, 52). Even after the Lord rejects Saul’s dynasty and kingship,
Saul is shown remarkable mercy: he’s permitted to live for many more
years, with his eventual successor David as a trusted lieutenant and
aide, rather than being immediately judged and replaced.
However, Saul’s fearfulness and distance from God leads him to
disobey, offering sacrifice without Samuel at Gilgal (1 Sam 13), then
fighting timidly and foolishly against the Philistines (1 Sam 14),
failing to follow God’s commandments to destroy the Amalekites (1 Sam
15), growing increasingly jealous and violent toward David, and killing
the priests of Nob. It seems that, having failed once due to impatience
and insecurity, he compounds those failings at each subsequent step,
instead of repenting and growing. He goes from acknowledging the Lord
himself (e.g., 1 Sam 11:13) to referring to him as “your“ God in talking
with Samuel (1 Sam 15:30), to being completely cut off from the Lord and
his prophets (1 Sam 28). His reign and life ended with the military
defeat of Israel, the deaths of his sons, and his own suicide to avoid
capture.
Solomon, David’s son and successor, starts out with enormous
potential. At his birth, he is named Jedediah (“beloved of the Lord”),
in response to a message from the prophet Nathan - the same prophet who
condemned David’s affair with Solomon’s mother Bathsheba. He begins his
reign with David’s support and acts quickly to secure and strengthen the
kingdom, dispensing justice to wrongdoers who had avoided judgment
during David’s reign. Solomon enjoys an unprecedented period of peace:
vassal states of that time would typically withhold tribute or rebel at
the death of a king, to test the new king’s rule, but he experienced
none of that (1 Ki 4:21, 24). He marries the daughter of the Pharaoh of
Egypt; Egyptian rulers had formerly refused their daughters to any
foreign land, and for a descendant of Egyptian slaves to marry an
Egyptian princess showed Solomon’s blessings and success. He offers huge
sacrifices to God in a display of his dedication to God, and God
responds directly in a dream, offering Solomon whatever he wants. In
Solomon’s answer, he thanks God for his love and promises, humbly
recognizes his own limitations, and asks for wisdom to serve his people.
God honors Solomon’s request, making him the wisest man to ever live,
and also promising him a long life, wealth, and greatness.
Solomon enjoys a long, prosperous, and successful reign: he dispenses
justice, sets up an effective bureaucracy to govern his kingdom,
sponsors international trade and exploration, and receives international
acclaim and fame. His wisdom goes beyond leadership and legal judgments;
he’s known for his psalms, proverbs, and knowledge of animals and
plants. His kingdom becomes so fabulously wealthy that silver is viewed
as without value. He builds a palace to cement and symbolize his rule;
expands the city of Jerusalem; fortifies the strategic cities of Hazor,
Megiddo, and Gezer; and builds a network of store-cities to supply his
military.
He builds a temple to the Lord - the long-time dream of his father
David, and the culminating physical symbol of God’s decision to live
among his people. At the zenith of Solomon’s reign, he dedicates the
temple to the Lord in a massive and magnificent worship service where he
expresses his heartfelt devotion to God:
O Lord, God of Israel, there is no god like you in heaven above or on
earth below! You maintain covenantal loyalty to your servants who obey
you with sincerity. You have kept your word to your servant, my father
David; this very day you have fulfilled what you promised…
God does not really live on the earth! Look, if the sky and the
highest heaven cannot contain you, how much less this temple I have
built! But respond favorably to your servant’s prayer and his request
for help, O Lord my God. Answer the desperate prayer your servant is
presenting to you today. Night and day may you watch over this temple,
the place where you promised you would live. May you answer your
servant’s prayer for this place. Respond to the request of your servant
and your people Israel for this place. Hear from inside your heavenly
dwelling place and respond favorably. (1 Ki 8:23-24, 27-30)
Woven throughout all of this success and splendor, though, are hints
of trouble. Solomon’s marriage to the daughter of Pharaoh shows his
power and cements a valuable foreign alliance, and Jewish tradition
states that she became a Jewish proselyte, yet the Israelites are warned
against foreign alliances and relations with Egypt, and Solomon seems to
recognize that the marriage falls short of God’s holiness (2 Chron
8:11). He spends seven years constructing the magnificent temple of the
Lord - but thirteen years constructing his own personal palace. (The
fact that he was aided by David’s preparations for the temple may
explain some of this but perhaps not all.) The court and kingdom are
incredibly wealthy, but that wealth is created in part through
significant forced labor and taxation, which spurs a rebellion after
Solomon’s death. His longstanding friendship and trade with Hiram, king
of Tyre, helps him build the temple and palace, yet he repays Hiram by
attempting to trade twenty towns (even though those should have been
considered part of the Promised Land) that left Hiram feel like Solomon
was ripping him off (1 Ki 9:11-14). Solomon’s splendor and power are
shown through his treasure, his army of horsemen and chariots, and his
many wives, and yet Moses forbids kings from amassing treasure, horses,
or wives (Deut 17:16-17).
All of this leads to disaster as Solomon’s reign progresses. His 700
wives, 300 concubines, and numerous foreign alliances become
entanglements and distractions that pull him away from God. It starts,
perhaps, as mutually beneficial alliances and politically expedient nods
toward other nations’ religious practices, but Solomon’s emotions become
entangled by his many marriages and he starts worshipping other gods
himself. Out of mercy, God postpones full judgment until after Solomon’s
death, but Solomon ends his reign harried by enemies to the north,
south, and within, with Israel only a short time away from rebellion and
a division that never healed.
What are we to make of the lives of these three men?
All started, to varying degrees, with promise, potential, and
acknowledgement of God. All showed some measure of success and service
to God and his people. David and Solomon in particular showed, for
all-too-brief moments, what God’s people could look like, when
gathered together in faithfulness to celebrate and worship the Lord and
to enjoy his goodness. All three were later brought low - Saul by his
insecurities and disobedience that led to a growing darkness and
distance from God, David by the devastating choices and consequences
that flowed from a single act of adultery, Solomon in a prolonged
process of compromise and ensnarement that turned away his devotion to
God.
All three are tragedies. Like any good tragedy, they’re good stories
- as in tragedies since ancient Greece, we see the tragic heroes’
virtues and flaws, we watch their falls, we experience the catharsis of
pity for them and fear as we reflect on the potential for flaw and fall
within our own lives.
All three form a critical part of the history of God’s dealings with
his people. Saul’s failures set up the path to David’s kingship; David’s
devotion to God results in the epochal promise of 1 Samuel 7, that a
descendent of David would always be on the throne, that was ultimately
fulfilled in Jesus; Solomon built the temple that became the center of
the worship of God for centuries.
And there are good moral lessons to draw from the lives of all three.
We can see how Saul’s humility and zeal, from another angle or in other
circumstances of his life, can manifest as insecurity and impatience,
then we can reflect on how strengths can become weaknesses if not
tempered and centered in a deeper commitment to the good. David’s affair
shows us the necessity of fleeing temptation, the weaknesses that exist
even within a man after God’s own heart, and the importance of heartfelt
repentance. Solomon’s life prompts reflection on the differences between
intelligence, wisdom, earthly success, and faithfulness to God and the
paradox of how material blessings can tempt us to forget God. And so
on.
Is that all, though? If we want a good tragedy, we can read
Oedipus Rex or Shakespeare’s Macbeth or see Anakin
Skywalker’s fall in Revenge of the Sith. The lives of Saul,
David, and Solomon give moral lessons, but so do the lives of Abraham
Lincoln, Gandhi, Tony Stark. Reading about the Israelite kings has the
not-insignificant advantage that they’re part of God’s people and their
accounts are divinely inspired, and they teach history in a way that the
lives of Stark or Skywalker don’t, but if all we gain is some catharsis
and historical knowledge and some moral teachings, we’re not seeing the
whole picture.
The Israelites were called to be God’s people. Moses promised that
someday they would have a king (Deut 17:14-20). We see that the kings
were to represent God as his regent on earth, to shepherd God’s people,
to ensure justice, to provide protection and rest so that the people
could enjoy the blessings of land and divine presence that God had
promised them. Yet Saul, David, and Solomon show that no human is fully
up to this task - whether humble beginnings or divine prophecies from
birth, unqualified success in battle or unprecedented peace, physical
stature or superlative wisdom, talent or wealth or eloquence, all ended
in tragedy. If even the best of humans fails, then the only way that
God’s people can have a ruler who faithfully follows God and guides his
people is if God himself is that ruler.
The lives of Saul, David, and Solomon, give the historical facts
around the prophecies and promises of Christ, but they also show our
need for Christ. The potential of Saul, devotion and strength of David,
and wisdom and splendor of Solomon all foreshadow the greater strength
and wisdom and lasting splendor of the Son of David.
